Admiral Palliser's Trail

North Shore of the Bay of Islands

Sir Hugh Palliser was a governor of Newfoundland in the 18th century, and the man who sent Captain James Cook to survey the west coast of the island. The highway along the north shore of Humber Arm, Route 440, is named for him, and takes visitors into an area great for hiking and bird watching.

The road passes through some very scenic areas, and such towns as Irishtown and McIver's, where there's an Arctic Tern colony on an offshore island, before reaching the end of the road at Cox' Cove.

Aboriginal peoples from what is now Quebec and Nova Scotia trapped here before the Europeans arrived. From about the early 1700s onward, fishing was the mainstay of the economy, supplemented by small-scale farming and logging. When a paper mill was built in nearby Corner Brook in the 1920s, many people went to work there, but the communities weren’t connected to the city until a road was built in the 1950s.