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Frontispiece.
THE LABRADOR COAST.
FOURNAL OF TWO SUMMER CRUISES TOMEERAT UREGION.
WITH NOTES ON ITS EARLY DISCOVERY, ON THE ESKIMO, ON ITS PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY, GEOLOGY AND NATURAL HISTORY,
BY
ALPHEUS SPRING PACKARD, M.D., Px.D.,
CORRESPONDING MEMBER OF THE AMERICAN GEOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY, NEW YORK; AND OF THE
APPALACHIAN MOUNTAIN CLUB, BOSTON.
With Maps and llustrations.
NEW YORK: NDC; HODGES; PUBLISHER,
47 LAFAYETTE PLACE.
LONDON: KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, TRUBNER & CO. 189gI,
TO THE MEMORY OF
PAUL A. CHADBOURNE,
LATE PRESIDENT OF WILLIAMS COLLEGE, AND FOR SOME TIME PROFESSOR OF CHEMISTRY AND NATURAL HISTORY IN BOWDOIN COLLEGE, AND WHO CONDUCTED THE FIRST STUDENTS’ EXPEDITION FROM WILLIAMS
COLLEGE TO LABRADOR,
' THIS BOOK IS GRATEFULLY INSCRIBED
BY HIS FORMER PUPIL AND FRIEND, THE AUTHOR, WHO GLADLY ACKNOWLEDGES THE ENCOURAGEMENT AND MANY KINDNESSES RECEIVED FROM HIM
IN HIS EARLY STUDENT DAYS.
ie ls OAC E
THE Labrador Peninsula is less known than the interior of Africa or the wastes of Siberia. Its rivers are still stocked with salmon; its inland waters are the breeding places of count- less birds. Its numerous and deep fiords, and the splendid mountain scenery of the northern coast, with its Arctic ice- fields and thousand bergs, and the Eskimos, christianized .and heathen, will never cease to tempt to this threshold of the Arc- tic regions the hardy explorer or the adventurous yachtsman.
Though this book is mainly based on observations and col- lections made by the author in his early student days, it was thought that some general and standard account of the Labra- dor coast, its geography, its people, its fisheries, its geology, as well as its animals and plants, might be useful, even if future explorations of the great fiords and of the interior plateaux and rivers might in time result in far more complete works.
The scientific results, geological and zoological, are reprinted from the Memoirs of the Boston Society of Natural History for 1867. Chapters I, II, II], and VI are reprinted by per- mission from the Bulletin of the American Geographical Society for 1888. Chapters IV and XIII first appeared in the American Naturalist, and Chapter V is reprinted from Apple- tons’ Journal.
Sportsmen and ornithologists will be interested in the list of Labrador birds by Mr. L. W. Turner, which has been kind-
5
6 Preface.
ly revised and brought down to date by Dr. J. A. Allen. Dr. S. H. Scudder has contributed the list of butterflies, and Prof. John Macoun, of Ottawa, Canada, has kindly prepared the list of Labrador plants. The proof of this chapter has, in his absence, been read by Mr. Sereno Watson, Curator of the Harvard Herbarium, and who has kindly made some addi- tional notes and corrections. 3
Much pains has been taken to render the bibliography complete, and the author is indebted to Dr. Franz Boas and others for several titles and important suggestions ; and it is hoped that this feature of the book will recommend it to col- lectors of Americana.
The author also acknowledges his great indebtedness to William Bradford, Esq., the Arctic traveller and artist, for con- stant aid and courtesies extended while a member of his party, and for the gift of a number of photographs of the coast scenery and of the Eskimos, some of which have been reproduced in this volume.
The results of the three Canadian expeditions to Hudson’s Bay under Lieut. A. R. Gordon, R.N., of which Dr. Robert Bell was the naturalist and geologist; and of the journeys of Dr. K. R. Koch, and of Mr. Randle F. Holme, have been in- cluded, so that the work has been brought down to date and represents our present knowledge of the coast and interior.
It is hoped that the volume will serve asa cuide to the Labrador coast for the use of travellers, yachtsmen, sportsmen, artists, and naturalists, as well as those interested in geographt- cal and historical studies.
Brown UNIVERSITY, PRovIDENCE, R. I.
CHAPTER
ce
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f$
xX.
XI. XIl.
ALI.
XIV. XV. XVI.
XVII.
CONTENTS.
. THE PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY OF LABRADOR. . 3
Who First SAW THE LABRADOR COAST ?
THE GEOGRAPHICAL EVOLUTION OF LABRADOR. LIFE AND NATURE IN SOUTHERN LABRADOR. . ONE oF Firty DAYS IN SOUTHERN LABRADOR.
A SUMMER’S CRUISE TO NORTHERN LABRADOR.
I. From Boston to Henley Harbor.
A SUMMER’S CRUISE TO NORTHERN LABRADOR. II. From Henley Harbor to Cape St. Michael.
A SuMMER’s CrutsE To NORTHERN LABRADOR. III. From Cape St. Michael to Hopedale. é
A SUMMER’S CRUISE TO NORTHERN LABRADOR. IV. Hopedale and the Eskimos.
A SUMMER’S CRUISE TO NORTHERN LABRADOR.
VY. The Return Voyage to Boston. . : RECENT EXPLORATIONS. : : f Q :
Tue Civit History oF LABRADOR, WITH A BRIEF AC-
COUNT OF ITS FISHERIES. . : : 5 .
THE LABRADOR ESKIMOS AND THEIR FORMER RANGE SOUTHWARD. é
THE GEOLOGY OF THE LABRADOR COAST. : ; < THE ZOOLOGY OF THE LABRADOR COAST. 3 5 THE BOTANY OF THE LABRADOR COAST. ; 5 :
BIBLIOGRAPHY RELATING TO THE EARLY EXPLORA- TIONS, THE GEOGRAPHY, AND THE CIVIL AND NAT- URAL HisToRY OF LABRADOR. , : ; : :
120
140
CHAPTER: I, THE PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY OF LABRADOR.
Our knowledge of the interior of the Labrador penin- sula is still so scanty, owing to its inaccessibility, its un- navigable rivers, the shortness of the summer season, and the lack of game, as well as the enormous numbers of black flies and mosquitoes, that any description of this country must long remain imperfect. The only scientific explorer of the interior is Professor Hind, who ascended the river Moisie, which, however, is a confluent of the St. Lawrence, and is in fact situated only near the borders of Labrador, in the province of Quebec. None of the larger rivers of Labrador have been explored to near their sources; and no one except Indians and but a single employé of the Hudson Bay Company (Mr. Mc- Lean) has ever crossed any considerable portion of.:the interior. And yet the peninsula is well watered with streams, rivers, and chains of lakes. I have been in- formed by residents that the Indians of the interior, pre- sumably the Mountaineers, can travel in their canoes from the mouth of the Esquimaux River, which empties into the Strait of Belle Isle, across the country to the Hudson Bay posts in Hamilton Inlet. So far as we have been able to gather from maps and the accounts of explorers, such as McLean and Davies, the latter of
whom published an account of the Grand or Hamilton I
2 THE PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY OF LABRADOR.
River, and the Moravian missionaries Kohlmeister and Kyioch, who in their “ Journal of a Voyage from Ok- kak” described the Koksoak River and its probable source, as well as from our own scanty observations taken from elevations near the coast, the interior of Labrador is thickly studded with lakes, somewhat as in the Adirondack region of New York, though the in- ‘terior country is far more broken and mountainous.
It is certainly most desirable that explorers should penetrate this vast and unknown wilderness, however formidable may seem the barriers to travel. These obstacles would be the rapids and water-falls, the lone and difficult portages or carries, and the unceasing plague of mosquitoes and black flies. But the annoy- ance from insects might not be greater than that en- countered by explorers in Siberia, or by trout or salmon, fishermen in northern New England and Canada, while the difficulties and dangers of river navigation would not compare with those of a passage through the Colo- rado River. The route which would be most prolific in results would be to ascend the Meshikumau or Es- quimaux River from its mouth near Salmon Bay, in the Strait of Belle Isle, to its source, and thence to connect with the probably adjacent source of Grand or Hamil- ton River to the Hudson Bay post at Rigolet, in Hamilton or Invuktoke Inlet. Another journey which would be productive of good geographical results would be to cross the peninsula from Prince Rupert’s Land by way of Rupert River and Lake Mistassini to Hamilton Inlet. The Koksoak River should be explored to its. sources, and the low, flat, wooded region of the East Main, lying between Hudson Bay and the Labrador
MAPS OF THE LABRADOR COAST. 3
coast-region, should be adequately mapped. At present, less is known of the vast region between Hudson Bay and the Atlantic Ocean than of perhaps any region of - similar extent in North America; although the results of exploration might be of more value to geographical and geological science than to trade and commerce. Thanks to the labors of the Moravian missionaries, we now have a much better knowledge of the intricacies of the extreme northern coast of Labrador than is af- forded by the charts of the British Admiralty or the
United States Coast Survey; and it is to the rare op- portunity we have been generously afforded by the officers of the Moravian Society in London and Herrn- hut, Saxony, that we are able herewith to present maps which are at least approximately correct, and which must for a long time to come be the only source of any exact knowledge of the multitudinous bays, inlets, promontories, and islands of this exceedingly diversi- fied coast. 7
The first special map of Northern Labrador to be published was that by the Moravian Brethren Kohl- meister and Knoch. It comprised the northern ex- tremity of Labrador, north of latitude 57°, including Ungava Bay, and appeared in 1814.
Previous to this, Cartwright, in 1792, had published a map of Sandwich Bay and adjacent regions. Then succeeded the general chart of the coast published by Admiral Bayfield, in 1827, and the later charts of the British Admiralty.
In the United States Coast Survey report for 1860, besides an imperfect outline of the coast given in Mr. Lieber’s geological map of the Labrador coast, there is
4. THE PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY OF LABRADOR.
a special map of Eclipse Harbor surveyed by Lieut.- Commanding A. Murray, United States Navy, and drawn to a scale of 4 with the soundings indicated.
About the year 1873 (the date is not given on the copy of the map we have received) appeared a map of that portion of the coast embracing the sites of the principal Moravian stations and lying between N. lat. 55° and 59°. It was prepared by L. T. Reichel from the sketches made by himself, and published in the lack of any authentic maps of the coast. For a copy of this and the map of Aivekt6k or Eskimo Bay we are in- debted to the officers of the Society in Herrnhut, Sax- ony. On this map are given the route of the ship-chan- nel from the southward to Hopedale, and thence to the different Moravian stations up to Hebron; also the overland sledge-routes between Port Manvers and Ok- kak, and the latter station and Hebron. There is also an attempt to give in a general way the elevation of the coast, and the elevation of Kaumajet Mt. and Mt. Kig- lapeit is given as 4,000 feet. Scales of German and of English miles are also given.
The second special map was also prepared by Rev. L. T. Reichel, and published in 1873. It gives what is probably by far the most authentic map of Hamilton In- let and Aivektok, or Eskimo Bay, and the coast north- ward, the whole area mapped being comprised between latitudes 53° 20° and 56° 20’; it i$ of special value in giving a capital idea of the intricate fiord structure of the coast, and also a census of the white and Eskimo residents. ;
We have also been favored by B. Latrobe, Esq., Sec- retary of the Moravian Missions in London, with the
THE LABRADOR PLATEAU. 5
loan of a MS. map, by the late Rev. Samuel Weiz, of the coast from Byron Bay in latitude 54° 40’ around to the mouth of George River in Ungava Bay, and kindly allowed to copy it. _ With the aid of the new maps of Messrs. Reichel and Weiz we have been able to have compiled the new gen- eral map of the Labrador coast herewith presented ; the southern portion of the coast being reproduced from the British Admiralty and U. S. Coast Survey charts, as well as those of the Hydrographic Office, U. S. Navy Department, as follows: No. 9.—River and Gulf of St. Lawrence, Newfound- land, Nova Scotia, and the banks adjacent; Sheet 1. English and French Surveys. Published March, 1868. | No. 731.—Anchorages N. E. coast of Labrador, from Br. Surveys. Published Sept., 1876. No. 809.—Coast of Labrador, Cape St. Charles to Sandwich Bay. Br. Surveys to 1882.
‘There are in Lt. Gordon’s Report of the Hudson Bay Expedition of 1885, charts of the Ottawa Islands in Hudson Bay, and of one of the islands at Cape Chidley.
In its general features the peninsula of Labrador is an oblong mass of Laurentian rocks situated between the 5oth and 62d parallels of north latitude. On the east- ern or Atlantic coast it rises abruptly from the ocean as an elevated plateau, forming the termination of the Laurentian chain, which here spreads out. into a vast waste of hills and low mountains.*
* The mountains in the Quebec Province which appear in the accompanying map are hypothetical, and were wrongly inserted by the artist.
6 THE PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY OF LABRADOR.
This plateau of hills and mountains, with barren table- lands, rises abruptly from the sea-level, presenting a lofty but stern and forbidding front to the ocean, throughout the whole extent of 1,100 miles of coast from the Strait of Belle Isle to Cape Wolstenholme.
Mountaens.—On the northern shores of the Strait of Belle Isle the general elevation of the coast is from 500 - to 800 feet, and the highest mountains are the three Bradore Hills, which: are respectively 1,135, 1,220, and 1,264 feet in height. From Chateau Bay and Cape Charles the coast rises in height northwards, until at Square Island the higher elevations form mountains about 1,000 feet high. Going farther on, the Mealy Mountains, said to rise to an elevation of 1,482 feet, are seen forming a range extending along the peninsula situ- ated between Sandwich Bay and Eskimo Bay, with Hamilton Inlet.
Still higher is Mt. Misery, which we suppose to be ‘the same elevation as Mt. Allagaigai, a noble mountain mass rising to an altitude of 2,170 feet, forming the summit of an elevated plateau region lying half-way between Cape Harrison and Hopedale. It is a con- spicuous peak seen when crossing the mouth of Ham- ilton Inlet, and we well remember the grandeur of its appearance when partly wreathed in clouds, which left its summit so exposed as to make it look much higher than in reality.
The highest elevations in Labrador rise from the irregular coast range between latitude 57° and 60°; and judging from the views published by Dr. Lieber in the U. S. Coast Survey report for 1860, and by Professor Bell in the Report of the Canadian Geological Survey
THE MOUNTAIN RANGES OF LABRADOR. 7
for 1884, the scenery of this part of the country is wonderfully wild and grand, rivalling that of the coast of Norway, and of the coast of (eet the mountains ‘being about as high as in those regions. According to Prof. Bell: “After passing the Strait of Belle Isle, the Labrador coast continues high and rugged, and although there are some interruptions to the general rule, the ‘elevation of the land near the coast may be said to in- ‘crease gradually in going northward, until within seventy statute miles of Cape Chudleigh, where it has attained a height of about 6,000 feet above the sea. Beyond this it again diminishes to this cape, where it is 1,500 feet. From what I have seen’ quoted of Labrador, and from what I have been able to learn through published ac- ‘counts from the Hudson Bay Company’s officers and the natives, and also judging from the indications af- forded by the courses of the rivers and streams, the ‘highest land of the peninsula lies near the coast all along, constituting, in fact, a regular range of mountains parallel to the Atlantic seaboard. In a general way, this range becomes progressively narrower from Hamilton Inlet to Cape Chudleigh.” * The highest mountains in Labra- -dor were previously said by Messrs. Kohlmeister and Knoch to rise from a chain of high mountains terminat- ing in the lofty peaks near Aulezavik Island and Cape ‘Chidley. One of the smallest of these mountains, Mount Bache, was measured in 1860 by the Eclipse Expedition of the U. S. Coast Survey, and found to be 2,150 feet above the sea-level. This mountain is a gneiss elevation, and a sketch on the geological chart by
* Observations on the Geology, etc., of the Labrador Coast, etc., Rep. of ‘Geological Survey of Canada, 1884, p. 10 DD.
8 THE PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY OF LABRADOR,
Mr. Lieber, the geologist of the expedition, shows it to» be rounded by glacial action, while lofty, ‘ wild volcanic-- looking mountains form a water-shed in the interior,. whose craggy peaks have evidently never ae ground! down by land-ice into domes and rounded tops.”
While the highest elevations have never been meas- ured, the height of three of the lesser mountains along this part of the coast appears to have been roughly as-- certained. Professor Bell states that the mountains on: either side of Nachvak Inlet, about 140 miles south of Cape Chidley, “rise to heights of from 1,500 to 3,400: feet, but a few miles inland, especially on the south side,. they appear to attain an altitude of 5,000 to 6,000 feet,. which would correspond with the height of The Four Peaks, near the outer coast line, about midway between Nachvak and Cape Chudleigh.” The mountains around: Nachvak, he adds, ‘‘are steep, rough-sided, peaked, and: serrated, and have no appearance of having been glaci- ated, excepting close to the sea-level.” These mountains are formed of Laurentian gneiss, “ notwithstanding their extraordinary appearance, so different from the smooth, solid, and more or less rounded outlines of the hills composed of these rocks in most other parts of. the Dominion.” The height of these mountains was (evi- dently roughly estimated from that of an escarpment oni the south side of the inlet at the Hudson Bay Company's. port, which ‘rises to a height of 3,400 feet, as ascer- tained by Commander J. G. Bolton” (p. 14 DD).
According to the British Admiralty chart and the Newfoundland Pilot, Cape Chidley rises to a height — of 1,500 feet above the sea, and the highest point of the Button Islands has an equal elevation (Bell, p. 17 DD).
THE MOUNTAINS OF NORTHERN LABRADOR. 9
Port Burwell is situated on the island of which Cape Chidley is the northeastern point. This island is sepa- rated from the mainland by McLelan’s Strait. ‘‘ Nu- naingok is situated on an alluvial flat, extending between the two branches of the strait. The hill which rises steeply on the south side of it is about 700 feet high; but farther in, between the branches and on either side of them, the mountains are from 1,500 to 2,500 feet: high, and have ragged tops and sides” (Bell, p. 19 DD).
In his report for 1885 Professor Bell vives no additional measurements of mountains, but observes: ‘‘ The moun- tains everywhere in this vicinity | Nachvak Inlet] give evidence of long-continued atmospheric decay. The an- nual precipitation at the present time is not great, other- wise small glaciers would probably form among these. mountains, which lie between latitudes 58° and 60°, and which overlook a sea bearing field-ice for half the year, and from which bergs are never absent. Patches of snow, however, remain throughout the summer in shaded parts of the slopes and on the highest summits, which range from 4,000 to 6,000 feet above the ocean.” *. Raised beaches were observed on both sides of Nachvak Inlet.
South of the region visited by Professor Bell are the two mountains of Kaumajet and Kiglapeit, both of which are put at an elevation of 4,000 feet on Rev. L. T. Reichel’s map. Of these the former constitutes a penin- sula, off which lies the island of which Cape Mugford is the eastern promontory ; while Kiglapeit forms the great headland lying between Nain and Okkak in latitude about 57°, and of which Port Manvers is one of the in- dentations.
*Ann. Rep. Geol. Surv. Canada, New Ser., vol. i., 1885, p. 8 DD, 1886.
&
fe) THE PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY OF LABRADOR.
From these facts it will be seen that along this part of the northern coast, mountains as high as the Adirondacks, and even the White Mountains of New Hampshire, plunge directly into the sea, and are as wild and sublime as the coast mountains of Norway and Greenland.
Drainage and Rivers.—Of the water-sheds and water- systems of Labrador our knowledge is mostly conjecture, ~ on account of the lack of information regarding the in- terior. In none of the charts and maps are the rivers and internal lakes accurately represented, and there is the widest discrepancy between the different maps.
The Labrador plateau has an area of about 420,000 square miles. It has a coast-line of about 1,100 miles, stretching from the Strait of Belle Isle to Cape Wolsten- holme, and its greatest breadth is said to be 600 miles. It lies between the 4oth and 63d parallels of latitude, and the 55th and 79th meridians. Bounded on the east by the Atlantic Ocean, and on the north and west by Hudson Strait and Hudson Bay, its southwestern limits are defined by the Bersiamits, Mistassini, and Rupert rivers. The broadest and in general highest portion of the plateau appears to be in the southern portion of the peninsula, and it is here that the larger rivers appear to take their rise. |
From the northern shores of the Gulf of St. Law- rence and Strait of Belle Isle the Labrador plateau rises until it reaches a vast table-land or water-shed in the in- terior, the edge of which has been reached by Professor Hind in his explorations of the Moisie River.
This elevated region is thought by Professor Hind to attain a height of 2,240 feet above the sea-level, Pro- fessor Hind says of the table-land from which the river
THE LABRADOR TABLE-LAND. If
Moisie, and also, probably, the Esquimaux as well as Hamilton rivers take their rise: “It is pre-eminently sterile, and where the country is not burned, caribou moss covers the rocks, with stunted spruce, birch, and ' aspen in the hollows and deep ravines. The whole of the table-land is strewed with an infinite number of boul- ders, sometimes three and four deep; these singular erratics are perched on the summit of every mountain and hill, often on. the edges of cliffs; and they vary in size from one foot to twenty in diameter. Language fails to depict the awful desolation of the table-land of the Labrador peninsula.” This table-land or water-shed is probably more or less parallel to the Strait of Belle Isle, and situated between 100 and 150 miles inland. It probably terminates to the northeast in the Mealy Mountains. Numerous rivers descend the steep south- €rn slope into the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Of these the Moisie and Esquimaux rivers are the largest. They are Supposed to arise from a chain of lakes on the summit of the water-shed, which also gives rise to the Kenamou River.
