Hey gang, I've got a question for you that's sat in the back of my mind for the better part of a decade.
In my undergrad I had a Canadian History professor who was very much a Maritimes/East Coast historian. He was on the board of editors for Acadiensis, all that jazz. He was also a grumpy old coot with some pretty radical ideas and theories about both Eastern Canadian and Irish history.
He was also an anti-confederate and hated Sir John A with a fiery passion, but that's neither here nor there. Just a bit of character building.
Anyhow, in a second year course on the settlement of Canada's east coast he made a joking throwaway remark that St John's, Newfoundland was "the only European port in North America to be discovered rather than settled". This was in the context of migrant cod fishermen coming to Newfoundland and Labrador in the 15th century to take advantage of the huge schools of fish. Basques, Portuguese, Irish, Scandinavians, he said, would camp ashore in Newfoundland during summer months before returning home with their catch. According to him, these fishermen built up makeshift towns to pass their time.
He closed his discussion with "when they mapped Newfoundland, they found St John's to be a thriving port home to two taverns and a brothel."
I'm not sure if that whole lecture was just an elaborate setup to an arcane Newfie joke or if there is some kind of historical veracity to it.
I transferred schools not long after when my home history department was near completely gutted and changed my focus to Victorian history away from my local history/linguistics, so I never really followed up my questions about his lectures.
Until now!
So, what kind of veracity is there to my prof's claims? I'm pretty sure there's evidence of pre-Columbian European fishermen coming and going on the regular to Newfoundland, but beyond that I'm a blank slate. I'd love to hear /r/AskHistorians' views.
Aside from trying to make a couple of educated guesses on who your professor was, which I imagine I could get pretty close, I'll try to give you an approximate answer.
As with many things; the evidence is unclear. I do think that stories of a pre-Cabot town replete with pubs and brothels are likely exaggerations, but there is some historical discussion of the possibility of post-Viking, pre-Cabot contact in Newfoundland. From the Memorial University of Newfoundland website for the department of history:
The English port city of Bristol played a prominent role in the re-discovery of Newfoundland, and much attention has therefore been given to that port-city’s activities, not only at the time of Cabot’s historic voyage but during the decades before. Two very useful starting points in reading about this aspect of Newfoundland history would be Patrick McGrath, "Bristol and America 1480-1631," in Kenneth R. Andrews, Nicholas P. Canny, and P.E.H. Hair (eds.), The Westward Enterprise, English Activities in Ireland, the Atlantic and America, 1480-1650 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1979), pp. 81-102, and A.N. Ryan, "Bristol, The Atlantic and North America, 1480-1509," in John Hattendorf (ed.), Maritime History, Vol. I: The Age of Discovery (Malabar, FL: Krieger, 1996), pp. 241-255. Unfortunately this perfectly sensibly search for the context of Cabot’s voyages has led to some rather unfortunate tendencies to make unjustified claims about those activities.
The conventional view of this process assumes that Bristol commercial interests may have found Newfoundland several years before John Cabot’s famous voyage of "discovery" but kept the information a secret in order to capitalize on the rich fishing grounds. David Beers Quinn tries to make the case in "The Argument for the English Discovery of America Between 1480 and 1494," Geographical Journal CXXVII (1961), pp. 277-85; this essay was revised and reprinted in J.M. Bumsted (ed.), Canadian History Before Confederation (Georgetown: Irwin-Dorsey, 1972), pp. 18-30 (2nd ed., 1979, pp. 17-28).And it is a view that has been reiterated in as recent a publication as British Maritime Enterprise in the New World: From the Late Fifteenth to the Mid-Eighteenth Century (Lewiston, NY and Queenston, ON: Edwin Mellen Press, 1999); see especially "Part 2, North America: Chapter 1, "The First Explorers, 1480-1547." It is certainly true that there is evidence of voyages, perhaps even of discovery, of a place called Brasil, or Hy-Brasil or O’Brazil (a name of Gaelic origin, meaning "Isle of the Blest"). It was a mythical island that appeared on many sea charts from the fourteenth to nineteenth centuries. Late in the fifteenth century there were suggestions that Bristol venturers had found the island, only to lose the location, lending support to the idea that Bristol exploration of the North Atlantic in the 1480s and 1490s was therefore driven by a search to re-discover the place.
Since Newfoundland is not my particular area of expertise, aside from pointing you to these sources I could not really offer a complete value judgement on their contents. I don't think that it's readily accepted that there was a pre-Cabot town at the site of Saint John's, but I also think that some of the evidence is fuzzy and might not be all readily available.