Read CHAPTER VII - THE PEOPLE OF LABRADOR of A Labrador Doctor, free online book, by Wilfred Thomason Grenfell, on ReadCentral.com.

Since the publication of the book “Labrador, the Country and the People,” the means of transportation to the coast have been so improved that each year brings us an increasing number of visitors to enjoy the attractions of this sub-arctic land. So many misconceptions have arisen, however, as to the country and its inhabitants, and one is so often misrepresented as distorting conditions, that it seems wise at this point to try and answer a few questions which are so familiar to us who live on the coast as to appear almost negligible.

The east coast of Labrador belongs to Newfoundland, and is not part of the territory of Canada, although the ill-defined boundary between the two possessions has given rise to many misunderstandings. Newfoundland is an autonomous government, having its own Governor sent out from England, Prime Minister, and Houses of Parliament in the city of St. John’s. Instead of being a province of Canada, as is often supposed, and an arrangement which some of us firmly believe would result in the ultimate good of the Newfoundlanders, it stands in the same relationship to England as does the great Dominion herself. Labrador is owned by Newfoundland, so that legally the Labradormen are Newfoundlanders, though they have no representation in the Newfoundland Government. At Blanc Sablon, on the north coast in the Straits of Belle Isle, the Canadian Labrador begins, so far as the coast-line is concerned. The hinterland of the Province of Ungava is also a Canadian possession.

The original natives of the Labrador were Eskimos and bands of roving Indians. The ethnologist would find fruitful opportunities in the country. The Eskimos, one of the most interesting of primitive races, have still a firm foothold in the North chiefly around the five stations of the Moravian Brethren, upon whose heroic work I need not now dilate. The Montagnais Indians roam the interior. They are a branch of the ancient Algonquin race who held North America as far west as the Rockies. They are the hereditary foes of the Eskimos, whole settlements of whom they have more than once exterminated. Gradually, with the influx of white settlers from Devon and Dorset, from Scotland and France, the “Innuits” were driven farther and farther north, until there are only some fifteen hundred of them remaining to-day. Among them the Moravians have been working for the past hundred and thirty-five years. A few bands of Indians still continue to rove the interior, occasionally coming out to the coast to dispose of their furs, and obtain such meagre supplies as their mode of life requires. The balance of the inhabitants of the country are white men of our own blood and religion men of the sea and dear to the Anglo-Saxon heart.

During the past years it has been the experience of many of my colleagues, as well as myself, that as soon as one mentions the fact that part of our work is done on the north shore of Newfoundland, one’s audience loses interest, and there arises the question: “But Newfoundland is a prosperous island. Why is it necessary to carry on a charitable enterprise there?”

There is a sharp demarcation between main or southern Newfoundland and the long finger of land jutting northward, which at Cape Bauld splits the polar current, so that the shores of the narrow peninsula are continuously bathed in icy waters. The country is swept by biting winds, and often for weeks enveloped in a chilly and dripping blanket of fog. The climate at the north end of the northward-pointing finger is more severe than on the Labrador side of the Straits. Indeed, my friend, Mr. George Ford, for twenty-seven years factor of the Hudson Bay Company at Nakvak, told me that even in the extreme north of Labrador he never really knew what cold was until he underwent the penetrating experience of a winter at St. Anthony. The Lapp reindeer herders whom we brought over from Lapland, a country lying well north of the Arctic Circle, after spending a winter near St. Anthony, told me that they had never felt anything like that kind of cold, and that they really could not put up with it! The climate of the actual Labrador is clear, cold, and still, with a greater proportion of sunshine than the northern peninsula of Newfoundland. As a matter of fact, our station at St. Anthony is farther north and farther east than two of our hospitals on the Labrador side of the Straits of Belle Isle. Along that north side the gardens of the people are so good that their produce affords a valuable addition to the diet but not so here.