The Moisie River forms part of the St. Lawrence River | system. It is 250 miles long, and flows south, empty- ing into that river near the Bay of Seven Islands, at a point west of Anticosti and Opposite the northern shore ‘of the Gaspé Peninsula. From this point the streams running into the Gulf assume, the further we go east, a N. W. and S. E. direction. Such is that of the Meshi- kumau or Esquimaux River, which empties into the western mouth of the Strait of Belle Isle, at the lower Caribou Island. This stream is about 250 miles long, as J Jearned from residents, and is only navigable for about
12 THE PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY OF LABRADOR.
twelve miles from its mouth by ordinary fishing-boats. There is no large river between this and Hamilton River, which flows into the Atlantic in a direction a little north of east. The latter river seems to flow in a fissure that runs at right angles to the line of upheaval in the syenite and traps of the Atlantic coast ; as upon the Gulf coast the _rivers flow from the northwest along natural fissures in the earth’s crust that run at right angles to the axis of elevation of the Laurentian chain on the north side of the St. Lawrence. In this connection it should be no- ticed that the fiords on the Atlantic coast of Labrador assume the same direction, and though they agree much in this respect with the direction of those farther south, there is a yet greater west and east course as we go north- ward toward Cape Chidley, until beyond latitude 58° the fiords run ina N. W. and S. E. direction, especially on the Hudson Bay slope. According to Davies, the Grand cr Hamilton River is supposed to rise from a chain of lakes in the “rear of the Seven Islands, and flows for a considerable distance on the top of the ridge, if I may so express it, between the head-waters of the _rivers falling into the St. Lawrence and those falling into the Hudson Bay and Strait, for they are said by the Indians to be quite close to the waters of the Grand River on either side.” Our author also states that, “two hundred miles from its mouth it forces itself through a range of mountains that seems to border the table-land of the interior, in a succession of tremendous falls and rapids for nearly twenty miles. Above these falls the river flows with a very smooth and even current.” McLean in 1830 descended the river from the now aban- doned Fort Nasquapee, situated on Lake Petchikapou,
THE RIVERS OF LABRADOR. 13
to its mouth. He had reached the fort from Ungava Bay. Two other important rivers empty into Invuk- toke Bay: the Kenamou, which flows in from the south, and the Nasquapee or Northwest River, which is a larger stream with a very circuitous southeasterly course. Professor Hind gives us the fullest information as to the rivers of this region, and I should regard his map as, ~ in this respect, the most authentic one yet published. The situations of the rivers and lakes as given in our map are copied from his, with the exception of those on the Atlantic coast mapped by Messrs. Reichel and Weiz. Hind, however, strangely ignores the Esqui- maux River, which empties into the Strait of Belle Isle.* According to Hind, whose work appeared in 1863, and who obtained his information from employés of the Hudson Bay Company: ‘‘ The couriers of the Hudson Bay Company traverse the country between Musquano (or Natashquan) and Hamilton Inlet two or three times every year. The journey can be made in fifteen days in canoes, and this route has long been a means of com- munication between Hamilton Inlet and the Gulf. The St. Augustine forms the great canoe route of the Mon- tagnais through this part of the country. . . . The
* “¢The Kenamou River, which enters Hamilton Inlet from the south, cuts through the Mealy Mountains thirty miles from the coast; it is a succession of rapids, and scarcely admits of navigation, even by canoes. The Nasquapee or Northwest River falls into the inlet on the north side, nearly opposite. the mouth of the Kenamou. The inlet is here twelve miles across. About ;two miles from its outlet the Nasquapee River passes through a long narrow lake bordered by high mountains. It takes its source in Lake Meshikumau (Great Lake), and the river itself, according to Indian custom, is called by the Nas- quapees Meshikumau Shipu. There is a canoe communication between this river and the Ashwanipi, which is shown on two maps, constructed by Montag- nais Indians, in my possession.” —Hind’s ‘‘ Labrador,” ii., 138.
14 THE PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY OF LABRADOR.
St. Augustine, falling into a fine bay of the same name, has its source in the lakes and marshes on the table- land, which also give rise to the Kenamou, which falls into Hamilton Inlet. By this route the Montagnais can journey in their canoes from the Gulf of St. Law- rence to Hamilton Inlet in seven days.”
The country north of Hamilton Inlet is thus described by one of the Hudson Bay Company’s officers (presum- ably Mr. McLean) who was sent to explore it: ‘“ From Northwest River House the Nasquapee River is as- cended for about sixty-five miles, when it is left at Mont a Reine Portage. The country from Mont a Reine — Portage to Little Seal Lake is as barren and as miser- able as can be seen anywhere; the trees are all burnt, and nothing but stones and dry stumps to be seen. On the ist of July, 18309, the ice was still firm on Meshiku- mau or Great Lake. There is no wood to build on the shores of that extensive sheet of water; it is only at Gull Nest Lake that wood remains in that direction. The borders of Nasquapee River,-when the expedition ascended it in June, were still lined with ice, some of it ten feet thick.” (Hind.)
South of Hamilton Inlet, after passing the first range of mountains on leaving the bay, an elevated plateau is gained, says Hind, which continues until the shores of the Gulf of St. Lawrence are apprdached, when the country becomes more mountainous and slopes rapidly to the seaside. The breadth of the plateau is 100 miles, and it abounds in lakes. i
The Atlantic system of streams to the north is one ' of small rivers flowing into the ocean in an easterly course.
THE RIVERS OF NORTHERN LABRADOR. 15
Ungava Bay receives two important rivers which im- perfectly drain the northwestern slope of Western Labrador. The smaller of the two is the Kangutlua- luksoak or George River, which empties into the bay in lat. 38° 57’, and is 140 miles long. Its water-shed is said by Kohlmeister and Knoch to be a chain of high mountains which terminates in the lofty peaks of syenite at Aulezavik Island and Cape Chidley.
The two Moravian missionaries mentioned above state in addition that “this chain’ of mountains may be seen from the Kangutlualuksoak River, in Ungava Bay, which is collateral proof that the neck of land termin- ated to the north by Cape Chidley is of no great width. Boththe Nain and Okak Esquimaux frequently penetrate far enough inland to find the rivers taking a westerly course, consequently towar ds the Ungava coun- try. They even now and then have reached the woods skirting the estuaries of George and South rivers.” These missionaries describe the Koksoak or South River as flowing smoothly through a low, rocky (prob- ably Silurian) district, and emptying into Ungava Bav in lat. 58° 36’. It is said to resemble at its mouth the Thames, and affords anchorage for vessels twenty-four miles from its mouth. This stream probably arises near the source of the Grand or Hamilton River, and flows in a N. N. W. direction, probably along a natural fissure formed by the juncture of the Silurian rocks and Lau- rentian fo .
* This river is data to tiie its Source in jae Csniapaseaw, which i is 70 oithiles long and 20 broad, situated in the centre of the peninsula, equidistant from the St. Lawrence, from Ungava and. Hamilton Inlet, being 350 miles from each of those points.
“It is rapid and turbulent, flowing through a partially wooded country. At
16 THE PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY OF LABRADOR.
At the western political boundary-line between Labra- dor and Prince Rupert’s Land, according to recent maps, we find apparently another water-shed, which on the eastern slope sends a few streams into the Koksoak River, while on its western slope descend several streams which flow in a westerly course into Hudson and James's bays.
Thus. it will be seen that thése four river systems take their rise from a great water-shed which curves in a southwesterly direction from Labrador along the north- ern shores of the St. Lawrence River and the Great Lakes. ee
Lakes.—The following remarks are taken from our memoir on the ‘‘Glacial Phenomena of Labrador and Maine.” *
Labrador is essentially a dae district. Its numerous rivers afford a very imperfect system of drainage to a country densely covered with lakes, ponds, and pools, and morasses innumerable. It resembles in this respect the probable aspect of the Lake or Terrace period in New England and Canada after the Glacial period, when
‘
South River House (now abandoned) it receives the Washquah River, which forms the route of communication between Ungava Bay and Hamilton Inlet. From this point to the sea (150 miles) the current, though strong, is less broken by rapids: it also widens very much, and ninety miles from its mouth it is a mile in breadth, flowing between high rocky banks, thinly clothed with trees ; it is nearly a league in width. Fort Chimo is situated twenty-eight miles from the sea.”’ George’s River was ascended by officers of the Hudson Bay Com- pany to establish relations with the Nascopé Indians, near its source. For 220 miles it was, though full of rapids, deep enough for barges. ‘‘ The general course of the river is north, running parallel to. the coast of Labrador, where it is at no time more than 100 miles distant, and often much nearer,” (Hind.) We may expect a full description of the region about Fort Chimo when Mr, L. M. Turner’s report is issued, as he spent two years at this station. * Memoirs of the Boston Society of Natural History, i., 210-303, 1866.
LABRADOR LAKES. 17
the present broad rivers’ were only chains of lakes, and may thus be said to be in an embryonic stage, as its river-beds have never been remodelled and scooped out into gentle declivities and broad valleys, nor immense depths of sand and clay deposited to smooth over the inequalities of the rocky surface of the country, such as in the temperate zone render a continent inhabitable throughout its breadth ; while in Labrador man can only inhabit the coast, and gain a livelihood from the sea. We must distinguish two classes in the lakes of Labra- dor, viz.: the deep mountain ¢arzs, lying in the interior, directly upon the summits of the water-sheds ; and the far more numerous broad, shallow lakes and pools spread profusely over the surface below the height of land. ‘These last occupy shallow depressions and_ hollows, most probably excavated by glaciers in valleys which have been simply remodelled by glacial action. The deep tarns, on the contrary, evidently fill original depressions, sinking between lofty ranges of hills. Davies says that in the region about the source of the Hamilton River the lakes are very deep, and lie directly on the height of _ land, while the ponds on the lowlands are shallow ; and, on the other. hand, those which directly communicate with the ocean or with the fords are in general distin- guished for their depth. ‘‘ This almost universal shal- _lowness of the lakes isa singular feature, when the nature of their borders is taken into consideration, as they are generally surrounded by hills, which would lead one to look for a corresponding depth in the lake; but instead of this some. are so shallow that for miles there is hardly water enough to float a half-loaded canoe. I am in- formed by my friend, John McLean, Esq., that this is
18 THE PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY OF LABRADOR.
likewise the case with the lakes lying on the water-shed of Ungava Bay. The lakes lying oz the table-land are said to be deep.” He also states that the large lakes in the interior are well stocked with fish, while the shallow lakes, and, in fact, the deep ones communicating with the ocean, are in general very destitute of them.
We must believe that the same causes that produce the deep fiords likewise account for these deep fissures and depressions in the summit of the water-sheds. It is evident that any amount of glacial action, however long sustained and vast in its operation, can never account for these rude, irregular, often ‘ geoclinal,” troughs which follow lines of fracture and faults, lying along the axis of elevation of mountain chains, or at neariy nght angles to them.
Frords.—The fiords onthe Labrador coast are of great extent and depth. They are either original lines of frac- _ ture.and faults, or what Professor Dana terms geoclenal troughs, occurring at the line. of juncture of two rock formations. Thus, Chateau Bay is a fissure at least 1,200 feet in depth. The western shore rises 600 feet above the sea-level, and the waters of the bay at their deepest are 600 feet in depth. This fault must have — been produced at the time of the upheaval of the syenites of the coast.
All the broad, deep bays and fiords on the Atlantic Ocean occur at the juncture of the syenites and gneiss. There are deep bays between Cape St. Lewis and Cape St. Michael’s, where syenites rise through the gneiss, producing faults and lines of dislocation. The large bay just north of Cape St. Michael’s occurs at the junc- tion of gneiss and “hyperite” rocks. Sandwich Bay
GLACIAL LAKES. Ke)
and Hamilton [nlet were formed by the denudation of the Domino gneiss. Despair Harbor is a deep fiord oc- curring at the juncture of the *‘ Aulezavik gneiss” of Lieber, with syenitic rocks forming the coast-line between this point and Hopedale. The irregular overflows of tap and syenitic rocks which enclose the gneiss rocks, produce an immense number of cross fiords and channels, from the presence of innumerable islands which line the coast, and are composed of these eruptive rocks.
These original fissures and depressions have been modified by glaciers, by frost and shore-ice and icebergs, and by the waves of the sea.
The shallow lakes, formed most probably by glaciers, lie in shallow troughs, upon a thin bed of gravel and boulders. We only learn in some regions, especially in Southern Labrador, that the country has been covered with boulders by their presence on the banks and in the centre of these pools. Clear examples of lakes partially surrounded by walls of rock, with the banks at one end completed by a barrier of sand and gravel, are frequent. Such barriers of drift have lost entirely their resemblance _ to glacial moraines, to which they undoubtedly owe their origin, since the drift deposits have been remodelled into sea beaches composed of very coarse gravel and boulders, while the finer materials have been swept away by the powerful “ Labrador current,” with its burden of icebergs and floe-ice that has so effectually removed traces of the former presence of what we must believe to have been extensive glaciers. |
From all that has been published, it would seem that the entire interior of the Labrador peninsula is strewn with boulders, having once been covered with land-ice,
20 THE PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY OF LABRADOR.
which flowed into the Atlantic on the east and south, and Hudson Bay on the west and north. The forest growths sometimes clothe the lower hills, but in general are confined to the protected river-valleys and lake basins. :
Itis to be hoped that at no distant day some skilled explorer, with a sufficient knowledge of geology, may thread the interior of the peninsula from Ungava to Hamilton Inlet, passing thence by the Esquimaux River to the Strait of Belle Isle. The region from the head- waters of the Hamilton River to Hudson Bay should also be traversed, and when this is done we shall be pro- vided with a knowledge of this vast, shadowy, gloomy, forbidding region, of which we now apparently know less than of the interior of Alaska, the tundras of Siberia, or the plateaus of Central Africa.
CHARTER IT. ; WHO FIRST SAW THE LABRADOR COAST ?
THOSE rovers of the northern seas, the Norsemen, pushing out from the fiords of Greenland in their one- masted craft, no larger than our coasters or mackerel boats, without doubt sighted and coasted along ‘the Labrador,” nearly five centuries before John Cabot made his first landfall of the American Continent.
The Labrador coast was not, however, the first Ameri- can land visited by the Norsemen.*
Kohl states that New England was first’ discovered by Biarne, in 990. It appears that Heriulf, one of the earliest colonists of Greenland, had a son, Biarne, “who, at the time his father went over from Iceland to Green- land, had been absent on a trading voyage in Norway. Returning to Iceland in ggo, and finding that his father, with Eric the Red, had gone to the west, he resolved to follow him and to spend the next winter with him in Greenland. ; oe
‘They boldly set sail to the southwest, but having
* We should acknowledge that, not having access to the primitive sources in which the voyages of the Norsemen to the American shores are. described, we have placed our dependence on the account given by a learned German geogra- pher, J. G. Kohl, in his History of the Discovery of Maine, as the most authori- tative exposition of early voyages and discoveries in northwestern America. Kohl’s views are based on Rafn’s Antiquitates American. (Documentary History of the State of Maine. Collections of the Maine Historical Society. Second Series, Vol. 1. 1869).
21
Die, WHO FIRST SAW THE LABRADOR COAST?
encountered northerly storms, after many days’ sail they lost their course, and when the weather cleared, they de- scried land, not, however, like that described to them as ‘Greenland.’ They saw that it was a much more south- ern land, and covered with forests. It not being the intention of Biarne to explore new countries, but only to find the residence of his father in Greenland, he im- proved a southwest wind, and turned to the northeast, © and put himself on the track for Greenland. After sev- eral days’ sailing, during which he discovered and sailed by other well-wooded lands lying on his left, some high and mountainous and bordered by icebergs, he reached Heriulfsniis, the residence of his father, in Greenland. His return passage occupied nine days, and he speaks of three distinct tracts of land, along which he coasted, one of which he supposed to have been a Jarge island.”
So much for the facts taken from the Norse records and sagas. Dr. Kohl then goes on to say: ‘‘ That Biarne, on this voyage, must have seen some part of the Ameri- can east coast is clear from his having been driven that way from Iceland by northerly gales. We cannot de- termine with any certainty what part of our coast he sighted, and what was the southern extent of his cruise. But taking into consideration all circumstances and state- ments of the report, it appears probable that it was part of the coast of New England, and perhaps Cape Cod, which stands far out to the east. One day and night's sailing with a favorable wind, was, in Iceland and Nor- way, reckoned to be about the distance of thirty German miles. Two days and ‘nights,’ therefore, would be sixty German miles, and this is about the distance from Cape Cod in New England to Cape Sable in Nova Scotia.”
BIARNE’S LANDFALL. 23
Vhat the-Jand first seen by Biarne was necessarily so far south as Cape Cod does not, we would venture to submit, follow from the facts we have quoted. Is it not more probable that the country was some portion of Nova Scotia, a land as much “‘ covered with forests” as New England?
But Dr. Kohl] maintains that the second Jand which was ‘“ well-woodea”. was Nova Scotia. In his own words :
“The second country seen by Biarne must, then, probably have been Nova Scotia. The distance from Nova Scotia to Newfoundland is about three days’ sail ; and from Newfoundland to the southern part of Green- land, a Northman navigator, with fresh breezes, might easily sail in four days, and thus Newfoundland was probably the third country discovered by Biarne.”
We should not have the hardihood to criticise Dr. Kohl’s statements and conclusions, if we had not made two voyages to Labrador, in which we sailed from Cape Cod to Nova Scotia, skirted that coast, approached within a mile of Cape Ray, Newfoundland, and spent a summer on the northern shores of Belle Isle, opposite Newfoundland ; and a second summer in coasting Lab- rador as far north as Hopedale. Hence the general appearances of the Nova Scotian, Newfoundland, and Labrador coasts are, though in a slight degree, to be sure, known to us.
The records state that the southernmost Jand seen by Biarne was ‘covered by forests ;’ this would apply to Nova Scotia as well as to the coast of Massachusetts. It is then said that without landing, improving a southwest wind and steering northeast, “he put himself on the
24. WIIO FIRST SAW THE LABRADOR COAST ?
track for Greenland.” This would be the course from Cape Cod to Nova Scotia, it is true, but such a course would also take him from the eastern end of Nova Scotia to Cape Race, Newfoundland, while from the present position of St. John’s the course to the site of the Green- land Norse settlements is a northerly one.
As Kohl states, the distance from Nova Scotia to Newfoundland is about three days’ sail; but the wind would have to be strong and fair all the time, for the distance from Halifax to St. John’s, Newfoundland, is about 530 miles. A Viking’s ship was by no means a modern cutter either in her lines or rig. I have seen in the Sogne ford a vessel of forty or fifty tons, her hull clumsy and broad, with her single mast placed mid- ships and carrying a square sail; her stern rather high, and her prow rising five or six feet above the bows. A Norwegian friend observed to me at the time, ‘“‘ There,” said he, “hang the gunwale of that vessel with shields and fill her with armed men, and you would havea Vik- ing’s ship!’ We doubt whether Biarne’s craft could have made in “one day and night’s sailing with a favor- able wind,” more than. 138 statute miles, or thirty Ger- man miles. At sucha rate it would take from five to six days to go from Halifax to St. John’s, Newfound- land. The passage by a swift ocean steamer of the Allan Line requires from forty-two to forty-cight hours.
Passing by Newfoundland, which is well-wooded, ex- cept on the more. exposed northeastern coast, Biarne, sailing by a land .“ said to be high and mountainous, and bordered by icebergs, reached Heriulfsnas.”. ‘This land could have been none other than the Labrador coast from the mouth of the Strait of Belle Isle northward.
BIARNE’S RETURN VOYAGE. 25
If Biarne’s return passage occupied only nine days, he could not possibly have sailed from Cape Cod to Greenland in that time. A nine days’ trip from Boston to the Labrador coast at the mouth of the Strait of Belle Isle is a remarkably short one for an ordinary fishing- schooner.
The distance from Boston to the Greenland coast a little north of Cape Farewell, where the southernmost Norse settlements were made, is about 2,300 miles. The southern coast of Labrador is about half-way. The exact sailing distance from Thomaston, Maine, to Caribou Island, ‘Strait of Belle Isle, Labrador, is 910 miles.
The “‘ Nautilus,” the vessel in which I first sailed to
Labrador, was a staunch schooner of 140 tons. She sailed from Thomaston, Maine, June 27, and passing around Cape Breton, reached Caribou Island in ten days* (July 7th): after leaving our party on the Labra- dor coast, she set sail for Greenland July oth, over nearly the same route as the Norsemen must have taken. From Captain Ranlett of the ‘‘ Nautilus,” I learn that he first sighted Jand on the coast of Greenland on the 17th, in lat. 62° 58’, and long. 52° 05’... The land next seen was about lat. 63° 10’, long. 50° 45’. This is about fifty miles south of Fiskernaes, and 25 miles north of Prederickshaab. The voyage to Greenland was thus -made in about nine days, as the vessel did not reach land before the 18th. The return voyage from God- thaab to Bonne Esperance, Labrador (three miles west from Caribou Island), was made in twelve days. The
* Rev. C. C. Carpenter writes me that he sailed in a fishing-smack from Cari- ou Island Oct. 3d, and made the shores of Maine on-the 13th.
