By 1904 the local rope walk ensured fishermen no longer had to import twine and nets from Bridport in England's West Country. Local companies advertised that oil clothes and other things made at home were better than imports from America. The newspapers praised anyone who opened a new factory, or invented a new product.

William remembered one man who lived near the tannery on the east side. He had built a new kind of wooden bicycle. The papers called him a great inventor, even though he never made another one.

It was all inventors and explorers. The year St. John's got its first two automobiles, the whole world was excited about explorers seeking a north-west passage. By the winter of 1904-1905 the Norwegian Roald Amundsen had found the magnetic north.

As William Pender crossed Job's bridge and looked to the narrows, he thought about the coming spring. Robert Peary planned to stop in St. John's to get supplies for his trip to the North Pole. Like everyone else in town, William wanted a chance to see the great explorer.

Yes, in St. John's in 1905 you could smell the famous Newfoundland cod fish. You could taste sweet black molasses from Barbados. Schooners that came for fish brought tamarinds and dried apricots and fancy dried goods from their lands.

Newfoundland was not an outpost. It was a centre of trade. No schooner left the harbour with an empty hold. There was no such thing as a hollow, empty day on Water Street. You could smell wood smoke from the cresset fire every cooper had in his shop. You could smell delicious things the ships brought in from other countries-cocoa and chocolate, jellies and marmalade, ale, cigars, sole leather and toilet soap.