Her father burned his boat. She built an inn.

She left the island at sixteen, in 1975, and studied business at Carleton University in Ottawa. She worked for oil companies in Alberta, then joined a fibre-optics firm called JDS Fitel and spent ten years there, ending as chief financial officer. In 1999, at the height of the technology boom, it merged with an American company to become JDS Uniphase.

In 2001 she exercised stock options worth about 69 million U.S. dollars and left. She was 43. 60 Minutes describes her as having been the third-highest-paid female executive in America. She spent the next four years sailing around the world.

Then she went home. The cod fishery had been closed since 1992 and the island was emptying. In 2006 she and her brothers Alan and Anthony set up Shorefast, a registered charity, to see what could be done about it. A shorefast is the line that ties a cod trap to the shore.

They began with art. Fogo Island Arts started in 2008, and four studios designed by Todd Saunders went up on the rocks for visiting artists. Saunders was born in Gander and works in Norway. The studios look as if they have just landed.

The Fogo Island Inn opened in June 2013, and Saunders designed that too. It has 29 rooms on four floors, every one facing the North Atlantic, and one end of it stands on steel legs about nine metres high, the way a fishing stage stands over the water. The furniture and the quilts are made on the island. There are saunas and hot tubs on the roof.

60 Minutes put the cost at 40 million dollars. Ottawa and the province gave five million each. The rest was philanthropy, starting with her own.

Here is the unusual part. The inn belongs to the charity. Nobody owns shares in it, and every dollar of surplus goes back into the island through Shorefast, which also runs a furniture workshop, a business selling cod caught on hand lines, an ice cream shop and a restaurant.

Each stay comes with a label, set out like the nutrition panel on a cereal box, showing where the money goes. By Shorefast’s figures, 65 cents of every dollar stays on Fogo Island, 13 go elsewhere in Newfoundland, 19 to the rest of Canada and 3 leave the country.

Shorefast and the inn employ more than 300 islanders, on an island of about 2,100 people. Michelin gave the inn three keys in 2024, its highest rating for a hotel.

It has not fixed everything, and nobody on the island says it has. The 2021 census counted 2,117 residents, down from 2,706 fifteen years earlier. Houses that sold for 25,000 dollars now sell for ten times that, which is good news if you already own one. In 2022 the inn and the town council argued over a tax bill of 57,000 dollars and needed a mediator. One café owner told 60 Minutes the inn was a gift and a nuisance at once, which seems about right for a neighbour that size.

Cobb has said she wants less of the market, not more. There are 29 rooms and there will not be 290.

The island, meanwhile, is still the island. Caribou walk across the harbour ice. Icebergs go past in late spring. Brimstone Head, a rock at the far end, is listed by the Flat Earth Society of Canada, not entirely seriously, as one of the four corners of the world.

You can stand on it for nothing.