26 WHO FIRST SAW THE LABRADOR COAST?
‘Nautilus’ left Godthaab Aug. 13th, and entered the Strait of Belle Isle Aug. 24th, anchoring at Bonne Esperance Aug. 25th. Then sailing from Bonne Espe- rance Aug. 26th, owing to calms and a storm she did not reach Thomaston until September 11th, a period of about fifteen days. It thus appears that the voyage. from the mouth of the Penobscot River, Maine, to southern Greenland, through the Gulf of St. Lawrence, a shorter route than that of the Northmen east of Newfoundland, took nineteen days, not including the detention on the Labrador coast, while the return voyage from southern Greenland to Maine required 27 days. '
In 1864 my second trip to the Labrador coast was made in a Wellfleet oysterman, a schooner of about 140 tons, built for speed, with long spars and large sails.. She was probably the fastest vessel which ever visited the Labrador coast. The voyage from . Boston to Mecatina Island on the Labrador coast, through the Gut of Canso, was made in seven days; it was. probably the quickest voyage from Massachusetts to Labrador ever made. We ran from Provincetown to Port Mul- grave in the Gut of Canso in just forty-eight hours. The return trip from Caribou Island to Boston, a dis- tance of about nine hundred miles, was made in nine days. The average was therefore just a hundred miles a day. How could a Norseman’s clumsy craft of forty or fifty tons, with but a mainsail and a jib, outdo such - sailing as that ?
The Norse record says that Biarne’s ‘‘ return passage occupied nine days,” and Kohl adds that ‘“ from New- | foundland to the southern part of Greenland a North- man navigator, with fresh breezes, might easily sail im
. HELLULAND THE MODERN LABRADOR. ZY
four days. But we have seen that with fresh breezes a modern schooner, at least three times as large as a Viking’s ship, required eight or nine days to run from a point but a few miles from northern Newfoundland, z.2., Belle Isle, to southern Greenland. The distance from St. John’s, Newfoundland, to the Norsemen’s colonies in southern. Greenland is not less than 1,500 miles. To perform a voyage of this length in four days would be an impossibility fora modern yacht. It is not impossible, however, that Biarne sailed from southern Newfound- land to Greenland in a period of about nine days. Buta voyage from Cape Cod to Greenland by an ordinary schooner requires at least three weeks, or from twenty to thirty days at the most.
Instead then of accepting Kohl’s summary of Biarne’s voyage stated on p. 63 of his work, we should be m- clined to believe, as the results of the expedition, that Biarne was the first European to sight the coast of Newfoundland, possibly the eastern extremity of Nova Scotia, while he also saw the mountainous, desolate, tree- less, rocky coast of Labrador.
The next Norse adventurer, Leif, the son of Erik, not only sighted the Labrador coast but landed on it. To this country he gave the name of stony land, or « Helluland,” a name perpetuated in an Iceland map of 1570 by Sigurd Stephanius.
The records tell us that Leif, the son of Bk the Red, the first settler in Greenland, having bought Biarne’s ship in the year 1000, manned her with a crew of thirty-five men, among whom was Biarne himself, and followed Biarne’s track towards the southwest. Kohl then says: ‘‘ They came first to that land which Biarne
28 WHO. FIRST SAW THE LABRADOR COAST ?
. had last seen, which, as | have said, was probably our Newfoundland. Here they cast anchor and went on
shore, for their voyage was not the search of a son after his father, but a decided exploring expedition. They ‘found the country as Biarne had described it, full of ice mountains, desolate, and its shores covered with large fat stones. Leif, therefore, called it ‘Flelluland’ (the stony land).”
Here again we should differ from Kohl as to Leif’s first landfall. A southwest course would naturally carry him to the Labrador coast, while the description— ‘full of ice mountains, desolate, and its shores covered with large flat stones’—well describes the barren, rock-bound, treeless coast of Labrador, in distinction from the much lower, wooded coast of Newfoundland. Moreover, St. John’s, Newfoundland, lies nearly due south of the southern extremity of Greenland.
While it is to be doubted whether Biarne ever went south of Newfoundland, we see no reason for dis- believing the conclusions of Rafn and Kohl, that the followers of Biarne, Thorwald and Thorfinn Karlsefne, became familiar with Cape Cod and wintered at Vin- land. There is no reasonable doubt but that they landed on Nova Scotia; there is no reason to disbelieve the records which state that they wintered farther west where no snow fell, so that the cattle found their food in the open fields, and wild grapes were abundant, as they certainly are in Rhode Island and southern Massa- chusetts, as compared with Maine or Nova Scotia.
Without reasonable doubt, then, Helluland of the Norse and Icelandic records is Labrador, though it is not impossible that the bare and rocky coast of north-
HELLULAND THE MODERN LABRADOR. 290
eastern Newfoundland was by some regarded as Hellu- land. It would be easy for a vessel in those days to pass by without seeing the opening into the Strait of Belle Isle, and, owing to the somewhat similar scenic features of the two lands, to confound the northeastern. extremity of Newfoundland with Labrador.
That, as some have claimed, the Norsemen ever sailed through the Strait of Belle Isle, coasted along Southern Labrador and wintered at the mouth of the river St. Lawrence, is certainly not supported by the early Norse records as interpreted by Kohl.
Their vessels sailed to the seaward of Newfoundland. That they did not feel drawn to sojourn in Helluland is no wonder. Its coast presented no more attractions than Greenland, while the grapes, food, and furs, with the verdure and mild winter climate of “ Vinland the Good,” led to one expedition after another, as late per- haps as 1347, when, according to the Icelandic annals, ‘“‘a vessel, having a crew Of seventeen men, sailed from Iceland to Markland.”
Then came the decadence of Norse energy and _ sea- manship, succeeded by the failure of the Greenland col- onies, which were overpowered and extinguished by the Eskimo. <A dense curtain of oblivion thicker and more impenetrable than the fogs which still wrap the regions of the north, fell upon these hyperborean lands, until, in 1497, the veil was again withdrawn by an English hand.*
Since the foregoing remarks were sent to the printer,
* The voyage of Szkolney, the Pole, to the coasts of Greenland and Labrador, is stated to have been performed in 1476. See Humboldt, Examen Critique, ii, p. 152. (N. A. Review, July, 1838, 170.)
30 WHO FIRST SAW THE LABRADOR COAST?
Prof. E. N. Horsford’s address at the unveiling of the statue of Leif Eriksen’ has appeared. He also adopts the general opinion that Helluland was Newfoundland, but the language of these extracts convinces us still more that Helluland was Labrador.
In the first translation printed by Prof. Horsford of the Saga of Erik the Red, it is stated in the account of the expedition of Biarne, that after leaving Iceland bound for Greenland, he missed that country and was ‘‘ borne before the wind for many days, they knew not whither,” finally approaching land which ‘was not mountainous, but covered with wood,” with rising ground in many parts. Then sailing two days, and putting the ship about, leaving the land on the left side, he saw land again, “low and level, and overgrown with wood.” This land was probably Newfoundland, perhaps, the southern or eastern part. We would, however, contend that the next or third land which Biarne saw was Lab- rador, for the Saga reads: “At length they hoisted sail, and turning their prow from land, they stood out again to.sea; and having sailed three days with a south- avest wind, they saw land the third time.” This land was high and mountainous, and covered with ice. They asked Biarne whether he wished to land here. He said, ‘No; for this land: appears to me little inviting.” Without relaxing sail, therefore, they coasted along the shore till they perceived that , this was an island. They then put the ship about, with the stern towards land, and stood out again to sea with the same wind, which blowing up very strong,-Biarne desired his men to shorten sail, forbidding them to carry more sail than with such a heavy wind would be safe. ‘When they had thus
HELLULAND THE MODERN LABRADOR, 3.1
sailed four days, they saw land the fourth time.” ‘To- wards evening they reached the very promontory not far north of Cape Farewell where Heriulf, the father of Biarne, dwelt.
The high, mountainous land, covered with ice, was probably Labrador near Cape Harrison, or along the coast to the northward, and a Norseman’s vessel, with a strong, fair wind, could probably sail from that part of the Labrador coast to near Cape Farewell, a distance of a little over 600 miles, in four days, allowing that a Vik- ing’s ship of about 60 tons could sail from eight to ten miles an hour under a spanking breeze. Certainly they could not have made the distance from any part of New- foundland, which is about 900 miles, in four days.
From the account of the expedition of Leif Eriksen :
‘All being now ready, they set sail. and the first land to which they came was that last seen by Biarne.
“They made direct for land, cast anchor, and put out ima boat. Having landed, they found no herbage. All above were frozen heights ; and the whole space between these and the sea was occupied by bare flat rocks ; whence they judged this to be a barren land. Then said Leif, ‘We will not do as Biarne did, who never set foot on shore: I will give a name to this land, and will call it ‘‘Helluland” [that is, land of broad stones|.’” Here - again we have a much better description of Labrador than of northeastern Newfoundland. From there Leif sailed to what he called Markland, or ‘‘ Land of Woods,” which may have been southern Newfoundland, or east- ern Nova Scotia, or Cape Breton, as it is but two days’ sail from the Gut of Canso to Cape Cod; and the Vin- land of Leif was undoubtedly the shore lying east and » south of Cape Cod.
!
32 WHO FIRST SAW THE LABRADOR COAST?
From Mr. J. Elliot Cabot’s translation of the Saga re- lating to Biarne’s voyage (Mass. Quart. Rev. 1849, quoted by Horsford), we take the following reference to Helluland. As before, on returning from the south, after turning the bow of his vessel from the land and. sailing out to sea for three days with a W.S.W. wind, Biarne saw a third land; “but that land was high, moun- tainous, and covered with glaciers :” then the wind rose, and they sailed four days to Heriulfsness.
A.D. 999, Leif set sail. ‘‘ First they found the land which Biarne had found last. . Then sailed they to the Jand and cast anchor, and put off a boat and went ashore, and saw there no grass. Mickle glaciers were over alk the higher parts; butit was like a plain of rock from the glaciers to the sea, and it seemed to them that the Jand was good for nothing. Then said Leif: ‘We have not done about this land like Biarne, not to go upon it ; now I will give a name to the land ana cali it ‘“ Hellu- land” [flat-stone land ].’”
The northeastern coast of Newfoundland is rather low, not mountainous, is somewhat wooded, with cer- tainly more or less herbage on the outer islands and points. The rock formations are of later age than the Laurentian. We are familiar with the appearance of the Newfoundland side of the Strait of Belle Isle, which decidedly contrasts with that of Labrador opposite.
CHAPTER. TE: THE GEOGRAPHICAL EVOLUTION OF LABRADOR.
June 24th, 1497, a year before Columbus discovered the American continent, the crew of a little vessel, the “Matthew,” bound from Bristol on a voyage of discov- ery to ascertain the shortest line from England to Cathay, sighted land. The vessel was under the com- mand of John Cabot, who was accompanied by his son Sebastian, a lad still under age, perhaps but nineteen or _ twenty years old. Sebastian kept the ship's log; but the narratives of this, as well as his other voyages, have been lost.
The land was called ‘“.Prima vista,” and it was believed by Biddle and Humboldt, as well as Kohl and others, that this region which the Cabots first saw was the coast of Labrador in 56° or 58° north latitude. While the narrative of this momentous voyage has been lost, a map of the world ascribed to Sebastian Cabot, and engraved in 1549, contained an inscription, of which we will copy an extract translated in Hakluyt’s Voyages (iil. 27).
Tn the yeere of our Lord 1497, John Cabot, a Vene- tian, and his sonne Sebastian (with an English fleet set out from Bristoll) discouered that land which no man before that time had attempted, on the 24 of [une about fiue of the clocke early in the morning. This land he called Prima vista, that is to say, First seene, because as
33
34 THE GEOGRAPHICAL EVOLUTION OF LABRADOR.
I suppose it was that part whereof they had the first sight from sea. That Island which heth out before the land, he called the Island of S. Iohn vpon this occasion, as I thinke, because it was discouered vpon the day of Iohn the Baptist. The inhabitants of this [sland vse to weare beast skinnes, and haue them in as great estima- tion as we haue our finest garments. In their warres they vse bowes, arrowes, pikes, darts, woodden clubs, and slings. The soile is barren in some places, and yeildeth little fruit, but it is a of white beares, and stagges farre greater than ours.” (Page 27.) 7 Kohl seems fully persuaded that the landfall of John: Cabot was Labrador, because of the presence of white bears.* But if the inscription and map are genuine, the description of the inhabitants of the island, both men and beasts, would better apply to those of the eastern or southern coast of Newfoundland. The human beings | were more probably red Indians than Eskimo. On the Labrador coast the soil is ‘“‘ barren” in all places, while the “stagges far greater than ours” may have been the moose, which then abounded and still exists in New- foundland, and must have been rare, if it ever lived, on the coast of Labrador. Moreover the “ white bears’ spoken of as being so abundant may have been a white variety of the black bear, or perhaps the “‘ barren ground” pale bear of Sir John Richardson may have been fre- quent in Newfoundland. It appears to have been of smaller size than the brown bear of Europe, because in Parmenius’ account of Newfoundland, published in 1583,
*«€This agrees much better with the coast of Labrador than with that of. Newfoundland, to which the white bears very seldom, if ever, come down.”
(Page 133.)
CABOT THE DISCOVERER OF LABRADOR. 35
it is said: ‘ Beares also appear about the fishers’ stage of the countrey, and are sometimes killed, but they seeme to be white, as I conjectured by their skinnes, and somewhat lesse than ours.” (Hakluyt.)
On the other hand, the true white or polar bear may have frequently visited the eastern coast of Newfound- land, as it formerly abounded on the Labrador coast.
Moreover, nothing is said in the inscription of any ice, which at that date, the 24th of June, so abounds from the Strait of Belle Isle northward to the polar re- gions. Besides, if we contrast the account of this voy- age of the two Cabots in 1497 with that of the younger Cabot the following year, it seems plain that John Cabot’s “ Prima vista” was Newfoundland rather than ‘Labrador.*
In May, 1498, Sebastian Cabot, under license of Henry VII., in command of two ships, manned with three hundred mariners and volunteers, again sailed to the northwest in search of Cathay. Kohl says: ‘We have no certain information regarding his route. But he appears to have directed his course again to the coun- try which he had seen the year before on the voyage with his father, our present Labrador.” Farther on he remarks: ‘‘ The Portuguese Galvano, also one of the - original and contemporary authorities on Cabot's voyage of 1498, says that, having reached 60° north latitude, he and his men found the air very cold, and great islands of ice, and from thence putting about and finding the land. to turn eastward, they trended along by it, to see
* According to Charles Dean, LL.D., in the Critical History of America, vol. jii., John Cabot’s landfall was the northern part of Cape Breton Island.
36 THE GEOGRAPHICAL EVOLUTION OF LABRADOR.
if it passed on the other side. Then they sailed back again to the south.” :
From this and other statements by Humboldt and D’ Avezac, Kohl concludes that ‘“‘ Cabot in 1498, without doubt, sailed along the coast of Labrador and the west- ern shores of Davis's Strait. Finally, after a struggle with the ice off the Cumberland peninsula in 67° north latitude, where he probably lost a number of his men, - he abandoned any further advance. He then retraced his course southward along the coast of Labrador, and probably camé to anchor in some bay on the eastern coast of Newfoundland, where he rested his men and repaired the damage done to his vessels by the Arctic ice. His vessel was probably the forerunner of the fleet of English, Portuguese, Basque, French, and Spanish fishermen which in the next two centuries visited those shores, opening to the Old World a source of revenue more available than the fabled wealth of Cathay.
Still, dreams of the Indies led Cabot on southward, past Newfoundland, past Nova Scotia, along the New England shores, and probably southward near Cape Hatteras, with the hope of finding a direct passage to theeHast; <1)
Although on their return from their first voyage of 1497 the Cabots believed that the land they had dis- ~ covered was some part of Asia, to them must be given the credit of beholding the American continent before Columbus; while, with little or no doubt, Sebastian Cabot beheld in July, 1498, the mainland of Labrador, for, says Hakluyt, ‘‘ Columbus first saw the firme lande, August 1 1, 1498.” ee
eg Kohl, p. 131, foot-note.
THE PORTUGUESE ON THE LABRADOR COAST. 37
English seamen, then, were the first to reveal to a world which had forgotten the deeds of the Norsemen the northeastern shores of our continent, and to carry to Europe the news of the wealth of life in the seas of Newfoundland and the Bay of St. Lawrence.
The Cabots were of Italian origin, though Sebastian was born in Bristol. The English did not immediately follow up their discoveries, for the next explorer who ventured near if not within sight of the Labrador coast ‘was a Portuguese, Cortereal, who was commissioned by Emanuel the Great of Portugal, the same enterprising monarch who had previously sent out Vasco de Gama on his voyage around the Cape of Good Hope.
Cortereal sailed from Lisbon in the year 1500. His landfall was Newfoundland near Cape Race, or north- ward at Conception Bay. From this point he sailed northward, and probably discovered Greenland. He then came to the mouth of a river called by him ‘“ Rio nevado,” which is supposed to have been near the lati- tude of Hudson’s Strait. Here he is said to have been stopped by ice. He then sailed southward, resting on the east coast of Newfoundland before returning to Lisbon.
The next year Cortereal returned to Newfoundland. He was unable to reach the northern regions on account of the ice, which was more abundant than the year before. On his return his vessel and all aboard foun- dered, the companion ship reaching Lisbon. The land, Cortereal visited was mapped on a Portuguese chart in 1504, and was called “Terra de Cortte Reall.” Kohl claims that ‘the configuration of the coasts and the names written upon them prove that parts of New-
LABRADOR.
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EARLY VISITORS TO THE LABRADOR COAST. 39
Labrador and Newfoundland being a nebulous mass. In a Portuguese map of 1520, nevertheless, we have the name of “ Lavrador,” which, however, was applied to Greenland, while the Labrador coast and Newfoundland were confounded and given the name “ Bacalhaos.”
But yet it is to the Portuguese that we owe the name of Labrador. Kohl tells us that ‘‘ King Emanuel, hav- ing heard of the high trees growing in the northern countries, and having seen the aborigines, who appeared so well qualified for labor, thought he had found a new slave-coast like that which he owned in Africa; and dreamed of the tall masts which he would cut, and the men-of-war which he would build, from the forests of the country of the Cortereals.”
The word Labrador is a Portuguese and Spanish word for laborer. Ona photograph of a Mexican field-hand, or peon, ploughing in a field, which we lately purchased in Mexico, is written ‘‘ Labrador.” In a recent book on Cuba the author thus speaks of a wealthy Cuban planter : “He is, by his own account, a F[yo de Labrador (jabor- er’s son) from Alava, in the Basque Provinces.”* Cor- tereal’s land was thus the “laborer’s land,” whence it was hoped slave laborers might be exported to the Portuguese colonies.
The Portuguese also, as is well known, applied to Newfoundland the name Bacalhaos, which means dried codfish or stockfish.
As the result of Cortereal’s voyage the Portuguese fishermen through the rest of the 16th century habitually visited the shores and banks of Newfoundland, and undoubtedly were more or less familiar with the Labra-
* A. Gallenga. The Pearl of the Antilles, p. 100. 1874.
40 THE GEOGRAPHICAL EVOLUTION OF LABRADOR.
dor coast, for Scandinavian authors report their presence on the Greenland coast. (Iohl, p. 190.)
In a foot-note to p. 197 of his ‘‘ Pioneers of France in the New World,” Mr. Parkman remarks: ‘‘ Labrador— Labratoris Terra—is so called from the circumstance that Cortereal in the year 1500 stole thence a cargo of Indians for slaves.” , That the ‘‘ Indians” were captured on the Labrador coast, however, appears to be an in- exact statement. There were probably then no ted Indians or timber on the Labrador coast, but Cor- tereal must have entrapped them in Newfoundland or some place southward. Kohl [p. 169] tells us that these aborigines, captured according to the custom of the explorers of that day, are described, by an eye-wit- ness who saw them in Lisbon, as tall, well built, and admirably fit for labor. We infer from this statement that they were not Esquimaux from the coast of Labra-_ dor, but Indians of the Micmac tribe, inhabitants of Newfoundland and Nova Scotia:” The editor of Kohl's work adds a quotation from the Venetian Pasqualigo, who says: ‘Fis serene majesty contemplates deriving great advantage from the country not only on account of the timber, of which he has occasion, but of the in- habitants, who are admirably calculated for labor, and are the best slaves I have ever seen.” ua
The path opened by Sebastian Cabot was not only trod by Portuguese, but the Spanish,* Basques, French (Bretons and Normans), and English frequented the rich fishing-banks of. Newfoundland, and with little
* «The voyage of Estevan Gomez produced in Spain the same effect which those of the Cabots, of Cortereal, and of the men from-Normandy and Brittany had produced in England, Portugal, and France—it conducted the Spaniards to the northwestern fisheries’’ (Henry Hudson, by Ashler, Hakluyt Svc. p. xcix.)
THE VOYAGES OF CARTIER, > At
doubt visited the Gulf of St. Lawrence and the southern coast of Labrador. Their discoveries were perhaps
recorded in Gastaldi’s map. Labrador first became clearly differentiated from
Newfoundland by Jacques Cartier. To him we owe
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the discovery of the Strait of Belle Isle; of Belle Isle, the Isola De’ Demoni of earlier voyages; of Chateau Bay and other poits on the Gulf coast of Labrador. Sailing from St. Malo the 20th of April, 1534, he arrived May roth on the eastern coast of Newfoundland, ‘near Cape Buonavista. From this cape Cartier pushed northward until he came to what is now called Foge Island, which was one of the resorts of the great auk, or
42 THE GEOGRAPHICAL EVOLUTION OF LABRADOR.
“penguin” of the early explorers. But we will let Cartier describe the scene which met his eyes in his own words translated by Hakluyt from ‘‘ The first Relation of Iaques Carthier of S. Malo, of the new land called New France, newly discovered in the yere of our Lord 1534.