The dominant industry of the whole Colony is its fisheries the ever-recurrent pursuit of the luckless cod, salmon, herring, halibut, and lobster in summer, and the seal fishery in the month of March. It is increasingly difficult to overestimate the importance, not merely to the British Empire, but to the entire world, of the invaluable food-supply procured by the hardy fishermen of these northern waters. Only the other day the captain of a patrol boat told me that he had just come over from service on the North Sea, and in his opinion it would be years before those waters could again be fished, owing to the immense numbers of still active mines which would render such an attempt disproportionately hazardous. From this point of view, if from no other more disinterested angle, we owe a great and continuous debt to the splendid people of Britain’s oldest colony. It was among these white fishermen that I came out to work primarily, the floating population which every summer, some twenty thousand strong, visits the coasts of Labrador; and later including the white resident settlers of the Labrador and North Newfoundland coasts as well.

The conditions prevailing among some of the people at the north end of Newfoundland and of Labrador itself should not be confused with those of their neighbours to the southward. Chronic poverty is, however, very far from being universally prevalent in the northern district. Some of the fishermen lead a comfortable, happy, and prosperous life; but my old diaries, as well as my present observations, furnish all too many instances in which families exist well within the danger-line of poverty, ignorance, and starvation.

The privations which the inhabitants of the French or Treaty shore and of Labrador have had to undergo, and their isolation from so many of the benefits of civilization, have had varying effects on the residents of the coast to-day. While a resourceful and kindly, hardy and hospitable people have been developed, yet one sometimes wonders exactly into what era an inhabitant of say the planet Mars would place our section of the North Country if he were to alight here some crisp morning in one of his unearthly machines. For we are a reactionary people in matters of religion and education; and our very “speech betrays us,” belonging as so many of its expressions do to the days when the Pilgrims went up to Canterbury, or a certain Tinker wrote of another and more distant pilgrimage to the City of Zion.

The people are, naturally, Christians of a devout and simple faith. The superstitions still found among them are attributable to the remoteness of the country from the current of the world’s thought, the natural tendency of all seafaring people, and the fact that the days when the forbears of these fishermen left “Merrie England” to seek a living by the harvest of the sea, and finally settled on these rocky shores, were those when witches and hobgoblins and charms and amulets were accepted beliefs.

Nevertheless, to-day as a medical man one is startled to see a fox’s or wolf’s head suspended by a cord from the centre, and to learn that it will always twist the way from which the wind is going to blow. One man had a barometer of this kind hanging from his roof, and explained that the peculiar fact was due to the nature of the animals, which in life always went to windward of others; but if you had a seal’s head similarly suspended, it would turn from the wind, owing to the timid character of that creature. Moreover, it surprises one to be assured, on the irrefutable and quite unquestioned authority of “old Aunt Anne Sweetapple,” that aged cats always become playful before a gale of wind comes on.

“I never gets sea boils,” one old chap told me the other day.

“How is that?” I asked.

“Oh! I always cuts my nails on a Monday, so I never has any.”

There is a great belief in fairies on the coast. A man came to me once to cure what he was determined to believe was a balsam on his baby’s nose. The birthmark to him resembled that tree. More than one had given currency if not credence to the belief that the reason why the bull’s-eye was so hard to hit in one of our running deer rifle matches was that we had previously charmed it. If a woman sees a hare without cutting out and keeping a portion of the dress she is then wearing, her child will be born with a hare-lip.

When stripping a patient for examination, I noticed that he removed from his neck what appeared to be a very large scapular. I asked him what it could be. It was a haddock’s fin-bone a charm against rheumatism. The peculiarity of the fin consists in the fact that the fish must be taken from the water and the fin cut out before the animal touches anything whatever, especially the boat. Any one who has seen a trawl hauled knows how difficult a task this would be, with the jumping, squirming fish to cope with.

Protestant and Catholic alike often sew up bits of paper, with prayers written on them, in little sacks that are worn around the neck as an amulet; and green worsted tied around the wrist is reported to be a never-failing cure for hemorrhage.

