WHERE THE FORGE was, there is nothing now. The site is overgrown with scrub. There are horseshoes lying everywhere, in the grass, above ground and below. You have only to dig with your heel to unearth a shoe or a nail or a rusting railway spike. Sod has grown over Charlie’s pile of rough stock, which must have sunk some into the ground, for the mound that my father remembers looking up at is just a few feet high.

They believe they have found the site of Baltimore’s great but short-lived mansion on the Downs, a mansion that was razed by pirates, Protestants, weather and decay. They are still trying to puzzle out its shape and dimensions.

The Downs have been marked out on a grid with string, and students and professors from the college in St. John’s are sifting through the excavation square by square. In each hole, a person crouches, brushing dust from shards of china, piecing together cups and plates, unearthing cutlery that they hope can be restored.

They have yet to find the salt works mentioned in the letter sent to Lord Baltimore from Ferryland by Edward Wynne in 1622. They are sorting out the floor plan, speculating about which room lay where. There is talk that the whole house will be reconstructed exactly as it was, that one day the people of Ferryland will look out their windows and see what people looking out theirs saw four hundred years ago.

There would have been a day when the Welshmen who preceded him and spent years preparing a place for him saw Lord Baltimore’s ships from the top of the Gaze, proof that the Old World had persisted in their absence, that all that lay between them and home was a finite stretch of water. Here was Baltimore, making real again things they had stopped believing in, Baltimore who would never see, as they had, Ferryland before the first ship landed, the place before it had a name, who would never, as they had, draw near to an empty shore feeling as if they had gone back to the brink of time, as if time would begin the moment they set foot upon the beach. They had not arrived at the end of a mission of discovery and exploration as Cabot had in 1497, when he made landfall at Cape Bonavista. They had come to stay for good, as absurd and as terrifying as that must have seemed to them as, in the last few minutes of their journey, they regarded Newfoundland. They had neither his illusions nor the prospect of a quick return to England to sustain them.

Baltimore would never know the loneliness and solitude they felt in those first days. But here at last was “his Lordship” on whose behalf they had been toiling for years but whose existence they did not really believe in, so impossible was it to imagine an aristocrat resident in such a place, however fine his house might be. He would stick out among the colonists the way his unoccupied mansion did among their tilts and huts.

In his ship was as much of home as he had been able to cram into it. His mansion house was ready for him. It was there, incongruously there for him to see as he hove to in sight of Ferryland.

I have often wondered what he thought when he first set eyes on it, if it matched his expectations, if it was everything his governors had promised it would be. Baltimore, his wife and children looking at their new home as they drew near to it. He was fifty-two years old, beyond the life expectancy of even an aristocrat in the early 1600s. In old age, he was starting over in a place he had never set eyes on, a place where habitation by the white man was still an experiment.

In his portrait, which could pass for Shakespeare’s, he looks very much like a man of his time. His neck and his shoulders are enclosed in ruffled layers of white lace, the rest of his body in a long black cloak; he has a moustache, a Van Dyke beard and long hair brushed back behind his ears.

There is in his expression the faintly amused disdain for his portraitist and for all those who will look upon his work that is often seen in portraits from that time. He does not look like someone destined to forsake two thousand years of civilization to start his life again in Newfoundland.

Once he moved in, all that was required to complete the illusion that he was still in England was for him to draw the curtains on his windows. The mansion house had been located not with any mind to shelter from the elements or fend off attack by pirates but to show it off to best advantage to Baltimore on his arrival, to the colonists and to anyone from elsewhere who might be sailing by.

When winter came—the worst one since the colony had been established—he soon realized what a fool he’d been. Though he gave them shelter in his house, ten of his forty subjects died from scurvy or starvation.

A northeast wind, when it gusted, funnelled down the chimneys, put out the meagre fires and swept in icy drafts throughout the great house, which became an infirmary. The time he spent there would come back to him in nightmares for what little remained of his life. Snow drifted down the chimneys, at first melting, then gathering like ashes in the grates until Baltimore was forced to admit that fires were unfeasible and ordered that the flues be closed and the doors and windows boarded up. Until they ran out of oil for their lanterns, it was barely possible to breathe in the mansion house there was so much smoke. After the oil ran out, the house was dark day and night except for the light from the candles that were rationed out. It was not long before the house was like the steerage hold of a ship, all aboard her trying to ride out the winter the way they had the crossing from the Old World to the New. Seasickness was the one affliction they were spared. But there was no pilot to tell them how much progress they were making, how much longer they would be confined or what he thought their chances were. Those few who, in the fever of starvation and disease, ventured out reported snow so deep and ice so thick they were sure they would never melt no matter how long summer, if it ever came, might be.

Everyone in the mansion house was given extreme unction by the priests who had made the crossing with Lord Baltimore. Messages were written informing those who might one day find their remains that they were Catholics and desired to be buried as such. It seemed when the candles were put out that there was nothing in the world but the droning of the wind.

In the spring he took with him back to England all those who survived the winter. He deserted the mansion house, left all its contents and furnishings behind. This is what they are digging up, what lies beneath the town of Ferryland, beneath the site of Charlie’s house and what remains of Charlie’s forge.

They sailed out of the Pool and, if they looked back, saw the first ghost town of the New World, the mansion house barely finished but deserted on the Downs, forts and wharves and huts made from trees around whose fresh stumps wood chips still lay scattered.

I have often imagined Baltimore and his family standing on the deck of their ship, watching with relief the land recede. Theirs was the first casting-off, the first abandonment, the first admission of defeat. They were the first to pack up and leave everything behind. They blazed a trail of retreat that many after them would follow.

They probably believed that not only Ferryland but all of Newfoundland was uninhabitable and they were taking what for all time would be the last look at the place that anyone would take.

Within a year he made plans to begin a colony on what he had been assured were the more moderate shores of the continent, southeast of Newfoundland, a place called Maryland. The land of Mary after Charles I’s queen, to him Mary the Virgin whose likeness in ice would three hundred years later pass within a mile of where he lived. Before he could set sail for his new colony, he died.