‘““Vpon the 21 of May the winde being in the West, we hoised saile, and sailed toward North and by East from the Cape of Buona Vista vntil we came to the Island of Birds, which was enuironed about with a banke of ice but broken and crackt : notwithstanding the sayd banke, our two boats went thither to take in some birds, whereof there is such plenty, that vnlesse a man did see them, he would thinke it an incredible thing: for albeit the Island (which containeth about a league in circuit) be so full of them, that they seeme to have bene brought thither, and sowed for the nonce, yet are there an hun- dred folde as many hovering about it as within ; some of the which are as big as iays, blacke and white, with beaks like vnto crowes: they lie alwayes vpon the sea = > they cannot flie very high, because their wings are so little, and no bigger than halfe ones hand, yet do they flie as swiftly as any birds of the aire leuell to the water ; they are also exceeding fat; we named them Aporath. In lesse then halfe an houre we filled two boats full of them, as if they had bene with stones: so that besides them which we did eat fresh, eury ship did powder and salt five or sixe barrels full of them.
‘« Besides these, there is another kinde of birds which houer in the aire, and ouer the sea, lesser then the others ; and these doe all gather themselves together in the Isl- and, and put themselves vnder the wings of other birds
THE VOYAGES OF CARTIER. 43
that are greater: these are named Godetz. There are also of another sort but bigger, and white which bite even as dogs: those we named Margaulx.
“ And albeit the sayd Island be 14 leagues from the maine land, notwithstanding beares come swimming thither to:eat of the sayd birds; and our men found one there as great as any cow, and as white as any swan, who in their presence leapt into the sea; and vpon Whitsun - mvnday (following our voyage toward the land) we met her by the way, swimming toward land as swiftly as we could saile. So soone as we saw her, we pursued her with our boats, and by maine strength tooke her, whose flesh was as good to be eaten as the flesh of a calfe of two weres:. olde.”
Cartier then sailed north, entered the Strait of Belle Isle, anchoring at Blanc Sablon, still a settlement east of Bradore Bay.
“White Sand [Blane Sablon] is a road in the which there is no place guarded from the south, or southeast. But towards south-southwest from the saide road there are two Ilands, one of the which is called Brest Island, _and the other the Iland of Birds, in which there is great store of Godetz, and crows with red beaks and red feete: they make their nests in holes vnder the ground euen as conies.” 3 ;
The great French navigator harbored in the ancient port of Brest, near these Islands; the “Iland of Birds,” being the present Parroqueet Island, fifteen wee east- ward of the mouth of Esquimaux River.
Our voyager then coasted along these forbidding shores to St. James River, where he first saw the natives; “they weare their haire tied on the top like a wreath of
44 THE GEOGRAPHICAL EVOLUTION OF LABRADOR.
hay; ... they paint themselves with certain Roan colors; their boates are made of the barke of birch trees, with the which they fish and take great store of seales, and as farre as we-could vnderstand since our comming thither, that is not their habitation, but they come from the maine land out of hotter countries, to catch the saide seals and other necessaries for their liuing.” These red men must have been the Mountaineer Indians, which still come down to the coast from the warmer interior each summer to fish for seal. Cartier makes no men- tion of the Eskimo, who would undoubtedly have been encountered if their roving bands had been living on the coast from Chateau Bay to the Scven Isles, which he so carefully explored.
This coast appeared to Cartier so disagreeable, . un- productive, and barren, that he exclaimed, “It ought to be the country which God had given to Cain.” So he crossed the Strait of Belle Isle, sailed over to Newfound- land, coasted that Island to Cape Anguille, which he reached on the 24th of June. From there he sailed over to the Magdalen Islands, to the Bird rocks (Isles aux Margaulx), thence to Prince Edward’s Island, thence to Miramichi, afterward to Gaspé Bay, and coasted Antt- costi, crossing over again to near and within sight of the Mingan Islands. Not on this voyage discovering the river St. Lawrence, he finally turned homewards, coast- ing along the Labrador shore, touching at Cape Tien- not, now called Cape Montjoli. Thence he returned to France through the Strait of Belle Isle..
The next year Cartier returned, sailing again through the Strait of Belle Isle ; and, coasting along the southern shores of Labrador, discovered the river St. Lawrence.
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46 THE GEOGRAPHICAL EVOLUTION OF LABRADOR.
On his third voyage, Cartier entered the Gulf of St. Lawrence, passing in between Newfoundland ‘and Cape Breton, thus for the first time demonstrating that New- foundland was an island and not a part of the continent.
The next step in the geographical evolution of Lab- rador is seen in Mercator’s great map of 1569. Kohl tells us that for the compilation of this map Mercator had collected many printed and manuscript maps and charts, and many reports of voyages of discovery. ‘‘ But,” says Kohl, ‘‘the best portion of Mercator’s work, and a real and valuable improvement upon all former maps, is his delineation of the large peninsula of Labrador, lying southwest of Greenland. On all former maps, that re- gion was ill-shapen and most incorrectly drawn. But here, under the name of ‘Terra Corterealis,’ it receives its proper shape, with a full and just development, which had not been given to it on any map prior to 1569. He makes its eastern coast run southeast and northwest, as it really does from about 53° to 60° N. In the north he plainly shows the narrow entrance of Hudson’s Strait, and at the west of it a large gulf, called by him ‘ Golfam de Merosro.) This remarkable gulf may be an indica- tion of either Hudson’s Bay or only the Bay of Ungava. I think that the latter was meant; first, because the ‘Gulf of Merosro’ has the longitude of the mouth of the river St. Lawrence, which is also the longitude of the Bay of Ungava; second, because the said gulf is represented as closed in the west. The western coast of the Bay of Ungava runs high up to the.north, where Hudson’s Strait is often filled with ice. This may have Jed the unknown discoverers, the informants of Mercator, to suppose that it was closed in the west. If they had
THE PORTUGUESE. VOYAGES. 47
looked round Cape Wolstenholm into Hudson's Bay, they woutd have perceived a broad bay and open water before them. .
‘‘ Mercator does not indicate, so far as I know, the sources from which he derived these remarkable improve- ments for his chart, which were not known by Homem in 1558, and of which there are only slight indications on the Cabot map of 1544. He adopts the Portuguese names for his ‘Terra Corterealis, namely, ‘Golfam de Merosro,’ ‘Y. dus Demonios,’ ‘Cabo Marco,’ ‘Ilha da Fortuna, ‘Baia dus Medaus,’ ‘Rio de Tormenta,’ “Vlhas de Caravillo, ‘Baia de Malvas,’ etc. Some of the names are not new, but had been long known, though not always put in the same position. We know of no official Portuguese exploring expedition made to these regions between the time of Homem (1558) and Merca- tor (1569); and therefore the suggestions of Dr. Asher, for the solution of this problem, have a high degree of probability. He says :* ‘The Portuguese fishermen continued their surveys of the northern coasts,’ com- menced by Gaspar Cortereal in 1500, ‘ most likely for no other purpose than to discover advantageous fisheries. They seem to have advanced slowly, step by step, first along the shores of Newfoundland, then up to the mouth of Hudson’s Strait, then through that strait, and at last into Hudson's Bay,’ or, as I think, into Ungava Bay. ‘With a certain number of ancient maps, ranging from 1529 to 1570, before us, we can trace this progress step by step. In i544, the time of Cabot’s map, ‘the Por- tuguese seem not yet to have reached the mouth of the Strait; and in 1570, or, as I think, 1569, the date of
* See G. M. Asher's ‘‘ Henry Hudson,” * Introduction, p. xevi. , London, 1860.
48 THE GEOGRAPHICAL EVOLUTION OF LABRADOR.
our Mercator’s map,* ‘they have reached the bay,’ Hudson’s, or at least Ungava Bay. ‘We ¢an, there- fore, state with the greatest certainty that Hudson’s Bay,’ Hudson’s Strait as far as Ungava Bay, .. . ‘had been discovered before the publication of Ortelius’s at- las, which took place in 1570,’ or, better, before the pub- lication of Mercator’s chart, which took place in 1569. ‘But we are not equally certain that the discovery falls within the years 1558 to 1570, or, better, 1569, ‘because — we have only the negative evidence of Diego Homem’s chart to support the latter assertion. The fact itself is, however, probable enough.’ ”
To the English navigators of the 16th and 17th cen- turies succeeding Cartier we owe the next step in our knowledge of the geography of the Labrador peninsula.
In 1577 Master Martin Frobisher sighted the coast of Northern Labrador, which he called ‘ Frisland,” using a: word which frequently appears in the early charts. The point he first sighted was probably north of 58°, for after coasting four days along the coast for perhaps a distance of nearly two hundred miles, a voy- age of eight days, between the 8th and 16th of July, would carry him to Frobisher’s Strait. Moreover his description of the coast apphes well to the northern ex- tremity of Labrador beyond, Hopedale and Okkak.
The narrative reads thus:
“The 4. of luly we came within the making of Fris- land. From this shoare ro. or 12. leagues, we met great Islands of yce, of halfe a mile, some more, some
* Dr. Asher does not mention Mercator’s map of 1569. He had before him the map of Ortelius of 3570, who was only a follower and copyist of Mercator, but adopted his views.’
THE PORTUGUESE VOYAGES. 49
lesse in compasse, shewing above the sea, 30. or 4o. fathoms, and as we supposed fast on ground, where with our lead we could scarce sound the bottom for depth.
‘‘Here in place of odoriferous and fragrant smels of sweete gums, and pleasant notes of musicall birdes, which other Countreys in more temperate Zones do yeeld, wee tasted the most boisterous Boreal blasts mixt with snow and haile, in the moneths of [une and Iuly, nothing inferior to our vntemperate winter ; a sudden alteration, and especially in a place of Parallele, where the Pole is not eleuate aboue 61. degrees ; at which height other Countreys more to the North, yea vnto 7o., degrees, shew themselues more temperate than this doth. All along this coast yce lieth, as a continuall bulwarke, and so defendeth the Country, that those that would land there, incur great danger. Our Generall 3. days together attempted with the ship boate to haue gone on shoare, which for that without great danger he could not accomplish, he deferred it vntil a more convenient time, All along the coast he very high mountains cou- ered with snow, except in such places,where through the -steepenes of the mountains of force it must needs fall. Foure days coasting along this land, we found no signe of habitation. Little birds, which we judged to have lost the shoare, by reason of thicke fogges which that Country is much subiect vnto, came flying into our ships, which causeth us. to suppose, that the Country is both more tollerable, and also habitable within, than the out- ward shoare maketh shew or signification.
‘“From hence we departed the eight of luly ; on the 16. of the same, we came with the making of land, which land our Generall the yeere before had named the
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FROBISHER’S VOYAGE. 51
Queenes foreland, being an Island as we iudge, lying neere the supposed continent with America; and on the other side, opposite to the same, one other Island called Halles Isle, after the. name of the Master of the ship, neere adiacent to the firm land, supposed Continent with fcia. er (Page..57;)"
In Rundall+ we find it stated that ‘ Frobisher, now - left to himself, altered his course, and stood to the S.W.; and, seventeen days afterwards, other land, judged to be LABRADOR, was sighted in latitude 62° 2’ N.” (p.11). In this latitude, however, lies Meta Incognita. _
“The great cape seen [by John Davis] on the 31st was designated, it is stated, Warwicx’s ForeELAND; and the southern promontory, across the gulf, Cape CnHrp- LEY.{ On this Fox observes: ‘Davzs and he {| Wey- mouth, a later navigator] ad, / concezve, light Hudson into his Streights.. The modern authority before cited expresses a similar opinion; and there is no reason to doubt the fact.
‘From Cape Chidley a southerly course was taken to seek the two vessels that were expected to be at the fishing-ground ; and on the toth, in latitude 56° 4o’, they had a fresking gale at west-northwest. On the 12th, in about latitude 54° 32’, an island was fallen in with which was named Darcie’s Island. Here five deer were
* «© The second voyage of Master Martin Frobisher, 1577, written by Master Dionise Settle. Hakluyt, vol. iii., New Edition, London, 1810.”
+ Narratives of Voyages towards the Northwest in search of a passage to Cathay and India, 1496-1631. By Thomas Rundall, Esq., London, Hakluyt Society, 1849, 8°, pp. 259.
t “*‘ The worshippfull M. John Chidley, of Chidley, in the county of Deuon, esquire,’ was apparently chief promoter of an expedition whichsailed Anno 1589, for ‘the province of Araucoon thecoast of Chili, by the streight of Magellan. Of this expedition M. Chidley was also the General. Hakluyt, iv. 357.”
52 THE GEOGRAPHICAL EVOLUTION OF LABRADOR.
seen, and it was hoped some of them might be killed, but on a party landing, the whole herd, after being twice coursed about the island, ‘took the sea and swamme towards ilands distant from that three leagues,’ They swam faster than the boat could be pulled, and so escaped. It was represented that one of them ‘was as bigge as a good prety cowe, and very fat, their feet as big as oxe feet.’
‘“The 13th, in seeking a harbour, the vessel struck on a rock and receiveda leak ; which, however, was mended the following day, in latitude 54°, ‘in a storm not very outragious at noone.’ On the 15th, in latitude 52° 40’, being disappointed in their expectations of finding the Elizabeth and Sunshine, or of finding any token of those vessels having been in the vicinity, and there being but little wood, with only half a hogshead of fresh water on board, it was determined to shape the course homeward for England. This was accordingly done, and they arrived on the 15th of September in Dart- mouth, ‘giving thanks to God’ for their safe arrival.” (Page 49.)
But it is to Davis, after whom Davis Strait was named, that we owe the most exact knowledge of the Labrador coast, until modern times. The following extracts contain all that we can find regarding his ex- ploration of the Labrador coast. :
Davis, in the V/oonshine, \eft Greenland in latitude ~ 66° 33’ Aug. rst, 1586. “She crossed the strait in nearly a due westerly direction. The 14th of August she was near Cape Walsingham, in latitude 66° 19’ on the American side. It was too late for anything more than a summarv search along the coast. The rest of
WEYMOUTH’S VOYAGE. 53
- the month, and the first days of September, were spent in that search. Besides the already known openings, namely, Cumberland Strait, Frobisher’s Strait, and Hud- son’s Strait, two more openings were found, Davzs’s [net in 56°, and Jvuctoke Inlet in 54° 30’. Davis's men had to cross the Atlantic in his miserable craft, and he per- formed the voyage through the equinoctial gales in little more than three weeks. He reached England again in the beginning of October, 1586.” (Henry Hudson, cxyv.)
Davis was followed by Weymouth in 1602. Accord- ing to Rundall : ;
“From the 5th to the 14th of July, the navigator appears to have been ranging along the coast of Labra- dor, where, on the toth, variation 22° 10’ W., he saw many islands. On the 15th he was in latitude 55° 31’, variation 17° 15’ W.; and the day following saw ‘ a very pleasant low land, all islands,’ in latitude N. 55°, varia- tion 18° 12’ W. On the 17th he entered and sailed up an inlet for thirty leagues, in sanguine hope of having found the desired passage ; but he was doomed to dis- appointment. In this inlet, which has been identified with Sleeper’s Bay on Davis’s Inlet, Weymouth en- countered his last peril, and escaped in safety. The fly- boats were assailed by a furious storm, which terminated in a whirlwind of extreme violence, that rendered them, for a while, completely unmanageable ; and though very strongly built, they took in so much water, for want of spar decks, that they narrowly escaped being swamped. As soon as the weather cleared up, the course was shaped for England.” (Page 68.)
The Labrador coast was next seen by Master John
54 THE GEOGRAPHICAL EVOLUTION OF LABRADOR.
NORTHERN DISCOVERIES or
JOBN DAVIS
1585-6 -7,
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60 Longitude West 55 from Greenwich 50 45 “aad FOP ie HOTU T SILLY ‘Eaw4 Weller ,PRGS-
VOVAGE OF CAPTAIN KNIGHT. 55
Knight, who sailed April 18, 1606, from Gravesend in the Hopewell.
“ After a most tedious and uninteresting passage, the vessel arrived off some broken land, in latitude 56° 25’ N.: much ice driving to the southward. The wind was fresh and the commander made fast to a piece of ice ; but falling calm, he endeavored to row in between the masses. This wasan unfortunate attempt. The weather became thick and foggy, and a furious storm arose on June 14: they were driven about in the ice. Lost sight of land till the roth, when it is described as being . seen again, rising like eight islands in latitude 56° 48’ N., variation 25° W. The vessel was then taken into a cove, and made fast by hawsers laid out on shore. On June 26th, Capt. Knight, his mate, and three hands set out, well armed, to explore a large island. They disappeared, having probably been killed by the natives.
“On the night of the 29th, ‘they were attacked by savages, who set on them furiously with bows and arrows; and at one time succeeded in obtaining posses- sion of the shallop. However, the eight mariners, with a fierce dog, showed a resolute front, and the assailants, upward of fifty in number, were finally driven off. The savages are represented to have been ‘ very little people, tawnie colored, thin or no beards, and flat-nosed.’ They are also described as being ‘man-eaters;’ but for this imputation there appears to be no warrant, except in the imagination of the parties on whom the attack was made.”
On the 4th of July, the vessel was in great danger of foundering, the craft leaking badly.
‘Shaping their course towards Newfoundland, with
56 THE GEOGRAPHICAL EVOLUTION OF LABRADOR.
a strong current in their favour, they made Fogo on the 23d of July. At that place they were most hospitably entertained. Having refitted, they left on the 22d of August, full of grateful feelings towards their generous friends; and arrived at Dartmouth on the 24th of December.” (Pages 75, 76.) In 1610 Henry Hudson discovered the strait which bears his name, his discoveries being recorded in the accompanying map, copied from the volume on Henry Hudson published by the Hakluyt Society.
In the narrative of the Voyage of Szr Thomas But- ton (1612-13) we find the following reference to Cape Chidley:
“On this part of the voyage, the following remarks are reported, by Fox, to have been made by <Adbacuk Prickett. ‘He saith, they came not through the maine channell of /retum Hudson, nor thorow Lumley’s [nlet, but through into the Mare Hyperborum betwixt those Ilands first discovered and named Chidley’s Cape by Captain Davis, and the North part of Amerzca, called by the Spaniards, who never saw the same, Cage Labrador, but it is meet by the N. E. point of Amerzca, where was contention among them, some maintaining (against others) that them Ilands were the Reso/utzon, © etc. (Page 80.)
Captain Grbbons, in 1614, appears to have been de- tained for some months on the Labrador coast.
“Of the result of the voyage, all that is known,” says Asher, ‘is thus laconically communicated by Master Fox: ‘Little,’ he says, ‘is to be writ to any purpose,. for that hee was put by the mouth of /vetum Hudson, and with the ice driven into a bay called by his company
GIBBUN'S VOYAGE. 57
Gissons HuIs Hote, in latitude about 57° upon the N. E. part of S¢zxenza, where he laid twenty weeks fast amongst the ice, in danger to have been spoyled, or never to have got away, so as the time being lost, hee was inforced to returne. The bay in which Gibbons was caught is supposed to have been that now called Nain, on the coast of Labrador.” (Page 95. Arctic Voyages, p. 205.)
TABULA NAUTICA.
qua representantur orae mari- timce meatus ac freta noviter a H. Hudsono Anglo ad caurum supra Novam Franciam inda- gata Anno /612,
MAP OF HENRY HUDSON’S DISCOVERIES—HAKLUYT SOCIETY.
A summary mention of the early voyages we also _ find in the records of the Hakluyt Society :
“ FTyudson’s Stratt had been discovered by Sebastian Cabot in 1498. The Portuguese had sailed through it
58 THE GEOGRAPHICAL EVOLUTION OF LABRADOR.
and had become acquainted with part of Hudson’s Bay between 1558 and 1569. In 1577 Frobisher had by chance entered the strait. In 1602 Weymouth had sailed nearly a hundred leagues into it, from Hatton’s Headland to the neighborhood of Hope’s Advance Bay. ‘The whole east coast of North America, from 38° north to the mouth of Hudson’s Strait, had been sur- veyed by Sebastian Cabot in 1498, and part of it before, in 1497, by his father and him. Others had rediscov- ered various parts. Thus the east of Newfoundland had been explored by Cortereal in 1501; the south coast, by some fishers from Normandy and Brittany in 1504 and 1508. The mouth of the St. Lawrence-had also been visited by Cortereal and by these French mariners. — The river, nearly up to the lakes, and all the surround- ing country, had been thoroughly explored by Jacques Cartier in 1534 and 1535, and afterwards by Roberval and Cartier. “The Sandbanks near the mouth of the St. Lawrence, and the fishing-stations along the Newfoundland coast, were frequented by the English, Portuguese, French, and Spaniards.” (H. Hudson, Hakluyt Soc. cxliv.) After Henry Hudson’s voyage, no further explora- tions were made of the Labrador coast, so far as we can ascertain, until the time of rear-Admiral Bayfield, of the British Navy, who, during the years 1815 to 1827, sur- veyed and mapped this coast as well as the Gulf of St. Lawrence and Newfoundland. His researches are em- bodied in the English Admiralty charts, from which the maps of the Labrador peninsula in use up to about 1880 — are copied. Of the advances lately made by British and Moravian surveys mention has previously been made.
