Statue of limitations: Some thoughts about the Corte-Real monument
That statue by Confederation Building is a figure of myth, and not an appealing one
It started out with quizzing my daughter about the name of the person represented by the statue. Driving past it on the way to a piano lesson or a basketball practice, I would ask who that big galoot was. "Gaspar Corte-Real" was the correct answer.
Later, as she got older, passing the statue was an occasion to tell her how Portuguese fishing vessels and their crews were a seasonal presence in the St. John's of my youth and how they had used our harbour since or before the English. How the first known letter from the "New World" to the Old was from St. John's in 1527, written by John Rut to King Henry VIII of England and mentioning their presence:
"…the third day of August we entered into a good harbour called St. John and there we found Eleuen Saile of Normans and one Brittaine and two Portugal barks all a fishing".
Even in my time you could slip aboard a Portuguese vessel docked here to buy tasty SG cigarettes cheap and usually be offered a glass of brandy to toast the transaction. The harbour apron wasn't fenced then and St. John's was generally a much cooler place.
My daughter is an adult now, so any talk of Corte-Real is around colonialism (about which she judges my jokes wholly inappropriate) and whether Gaspar Corte-Real should be so remembered in St. John's, about whether the statue of him on Prince Philip Drive should come down.
Corte-Real has a passing mention in my last novel Today I Learned It Was You (the scheming Giovanni Cabotto is also featured, so those who take delight in being offended are encouraged to buy the book and see if I meet the threshold to thrill).
What do we know? Very little indeed
I did some research for the yarn that could only be cursory because so little can be said about Corte-Real with confidence. We cannot be sure he was ever anywhere near Newfoundland and/or Labrador.
The statue up by Confederation Building is a figure of myth. While it might have been that its installation was an effort by the then sclerotic Salazar regime to spin their reputation in the face of growing troubles with the Luta Armada de Libertação Nacional in Angola I think here, at the time, it was mostly understood to be about fish.
If you are not old enough or from away, you cannot remember the Portuguese here so likely won't grasp that context.
In the end the Portuguese and the Spaniards obtained the same bottom dragging kit as we did and joined in the effort to destroy the stocks of cod, yellow tail and turbot and shit-haul the habitat in the process.
They were repeatedly caught exceeding quotas and using illegal gear. So we gave them the boot. What they did is hard to forgive but I greatly miss the Portuguese presence in St. John's.
The White Fleet: See an archival episode of CBC's Land & Sea:
We have a problem
Meaning is mutable. If enough people now see the statue of Corte-Real as memorializing a character who enslaved Indigenous people during his imperial ventures, we have a problem.
Rather than blow it up like some Bamiyan Buddha and completely lose its utility as a good argument I propose an art project to transform its meaning once again.
I say we turn it upside down and rename it "The Smallwood Years."
For this conceptual piece I will charge the province less than half the annual fee for service of your basic townie ophthalmologist. Christo wouldn't have wrapped the Port-a-gee's big toe for what I'm asking.
Or better, the money it would cost to remove the triggering sculpture, or put it on its head, could be focused on problems of the present and future and be used to improve nutrition and provide fit housing on the north coast of Labrador because, on some scores, we haven't done much better than Gaspar himself, whoever he was.
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