Labrador. The Country and the People

The land was not the coast of fiords and glaciers for which he was looking; it was a shore without mountains, show¬ ing only small heights covered with dense woods.Bjarni put about and sailed to the north.The sky was now fair, and after sailing for five or six days he saw land again on the larboard, but that land was high, mountainous, and covered with glaciers."Then the wind rose, and they sailed four days to Herjulfsness.There is no doubt that the high, mountainous land, covered with glaciers, was the coast of Labrador.Nothing came of Bjarni Herjulfson's adventure till the LABRADOR China.They seem to have set him thinking.Like other men of his day, he had "studied the sphere," as the saying went; and he seems to have conceived the idea, inde¬ pendently of Columbus, of reaching the country where the spices grew by sailing westward.In quest of merchants who would furnish him forth he went to the west of Eng¬ land.There he found, in the matter of the new route, affairs much farther advanced than he could have sup¬ posed.In 1480 two ships had sailed from Bristol to discover the fabulous islands of Brazil and the Seven Cities which were supposed to lie between Ireland and the east coast of Asia.The expedition was fruitless, but it shows that the project of the westward route was already in the air.From Bristol Cabot made a long series of attempts to reach the islands which the ships that sailed in 1480 had failed to find.He believed they would prove steppingstones to the coast of Asia.Year after year expeditions went out under his direction; autumn after autumn they returned to Bristol empty-handed.Cabot's patrons were already beginning to withdraw their support, when in the summer of 1493 news came to England that Christopher Columbus, with three Spanish ships, had reached the islands of Asia.1 Cabot renewed his efforts, and on May 2, 1497, he sailed under royal patent on the voyage which brought him out on the shores of North America.The voyages of the Cabots have been a storm-centre of 1 The reason why Columbus succeeded where Cabot failed, is that Columbus crossed the Atlantic in a region where the trade-winds blow steadily from the east; whereas the tract of ocean from Ireland to America is one of the most unquiet in the world, and a vessel on its westward course in those latitudes has to contend, not only with ad¬ verse winds and broken weather, but with frequent and dense fogs.LABRADOR Captain Gibbons was ice-bound for twenty weeks in "a Bay called by his company Gibbons his Hole"; it is supposed to have been what is now Nain Bay.In 1610 Henry Hudson passed through Hudson's Straits to Hud¬ son's Bay, and so demonstrated the true nature of the Labrador peninsula.In the seventeenth century the French Canadians began to explore the Labrador coast.In 1657 Jean Bourdon of Quebec tried to reach Hudson's Bay by sea.He sailed up the Atlantic seaboard until he reached 55° north lati¬ tude; there he was compelled to turn back on account of the icebergs.Twenty-five years later Jolliet, the discov¬ erer of the Mississippi, also sailed on a voyage of exploration up the Labrador coast.The chart which he made of Hudson's Bay and Labrador is still preserved in the Archives of the Marine at Paris.It is, however, only within recent times that anything like an exact cartographical knowledge of the coast of Labrador has been arrived at.This has been due, on the one hand, to the British admiralty surveys, the first of which was carried out by the great Captain Cook, and on the other hand to the excellent charts of the Moravian missionaries.The interior of Labrador is still to a large extent unexplored.The great industry of the coast has always been its fisheries.In the middle ages fish played a much more important part in the economic life of Europe than it does to-day.The number of fast days in the year, and the way in which they were observed all over Europe, made fish one of the great staples of existence.Until the sixteenth LABRADOR the number of fishing-posts which existed.Not only were there cod fisheries and seal fisheries, there were even salmon and porpoise fisheries.The seal fishery was espe¬ cially important.It supplied the oil which was used for giving light in Canada and for dressing hides in Europe.In 1744, we learn from an old table of products, several thousand barrels of oil were exported from Labrador to France.In the industrial life of New France Labrador played a much larger part than has been usually realized.The Jesuits did not reach Labrador.In 1730 Father Pierre Laure, serving at Chekoutimi on the Saguenay, wrote to his superior: "I think it would be a good thing if your Reverence would permit me to go to Labrador, where I know that great results can be obtained."But his petition was not granted.The only priest, so far as we know, who worked on the Labrador coast, was the Abbe Martin, who petitioned in 1727 to be allowed to set up a seal fishery there.The memorandum of the Gov¬ ernor and Intendant on the subject throws light on the conditions of the coast in 1727; they write: -"We cannot answer immediately in the matter of the Sicur Martin's request to set up an establishment of the Labrador."This region scarcely seems suitable