LABRADOR A LAND OF MYSTERY. 59
To most readers the Labrador coast is still a Meta Incognita, an Ultima Thule, aland of mystery, shrouded by fog and gloom. The ordinary knowledge of it is as vague and indefinite as in the times of Cabot. The period when accurate charts of this intricate coast with its tens of thousands of islands, skiers, and ledges will be made, seems far distant. Local pilots and fishermen from Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, and at times from the United States, with an occasional Newfoundland or Canadian steamer, ply over regularly beaten routes, but owing to the lack of commercial interest in these barren, almost deserted shores, the coast will for years still re- main well-nigh beyond the pale of modern interests and thoughts.
In time the Indian and Eskimos will be a people dead and forgotten. The Moravian settlements will be aban- doned. Already, owing to the decrease in the cod fish- ery, famine and want are slowly but surely reducing by removal and death the numbers of the lingering white population, and the coast will be still more desolate and lonely than now.
And yet this coast stands like a protecting, guardian wall between the frozen north and the more temperate, inhabitable regions south and west. Its unexplored bays and rivers will always remain full of interest to our ad- venturous yachtsmen, as well as to the naturalist, the ‘sportsman, and traveller.
CHAPTER, LV. LIFE AND NATURE IN SOUTHERN LABRADOR.
Tue following recollections of our student days are offered with the suggestion that the more adventuresome of our college boys of the present day might spend to advantage the long summer vacation in cruising on our northern coasts, and combine in agreeable proportions science and travel. : ;
In the summer of 1860, while a student in Bowdoin College, I joined the Williams College expedition to Labrador and Greenland under the charge of Professor P. A. Chadbourne. June 27th found us on board the Nautilus, a staunch schooner of about 140 tons, com- manded by Capt. Randlett. Soon after five o'clock of a bright, fresh morning our vessel cast off from the wharf at Thomaston, Me. The Thomaston’ band played a lively air, a clergyman made a parting address, calling down the blessings of Heaven upon the argonauts ; our ‘Nestor replied, the students cheering for the citizens of Thomaston and the band, and with a favoring northwest wind the Vazu¢z/us, gliding down the current of the St. George's River, a deep fiord, in a couple of hours reached the open sea.
Our course lay inside of Monhegan, with its high, bold sea-wall. Passing on, the Camden Hills recede, and we
endeavor with the glass to make out the White Moun 60
THE NEWFOUNDLAND COAST. 61
tains, said by some to have been seen by Weymouth from inside of Monhegan. The ocean swell not being con- ducive to historical controversy, we turn to watch the Mother Carey’s chickens and the grampus as well as the fin-back whales sporting in the waves.
By the next morning we had sailed 190 miles from Thomaston, past Cape Sable, and our northwest wind still attending, we bowl along, through schools of por- poise, while two or three whales pass within a few fathoms of our vessel, showing their huge whitish backs. The next day our seven-knot breeze does not fail us, and takes us by the 30th intoa region of light winds and calms off the Gut of Canso.
July 1st we sail along Cape Breton Island, its red shores glistening in the noonday sun and then mantled with purple as the sun goes down over Louisbourg. As darkness sets in the lights of Sidney appear. The next morning’s sun rose on Cape Ray, around which we beat, passing within a mile of Channels, a fishing-village of Newfoundland, behind which rise steep hills clothed with ‘‘tucking-bush,” or dwarf spruce and larch. Cape Ray pushes boldly into the sea, its precipitous sides of decomposed sandstone furrowed by the rains which pour down its scarred cheeks, on which still linger banks of the last winter’s snows.
By the next evening we pass Cape St. Georges. The 4th was celebrated in the Gulf of St. Lawrence amid fog and rain. It was succeeded by a twenty-four hours’ gale, rather severe for the season, which tested the excel- lent qualities of the Mautelus as a sea boat. This being our first storm at sea was enjoyed more keenly than sim- ilar gales in after-years. The sea swept our deck, but
62 LIFE AND NATURE IN SOUTHERN LABRADOR.
only a few drops entered the cabin. The experience was novel and interesting ; fortunately we were not sea- sick; the long waves sloped up like far-reaching hills; sea-birds rode on their crests, and the wind, like a swarm — of furies, tore through ourrigging. There were but oc- casional glimpses from the companion-way of our dark, close cabin, redolent with the stench of the bilge-water. The storm abated after sunset, and the morning of the 6th found us only fifty miles from Caribou Island. Towards noon the first iceberg was seen; others came into view, some stranded, others floating on the sea.
The evening was a glorious one; after a gorgeous sunset, the twilight lasting until after ten o'clock, the moon rose upon berg and sea. We were in an arctic ocean ; creatures born in the Greenland seas floated past our vessel, and while becalmed at night we fished up from a depth of sixty or seventy fathoms a basket star- fish (A strophyton agassiziz) large enough to cover the bottom of a pail.
The impressions made on our minds the next day as we approached the coast and passed in shore, winding through the labyrinth of islands fringing the main land, are ineffaceable. That and other days in Southern Labrador are stamped indelibly on our mind. It was passing from the temperate zone into the life and nature of the arctic regions. There is a strange commingling of life-forms in the Strait of Belle Isle: the flora and fauna of the boreal regions struggling, as it were, to dis- place the arctic forms established on these shores since the ice period, when Labrador was mantled in perennial snow and ice, when the great auk, the walrus, and the narwhal abounded in the waters of the Gulf of St. Law-
THE LABRADOR FLORA. 63
rence, and the Greenland flora, represented by the Arenaria grenlandica, the dwarf cranberry, and the curlew-berry or black Empetrum, nestled among the snow and ice of the glacier-ridden hills.
We landed on the morning of July 7th, and I was astonished at the richness of the arctic flora which car- peted the more level portions of the island. Groves of dwarfed alders, over which one could look while sitting down, crowded the sides of the valleys, watered by rills of pure ice-cold water. The groves of spruce and hack- matack were of the same lilliputian height. In the glades of these dwarfed forests and scattered over the moss-covered rocks and bogs were Cornus canadensts, two varieties in flower ; Kalmza glauca was in profusion, as attractive a flower as any; the curlew-berry (Zm- petrum nigrum), the dwarf cranberry, with other flow- ers and grasses characteristic of the arctic and Alpine regions. Particularly noticeable were the clumps of dwarf willow from six inches to a foot in height, now in flower and visited by the arctic humble-bee and other wild bees. Other insects of subarctic and arctic types were numerous, among them a geometrid moth (//eu- maptera hastata), which extends from the Alps and snow-fields of Lapland around through Greenland and Labrador to the mountain regions of Maine, New Hampshire, northern New York, Colorado, and Alaska. The flies, beetles, and other forms had an arctic aspect, showing that on the shores of the Strait of Belle Isle the insect fauna is largely tinged with circumpolar forms.
On the 7th of July our party of seven men landed, lodged in a Sibley tent, and the Vazézlus left us for the
64 LIFE AND NATURE IN SOUTHERN LABRADOR.
Greenland seas with the majority of our party.. Our tent, provisions, and baggage becoming soaked with the rain and dampness, two days after, we moved over to Caribou Island and built a house of Canada clapboards, kindly loaned for the purpose by the Rev. C. C. Car- penter, missionary to Southern Labrador, for whom a large frame house, sheltering under its roof a chapel, study, and living-rooms, was building.
A Canadian clapboard is twelve inches long and six inches wide; with these and a few joists two of the party built a house twelve feet square, which sheltered us from the sun and the black flies, and only leaked when it stormed, which happened regularly twice a week, usually Wednesdays and Sundays. Six berths were put up on the north side (the seventh man was accommodated in the mission-house); a wide board placed on two flour-barrels at the west end served as a dining and study table, and in the southeast corner a little stove, not over fifteen inches square, with a funnel whose elbow, projecting out-of-doors, had to be turned with every change of wind, was the /ocuzs, the modern- ized hearthstone, over which hung our Lares and Penates, sundry hams and pieces of dried beef, pzeces-de- resistance of our meals, often alleviated by game and fish, clams and scallops or pussels (Pecten magellantcus),
with entrées of seal and whale flesh. How we college.
boys cooked and ate, rambled and slept in those seven weeks of subarctic life is a: subject of pleasant memory. They were days of rare pleasure, of continuous health, and formed an experience whose value lasted through our future lives. We made hunting, ornithological, entomological, botanical, and dredging expeditions in all
HLH PW PUAN
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To face page 64.
Tit Came ON Cartinou
THE LABRADOR FLORA. 65
directions, by sea and land; the geology and the flora and fauna were explored with zeal, and resulted in the discovery of many new forms and the detection of Alpine and arctic European species before, unknown to this continent. We investigated the Quaternary for- mation, ice marks, drift and fossil shells; procured fossils of the Cambrian red sandstone beds, chiefly a sponge (a new species of Archeocyathus), which were scattered along the shore, probably derived from the red sandstone strata so well developed at Bradore, also visited by some of our party. The results were perhaps of some importance to science, but the lessons in natural science we learned were of far greater moment to ourselves.
The coast of Labrador is fringed with islands, large and small, from the mouth of the St. Lawrence to Hud- son’s Strait. A sailboat can go with safety from one point to the other, and only occasionally will be exposed to the ocean swell. These islands are the exact counter- part of each other, differing mainly only in size and altitude. Caribou Island was two or three miles in length, formed of Laurentian gneiss, which had been worn and molded by glaciers. Its scenic features re- called those of the more rugged portions of the coast of Maine, particularly in Penobscot Bay and Mt. Desert. The higher portion of the island is of bare rounded rock, with deep valleys or fissures down which run little rills; these valleys are dense with ferns, shelter many insects, and where they widen out into the lower land support a growth of dwarf spruce, hackmatack and wil- low. In the more protected parts a few poplars and mountain-ash rise to a height of from ten to fifteen feet.
66 LIFE AND NATURE IN SOUTHERN LABRADOR.
The Alpine vegetation is mostly confined to the exposed boggy places or moors, in which are pools of water, supporting water-boatmen, case-worms, aquatic beetles and numerous water-fleas, and an occasional hair-worm or Gordius.
Along the lower portions by the shores are patches of salt marsh with shallow pools of water, which in the spring and autumn are undoubtedly frequented by ducks and geese, though only a few of the former were to be seen. Indeed, I was surprised to see so few sea-fowl. They were principally the parroquet, which abounded on the sea a mile or two away from shore. A _ favorite breeding-place of this most interesting of arctic birds . was in the soft red Cambrian sandstone of Bradore, an island lying fifteen miles easterly from Caribou Island. With their powerful parrot-like beaks they excavate the crumbling rock, extending their galleries in to the dis- tance of several feet. Three of our party made an ex- pedition to this well-known breeding-resort, and in thrusting their hands into the burrows received an occa- sional bite from the sharp strong bills of the birds which was not soon forgotten. Ducks were occasionally seen, the eider-duck and also the coot, as well as the loon, both the northern diver and the red-necked loon. Shore- birds, particularly the ring-necked plover, and others of its family, abounded, while the most familiar bird was a white-headed sparrow which nested near our camp.
It was not yet the time for the curlews. About the middle of July the sheldrake and coot, which breed in the inland ponds, lead out their young and appear in great numbers. The old ones are wary and hard to shoot, but the young will then be in fine condition. At
a
MOUNTAINEER INDIANS. 67
this time the ‘“’longshoremen” abandon their diet of salt pork, bread and molasses, and feast on game, for then, we were assured, they have “ great plenty fowl.”
In August, also, one or two families of the red Indians or Mountaineers of the interior come down to the mouth of the Esquimaux, or ‘“ Hawskimaw” River, as it is pro- nounced by the settlers, to hunt seal, especially the young, and ducks as well as curlew. These Indians are entirely governed in their wandering by the situation of the deer and other game. One may travel a hundred miles up the Esquimaux River without meeting them.
I saw but a single Esquimau man at Caribou Island. His low stature, his prominent, angular cheek-bones, pentagonal face, and straight black hair sufficiently char- acterized his stock. The only other native Esquimau was the wife of an Englishman, John Goddard, the “ King of Labrador,” who lived on a point of land three ‘miles west of Caribou Island. She was a famous hunter, would go out in a boat, shoot a seal and dress it, making boots and moccasins from the skin. Whether these Esquimaux had strayed down from the north or, as I suspect, were the remnants of their people who may have inhabited the entire coast from the Gulf of St. Lawrence to the arctic regions, deserves further investi- gation.
Few mammals were to. be seen. The deer and cari- bou were confined to the mainland. On our island was a white fox, or rather a blue one, for his summer pelage was of a slate-color. His burrow was situated in a hill- side behind our house. He would prowl about our camp at night, and he might have known that it was un- safe to come within reach of our guns. His skin un-
68 LIFE AND NATURE IN SOUTHERN LABRADOR.
doubtedly adorns the museum of the Lyceum of Nat- ural History of Williams College.
A weasel also visited our camp. The otter frequents the brooks at the head of Salmon and Esquimaux rivers. In winter they rarely come outside, z.¢., to the coast.
It is well known that in Newfoundland the bears, especially those living near shore, will eat fish, their diet being mixed, and such bears are more savage than those in the interior, which live chiefly on berries and ants. While on Caribou Island a fisherman living a mile and a half from us had his sea-trout nets invaded by two old bears accompanied by a young one; at low water they would walk out to the nets, tearing them apart in order to eat the fish.
We were told that a Mr. Hayward, an Englishman who lives at a distance of two miles across the bay, had about ten years since shot the last polar-bear seen on this coast. .
Speaking of trout, thére are two kinds : one living in the brooks and lakes, the other the sea-trout,a handsome fish about twelve inches in length, whose food we found consisted of a surface-swimming marine shrimp, the Myszs oculata, which lives in immense shoals. The sea- trout is taken in nets, and so far as we experimented do not, in salt water, rise to the fly.
Although it was now the 15th of July, the warmer summer weather had not yet come, we were told by the people on shore.. There is, however, scarcely any spring in Labrador. The rivers open and the snow disappears by the roth of June as a rule, and then the short summer is at once ushered in.
Potatoes, and especially turnips, are raised without
LABRADOR BUTTERFLIES. 69
much difficulty as far north as Caribou Island. Rhu- barb is said to do well farther up the coast towards the Mecatina Islands. Among the wild-flowers blooming in the middle of July were the dandelion and Potentzlla anserina. Another Potentilla was the P. ¢rzdentata, the mountain trident, with its three-toothed leaf and modest white flower. [twas pleasant to see this flower, so familiar from my earliest childhood, as it flourishes on the plains of Brunswick, Me., and is common on Mt. Washington as well as on the mountains of Maine, and abounds on the bare spots about Moosehead Lake, particularly at the foot of Mt. Kineo. The wild cur- rant, strawberry, and raspberry were in flower; the straw- berry plants were luxuriant, sometimes eight inches in height, but the raspberries were dwarfed, not exceeding the strawberry in height. Up the rivers the raspberries and blackberries are abundant, but the latter low and dwarfish.
The shad bush ( Amelanchzer canadensis) was now in flower, blossoming in southern New England in April or early May, while Rubus chamemorus, the cloud-berry, so abundant in Greenland and Arctic America as well as on the fields of Norway and Sweden, and the ‘ tundras” of Siberia, was going out of flower. With it were asso- ciated the star-flower, 77zentalzs americana, a few Clin- tonia borealis, Smlactna bifoliata and probably S. stellata, Streptopus amplextfolia , one or two species of Andro- meda ; an Iris, species of Vaccinium, the A rctostaphylus uva-urst or bear-berry; the shore-pea, a honeysuckle (Lonzcera cerulea), a Viburnum, and also the buckbean (Menyanthes trifoliata).
Among the flowers fluttered the white butterfly
7O LIFE AND NATURE IN SOUTHERN LABRADOR.
(Preres frigida), a Coltas labradorensis, Argyunts tricla- vis, and some geometrid moths, while a few owlet moths flew out of the grass at the late twilight, which now lasted until near eleven o'clock at night, when fine print could be read. :
We were told that the average temperature in June here is 48°, that of July 56°. In the warmer days of summer the thermometer rises from 64° to 68°, rarely to 70. July 17th was one of the warmest and most pleas- ant days of the month; the temperature was 60° F. The 21st, however, was much warmer, the thermometer being 72° F.
July 18th was the day of the eclipse : the sun was ob- scured in the forenoon; the light of day was much modi- fied, though not approaching twilight. The steamer which we saw on the day of the storm inthe Gulf of St. Lawrence was without doubt that which bore the Coast Survey eclipse party to Cape Chidley, where the eclipse was total.
After roaming over the island and making pretty full collections of the insects, we paid attention to the marine zodlogy. Shore collecting is not as remunerative in Labrador as on the Maine and Massachusetts coasts. The most noticeable form is the six-rayed starfish (4 steracanthion polarzs), which sometimes measured twenty inches from tip to tip of its opposing rays; its color was a dirty yellowish white,
PELICAN’S FOOT SHELL.
MARINE LIFE. pis
not red as in the common five-finger, also abundant. The polar star-fish is common in Greenland, and is a truly arctic form.
The common crab (Cancer zrrorata) frequently oc- curred under stones, but the lobster was neither seen nor heard of ; though common on the southern shores of Newfoundland it does not reach north into the Strait of Belle Isle. Among the worms which occurred at low- water mark was the Pectinaria. On the New England coast it only occurs in deep water below tide mark.
_ Dredgings were first made at the mouth of Salmon River, a few rods from shore, in some eight fathoms of water in a firm deep mud. The most characteristic shells were gigantic Aphrodite erenlandica, large -cock- les (Cardium islandicum), as well as the pelican’s foot (Aporrhars occzdentalzs), which occurred of good size and in profusion. In the soft mud occurred multitudes of the neat little sand star (Ophzoglypha nodosa). An- other form dredged on rocky bottom was Cyxthza pyre- forms, or the sea peach, and large specimens were cast up by the waves on the beach. Every spare day was given to dredging, and having been deeply interested in ‘marine zodlogy by the writings of Gosse, in England, and of Stimpson in this country, and having obtained a good idea of the local marine fauna of Casco Bay, in Maine, it was with no little interest and expectation that we dropped the dredge in arctic waters, and we were not a little delighted with the result of finding so near shore and in such shallow water, forms which off the coast of Maine, in deep water, were rare and usually but half grown.
July 25th a party of us rowed up Salmon Bay and
Jz LIFE AND NATURE IN SOUTHERN LABRADOR.
went a mile up the river. The tide was out and we looked for the fresh-water mussel (4 /asmodon arcuata), which is our northernmost species, and inhabits the rivers of southern Newfoundland. We could find none, although the settlers told us that mussels, clams, and ‘‘oysters” were common enough in the river. But something better was discovered. We found traces of genuine Quaternary marine sands and clays containing fossils. There were several banks of sand and clay along the edges of the river. In the latter | found Aphrodite sraentandica and Aporrhars occidentalis, with Bucconum undatum. Vhey had been washed out of the clay into the bed of the river, and'were collected at low-water. { also dug several inches into the clay bank and found the disintegrated shells of the Aphrodite, so as to leave no doubt but that the shells were fossils. Down at the mouth of the stream at the head of the bay, on the flats, I found several Guccenum undatum, and quite a number of Aporrhazs, young and old, broken and entire. On each side of the river was a terrace of sand and clay, with a thick growth of alders and willows, with the fire-weed (Epelobtum angustifolcum), the golden-rod and a large cruciferous plant common in the mountainous parts of New England; also Comarum palustre, and a Thaltc- trum. Farther back and mostly lining the banks was a dense growth, impossible to penetrate save occasion- ally where there was a break in the thicket of spruce and birch, perhaps Betula populzfolca. Still farther up and away back stretched the bare moss-covered hill- tops, the summer-resort of deer and caribou. Here we saw a ptarmigan, But this was one of our halcyon days, of which there were few, as the last two weeks of
UP THE ESQUIMAUX RIVER. We.
July were stormy and wet. The clear fair-weather winds were from the southwest; the southeast winds brought in the fog and rain, while the northerly winds brought a few curlew, the advance-guard of the hosts which were to arrive early in August.
The 3d of August was a fine day. A party of us went up the Esquimaux River to Mrs. Chevalier’s, whose husband, now dead, entertained Audubon when visiting this coast. The sail up the river was a pleasant one. It was about three miles from its mouth to an expansion of the river on whose shores were four or five winter houses. Although most of the settlers live on the coast through the year, some have their winter and summer houses. Those who live up the interior, sometimes a distance of seventy miles from the coast, where there is wood and game, move from the shore about the 2oth of October. -They spend a month in cutting wood, a farm- ily burning through the winter about thirty cords. Then succeeds a month of hunting and trapping. The snow does not come, we were told, until the last of De- cember, although we should judge this to be an extreme statement, and the snow is not usually more than three feet deep. The people profess to like the winter better than the summer. They shoot deer, foxes, etc., black fox being sometimes secured, whose skin is worth be- tween two and three hundred dollars. Grouse are abundant, a good hunter securing from sixty to seventy a day in favorable seasons. At any rate fresh meat is obtained for each family two or three times a week.
