1) Thoreau writes in Walden: "A man is not a good man to me because he will feed me if I should be starving, or warm me if I should be freezing, or pull me out of a ditch if I should ever fall into one. I can find you a Newfoundland dog that will do as much."

2) Some folks who owned Newfies:
Sir Walter Scott, James Boswell, Herman Melville, Humphrey Bogart, Bing Crosby, Robert Kennedy, and Robert Frost all owned Newfs. A Newf had accompanied Anna to the court of Siam. Richard Wagner owned two. And while King George III owned a Newf on his side of the Atlantic, Samuel Adam's Newf, QueQue, picked quarrels with the redcoats on the other side. The first dog to cross the American continent, a Newf named Seaman, belonged to Meriwether Lewis of the Lewis and Clark Expedition.

3) Every Newf owner knows of the monument and tribute Lord Byron gave Boatswain, who "possessed all the virtues of man without his vices. . . ."
The poet concludes his Inscription on the Monument of a Newfoundland Dog with the lines:
     Ye! who perchance behold this simple urn,
     Pass on - it honors none you wish to mourn:
     To mark a friend's remains these stones arise;
     I never knew but one, - and here he lies.

4) In Carlisle, England, on the seventh April 1832, a certain Joseph Thomson sold his wife by auction to Henry Mears for twenty shillings and a Newfoundland dog.

5) The Newf, great swimmers, have saved an untold number of lives from drowning. Sir Edwin Landseer depicted them in this role in multiple paintings.

6) In 1805, a Newf participated in the Battle of Trafalgar, serving on the English frigate H.M.S. Nymph as ship dog. The dog was the first member of the boarding party to reach the deck of France's Cleopatra when she struck her colours.

7) On the other side of the Napoleonic Wars, during his 1814 escape from Elba, Napoleon, who could not swim, slipped and fell undetected into the dark waters beside the ship. A Newf leaped in and rescued him.

8) The story goes that in 1919 the coastal steamer ~Ethie~ began to break apart on the rocky coast of Nova Scotia during a blinding snowstorm, the ship listing, her lifeboats washed away, there seemed no hope of rescue. On the shore they could not launch their boats because of the pounding surf and one man from the ship had already drowned attempting to swim ashore with a rope. The captain gave the next rope to ship dog Tang, a Newf. Tang succeeded in gaining the shore. A hawser was drawn and every passenger and crew member was saved, ninety-two in all. Tang received the medal for Meritorious Service from Lloyd's of London.

9) And in Barrie's ~Peter Pan~, the family's nursemaid is a Newfie named Nana.