Every summer some twenty thousand fishermen travel “down North” in schooners, as soon as ever the ice breaks sufficiently to allow them to get along. They are the “Labrador fishermen,” and they come from South Newfoundland, from Nova Scotia, from Gloucester, and even Boston. Some Newfoundlanders take their families down and leave them in summer tilts on the land near the fishing grounds during the season. When fall comes they pick them up again and start for their winter homes “in the South,” leaving only a few hundreds of scattered “Liveyeres” in possession of the Labrador.

We were much surprised one day to notice a family moving their house in the middle of the fishing season, especially when we learned that the reason was that a spirit had appropriated their dwelling.

Stephen Leacock would have obtained much valuable data for his essay on “How to Become a Doctor” if he had ever chanced to sail along “the lonely Labrador.” In a certain village one is confidently told of a cure for asthma, as simple as it is infallible. It consists merely of taking the tips of all one’s finger-nails, carefully allowed to grow long, and cutting them off with sharp scissors. In another section a powder known as “Dragon’s Blood” is very generally used as a plaster. It appears quite inert and harmless. A little farther south along the coast is a baby suffering from ophthalmia. The doctor has only been called in because blowing sugar in its eyes has failed to cure it.

A colleague of mine was visiting on his winter rounds in a delightful village some forty miles south of St. Anthony Hospital. The “swiles” (seals) had struck in, and all hands were out on the ice, eager to capture their share of these valuable animals. But snow-blindness had incontinently attacked the men, and had rendered them utterly unable to profit by their good fortune. The doctor’s clinic was long and busy that night. The following morning he was, however, amazed to see many of his erstwhile patients wending their way seawards, each with one eye treated on his prescription, but the other (for safety’s sake) doctored after the long-accepted methods of the talent of the village tansy poultices and sugar being the acknowledged favourites. The consensus of opinion obviously was that the stakes were too high for a man to offer up both eyes on the altar of modern medicine.

In the course of many years’ practice the methods for the treatment and extraction of offending molars which have come to my attention are numerous, but none can claim a more prompt result than the following: First you attach a stout, fine fish-line firmly to the tooth. Next you lash the other end to the latch of the door we do not use knobs in this country. You then make the patient stand back till there is a nice tension on the line, when suddenly you make a feint as if to strike him in the eye. Forgetful of the line, he leaps back to avoid the blow. Result, painless extraction of the tooth, which should be found hanging to the latch.

Although there have been clergyman of the Church of England and Methodist denominations on the coast for many years past devoted and self-sacrificing men who have done most unselfish work still, their visits must be infrequent. One of them told me in North Newfoundland that once, when he happened to pass through a little village with his dog team on his way South, the man of one house ran out and asked him to come in. “Sorry I have no time,” he replied. “Well, just come in at the front door and out at the back, so we can say that a minister has been in the house,” the fisherman answered.

Even to-day, to the least fastidious, the conditions of travel leave much to be desired. The coastal steamers are packed far beyond their sleeping or sitting capacity. On the upper deck of the best of these boats I recall that there are two benches, each to accommodate four people. The steamer often carries three hundred in the crowded season of the fall of the year. One retires at night under the misapprehension that the following morning will find these seats still available. On ascending the companionway, however, one’s gaze is met by a heterogeneous collection of impedimenta. The benches are buried as irretrievably as if they “had been carried into the midst of the sea.” Almost anything may have been piled on them, from bales of hay among which my wife once sat for two days to the nucleus of a chicken farm, destined, let us say, for the Rogues’ Roost Bight.