The houses are small, built of wood, boarded and shingled, seldom constructed of logs, and are heated by peculiar stoves, great square structures resembling Dutch
74 LIFE AND NATURE IN SOUTHERN LABRADOR.
stoves, and heating the whole house, the two living- rooms opening into each other, the stove being placed partly in each, the partition between the two rooms be- ing cut away to admit the stove.
The French residents at the Mecatina Islands, more social and gayer than the phlegmatic English settlers about the mouth of the Esquimatx and Salmon rivers, spend the winter evening in dancing and other gayeties to which the Anglo-Saxon, in Labrador at least, is a comparative stranger.
The Esquimaux River at its eastern entrance is but a few rods wide. Passing Esquimaux Island we sailed out into a broad bay or expansion of the river, with ravines leading down to it, and under the steep bank protected from the northerly winds were the winter houses pre- viously described. Up the river, just beyond Mrs. Chey- alier’s, the river contracted into narrows with. rapids; it then opened into another bay or expansion two miles wide, the river being a succession of lakes connected by rapids, and thisis typical of the rivers and streams of the Labrador peninsula. A barge cannot sail up the Esqui- maux River more than fifteen miles, although one can push farther on in a flat boat. We were told that the river is about two hundred miles in length, and although perhaps the largest in Labrador it has never been ex- plored.
Here we met the black flies in full force, and al- though we had been fearfully annoyed by them in ram- bling over Caribou Island, here they were astounding, both for numbers and voracity. The black fly lives dur- ing its early stages in running water. The insect finds nowhere in the world such favorable conditions for its
UP THE ESQUIMAUX RIVER. 75
increase as in Labrador, over a third of whose surface is given up to ponds and streams. The insides of the win- dows of Mrs. Chevalier’s house swarmed with these fiends, the children’s faces and necks were exanthema- tous with their bites; the very dogs, great shaggy New- foundlanders, would run howling into the water and lie down out of their reach, only their noses above the sur- face. ‘The armies of black flies were supported by light brigades of mosquitoes. No wonder that these entomo- logical pests are a perfect barrier to inland travel; that few people live during summer away from the sweep of the high winds and dwell on the exposed shores of the coast to escape these torments. They are effectual es- toppels to inland exploration and settlement.
Accepting our hostess’s kind invitation to take dinner, we sat down to a characteristic Labrador midday meal of dough balls swimming in a deep pot of grease with lumps of salt pork, without even potatoes or any des- sert ; nor did there seem to be any fresh fish. The sta- ples are bread and salt pork; the luxuries game and fish; the delicacies an occasional mess of potatoes, brought down the St. Lawrence once a year in Fortin’s trading schooner.
Over the mantelpiece was a stuffed Canada grouse or partridge and a ptarmigan in its winter plumage; but | was most delighted with the gift of some Quaternary fossils with which Mrs. Chevalier kindly presented me, including large specimens of Cardzta borealis, Apor- _rhazs occtdentalas and, most valuable of all, the valves of a brachiopod shell, which I had also dredged on the coast in ten fathoms, the Wypothyres pszttacea. On our return down the river we fished up the valves of the
76 LIFE AND NATURE IN SOUTHERN LABRADOR.
Fecten magellanicus, the great scallop shell, which lives — in five or six feet of water. . This mollusc, which is lo- cally known in Labrador by the name of ‘ pussel,” we afterwards obtained in quantity, fried it in butter and meal, finding it to be delicious eating, combining the properties of the clam and oyster, the single large ad- ductor muscle being far more tender than that of the common scallop of southern New England and New Y ork.
With our man, James Mosier, and his sailboat we spent two days in dredging in from forty to fifty fathoms out in the Strait of Belle Isle, three or four miles from land. The collection was a valuable one, containing some new species. The crown of the bank which we raked with our poorly constructed dredge was packed with starfish, polyzoans (including a coral-like form, or myriozoum), ascidians, shells, worms, and crustacea. The collection was purely arctic, and had not the only dredge I had become broken, we should have reaped, or rather dredged, a rich harvest. As it was, the novelties were quite numerous, and the interest and excitement, as well as labor, of overhauling, sorting, and preserving what we did obtain lasted for several days.
The only plant besides stony vegetable growths called ‘‘nullipores” dredged at this depth was a delicate red sea-weed, the Pézlota elegans, which was found after- wards to extend as far down in depth as ninety fathoms. Those who glibly talk, on ¢erra firma, of plant life as affording a basis for animal life, should dredge in deep water. They will find that a vast population of animals of all sorts and conditions in the scale of life is spread at all depths over the sea-bottom, thriving almost with-
DREDGING IN THE STRAIT OF BELLE ISLE, TE
out exception on one another—on animal protoplasm— and in the beginning of creation animal life was without doubt contemporaneous in appearance with vegetable existence. Indeed, what is the difference in form and structure between a bacterium and amoner? The two worlds of plant and animal life arise from the same base, a common foundation of simplest structure, showing
A BRANCHING POLYzooN. Myriozoum subgracile. (Natural size.)
none of the distinctive characteristics of animal or plant life, and only barely earning the right to be called or- ganisms, that vague term we apply for convenience to any, even the simplest structures endowed with life.
Of all the pleasures of a naturalist’s existence, dredg- ing has been, to our mind, the most intense. The severe exertion, the swimming brain, the qualms of sea-sick- ness, tired arms and a broken back, the memory of all these fade away at the sight of the new world of life, or at least the samples of such a world, which lie wriggling and sprawling on the deck of the sailboat, or sink out of sight in the mud and ooze of the dredge, to be brought
78 LIFE AND NATURE IN SOUTHERN LABRADOR.
to light by vigorous dashes of water drawn in over the side of the boat. Those days of dredging on the Lab- rador coast, where there was such an abundance and luxuriance of arctic varieties, were days never to be for- gotten. There is a nameless charm, to our mind, in everything pertaining to the far north, the arctic world, and we can easily appreciate the fascination which leads one back again to the polar regions, even if hunger and frost had once threatened life. Arctic exploration has but begun, and though its victims will yet be numbered by the score, enthusiasts will still attempt the dangers of arctic navigation, and fresh trophies will yet be won.
Early in August, during the few still clear nights suc- ceeding bright and pleasant days, we had auroras of © wondrous beauty, not excelled by any depicted by arctic voyagers.
On the :oth of August the curlews appeared in great numbers. On that day we saw a flock which may have been a mile long and nearly as broad; there must have been in that flock four or five thousand! The sum total of their notes sounded at times like the wind whistling through the ropes of a thousand-ton vessel; at others the sound seemed like the jingling of multitudes of sleigh- bells. The flock soon after appearing would subdivide into squadrons and smaller assemblies, scattering over the island and feeding on the curlew-berries now ripe. _ The small plover-like birds also appeared in flocks. The cloud-berry was now ripe and supplied dainty tid-bits to these birds.
By the 18th of the month the golden rods were in flower. Here, as has been noticed in arctic regions, few bees and wasps visit the flowers; the great majority of
LABRADOR FOSSILS.” 79
insect visitors are flies (Muscidz), especially the flesh fly and allied forms. A bumble-bee occasionally presents himself, more rarely a wasp, with an occasional ichneu- mon fly, but the two-winged flies, and those of not many species, were constant visitors to the August flowers. The black flies still remained to this date terri- ble scourges in calm weather, though in cloudy days and at night they mostly disappeared.
Wandering through the fog and drizzle along the mud flats on the northern side of the island I picked up A porrhats occidentalis, Fusus tornatus, Cardzta boreales, large valves of Saxzcava rugosa, Buccinum and As¢arte sulcata and compressa; these and Pecten zslandicus and other shells forming much the same assemblage as I had dredged a few days previous out in the straits in fifty fathoms. The only recent shells lying about were shal- low-water forms, such as the common clam, 7el/zna fusca and the razor shell. It was evident that here was a raised sea-bottom, and the Quaternary formation. In the afternoon I returned to the spot and dug up many more shells mingled with pieces of a yellow limestone containing Silurian fossils, brachiopods, and corals. This horizon, then, represented a deep sea-bottom, over which the open sea must have stood at least 300 feet, while the clay fossils of the mouth of the Esquimaux River must have lived ina deep muddy bay sheltered from the waves and currents of the open sea. The drift deposits of La- brador are scanty in extent compared with those of the Maine coast. They are but isolated patches compared with the extensive beds of sand and clay which compose the Quaternary deposits of New England.
On the 22d August we made our last excursion up
80 : LIFE AND NATURE IN SOUTHERN LABRADOR.
the Esquimaux River, going up some six miles from its mouth. From a hill-top I could look over the surface of this lake-dotted land. The surface was rugged and bare in the extreme. The river valley, however, was well wooded, the spruce and birch perhaps thirty feet in height. Here and there the river passed through high precipitous banks of sand. The hills were rough, scarred with ravines, precipices, and deep gaps, the syenite wearing into irregularly hummocky hills, the rough places not filled up with drift, and thus the contours tamed down as in New England. | Indeed, Labrador at the present day is like New England at the close of the ice period or at the beginning of the epoch of great riv- ers, before the terraces were laid down and the country adapted for man’s residence. Labrador was never
adapted for any except scattered nomad tribes. It is.
still an unfinished land.
While the hills were bare and the rocks covered with the reindeer moss, here and there by the river's edge in favorable, protected places were tall alders and willows, with groups of asters and golden rods. Here I saw a veritable toad, and glad enough was I to recognize his lineaments. I was also told that there were frogs in ex- istence, though we never saw or heard them. There are no snakes or lizards, so that our history of these animals in Labrador will be as brief as that of the Irish historian, but we did find a small salamander at Belles Amours in a later trip to this coast.
On our return we found that a whaler had towed a whale into the mouth of the river and was about to try out the oil. We secured a piece of the flesh, and on reaching camp boiled it; it was not bad eating, tasting
THE RETURN HOME. SI
like coarse beef. Seal’s flippers we also found not to be distasteful, though never to be regarded as a delicacy.
Dredging and collecting insects on fine days when not too calm filled up the measure of our seven weeks. The time passed rapidly, the days were too short for all the work we planned to do, and it was not without regret that we left the rugged untamed shores of ‘the Labra- dor.” On the afternoon of the very day she had set for her return to Caribou Island, the Vauz¢z/us hove in sight. As she made our harbor she struck upon a sunken rock, tore off a piece of her keel, but slid.off and came to an- chor as near as practicable to the mission house, and then succeeded the mutual spinning of Labrador and Greenland yarns by the reunited party.
CHAP TER CV, ONE OF FIFTY DAYS IN SOUTHERN LABRADOR.
Four o'clock Saturday morning, July 7th, 1860, in the Strait of Belle Isle, and that huge rampart of rock, these .few icebergs stranded here and there, this occa- sional lump of floe-ice floating down with the tide, these outlandish puffins, and large flocks of eider-ducks skim- ming the surface or flying high overheard, tell us that, after nine days of sailing, we are sighting the Labrador coast.
Here codfish grow largest and most numerous; so twenty thousand fishermen from the British colonies and about five thousand Yankees migrate hither every sum- ‘mer for the cod, herring, and salmon that swarm in these icy waters. Here, in the spring of the year, num- bers of hardy Newfoundland sealers risk their lives in the ice just breaking up; while all the year round there are estimated to be five thousand Esquimaux, Micmacs, Englishmen, Frenchmen, Jerseymen, and _half-breeds, who live, thanks to the codfish, on these favored shores. Here people are born, live, and die, who have never seen a horse, cow, sheep, or cat, or a civiligeddom Wild Esquimaux dogs, savage, wolfish creatures, are the only beasts of burden.
The animals and birds are half arctic and half temper- ate. Sweet, dwarfish, arctic flowers here nestle in beds
of reindeer-moss, while our Alpine flora one may gather 82
APPROACHING THE COAST. 83
on Mount Washington luxuriates with stunted growths of bushy firs and birches. So, nearly all the shells, worms, and creeping things are the same in kind and number as those that Otho Fabricius wrote of in his ‘Fauna Gronlandica,” during his dreary life in southern Greenland one hundred years ago.
As we approach land no capes run out to greet us, or sheltered harbor opens its arms to embrace. An unin- terrupted line of coast confronts the gulf. In one place alone is the intense monotony of the outline relieved by the Hills of Bradore, where the coast sweeps round fif- teen miles to the eastward, and the Strait widens out.
It is a charming morning, the sun up but an hour, and just breeze enough to move us over the placid sea. Flocks of grave, enormous-hook-billed puffins sweep by us in squadrons of fifties and hundreds, or flocks of eider- ducks fly swiftly out from the land. Coming up nearer to this strange coast, the line breaks here and there ; a few rocksand islands start out fromthe shore. We pass by schools of two-masted fishing-boats, with two men apiece hooking codfish; we hail the fellows, but they are too busy to look up. Things look a little more live- ly ; more islands appear, channels wind through them, choked with fleets of fishing-smacks. But the wind leaves us, so we put out a boat and are towed through these narrow passages, whose walls of rock rise on each side higher than the masts of our schooner, though not very precipitously, for all has been worn down and sub- dued by water. So we move along, as if on a smooth- flowing, deep, narrow river, or a Norwegian fiord; now we round a point, and can almost jump ashore; then a bend in the channel takes us over to the other side; now
84 ONE OF FIFTY DAYS IN SOUTHERN LABRADOR.
we luff a little to avoid a group of Nova Scotia fisher- men, fat, sleek, moon-faced fellows, whose boats, loaded with fish, are busy discharging their burden, pitching up on deck half-dead cod, which are seized in a trice by — groups of “headers,” ‘‘splitters,” and “gutters.” And then the multitudinous smells, now coming fierce and strong from deck and hold, anon gentle and spicy as the cook turns the morning fry. Now the surface is streaked with oily films, but these break away and dis- close, six or eight fathoms below, a clear, sandy bottom, strewed with fish offal, on which banks of sea-urchins feed. If we look long and steadily enough, we shall see swarms of beautiful, delicate, transparent jelly-fish, with an occasional Clio, a winged mollusk, fully as pure and beautiful, only more transparent. Suddenly the bottom is obscured by an immense shoal of caplin, slowly swim- ming just above the bottom. The rocks now reveal green, sunny declivities; little valleys, sprinkled with flowers; an arctic butterfly comes out to our vessel ; and now we open upon a house; it is only a deserted fish- house, but a cur, keeping up an incessant barking on the other side of the hill, lets us know that there are human beings, as well as canine, not far off. If we may believe it, there is a small, stunted, homely, Quebec cow feeding on the side of the hill. Here was a clear case of unnat- ural selection. The scenic features of this coast do not demand a cow to grace the foreground. Her nautical owner informs us, in sturdy Labradorian dialect, that she had been brought up this spring. ‘‘ I made her fast to her moorings, and there let her bide to eat the grass.” Her husband had broken loose from his moorings, and was emulating the roar of the waves on the “ land-wash.”
CARIBOU ISLAND. 85
The children, more used to seals. and sea-cows, had not yet recovered from their astonishment at this freak of Nature. . .
The channel now widens out into thesbay of Bonne Espérance, a fine open space of water, tolerably well sheltered from storms. Two days after I got settled on Caribou Island, in Salmon pay three miles east of Bonne Espérance.
Nearly the whole coast of Labrador is lined with mul- titudes of small islands, separated by deep, narrow chan- nels from the mainland, with here and there a bay of. some extent, where the islands are separated far apart. Thus, a small sail-boat can start from the mouth of the St. Lawrence, and take an inside passage up to the Strait of Belle Isle, and there will only be a few places where she will encounter the outside swell. These num- berless islets and channels are too numerous and intricate to be accurately mapped. At least, our ordinary charts give no accurate idea of their location, and navigation for the whole coast is a matter of guess-work.
Caribou Island is the largest within fifty miles, per- haps, of Salmon Bay. It is about two miles long and half as broad. But it isin vain to guess about the length or breadth of any part of this rough-and-tumble country, so I will measure it with my legs. It is a fresh, cool, breezy morning ; thermometer, say, at 56°. At noon it will not be higher than 65°.
At the outset, it may as well be said that this is no country for slippers or calfskin boots of ordinary make. Here Jersey cowhide or native-made sealskin boots are _ the mode. With anything on but these, two minutes’ walk out-doors will wet one’s feet thoroughly, so wet
86 ONE OF FIFTY DAYS IN SOUTHERN LABRADOR.
and soaked is the boggy ground. For bog-trotting, or | moss-tramping, or climbing rocks, sealskins @ da Esguz- maux, SO light and water-tight, are indispensable.
The way lies round the head of a little bay, which meets a quiet vale, filled with grass and ferns at the top, but half-way down, as it widens out, choked with a stunted spruce and fir growth, or what the people call “tucking,” or “‘tuckermel-bush.” It is in vain that we try to push through it, so dense the growth, so gnarled, twisted, and grown together in one impenetrable mass. the trunks, and so flat and table-like the branches spread out above. Here is a perfectly tight shelter, should it rain. Many a hunter, belated at nightfall, has crept under these bushes and made a comfortable night of it. So the bears find good hiding-places here, and cannot be found without dogs to scent them out. Lower down, the valley extends into an alder-swamp, a lilliputian growth, perhaps three feet high, choked with rank grasses. and sedges, crowding the sides of a slow-moving brook. Here mosquitoes and black-flies swarm; we are under shelter of a cliff, and there is no wind to keep off these horrible pests. How they rage and torment, these myr- iad entomological furies! Now for a frantic rush out of this purgatory, and a tiresome climb of a hundred feet up this cliff! It is high, but not very rough, for all the rocks are hidden by soft reindeer-moss, and the crev- ices are filled up with tuckermel, and the ravines that run down its sides have their dripping, mossy walls sprinkled over with Alpine flowers and their bottoms. carpeted with coarse arctic grasses. Only here and there patches of the original granite show themselves. Now - and then a brown or yellow butterfly flits by, or an arc-
SALMON BAY. 87
tic bumble-bee hums and buzzes in the flowers; two or three beetles crawl over the fern-leaves, while a few meagre, lean-looking flies lead a sort of doubtful exist- ence. There is none of that outburst and profusion of insect-life that characterizes woodland life inthe States in midsummer. For the benefit of the entomologically curious, I will state that nowhere on the coast, or inland, at least within twenty miles of Salmon Bay, has a grass- hopper been seen or heard of ! The common red-legged erasshopper, that is so abundant everywhere with us all the summer, which luxuriates on the summit. of Mount Washington, and is found by arctic travellers about Mel- bourne Island, spread, in fact, all through British and Arctic America, is here wanting, so scanty and parsimo- nious is the distribution of insect-life on these shores. But I must mention the wasp’s nest I stumbled upon one day, about as large as one of Heenan’s fists, stuck down under the moss, ina mass of roots. Well aware of the notorious temper of these insects, and fully con- scious of past sad experiences, I approached the dread precincts, extended a six-foot pole, and gave a gentle tap—no answer; another—two individuals crawl out—a simultaneous rush of the invader to the rear; the ‘“‘ com- bat deepens’—four more dabs with the six-footer—a baker’s dozen issue forth and fly around, alas! how dolo- rous and sad! They give chase for a pace or two, and then pause, look back irresolutely, and give it up. Such was my experience with Labrador wasps.
By this time we have topped the cliff, and far down below lies Salmon Bay. Seven fishermen from New- buryport find here one of the best harbors on the coast —securely landlocked, and good anchorage in fifteen
88 ONE OF FIFTY DAYS IN SOUTHERN LABRADOR.
fathoms’ mud—a beautiful dredging-ground. Large cockles, curious pelican’s-feet, delicate nereids, clumsy crabs, and neat, active shrimp, abound and multiply as the sands of the sea in number. On the right is Salmon Bay settlement, one of the most populous places on the coast, consisting of seven families. And now the eye, sweeping north, east, and west, takes in the vast desola- tion of hills, relieved only by gleaming fragments of ponds, or snow-banks of a sullen white. There is no continuous series of ranges rising up back of one an- other, like any well-ordered mountain group, but a chopped sea of undeveloped mountains, whose tops seem to have been ground down by water and ice when the world was much younger than it is now, but which, after this, as if a rebel horde of Titans, made seemingly inef- fectual attempts to grow up again, and only succeeded in spots; which, bare then, have been kept bare ever since by arctic frosts and snows.
