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    Links between France and Newfoundland, forged by sailors and fishermen, go back to Newfoundland's discovery by John Cabot, in 1497. According to the American historian Samuel Eliot Morison, the first authentic documents attesting to the presence of a French vessel on the Grand Banks go back to 1504, when a certain Jean Denys of Harfleur was fishing between Cape Bonavista and the Strait of Belle Isle; in 1506, Thomas Aubert of Dieppe fished there in the Pensée. As early as 1529, Norman merchants were exporting to England cod caught in Newfoundland waters. In 1542, no less than sixty vessels set sail from Rouen on the same day, bound for the Grand Banks.

    A significant Breton presence should be noted among the early fishers of these northern seas, a presence which became predominant in the nineteenth century the founding of the French communities of the Port-au-Port Peninsula. Jacques Cartier, himself a Breton, born in St. Malo in 1491, was the first to sail down the west coast of the island. Moreover, a curious coincidence links Cartier to the modern French communities on the Peninsula. During his 1534 voyage of discovery in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, Cartier discovered an island which he named, after the colour of its rocks, Red Island, and about two and a half kilometres from it, the imposing cliffs of a cape which he called Cap de Latte, recalling Fort la Latte near St. Malo. The cape, now known as Cape St. George, gave its name to the nearby village, one of whose earliest inhabitants, settled there as early as 1837, was a certain Guillaume or Djillaume Robin, a deserter from the French fishery and like Cartier, a native of St. Malo.