As the sturdy little steamer noses her way into some picturesque harbour and blows a lusty warning of her approach, small boats are seen putting off from the shore and rowing or sculling toward her with almost indecorous rapidity. Lean over the rail for a minute with me, and watch the freight being unloaded into one of these bobbing little craft. The hatch of the steamer is opened, a most unmusical winch commences operations and a sewing machine emerges de profundis. This is swung giddily out over the sea by the crane and dropped on the thwarts of the waiting punt. One shudders to think of the probably fatal shock received by the vertebrae of that machine. One’s sympathies, however, are almost immediately enlisted in the interest and fortunes of a young and voiceful pig, which, poised in the blue, unwillingly experiences for the moment the fate of the coffin of the Prophet. Great shouting ensues as a baby is carried down the ship’s ladder and deposited in the rocking boat. A bag of beans, of the variety known as “haricot,” is the next candidate. A small hole has been torn in a corner of the burlap sack, out of which trickles a white and ominous stream. The last article to join the galaxy is a tub of butter. By a slight mischance the tub has “burst abroad,” and the butter, a golden and gleaming mass, with unexpected consideration having escaped the ministrations of the winch, is passed from one pair of fishy hands to another, till it finds a resting-place by the side of the now quiescent pig.

We pass out into the open again, bound for the next port of call. If the weather chances to be “dirty,” the sufferers from mal-de-mer lie about on every available spot, be it floor or bench, and over these prostrate forms must one jump as one descends to the dining-saloon for lunch. It may be merely due to the special keenness of my professional sense, but the apparent proportion of the halt, lame, and blind who frequent these steamers appears out of all relation to the total population of the coast. Across the table is a man with an enormous white rag swathing his thumb. The woman next him looks out on a blue and altered world from behind a bandaged eye. Beside one sits a young fisherman, tenderly nursing his left lower jaw, his enjoyment of the fact that his appetite is unimpaired by the vagaries of the North Atlantic tempered by an unremitting toothache.

But the cheerful kindliness and capability of the captain, the crew, and the passengers, on whatever boat you may chance to travel, pervades the whole ship like an atmosphere, and makes one forget any slight discomfort in a justifiable pride that as an Anglo-Saxon one can claim kinship to these “Vikings of to-day.”

Life is hard in White Bay. An outsider visiting there in the spring of the year would come to the conclusion that if nothing further can be done for these people to make a more generous living, they should be encouraged to go elsewhere. The number of cases of tubercle, anæmia, and dyspepsia, of beri-beri and scurvy, all largely attributable to poverty of diet, is very great; and the relative poverty, even compared with that of the countries which I have been privileged to visit, is piteous. The solution of such a problem does not, however, lie in removing a people from their environment, but in trying to make the environment more fit for human habitation.

The hospitality of the people is unstinted and beautiful. They will turn out of their beds at any time to make a stranger comfortable, and offer him their last crust into the bargain, without ever expecting or asking a penny of recompense. But here, as all the world over, the sublime and the ridiculous go hand in hand. On one of my dog trips the first winter which I spent at St. Anthony, the bench on which I slept was the top of the box used for hens. This would have made little difference to me, but unfortunately it contained a youthful and vigorous rooster, which, mistaking the arrival of so many visitors for some strange herald of morning, proceeded every half-hour to salute it with premature and misdirected zeal, utterly incompatible with unbroken repose just above his head. It was possible, without moving one’s limbs much, to reach through the bars and suggest better things to him; but owing to the inequality which exists in most things, one invariably captured a drowsy hen, while the more active offender eluded one with ease. Lighting matches to differentiate species under such exceptional circumstances in the pursuit of knowledge was quite out of the question.

A visit to one house on the French shore I shall not easily forget. The poor lad of sixteen years had hip disease, and lay dying. The indescribable dirt I cannot here picture. The bed, the house, and everything in it were full of vermin, and the poor boy had not been washed since he took to bed three or four months before. With the help of a clergyman who was travelling with me at the time, the lad was chloroformed and washed. We then ordered the bedding to be burned, provided him with fresh garments, and put him into a clean bed. The people’s explanation was that he was in too much pain to be touched, and so they could do nothing. We cleansed and drained his wounds and left what we could for him. Had he not been so far gone, we should have taken him to the hospital, but I feared that he would not survive the journey.