If we imagine we can see forests growing among those hills, it is only because we have been told that woods do grow in the sheltered valleys, and now and then venture up the hill-sides. Thus the country runs back for hundreds of miles, the hills rising five to eight hundred feet high, bare and desolate, but the valleys are much better wooded in the interior of the country, be- ing warmer and more sheltered. ‘There are no regular rivers in Labrador, only rows of ponds—and very crooked rows—linked by rapids, which the Mountaineers only can navigate in their light canoes. There are no water-sheds, no continuous valleys to unite into one stream the thousand ponds that gather in every depres- sion,
STONE CIRCLES. | 89
But we have feasted long enough upon this rare, unique scene. We speak not of the freshness of the breeze, of the exhilaration and inspiration it brings, and not, least of all, of the perfect freedom from every sign of fly or mosquito. Now, as we return, for two miles of bog- trotting, an hour of black-fly and mosquito fighting! While sitting upon the hill during that half-hour’s rest the breeze kept the flies from our face; but how secretly and in what untoward numbers had the silvery-legged rascals crept into our flannel shirts, covered hat and back, doing nothing but hold on for the wind! but now, under lee of this wall, the plagues have the advantage. They fly into our face, eyes, nose, and mouth; they do not bite hard, like the mosquitoes, but the vampires suck long and deep, leaving great clots of blood. To com- plete the work, half a dozen frightful horse-flies of gigan- tic stature hover. about ; now and then, when we are not watching, they will settle down on our hands and bite terribly, making a wound which does not heal for days. It is useless to try to bear it. I make a stampede up the rocks to the breeze, but they follow in clouds, pounc- ing down like small-shot on my wide-awake. So run- ning, as if for my life, one moment, and stopping to rest the next; now starting up a white-headed finch or soli- tary robin, or stopping to watch a Canadian jay or hun- gry cormorant sailing aloft, or pausing to trace out two or three contiguous circles of bowlder-stones, which marked the former wigwams of the Esquimaux, who used to have bloody fights on this island with the Mountain- eer Indians; now wading a swamp, or making détours round miniature ponds, or jumping a narrow ravine, or circumnavigating a growth of tuckermel—I come toa
gO ONE OF FIFTY DAYS IN SOUTHERN LABRADOR.
stand onthe south side of the island. It has been blow- ing fresh for two or three days from the southwest, and the gulf rolls in a magnificent surf, sweeping grandly upon the pebbly beach or dashing wildly against the sea-wall. Half a mile from shore a huge iceberg is stranded, and the wind blows cold and damp. Farther out on the Strait the sun flashes on four or five other fine bergs, though it is the middle of July. And so clear is the air, that the low blue-limestone coast of Newfoundland, forty miles opposite, can easily be seen.
Now, where are all the sea-birds that I expected to find filling the air, and crowding the rocks, up here in Labrador? A lonely raven is just passing over, a few small land-birds are chipping on the rocks, a small owl wings his noiseless flight low over the bogs—these, with a pair of saddle-back gulls sailing aloft, are about the only birds to be seen. Sometimes a loon flies over the island, or a small flock of eider-ducks settles down in a pool. If one pushes out a little way into the Strait, he will start up a few razor-billed auks, or see a flock of guillemots, or their cousins, the murres. People here call the guillemots sea-pigeons, though more like crows than pigeons in size and color. A flock of puffins will fly off just out of gunshot across the bows of one's boat, for all these sea-birds are shy and difficult to approach. I must delay a moment on these puffins. They are queer, grave birds, profoundly Quakerish in their habit, wise-looking as the seven Gothamites, only wanting a pair of good, old-fashioned, silver-bowed spectacles to set off their enormous hook-nosed visages. Just here they are not very abundant, but fifteen miles up the coast, at Bradore, these peculiar people have appropriated
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A FLOCK OF CURLEWS. gI
a red-sandstone island. On this patch of rock, whose soft, crumbling surface they bore in all directions, mak- ing galleries about a foot from the surface, they have bred from time immemorial. However wild they are on the waves, here they suffer themselves to be pulled forth from their holes and summarily choked by ardent ornithologists without a squeak of resistance.
Indeed, June and July, or the first of August, is no time to come to Labrador for birds: all the ducks are among the inland ponds, breeding. The sea-birds that breed here gather in one place sixty miles down the coast, on the Bird Islands, forming the Mecatina group. There are few to molest their nests, and they live in compara- tive quiet. Leta crew visita breeding-place in the middle of June, and they can very quickly load a boat with eggs. . It is said that vessels come up here from Boston every year, and load up with eggs to carry back to the States.
About the middle of August that beautiful and grace- ful bird, the sea-swallow, or arctic tern, makes its appear- ance, flying about the sea-cliffs, hovering over the fisher- men’s boats, and keeping up an interminable screeching and twittering; they are the most garrulous of gulls. With them appear a few of the rarer gulls. Then the ring-necked and semipalmated plover, and flocks of sand- peeps and yellow-legs gather on the flats. But the cur- lews eclipse them all. We had had intimations of their arrival. Already had small squadrons been seen wheel- ing around the hill-tops, and now over the sea, and as they advanced or retreated, their “mild mixing cadence” now grew loud and near, and now waxed fainter and fainter. On the afternoon of the 1oth of August I heard the alarm of “Curlew!” and, sure enough, over
Q2 ONE OF FIFTY DAYS IN SOUTHERN LABRADOR.
across the neck, a mile away, was a flock of these birds, darkening nearly a square mile of the sky. There must have been many thousands in that flock, all piping and whistling like the jingling of ten thousand sleigh-bells, or the whistling of the wind through the ropes of a squadron of seventy-fours, while performing a series of evolutions of wonderful celerity and precision. The whole mass wheeled around the hills and over the plain, now stretching out over the bay, made up of smaller, troops, chasing each other around and through the whole moving mass in the greatest apparent confusion and dis- order. It was really a great sight, this marshalling of the curlew hosts. After this grand review of their forces they separate into small flocks, scatter over the country to feed on the curlew-berries now ripening, or to patrol the shore at low-water in search of stray worms and snails. The inhabitants kill large quantities of this deli- cious bird, and salt them down in barrels for winter use. They cannot conjecture where they come from, but say that the first northeast wind in late summer always brings them.
But the sun is going down in the fog and mist driving in from the gulf. The wind has hauled to the east, and blows chilly and damp ; and so ended many of the thirty fair days of the fifty I spent in Southern Labrador.
CHAPTER: VI.
al[sUMMER’S CRUISE TO NORTHERN LABRADOR. I. From Boston To HENLEY HARBOR.
In the spring of 1864, Mr. William Bradford, the well- known marine artist of New York, organized a party to cruise along the coast of Labrador, and if. possible to reach Hudson’s Strait, for the purpose of painting ice- bergs and arctic scenery. After having previously spent a summer on the southern coast, with no opportunity of extended explorations, it seemed rare good fortune to make one of a party bound for the Moravian settle- ments, and possibly Cape Chidley.
On the 4th of June, at 10.15 A.M., the fast schooner Benjamin S. Wright, Captain Brown, with two pilots, Capt. Ichabod Handy of Fair Haven, Mass., for the northern coast, and Capt. French for the southern shore, a Norwegian mate and two deck hands, with a cook and two cabin boys, carrying a party of fourteen gentlemen comprising lawyers, clergymen, naturalists, sportsmen, and pleasure-seekers, left the Philadelphia Packet Pier, Boston. Owing to an easterly wind a tug towed us down to the Narrows, where we spread our canvas, and beat down to Provincetown for the purpose of buying a -whaleboat, making harbor there at 9.30 in the evening.
Spending Sunday at Provincetown, where we visited some friends in the coast-guard, several of whom after- wards distinguished themselves in the war of the Rebel-
93
94 A SUMMER'S CRUISE TO NORTHERN LABRADOR.
lion, on the 6th, with a fresh northwest wind which so effectually ruffled the ocean that nearly every man set- tled his account there and then with the sea-god, our course was laid for Cape Sable, which we sighted at about 1 o’clock in the afternoon of the 7th.
The following day we bowled along at the distance of twelve miles from the Nova Scotian coast, the wind blowing a fresh gale from the northwest, and about 2 A.M. of the 8th ran into Chedabucto Bay, anchoring four . miles from Port Mulgrave. Weighing anchor the next day and moving up to the town, a mean little fishing- hamlet, while the crew took in wood and water, each one, according to his taste, went either shopping or trouting in the rain, or geologizing. On the following day I walked towards Porcupine Point, a bold headland said to be 275 feet above the Gut of Canso. ~( The view over the Gulf of St. Lawrence is a very pleasant one. The Gut of Canso opens into the Gulf four miles from the Point. The drift material consists of a rich soil con- taining bits and masses of red sandstone, some of the fragments containing calamites and the impressions of delicate sea-weeds. The rocks zz sztw are a white con- glomerate dipping at an angle of 80° and with a N. and S. strike.
The shores of the Gut of Canso are high and bold on the western side, but much lower on the Cape Breton shore. The contours of the hills on the Nova Scotian | coast are like those of a granite-gneiss region, the hills terminating in drift “scaurs.” On the Cape Breton side the houses are more numerous and the farms either more fertile or cultivated with greater care. At Port Mul- grave the inhabitants did not raise vegetables enough for
IN THE GULF OF ST. LAWRENCE. 95
their own consumption; and not infrequently a farmer was seen ploughing with a single ox. Exchange was $1.95. The people were all ‘“sesesh.” Although for the disunion of the “ States,” nothing could separate them from the love of whiskey and gin, as in the course of the afternoon there was a miserable stabbing fray, witnessed by a good many of the inhabitants, though it should be said that there were thirty sail then in the port, from which part of the material for the affray was afforded.
Our fishermen returned with a liberal supply of trout, and Mr. Bradford shipped a steward, who turned out to be an Indian soldier, and had assisted in blowing Sepoys from the cannon’s mouth. Whether he was morally and intellectually worse or better than a Sepoy was often a matter of discussion on the cruise.
We were now ready to push out into the Gulf, and the latter was now ready for the reception of the Benz. S. Wright. Yor but a few days ago vessels had been jammed in the ice immediately north of Port Mulgrave, the ice having remained later in the Gulf and been more abundant the past spring than for years. We were told that it was possible for people to walk on the ice a hun- dred miles out from the Magdalen Islands.
The next day found us off St. George’s Bay, the sport of light, baffling winds or of dead calms, but these ena- bled us to receive lasting impressions of the beautiful green slopes of the Cape Breton shores, with their ex- panse of green sward framing the square acres of ploughed land centred by red farm-houses. These were our last views of cultivated fields and well-trimmed glebes, until on our return we beheld the rich red farm-lands ot Prince Edward’s Island. |
96. A SUMMER’S CRUISE TO NORTHERN LABRADOR.
Sunday the 12th was a red-letter day, spent about the home of the gannet or solan-goose. At seven o'clock in the morning—and what a glorious one it was: the air soft and balmy, our good vessel’s bows gently rising and falling on the swell as if saluting in a measured, dignified way the appearance of the god of day—at this
hour Entry Island, one of the Magdalens, was twelve —
THE LARGEST OF THE BIRD ROCKS, AS SEEN IN 1864. (From a Photograph by Black.)
miles off. It is a high mass of red sandstone with abrupt sides and surmounted by two knolls; near it were several small islands, and a high grayish rock deeply incised by narrow valleys plunging suddenly down to the sea.
At noon we approached the Bird Rocks, a group of three islets, the largest 250 feet high and from a
THE BIRD ROCKS. 07
quarter to half a mile in length, the longest diameter extending east and west. The top is nearly flat and slopes gently towards the south. It is formed, as seen from the south side through a good glass at a distance of half a mile, of red friable sandstone, with thin beds of grit, which near the water’s edge are several feet in thickness, while several loose fragments look like bowl- ders, though there are no true transported rocks on the island.
The islets were nearly white on top, and I supposed this was due to the guano, but Mr. Bradford assured me that the white frosting, as it seemed to be, was the birds themselves; and sure enough, except a central patch of brown and green herbage, the western end was in part, and the eastern half of the island entirely, white with female gannets, resting on the rock above as well as on the larger shelves on the sides, while the small nooks and shelves of grit wére appropriated by myriads of murres.
At the report of a gun swarms of birds would rise from the rock and flutter in the air like flies, and at a rough estimate 10,000 were there. To the leeward many gannets, males, were seated in the water or flying over it, in company with a few murres—but nearly all were as if in ceaseless motion, and busy fishing or re- turning with fish to the avian metropolis.*
* In this connection it is interesting to read the description of the Bird Rock in Cartier’s first voyage.
‘“*Wee went southeast about 15 leagues, and came to three Ilands, two of which are as steepe and vpright as any wall, so that it was not possible to climbe them; and betweene them there is a little rocke. These Ilands were as full of birds, as any field or medow is of grasse, which there do make their nestes ; and in the greatest of them there was a great and infinite number of those that wee call Margaulx, that are white, and bigger than any geese, which were seuered in one part. In the other were onely Godetz, but toward the shoare
98 A SUMMER’S CRUISE TO NORTHERN LABRADOR.
Mr. Bradford spent ‘a busy day in sketching the unique scene, and his photographer, Mr. Pierce, from Black’s studio in Boston, took four good photographs of the rocks and birds. These rocks are the remnants of what were once vastly more extended strata, and the question arose in my mind whether the red soil of Port Mulgrave and vicinity were not the débrzs which had been in part borne from the Magdalen Isles, and in part from Prince Edward’s Island. |
Since 1864, when the photograph was taken by Mr. Bradford of which the accompanying sketch is a repro- duction, great changes have come over the famous gan- net rookery of Bird Rocks. Mr. W. Brewster, who, with Prof. Hyatt and others, visited these rocks in 1881, says in his account: ‘“‘In 1860 the number of gannets breeding on the ¢of of Great Bird (then uninhabited) was estimated by Bryant at about ‘ fifty thousand pairs,’ or one hundred thousand birds. In 1872 Maynard found this portion of the colony reduced to about five
there were of those Godetz, and Apponatz. We put into our boats so many of them as we pleased, for in lesse than one houre we might have filled thirtie such boats of them: we named them the Ilands of Margaulx. About five leagues fro the said Jlands on the west, there is another Iland that is about two leagues in length, and so much in breadth: there did we stay all night to take in water and wood. That Iland is enuironed round about with sand and hath a very good road about it, three or foure fadome deep. Those Ilands have the best soile that euer we saw, for that one of their fields is more worth then all the New land. We found it all full of goodly trees, medowes, fields full of wild corne and peason bloomed, as thick, as ranke, and as faire as any can be seene in Britaine so that they seemed to have bene ploughed and sowed. There was also a great store of gooseberies, strawberies, damaske roses, parseley, with other very sweet and pleasant hearbes. About the said Iland are very great beastes as great as oxen, which have two great teeth in their mouths like vnto elephants teeth, and liue also in the sea. We saw one of them sleeping vpon the banke of the water; wee thinking to take it went to it with our boates, but so soone as he heard vs, he cast himselfe into the sea. We saw also beares and wolves ; we named it Brions Iland. (Hakluyt, iii. 254.)
FIRST VIEW OF ‘‘ THE LABRADOR.” 99
thousand birds (a lighthouse had been erected on the |
summit of the rock and several men were living there). When we landed in 1881 the top of the rock was prac- tically abandoned, although there were some fifty nests at the northern end, which had been robbed a few days before, and about which the birds still lingered.”
Mr. Brewster says, however, that the common guil- lemot (Lomvza trozle) still breeds at Bird Rocks in
amazing numbers, but that the number is rapidly de- creasing, owing to the introduction of a cannon which is.
fired every half-hour during foggy weather. ‘At each discharge,” he says, “the frightened murres fly from the rocks in clouds, nearly every sitting bird taking its egg into the air between its thighs and dropping it after fly- ing a few yards. This was repeatedly observed during our visit, and more than once a perfect shower of eggs fell into the water around our boat.”
At 6 oclock this evening we were 95 miles from Little Mecatina Island, and at 11 o’clock of the next day (the r3th), we sighted land lying under a mirage which looked like the land itself, while the snow-banks ashore were transformed into icebergs floating in the guase sea. This singular mirage lasted until evening. As the land gradually “hove” in sight the mirage re- ceded and thé.bergs became veritable banks of snow. Little Mecatina was passed at 6 in the evening; its longer diameter was north and south, and the southern end of the glaciated island showed finely the “stoss” side, the “struck” side gradually sloping towards the north. ‘The Labrador coast at this point becomes high and bold, presenting a continuous front to the Gulf, with an occasional “hump” rising perhaps 300 feet or more
100 A SUMMER’S CRUISE TO NORTHERN LABRADOR.
above the general level of the land. The Island of Mecatina is 685 feet above the Gulf, Cape Mecatina being the highest land from Mingan to Bradore.
We dropped anchor in Sleupe harbor in Gore Island, after the quickest voyage Capt. French had ever made. The run from Boston had been a fine one, with north- west winds throughout, and no fog. At sunset the
thermometer was 42°, and it grew still cooler as we ran
into our harbor, which was on the southern exposure, on which were numerous snow-banks in the deep gulches leading down to the water.
The rocks were red syenite, like those of Mt. Desert, Me., with its characteristic hummocky outline and pre- cipitous walls fronting the sea. No bowlders were seen about the harbor, but the rocky shores were marked and polished by the ice for a few feet above the water's edge.
The murres and saddle-back gulls were now just hatching, while the eider-ducks were beginning to lay their eggs. The curlew-berry was now in flower. In the garden of one of the settlers (Michael Canté), who were French Canadians, the rhubarb or pie plant was
just above ground, the parsnips were six inches high, —
and the grass about the houses was four inches in height, but as yet there was no verdure on the hills, the surface being still sere and rusty, the snow having so recently melted away. The season opens here the middle or last of May, when the snow mostly disappears. The ice left
the bay the 20th of May, and about this date the black
bear comes out of his winter quarters. It was too early
for cod or salmon, and the capelin had not appeared. Our harbor was between two islands, and on one were
two houses, and on the other five, one of them a well-
THE EIDER-DUCK AND ITS NEST. IOI
built, neat house. About them lounged several Esqui- maux dogs. We dredged in ten fathoms ona rocky bottom, not, however, bringing up any novelties, though the animals were all of purely arctic typés.
June 14 was spent in egging and in collecting insects, Mr. Bradford secured the services of a Frenchman and his sail-boat, and with several others of the party landed on three islands situated four or five miles away. We found eight nests and twenty-five eggs cf the eider- duck, with those of the murre or guillemot and auk, besides three gull’s eggs, probably those of the saddle- back. We_-also found a nest of the red loon: it was situated on the edge of a small pond, The nest, partly submerged, was fourteen inches in diameter and in size and appearance like the gulls’ nests, though the latter were placed in dryer localities. The eider-ducks’ nests were abundant, as were those of the razor-billed auks, but those of the murres were even less common. The - eider-ducks ten years ago were extremely abundant, but the unremitting attacks upon their nests by “‘eggers” has resulted in the partial extinction of this valuable and interesting bird. All the eiders were busy in making their nests and in laying their eggs. The old or com- pleted nests contained a great mass of down, and were 12 to 15 inches in outside diameter, the downy mass in which the eggs sank being five or six inches high; the newer nests were without down; there were about five eggs to anest. Most of the nests which we saw were built on low land, near pools and not far from the sea- water, in a dense thicket of dwarf spruce trees, called “‘tucking-bush”’ or ‘‘tuckermel.” The murres and auks, as is well known, do not make nests, but drop their eggs
\ ; ae : 102 A SUMMER’S CRUISE TO NORTHERN LABRADOR.
under proj*cting rocks, or on overhanging shelves on high cliffs, or under blocks of granite. I found one murre’s egg which had been laid on the ice under a huge rock, and as I v;orked my way under the rock to get at the single egg, the stupid bird did not fly, but simply moved a few steps beyond my reach, making an odd guttural noise. It need scarcely be added that the vicin- ity of a murre’s or auk’s nest is filthy in the extreme. The egg-shell of these nestless birds is very thick, so that they may roll about or drop down without break- ing; how they came to be so much more conical or pointed at one end than usual is an interesting question.” We also saw a king eider flying with a small flock of eiders, as well as several “shags” and a northern phal- erope. : Insect-life was now stirring; the pools abounded in water boatmen (Corzxa), and whirligig beetles (Gyvz- nus), while a species of feathered gnat (Corethra) was just leaving the pupa, the cast skins of the latter floating on the surface of the pools. A lonely humble-bee was flying fussily about, a syrphus-fly was hovering over the flowers of the cloud-berry, and other insects were found under stones, amongst the moss, or in the water. The appearance of insect-life corresponded to that of south-
* “« There was one bird in particular which we watched for some time, the proud possessor of a brilliant green, strongly marked egg—as usual, to all appearance quite out of proportion to her own size—which she arranged and rearranged under her, trying with beak and wing to tuck the sharp end between her legs, but never quite satisfied that it was covered as it should be. Azt for the wonderful provision for its safety in the shape of the guillemot’s egg (a round, flat-sided wedge, which makes it, when pushed, turn round on the point instead of rolling, as eggs of the usual form if placed on a bare rock would do), most of those we saw would probably have been dashed to pieces long before.” (T. Digby Pigott’s Birds of the Outer Faroes, 1888.)
THE CORMORANT AND ITS NEST. 103
ern Maine at the end of April. The next day a white- faced wasp (Vespa maculata) flew aboard the vessel. The day was spent in searching for eider nests, of which I found a dozen in the ‘‘ tucking-bush,” with thirty eggs, and the rude nests and eggs of the saddle-back gull. June 16th was a beautiful day, rather warm, with light
Pads from the east and south, or quite calm. In the ~
afternoon a shower passed over from the west, and at night the wind was northerly ; the southwest summer winds had not yet set in, the prevailing winds being northerly. We spent the day in a search for the eggs of the ‘“‘ waupigan ” or common cormorant, and those of the shag or double- crested cormorant; William, a very intelligent French Canadian, taking us to their nesting-place in his row-boat. The nests were situated on a high cliff, a sort of shelf. We let William down over the precipice with a rope. There were fifty-five nests in all, and over them. rose flocks of cormorants disturbed at our coming; they were very shy and flew rapidly far off, wheeling about in cir- cles, but not daring to come near the nesting-place. There were five eggs in a nest; the latter were about
20 inches in outside diameter, built of thick birch limbs, —
whitened, as was the rocky shelf, with the excrement of the birds, and the entire neighborhood was pervaded with a far-reaching and intolerable stench of decaying fish. The eggs of the common cormorant are said to be laid earlier in the season than those of any other bird ; they are long, pointed, and of a dirty tea-color, some nearly white. The shags’ nests, mixed with those of the Waupigan, were situated in another place adjoining. They are usually laid on the bare rock, and William was surprised to find them on the precipice. The eggs are
.
