They had evidently been separated for many centuries from contact with the Amerindians of the mainland, though they may have been visited occasionally on the north by the Eskimo.

They had in fact been so long separated from the other Amerindians of North America that they were strikingly different from them in their habits, customs, and language.
[Footnote 1: The first Frenchmen visiting North America, and seeing the caribou without their horns, thought they were a kind of wild ass.
The reindeer of Newfoundland is a sub-species peculiar to this island.] The climate of Newfoundland is not nearly so cold as that of the mainland, nor so hot in summer, but it is spoilt at times by fogs and sea mists which conceal the landscape for days together.

In the wintertime, and quite late in the spring, quantities of ice hang about the shores of the islands, and when the warm weather comes, these accumulations of ice slip away into the Atlantic in the form of icebergs and are most dangerous to shipping.
To the south-east of Newfoundland the sea is very shallow for hundreds of miles, the remains no doubt of a great extension of North America in the direction of Europe which had sunk below the surface ages ago.
In this shallow water--the "Banks" of Newfoundland--fish, especially codfish, swarmed in millions, and still continue to swarm with little, if any, diminution from the constant toll of the fishing fleets.
Another creature found in great abundance on these coasts is the true lobster,[2] which filled as important a part in the diet of the Beothuk natives, before the European occupation, as the salmon did in the dietary of the British Columbian tribes.
[Footnote 2: _Homarus americanus_.

The lobster of Newfoundland and the coasts of North-east America is closely related to the common lobster of British waters.

These true lobsters resemble the freshwater crayfish in having their foremost pair of legs modified into large, unequal-sized claws.