author
Joseph Noad
1823–1898
Best known for a 1859 lecture on the Indigenous peoples of Newfoundland, this 19th-century writer combined public service with a strong interest in local history. His surviving work offers a window into how Newfoundland’s past was being interpreted in his own time.
1 Audiobook
About the author
Joseph Noad is credited in library and ebook records as the author of Lecture on the Aborigines of Newfoundland, a work delivered before the Mechanics' Institute in St. John's in January 1859 and later circulated in print. That lecture is the work for which he is most widely remembered today.
The historical record around him is a little messy: some modern book catalogs list an author named Joseph Noad with the dates 1823–1898, while major reference sources for the Newfoundland public official and lecturer Joseph Noad point instead to a man active in colonial government who served as surveyor general and was involved in public life in Newfoundland during the mid-19th century.
Because those records do not line up cleanly, the safest picture is a simple one: he was a 19th-century author associated with Newfoundland history, and his best-known publication reflects the era's curiosity about the island's Indigenous past. Readers coming to his work today will find it valuable mainly as a historical document that shows how people of his time wrote about that subject.