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.”