104. A SUMMER’S CRUISE TO NORTHERN LABRADOR.
smaller than those of the common cormorant, are whiter and more pointed, and are laid later than those of any other bird.
On our return we went by invitation into William’s house ; his children were attractive in looks, with fine eyes. This family and a neighboring one were the two - leading French Canadian families on the coast. They - told us that it was harder to gain a livelihood than here- tofore, the game and fish getting scarcer. Still, one family winter before last shot 1100 partridges. William, by the way, told us that there were four varieties of part- ridge: the spruce partridge, and the white or ptarmigan, of which they distinguish the mountain ptarmigan and the river ptarmigan, the latter the rarest ; the fourth kind they call the pheasant. The partridges were said to be now laying their eggs. William raised last year twenty- five bushels of potatoes, also turnips, while barley, hav- ing three months to grow, ripens on this inhospitable coast. Sheep might be raised; there were: no cows, though to the westward they are kept the year through. We were told that a walrus was killed near St. Augus- tine within twenty-five years, and that two had been seen in this vicinity since then. ~It will be remembered that the walrus formerly abounded in the Gulf of St. Law- rence, having been rendered extinct by the early fisher- men on the Magdalen Islands.
We saw an egging vessel at a distance. The “‘egg- ers” watch their chances to take great quantities of eggs of sea-birds, especially those of the eider-duck and murres. But there are now few who follow this illegal and nefarious occupation. Twenty years ago the busi- ness was at its height, and a schooner would load a cargo
TRANSPARENCY OF THE WATER. 105
of 65 barrels of eggs and take them to the States or up the St. Lawrence River to Quebec or Montreal. Of late years they would give half of what they found to the settlers on the coast as hush-money. When collecting the eggs they would make ‘“‘caches” of them, covering the heaps with moss; and if they were on the point of -being caught they would smash the whole cargo of eggs rather than be seized with them. Many are the adven- tures which the eggers have passed through, and the stories told of them rival the tales of smugglers and pri- vateersmen on more favored shores. They still collect and wantonly destroy the eggs of murres.
The eggs of the eider-ducks we found to make a good omelet, but those of the murres and gulls were too fishy to be palatable ; the food of the murres and puffin as well as gulls consisting largely of small fish, such as capelin and lance fish (A mmodytes). We saw male eiders two years old; they were brown with a little white; we were told that the eider is four years in arriving at maturity ; the guillemot only two years; the puffins and murres becoming adult in one year. The eider-duck is easily domesticated, and the young will follow a person to whom they are accustomed like a dog.
As soon as our vessel came into shallow water,—and in our boat excursions we were constantly impressed by the transparency of the water on this coast—we could look down for thirty or forty feet and see with distinctness the bottom with dark masses of sea-urchins and _ starfish. The water is more transparent than on the Florida coast. Indeed the fishermen sometimes complain of this prop- erty of the water, saying that the fish can see the nets too readily and do not enter them. The water is so clear
°
e
106 A SUMMER’S CRUISE TO NORTHERN LABRADOR.
that the Ctenophores, /dyza roseola and Pleurobrachia, as well as anotner kind I could not secure, were beautifully distinct far down in the pellucid depths. Fishing had begun at this locality to-day, the cod having struck in. It is evident that the ice having disappeared for nearly a month the water inshore undoubtedly had grown warm enough to allow the cod and other fish to come into shoal- water and spawn. It was manifest that as the season
opened later and later from south to north, the move- —
ment inshore would be later and later from south to north, and this fact has undoubtedly given rise to the popular impression that the cod and other fish migrated from the southern to the northern portions of the coast of our continent.
I anxiously questioned William as to the nature of the interior of Labrador. He told me that there were plains and terraces inland; that there were toads and frogs and ‘‘lizards,” which being interpreted undoubtedly means the salamander, most probably Plethodon elutenosus of Baird. He had been here twenty years before he saw a grasshopper, but this was not on the coast, but in the interior; and I know scarcely a better criterion of an arctic land-fauna than the entire absence of grasshoppers on the Labrador coast, since none occur in the circum- polar regions, either treeless Arctic America, Greenland or Spitzbergen ; but the interior wooded portion of the Labrador peninsula supports a truly boreal or “ Canadian” insect fauna, with grasshoppers.
Among the insects found were the showy caterpillars of Arctza caja and a weevil. Of the more noticeable flowers, there were a pink Arenaria, and a leek-like plant which I have often seen on the summit of Mt. Washington.
CARIBOU ISLAND. 107
The 17th we weighed anchor, and with light winds and some rain early in the morning, but a strong north- easterly head-wind in the forenoon, we made only twenty- five miles during the day. The coast along our course was of very even height, the monotonous outline being relieved by an occasional elevation. The rock was of syenite with its characteristic scenic features. It was of warm, reddish flesh tints, but full of chinks and cracks, made by the water percolating or running into them and freezing, resulting in the cracking and disruption of large rock masses. Then the continued action of the frost year after year widens the chinks into gulches, with even, precipitous sides, now filled with snow-banks ten or fifteen feet long, and sometimes a dozen or more rods in extent, their edges bordered with arctic flowers. The hills were barren on top, with moss and dwarf spruce in the cavities or ravines. Here and there were to be seen clumps of grass, but the herbage in a Labrador fore- ground is not grasses or sedges, but low shrubby woody plants such as the dwarf cranberry, the curlew-berry (Empetrum nigrum), etc., which form a dense uniform carpet of varied but dull green hues.
On the afternoon of the 18th we dropped anchor near Caribou Island, and on landing found Mr. Carpenter, the missionary of these shores, who had befriended us in so many ways while camping on this island in the summer of 1860. He waswell and prospering in his good work. I lost no time in borrowing a spade and digging for quaternary fossils, and was rewarded with the discovery of several species not detected in 1860; among these were Serripes groenlandicus, Buccinum undatum, etc.
On the evening before June 20, the longest day of the
16s A SUMMER’S CRUISE TO NORTHERN LABRADOR.
year, I could read fine print until half-past eleven at night. The next morning. I dredged in eight fathoms before weighing anchor, and was delighted to find several large specimens of a delicate bivalve shell (Paxdorzna arenosa); it was afterwards dredged up the coast at Long Island in fifteen fathoms in sand and stony bottom. It had not before been found south of the polar seas ; its discovery so far south was interesting from the fact that we had found it in a fossil state in sandy strata of clay at Brunswick, Me., and had also been found in the quaternary clays at Saco, Me., by Mr. C. B. Fuller. The association of this shell with Mucula expansa (antiqua) in the brick-yard clays gives positive proof that during the wane of the ice period the shore of Maine was the home of a truly polar assemblage of marine animals, and that then as now on this coast these shells were not con- fined to deep water, but lived in shallow retired bays in water not over fifty feet in depth.
Throughout the day we were in sight of the butte-like Bradore Hills, the highest of the three mountains being 1264 feet above the level of the Gulf. As these moun- tains overlook the scene of Jacques Cartier’s explorations in the Straits of Belle Isle, we would suggest that the highest of the three elevations be named Mt. Cartier.
On the shores of Bradore Bay are still to be seen, it is said, the ruins of the ancient port of Brest, which was founded by the Bretons and Normans about the year 1500. The ruins are situated about three miles west of the present boundary of Canada at Blanc Sablon. Samuel Roberton states in his Notes on the Coast of Labrador : ‘“ As to the truth of Louis Robert’s remarks there can be no doubt, as may be seen from the ruins and
MOUNT CARTIER. 109
terraces of the buildings, which were chiefly constructed of wood. I estimate that at one time it contained 200 houses, besides stores, etc., and perhaps 1000 inhabitants in the winter, which would be trebled during the sum- mer. Brest was at the height of its prosperity about the year 1600, and about thirty years later the whole tribe
THE BRADORE HILLS, THE HIGHEST PEAK MT, CARTIER.
of the Eskimos, who had given the French so much trouble, were totally extirpated or expelled from that region. After this the town began to decay, and
towards the close of the century the name was changed to Bradore.”
IIO A SUMMER’S CRUISE TO NORTHERN LABRADOR.
By sundown our vessel had made only ten miles, be- ing off Belles Amours, with a southerly and very light ~ breeze. The sunset was a glorious one, while the moon rose through the haze and mirage over the snow-banks of the Newfoundland coast. At three in the afternoon we saw several miles ahead of us the fields of ice which we were soon to encounter, choking up the straits, and enhanced in apparent extent by the mirage. The Labra- dor coast, along which we were sailing, is very bold and bluff-like, with lower points of land reaching out to us in a picturesque way, the remarkably even outline of the coast being interrupted by the Bradore Hills.
The dredge was put down about two miles from shore in from ten to fifteen fathoms ona hard, stony bottom, with good success. - Beautiful specimens of Lucernaria guadricornes, four inches in height and of a dull amber brown, came up in the same dredge with that superb naked mollusc, Dexdronotus arborescens, which were of a beautiful amber hue, dotted with white points. From the stomachs of fishes caught by some of the party were extracted specimens of a rare arctic crab (Chzonacetes oprlzo), which proved to be not uncommon in from ten to fifty fathoms in the Straits of Belle Isle.
The next day, from nine in the morning until three in the afternoon, we moved slowly through the floe-ice, which proved to be the outskirts of the immense fields of ice which this summer lined the northern coast of Labrador. Mr. Bradford kept his photographer busily at work taking views of the more remarkable forms. The splendid green hues, so varied and striking; the endless variety in the water-worn forms; the weird noises, now harsh and grating, now loud and roaring, produced by the
CTENOPHORES IN THE FLOE-ICE. Ii!
attrition of the cakes of ice ground together by the slight swell or-the conflicting currents, lent unending interest to the scene. The floes had evidently the air of tired and worn travellers; they had been borne for at least a thousand miles from Baffin’s Bay ; had been thrown upon one another by storms and ocean currents, broken and frozen together over and over again ; they were now rap- idly melting away in the bright, warm sun, for the water was filled with bits of clear dark ice, the fragments of large floes. Our vessel, her sails scarcely filled out by the light baffling breeze, rose and fell, ploughing her way through the yielding floes. The water between the cakes was alive with bits of animated ice, myriads of transparent Ctenophores crowding the sea from the surface to a depth of a fathom or more. The roseate /dyza, throwing off the most delicate reddish tints, seemed be- sides to reflect the delicate blues and greens cast off by the floes; an Alcinoe- like form, floating on its side, with blood- red tentacles, rose and sank among the ice- cakes, and with these in lesser numbers was associated that beautiful spherical liv- : ing ball of ice, the Beroe or Pleurobrachia a ; rhododactyla. The Alcinoe-like form was“? "ural size. the JJertensza ovum, a creature as fragile as it is beauti- ful. It is of a delicate pink color, with iridescent hues; the ovaries bright red, the deep purple-red tentacles in striking contrast with the delicate tints of the body itself. From this point until we reached Hopedale in lat. 55° 30’ it constantly occurred in the floe-ice, but was rarely seen in waters from which the ice had disappeared, as in harbors free from ice the Mertensia would keep out of
I12 A SUMMER’S CRUISE TO NORTHERN LABRADOR.
view near the bottom ; but as soon as the ice drifted in
and choked up any harbor we were in, myriads could be ~
seen near the surface, rising and falling between the ice- cakes, gracefully throwing out their tentacles, which were nearly two feet in length, and suddenly withdraw- ing them when disturbed. No true jelly-fish were to be seen ; the season was early for them, but the beautiful polar shell-less snail, the C/zone /emaccna, with its long wings and bright red tints, was not uncommon.
. Stopped by the ice early the next morning we came to anchor at Belles Amours, waiting for a change of wind to allow a passage past or through the floe-ice. The coast is high, abrupt, and precipitous. Numerous streams well stocked with trout tumble into the sea, and the drift deposits, of limited extent, consisted of coarse gravels and bowlders of syenite.
We looked for insects, finding nothing of particular interest, though noticing that the ants had just come out of their winter quarters. Glad enough were we to finda snail (//yalina electrina), and in the mud at the bottom of the ponds a little bivalve shell (Peszadzum); under stones in the brooks were larval stones-flies and Ephem- eree; while a little salamander (Plethodon glutznosus) of a slate color with a paler light dorsal band ran into the water, to my great disappointment just eluding my grasp, as it is doubtful if any salamander occurs much farther north on the coast than this species.
Here the alders were still in blossom, showing that the season had just opened, though the shadberry, the golden thread (Cop¢zs) and the bunch-berry (Cornus canadenses) were likewise in bloom; on the other hand the mountain-ash was just unfolding its buds.
: \ 14
THE KILLER. rac)
Dredgings carried on in so shallow water as four and six fathoms revealed pelicans’ feet (aporrhazs) in abun- dance and very fine large Serrzfes groenlandica, and with them in the mud and sand a great abundance of nemer- tean and other worms, and Amphipod Crustacea, with fine examples of Cuma bzspinosa.
The principal house-owner at this fishing-station was a Mr. Buckle, who had been out here for twelve years from Boston. To his comfortable house was attached a conservatory and garden. Though the scanty soil on this barren point looked unpromising enough, it was comparatively rich. He had built his own schooner, a vessel of thirty tons.
On the beach was the skull of a ‘‘ killer”; it had re- cently been~ brought ashore and was surrounded by a number of hungry whelks (Auccznum undatum) which were Cleaning off the flesh from the bones. The killer is the most voracious of the smaller cetaceans, and is the bulldog among the-whales. The head is very blunt, the skull thick, the jaws powerful, the teeth longer than those of the grampus. It is at once known when swim- ming in the water by its high, narrow, pointed dorsal fin, which projects five or six feet out of water. It at- tacks with great boldness and pertinacity the right and finback whales, gouging out from their lips and side lumps of flesh, and, as Captain Handy told me, is espe- cially fond of the whale’s tongue.
The next day we walked inland, following up the stream which empties into the Gulf at Belles Amours. We, however, took the wrong side of the brook and failed to see the cascade where the stream, as we were told, falls down over a precipice forty feet high ; but irom a
I14 A SUMMER’S CRUISE TO NORTHERN LABRADOR.
hill perhaps five hundred feet high, which overlooked the country, we could trace the course of the brook for about two miles, where it ran down a steep ravine, with ponds on either side, from which flowed streams sending thin
and broken sheets of water over steep precipices. The |
lake from which the stream issued was perhaps a mile long, situated on high land, and a foaming stream poured into it from the northwest, while farther on in another depression was probably a second lake like the one in view. Such is an ordinary Labrador stream—a chain of ponds connected by rapids or waterfalls. There was a dreary sameness to the surface of the country, relieved, however, by a few snow-banks. During our ramble we heard the familiar liquid notes of the wood thrush, and saw some coots flying over the pond. In the afternoon the wind hauled into the eastward and was followed by rain. : )
The 24th was misty and drizzly ; the wind east veering to the northeast. We dredged all the afternoon, part of the time scraping a coralline bottom. An arctic sea-cu- cumber (Pentacta calcigera) was common in five fathoms in mud, with the largest Serripes yet met with. The most interesting form brought up was a beautiful hydroid (Coryne mirabilis) growing on the red sea-weed (Pézlota elegans). \t was anchored by its stalk, with bell-shaped medusze attached, which were provided with four pink eyes and short, thick, knotted tentacles, the pendant proboscis being very long, club-shaped and of a pinkish hue. | : While lying at anchor a few boat’s lengths from shore we were visited by two or three weasels, which must have swum off to the vessel. They were exceedingly
BELLES AMOURS. II5
tame, approaching within a foot of my finger even when it was kept in motion.
On one side of our harbor was, as at Caribou Island, a sandy beach where the fishermen could haul their nets for lance. The Newfoundlanders would come here in their clumsy boats from a distance of eight miles, where their vessels were at anchor, and seine for lance fish. They made a great deal of noise about it, though there were only two boats; one man would stand up in the stern paying out the net, while the full boat’s crew would row rapidly around the fish, and another man standing up to his waist in the water hauled in the net; in this way four barrels of fish are often caught at a single haul.
Mr. Phoenix, one of our party, here caught a young salmon eight inches long. The next day (the 25th) saw us still weather-bound with thick fog and rain, clear- ing up towards the evening. In codfish caught at a depth of fifteen or twenty fathoms we found large fine specimens of the lobworm (Avrenzcola piscatorum) and a fine polar shrimp (Crangon boreas). ‘To-day I found the first Cyavea or nettling jelly-fish, the species which grows on the banks of Newfoundland by the end of summer, two feet in diameter, with long, trailing ten- tacles sometimes six fathoms in length; it is these feelers, filled with microscopic darts or lasso-cells, which become entangled with the lines and poison the hands of the fishermen. As yet not a common jelly-fish, the Aurelia aurita, had been seen.
The next day we were released from our prison; a fresh northwest wind cleared the ice from the shore, and our good ship made a fine run to Henley Harbor ; time from.6 A.M. to 3.30P.M.4 FAs we sailed out of the harbor
116 A SUMMER’S CRUISE TO NORTHERN LABRADOR.
we could see that the low point running out into the Gulf from the Laurentian background of syenite was the western extremity of the basin of Cambrian red sand- stones and grits which extend between Belles Amours and Anse-au-Sablon. Skirting the coast within a mile or two of these interesting series of rocks, they are seen to rise to a height of five or six hundred feet, forming the coast line, but with a contour tame and monotonous compared with the syenitic hillsof Bradore. The belt is a narrow one, and while sailing past the shore we could look up through the harbors and bays to the low coni- cal hills of Laurentian gneiss in the interior. Passing by Bradore Bay the lofty buttes of Bradore are seen to rise up from the low foreground of red sandstone. We then passed within sight of Greenly Island, where in 1856, during a severe southwest gale, so sudden and common in the strait, thirty-one vessels for want of good anchor- age and shelter were driven upon a lee shore. Parra- keet Island then hove in sight, a favorite breeding-place for the parrakeet or puffin, with a single house on it, the hospitable mansion of a member of the ubiquitous Jones family, where in 1860 a party from our camp on Caribou Island received board and lodging for which only thanks would be accepted.
We then sight Blanc Sablon. The land here is high and descends to the sea in five very distinct terraces, of which the second is much the highest. There were huge bowlders of grit on the beach; the raised beaches were packed with bowlders and the terraces in general direction appeared in perspective, as if dipping up the strait; like river-terraces they were parallel to each other, but the lower one gradually dips down and loses
THE PRIMORDIAL SANDSTONES. II7
itself in the water, while another slopes in the opposite direction. The higher terraces appear as if wooded or green. There were indeed three shades of green : in the lower terrace the debris is covered with a pale green herbage ; the older vegetation is darker, while the upper rusty green tint is very dark.
At Blanc Sablon, which was originally so named by Jacques Cartier, the settlement consists of twenty houses; they were painted white and from the vessel appeared like masses of floe-ice stranded on the shore. Of the houses four are ‘‘rooms,” or fishing-establish- ments.
We then pass the fishing-settlement of Forteau, with a lighthouse on the point, besides about twenty houses, and a Catholic church. Off the lighthouse is Shallop Island ; the harbor is two or three miles deep, walled in by vertical cliffs, furrowed and streaked by rain and frost. Into the harbor empties a salmon stream ; one man here seems to have the monopoly of the salmon fishery, put- ting up from twenty to sixty barrels a year ; they are salted and sent to Europe.
Now as we pass on, the bay opens and at its head we can see the Laurentian formation, with its low, ob- tusely pointed gneiss hills; but the general surface of the Labrador coast is very uniform, while the opposite shores of Newfoundland now recede and appear to be much lower. ‘The strait is about eleven miles wide in its narrowest part.
Sailing on but half a mile off shore at Anse-au-Loup, we can plainly see that the Cambrian rocks are red and. gray sandstones—that the strata, almost horizontal, dip a little to the west, descending to the strait: by three
118 A SUMMER'S CRUISE TO NORTHERN LABRADOR.
rock-terraces or shelves. A large brook here plunges in a broad sheet of foam straight down into the sea. The east side of the harbor of Anse-au-Loup is much higher than the western, the surface is irregular, and the but- tressed steeps recall the Palisades of the Hudson. Then we pass along a beautiful green glacis, and on the northwest face of the bluff are five terraces, with the sandstone strata slightly inclined. Here on the lowest bluff are to be seen four terraces (Fig. 4).
In the bay east of Anse-au-Loup, whose shores seemed
EAS aAN AW SOnunnn
AY NS “tl A N
A,TERRACES AT BLANC SABLON; &, AT ANSE-AU-LOUP; C, TERRACES SEEN FROM THE MOUTH OF A BAY EAST OF ANSE-AU-LOUP.
to be well wooded, we can again look through to the original broken Laurentian rock, and the Cambrian sandstone (Fig. C) runs out into a low point terminat- ing in a low, shelving, green glacis. On this point is the fishing-hamlet of Semedit (a corruption of Saint Modeste), with but two houses.
The wind freshened off the cliffs, and now sailing on,
—————— == = = ——SS = = SS ==
BELLE ISLE. 119
the rough and fissured syenitic coast is in marked con- trast to the Cambrian shores we had just left. Going farther on we pass from syenitic to gneiss rocks, which rise from the water in long swells.
Belle Isle, the Isle of Demons of the early navigators, — now