Fishermen from Portugal, the Basque provinces of France and Spain, Northern France (perhaps Normandy) and West Country England are known to have frequented eastern Newfoundland during the first half of the 1600s, some as early as the first decade of the 16th century.
The Beothuk are the Indigenous people of Newfoundland. They were Algonkian-speaking hunter-gatherers who probably numbered less than a thousand people at the time of European contact.