Although at the time it often seemed an unnecessary expenditure of effort in an already overcrowded day, one now values the records of the early days of one’s life on the coast. In my notebook for 1895 I find the following: “The desolation of Labrador at this time is easy to understand. No Newfoundlanders were left north of us; not a vessel in sight anywhere. The ground was all under snow, and everything caught over with ice except the sea. I think that I must describe one house, for it seems a marvel that any man could live in it all winter, much less women and children. It was ten feet by twenty, one storey high, made of mud and boards, with half a partition to divide bedroom from the sitting-room kitchen. If one adds a small porch filled with dirty, half-starved dogs, and refuse of every kind, an ancient and dilapidated stove in the sitting part of the house, two wooden benches against the walls, a fixed rude table, some shelves nailed to the wall, and two boarded-up beds, one has a fairly accurate description of the furnishings. Inside were fourteen persons, sleeping there, at any rate for a night or two. The ordinary regular family of a man and wife and four girls was to be increased this winter by the man’s brother, his wife, and four boys from twelve months to seven years of age. His brother had ‘handy enough flour,’ but no tea or molasses. The owner was looking after Newfoundland Rooms, for which he got flour, tea, molasses, and firewood for the winter. The people assure me that one man, who was aboard us last fall just as we were going South, starved to death, and many more were just able to hold out till spring. The man, they tell me, ate his only dog as his last resource.”

I sent one day a barrel of flour and some molasses to a poor widow with seven children at Stag Islands. She was starving even in summer. She was just eating fish, which she and her eldest girl caught, and drinking water no flour, no tea, nothing. Two winters before she and her eldest girl sawed up three thousand feet of planking to keep the wolf from the little ones. The girl managed the boat and fished in summer, drove the dogs and komatik and did the shooting for which they could afford powder in winter.

A man, having failed to catch a single salmon beyond what he was forced to eat, left in his little boat to row down to the Inlet to try for codfish. To get a meal breakfast and a little flour to sustain life on the way, he had to sell his anchor before he left.

The life of the sea, with all its attractions, is at best a hazardous calling, and it speaks loud in the praise of the capacity and simple faith of our people that in the midst of a trying and often perilous environment, they retain so quiet and kindly a temper of mind. During my voyage to the seal fishery I recall that one day at three o’clock the men were all called in. Four were missing. We did not find them till we had been steaming for an hour and a half. They were caught on pans some mile or so apart in couples, and were in prison. We were a little anxious about them, but the only remark which I heard, when at last they came aboard, was, “Leave the key of your box the next time, Ned.”

To those who claim that Labrador is a land of plenty I would offer the following incident in refutation. At Holton on a certain Sunday morning the leader of the church services came aboard the hospital steamer and asked me for a Bible. Some sacrilegious pigs which had been brought down to fatten on the fish, driven to the verge of starvation by the scarcity of that article, had broken into the church illicitly one night, and not only destroyed the cloth, but had actually torn up and eaten the Bible. In reply to inquiry I gave it as my opinion that it would be no sin to eat the pork of the erring quadrupeds.

Once when I was cruising on the North Labrador coast I anchored one day between two desolate islands some distance out in the Atlantic, a locality which in those days was frequented by many fishing craft. My anchors were scarcely down when a boat from a small Welsh brigantine came aboard, and asked me to go at once and see a dying girl. She proved to be the only woman among a host of men, and was servant in one of the tiny summer fishing huts, cooking and mending for the men, and helping with the fish when required. I found her in a rude bunk in a dark corner of the shack. She was almost eighteen, and even by the dim light of my lantern and in contrast with the sordid surroundings, I could see that she was very pretty. A brief examination convinced me that she was dying. The tender-hearted old captain, whose aid had been called in as the only man with a doctor’s box and therefore felt to be better qualified to use it than others, was heart-broken. He had pronounced the case to be typhoid, to be dangerous and contagious, and had wisely ordered the fishermen, who were handling food for human consumption, to leave him to deal with the case alone. He told me at once that he had limited his attentions to feeding her, and that though helpless for over a fortnight, and at times unconscious, the patient had not once been washed or the bed changed. The result, even with my experience, appalled me. But while there is life in a young patient there is always hope, and we at once set to work on our Augean task. By the strangest coincidence it was an inky dark night outside, with a low fog hanging over the water, and the big trap boat, with a crew of some six men, among them the skipper’s sons, had been missing since morning. The skipper had stayed home out of sympathy for his servant girl, and his mind was torn asunder by the anxiety for the girl and his fear for his boys.

