It's both strange and sublime that the official birthplace of English Canada is a fresh jewel only recently plucked from the margins of history.

Strange that so few people know the national historical significance of a town called Cupids, nucleus of Canada's sea-buffeted wonderland that is Newfoundland. And sublime that the harbour town is home to a merry band of folks rolling out the red carpet for a prince, a prime minister and, well, everyone else too—in the process cementing its status with new infrastructure and a soiree 400 years in the making.

Cupids, less than an hour's drive from St. John's, is the site of the second permanent English colony in the New World (after Jamestown, Virginia), and the first in what would become a nation—one federation, two official languages and 32 million people.

To visit this southwest corner of Conception Bay on the Northern Avalon peninsula, inhabited by 790 souls, is to suspend mainland myopia.

My traction here has been tricky, starting as a one-time resident of The Rock, studying at Memorial University of Newfoundland (MUN) in St. John's and, later, as a periodic "come from away." Assimilating Newfoundland's culture is like trying to climb fog. It's elusive and surreal—which is part of the fun.

There are zigzagging regional dialects in the countryside, a musical lingua franca of English, Irish and Scottish burrs, with a hint of French and an abridged alphabet; the people are an exotic medley of salty, bare-knuckle gamers and tender souls. Famously hospitable. Distinctly marine. Dauntless, adaptable. Natural conjurers of stories and song.

The History of Cupids

The Cupids ditty starts in what was originally called Cupers Cove in the New Founde Land (standardized spelling came much later). The uninhabited land was pre-scouted by a prominent member of Bristol's Society of Merchant Venturers, John Guy, a 17th-century explorer who was hip to the North Atlantic migratory fisheries and cache of cod.

In records of world expansion, Guy is outshined by the Cabots and Cartiers. But with a combined $8.5-million show of federal and provincial support, Cupids 400, a homegrown non-profit planning committee, is bringing its forgotten history out into the national limelight this summer.

Guy crossed the Atlantic Ocean on the Fleming in August 1610, making landfall in Cupers Cove with 38 colonists, grain, livestock and gallons of beer.

He also had charter rights to the whole island granted by King James I, for the express purpose of colonizing, fortifying and propagating the settlement. And there was that other matter—French colonies steadily advancing down the St. Lawrence River.

As an investor in the new Newfoundland Company, Guy was appointed the island's first governor.

Things were mostly plummy until the late spring of 1612 when the English Mafioso of the high seas, Peter Easton, pillaged Conception Bay. The notorious pirateer took livestock from the farmers and captured fishermen to enlist in his pirate fleet. Easton expanded his pirate fleet and sullied Guy's resolve, already tarnished by stingy investors back in England.

But the seed was planted, as evidenced by neighbouring sub-colonies such as Harbour Grace and Carbonear.

"The legacy of Cupids, that first foothold, is the settlement of Newfoundland," says Bill Gilbert, the chief archeologist and expert at the Cupids Cove plantation site, whose team of dedicated diggers and analysts are doing backbreaking work trying to add to a patchy historical record.

Unearthing Cupids' Legacy

Since 1995, they've revealed the original 90-by-120-foot outline and key structural features where Guy's colony built its first home and storehouse. They've unearthed about 145,000 artifacts, starting with fragments of 17th-century glass bottles and clay pipes. And there are also letters and journals surviving from Guy and another notable colonist, Henry Crout.

Newfoundland's oldest known document is the John Guy News-Sheet, a rag-and-bone parchment with cursive script dated Jan. 29, 1611. An English crier may have read the first-discovered first-hand account of Cupers Cove, which reported Guy's "plantacon in that Contynent... is very honest peacefull and hopefull, and very lykelye to be profytable."

The wellspring from the Cupids Cove archeological site, coupled with donations from the townspeople, filled the town's Cupids Museum, a volunteer-based initiative cobbled together 15 years ago by its tenacious curator, Linda Kane.

"I'm not modest about it," she says of the hardscrabble startup-turned-tourist attraction. "It took a lot of shoving around."

Almost 60 per cent of the government funding is going into revamping the museum. Opening in mid-June, the newly named Cupids Legacy Centre will become an interactive, state-of-the-art complex.

In a boon to regional tourism, Prince Charles rhapsodized about Cupids during his royal visit last November. Also in attendance: Newfoundland and Labrador's Premier Danny Williams, Prime Minister Stephen Harper—who politely asked if he would be invited back a third time when festivities culminate in August—and Trevor Smallwood, master of the Society of Merchant Venturers, the same Bristol society that financed Guy's 1610 voyage.

Coming Home to Cupids

At its peak is Cupids' nautical landmark, an old rock cairn. Here, lifelong resident Peter Laracy indulges me with his recitation of "Smokeroom on the Kyle," a Newfoundland folk tale about a colonial-freight shipwreck when the coastal steamers were still the main means of transport and communication. Nowadays we have means like, well, Laracy himself, who's also the capital works manager for Cupids 400 Inc.

"There's a certain essence to being a Newfoundlander and Labradorian," he says. "We have a very good sense of place, and who we are. We explore our connections, and because we're born and raised on an island there's a certain insular quality to that. There's a sense of valuing the life lessons learned by previous generations, and we want to share them and pass them down.The other essence is longing—a longing to come home, to be home, to live in the province. Not that it's perfect, but it's home."

Home, for many, once required migration from plantations to the best fishing grounds—the rocky Cupids headlands. In contemporary Cupids, they're accessed by the Burnt Head walking trail. Through blueberry thickets, past 19th-century rock walls that once surrounded family gardens, the trail opens to a breathtaking panorama of Conception Bay.

In this rarified air, minke and humpback whales rise and fall out in the distance where the first settlers glimpsed the virgin pastures and timberland around Cupers Cove.

One imagines those first lads and lassies, how they fancied the North Atlantic land as a kind of untouched utopia; fish-filled and forested and dramatically sculpted with capes and bays, channels, estuaries and isles. And how they rollicked in the first rhymes and riddles of the yarns that would centuries later be studied for clues about the birth of a nation.

Find out where to eat, stay and play here by checking out our Cupids Guide.