for a man of his cloth, there being only rocks in this place.The dissipa¬ tion which a trading-post brings about scarcely suits a missionary."These proposals show good intentions.We believe there is nothing behind them.But the matters which he proposes are too delicate not to require time for considera¬ tion."22 LABRADOR who, when presented at the French court, filled with admi¬ ration the young king, Louis XVI.The conquest of Canada in 1763 by the English worked a revolution on the Labrador coast.Shortly after the con¬ quest many of the French-Canadian gentry went back to France; we know, for instance, that in 1767 Captain Croizille de Courtemanche, half-brother of M. de Brouague, went back.At the same time there flocked into the coun¬ try a number of English and Scotch adventurers-"four hundred and fifty contemptible sutlers and traders," as Gov¬ ernor Murray called them.Some of these men bought up the concessions along the Labrador coast which the French Canadians were leaving.Between 1759 and 1808 they acquired nearly the whole coast from the Mingan Islands to Bradore Bay, and formed what was known as the Lab¬ rador Company, the leading spirit in which was Mathew Lymburner, the Quebec merchant who spoke so ably at the bar of the House of Commons in Westminster against the Constitutional Act of 1791.From 1763 also dates the first authentic account of a settled English fishery between the Strait of Belle Isle and Hamilton Inlet.Under the French regime Canada had included all Labrador; but by the proclamation of 1763 its eastern boundary became the River St. John.Labrador and Anticosti were annexed to Newfoundland.•Adventurers immediately began to establish themselves in the new territory.Captain Nicholas Darby, of Bristol, set up near Cape Charles, and the firm of Noble and Pinson, long well known on the coast, began to do business at Temple Bay.LABRADOR fisheries was one of the lesser causes which helped to bring about the American war, and it explains some episodes in the naval history of the war.In 1774 Labrador was given back to Canada.It was not until 1809 that it wTas finally reannexed to Newfoundland.A trader who came to Labrador in 1770 was Major George Cartwright.He had been aide-de-camp to the Marquis of Granby in the Seven Years' War; but failing to obtain promotion, he resigned his commission, and went into business on the coast of Labrador.He has left us his journals, in three large folio volumes.The great ma¬ jority of the entries are trivial." I went out a-shooting," he says on September 29, 1772, "but saw nothing."Yet the diary as a whole gives a vivid and minute account of the life at a post on the Labrador in 1770.The drunken¬ ness, the brutality, the license, are all depicted without reticence.Cartwright, who was a man of magnificent courage, treated the Irishmen and Indians under him like slaves."I gave MaeCarthy," he says, "twenty-seven lashes with a small dog-whip on his bare back, and in¬ tended to have made up the number thirty-nine; but as he then fainted, I stopped and released him; when he thanked me on his knees for my lenity.""I broke the stock of my Hanoverian rifle," he says at another time, " by striking a dog with it."So far as women were concerned, Cartwright's principles were frankly immoral.Yet he was religious after the fashion of his day.On Easter Sunday, he says, " I read prayers to my family both in the forenoon and afternoon."And after a providential es¬ cape from danger he writes: "We could attribute all these things to nothing but the effect of the immediate interpo-LABRADOR Admiral Richery, one of the ablest of the admirals of the French republic, made a flying visit from Cadiz to the Banks of Newfoundland.After having wrought cruel havoc among the fishermen on the Banks, he despatched three of his ships, the Duquesne, the Censeur, and the Friponne, under Commodore Allemand, to visit the coast of Labrador.Allemand was delayed by wind and fog, and when he arrived at Chateau Bay, most of the fishing vessels had left for Europe.Several ships, however, still remained, among them part of the rich convoy of peltries returning from Hudson's Bay.These Allemand captured.He then sent a summons to the commandant of Fort York, the blockhouse which Governor Palliser had built at Chateau Bay, demanding his surrender.When the com¬ mandant refused to surrender, Allemand opened fire on the fort, and soon silenced its fourteen guns.The English thereupon took to the woods, but not before they had set fire to all the buildings and stores at the post.The French landed, but found "nothing but ashes"; after a vain attempt to pursue the English garrison in the woods, they put to sea again, taking with them those prizes which they had not sunk or burned.They had done as much damage as it was possible for them to do.The people of Labrador have small reason to love the warships of revolutionary states.In 1809 Labrador was given back to Newfoundland.The arrangement was once more, however, found to be unsatisfactory.The C6te du Nord was really a part of Lower Canada, and it did not fit in, either legally or socially, with the system of government in Newfoundland.The G6 LABRADOR

Geography · Canadian Identity and History · Indigenous Studies and Ecology