When night fell, the old captain and I were through with the hardest part of our work. We had new bedding on the bed and the patient clean and sleeping quietly. Still the boat and its precious complement did not come. Every few minutes the skipper would go out and listen, and stare into the darkness. The girl’s heart suddenly failed, and about midnight her spirit left this world. The captain and I decided that the best thing to do was to burn everything and in order to avoid publicity to do it at once. So having laboriously carried it all out onto the edge of the cliff, we set a light to the pile and were rewarded with a bonfire which would have made many a Guy Fawkes celebration. Quite unintentionally we were sending out great streams of light into the darkness over the waters away down below us, and actually giving the longed-for signal to the missing boat. Her crew worked their way in the fog to life and safety by means of the blazing and poor discarded “properties” of the soul preceding us to our last port.

Although our work has lain almost entirely among the white population of the Labrador and North Newfoundland coasts, still it has been our privilege occasionally to come in contact with the native races, and to render them such services, medical or otherwise, as lay within our power. Our doctor at Harrington on the Canadian Labrador is appointed by the Canadian Government as Indian Agent.

Once, when my own boat was anchored in Davis Inlet, a band of roving Indians had come to the post for barter and supplies. Our steamer was a source of great interest to them. Our steam whistle they would gladly have purchased, after they had mastered their first fears. At night we showed them some distress rockets and some red and blue port flares. The way those Indians fled from the port flares was really amusing, and no one enjoyed it more than they did, for the shouting and laughter, after they had picked themselves out of the scuppers where they had been rolling on top of one another, wakened the very hills with their echoes. Next morning one lonely-looking brave came on board, and explained to me by signs and grunts that during the entertainment a white counter, or Hudson Bay dollar, had rolled out of the lining of his hat into our woodpile. An elaborate search failed to reveal its whereabouts, but as there was no reason to doubt him, I decided to make up the loss to him out of our clothes-bag. Fortunately a gorgeous purple rowing blazer came readily to hand, and with this and a helmet, both of which he put on at once, the poor fellow was more than satisfied. Indeed, on the wharf he was the envy of the whole band.

At night they slept in the bunkhouse, and they presented a sight which one is not likely to forget especially one lying on his back on the table, with his arms extended and his head hanging listlessly over the edge. One felt sorely tempted to put a pin into him to see if he really were alive, but we decided to abstain for prudential reasons.

We had among the garments on board three not exactly suited to the white settlers, so I told the agent to let the Indians have a rifle shooting match for them. They were a fox huntsman’s red broadcloth tail-coat, with all the glory of gilt buttons, a rather dilapidated red golf blazer, and a white, cavalryman’s Eton coat, with silver buttons, and the coat-of-arms on. Words fail me to paint the elation of the winner of the fox hunting coat; while the wearer of the cavalry mess jacket was not the least bit daunted by the fact that when he got it on he could hardly breathe. I must say that he wore it over a deerskin kossak, which is not the custom of cavalrymen, I am led to believe.

The coast-line from Ramah to Cape Chidley is just under one hundred miles, and on it live a few scattered Eskimo hunters. Mr. Ford knew every one of them personally, having lived there twenty-seven years. It appears that a larger race of Eskimos called “Tunits,” to whom the present race were slaves, used to be on this section of the coast. At Nakvak there are remains of them. In Hebron, the same year that we met the Indians at Davis Inlet, we saw Pomiuk’s mother. Her name is Regina, and she is now married to Valentine, the king of the Eskimos there. I have an excellent photograph of a royal dinner party, a thing which I never possessed before. The king and queen and a solitary courtier are seated on the rocks, gnawing contentedly raw walrus bones “ivik” they call it.

The Eskimos one year suffered very heavily from an epidemic of influenza the germ doubtless imported by some schooner from the South. Like all primitive peoples, they had no immunity to the disease, and the suffering and mortality were very high. It was a pathetic sight as the lighter received its load of rude coffins from the wharf, with all the kindly little people gathered to tow them to their last resting-place in the shallow sand at the end of the inlet. The ten coffins in one grave seemed more the sequence of a battle than of a summer sickness in Labrador. Certainly the hospital move on the part of the Moravians deserved every commendation; though I understand that at their little hospital in Okkak they have not always been able to have a qualified medical man in residence.

One old man, a patient on whose hip I had operated, came and insisted that I should examine the scars. Oddly enough during the operation the Eskimo, who was the only available person whom I had been able to find to hold the light, had fainted, and left me in darkness. I had previously had no idea that their sensibilities were so akin to ours.

At Napatuliarasok Island are some lovely specimens of blue and green and golden Labradorite, a striated feldspar with a glorious sheen. Nothing has ever really been done with this from a commercial point of view; moreover, the samples of gold-bearing quartz, of which such good hopes have been entertained, have so far been found wanting also. In my opinion this is merely due to lack of persevering investigation for one cannot believe that this vast area of land can be utterly unremunerative.

On one of the old maps of Labrador this terse description is written by the cartographer: “Labrador was discovered by the English. There is nothing in it of any value”; and another historian enlarges on the theme in this fashion: “God made the world in five days, made Labrador on the sixth, and spent the seventh throwing stones at it.” It is so near and yet so far, so large a section of the British Empire and yet so little known, and so romantic for its wild grandeur, and many fastnesses still untrodden by the foot of man! The polar current steals from the unknown North its ice treasures, and lends them with no niggard hand to this seaboard. There is a never-wearying charm in these countless icebergs, so stately in size and so fantastic in shape and colouring.

The fauna and flora of the country are so varied and exquisite that one wonders why the world of science has so largely passed us by. Perhaps with the advent of hydroplanes, Labrador will come to its own among the countries of the world. Not only the ethnologist and botanist, but the archaeologist as well reaps a rich harvest for his labours here. Many relics of a recent stone age still exist. I have had brought to me stone saucepans, lamps, knives, arrow-heads, etc., taken from old graves. It is the Eskimo custom to entomb with the dead man all and every possession which he might want hereafter, the idea being that the spirit of the implement accompanies the man’s spirit. Relics of ancient whaling establishments, possibly early Basque, are found in plenty at one village, while even to-day the trapper there needing a runner for his komatik can always hook up a whale’s jaw or rib from the mud of the harbour. Relics of rovers of the sea, who sought shelter on this uncharted coast with its million islands, are still to be found. A friend of mine was one day looking from his boat into the deep, narrow channel in front of his house, when he perceived some strange object in the mud. With help he raised it, and found a long brass “Long Tom” cannon, which now stands on the rocks at that place. Remains of the ancient French occupation should also be procurable near the seat of their deserted capital near Bradore.

My friend, Professor Reginald Daly, head of the Department of Geology at Harvard University, after having spent a summer with me on the coast, wrote as follows:

“We crossed the Straits of Belle Isle once more, homeward bound. Old Jacques Cartier, searching for an Eldorado, found Labrador, and in disgust called it the ‘Land of Cain.’ A century and a half afterward Lieutenant Roger Curtis wrote of it as a ’country formed of frightful mountains, and unfruitful valleys, a prodigious heap of barren rock’; and George Cartwright, in his gossipy journal, summed up his impressions after five and twenty years on the coast. He said, ’God created this country last of all, and threw together there the refuse of his materials as of no use to mankind.’

“We have learned at last the vital fact that Nature has set apart her own picture galleries where men may resort if for a time they would forget human contrivances. Such a wilderness is Labrador, a kind of mental and moral sanitarium. The beautiful is but the visible splendor of the true. The enjoyment of a visit to the coast may consist not alone in the impressions of the scenery; there may be added the deeper pleasure of reading out the history of noble landscapes, the sculptured monuments of elemental strife and revolutions of distant ages.”