Labrador

“ But here are a hundred harbours—a thousand miles of coast—with reefs and islands scattered like dust the length of it. The man who sails the Labrador must know it all like his own back yard—not in sunny weather alone, but in the night, when the headlands are like black clouds ahead, and in the mist, when the noise of breakers tells him all that he may know of his whereabouts. A flash of white in the gray distance, a thud and swish from a hidden place: the one is his beacon, the other his fog-horn. It is thus, often, that the doctor gets along. ”

“ This Labrador coast becomes ever bolder and grander as one sails northward. Here the snowy mountains are quite Alpine in appearance. This morning the thick mist hides all but the base of these magnificent hills, but the enormous rocky masses, rising so quickly from the water's edge into the heights veiled from us, give some idea of their grandeur. Our captain is, indeed, well acquainted with their aspect or he would not have ventured to enter this bay under such circumstances. ”

“ But all days yield to those of Labrador when the better genius of its climate prevails. Then one feels the serenity of power, then all his blood is exalted and pure, and the globules sail through his veins like rich argosies before trade-winds. Then an irritable haste and a weak lassitude are alike impossible; one's nerves are made of a metal finer than steel, and he becomes truly a lord in Nature. ”

“ In an easterly gale, the billows roll up out of the level of the ocean, and wreck themselves upon these crags, rushing back through gulfs and chasms in a way at once awfully brilliant and terrific.
This is the rosy time of Labrador. The blue interior hills, and the stony vales that wind up among them from the sea, have a summer-like and pleasant air. I find myself peopling these regions, and dotting their hills, valleys, and wild shores with human habitations. A second thought, and a mournful one it is, tells me that no men toil in the fields away there; no women keep the house off there ”

“ We have learned at last the vital fact that Nature has set apart her own picture galleries where men may resort if for a time they would forget human contrivances. Such a wilderness is Labrador, a kind of mental and moral sanitarium. The beautiful is but the visible splendor of the true. The enjoyment of a visit to the coast may consist not alone in the impressions of the scenery ”

“ Labrador is a miracle of youth and age combined. It is still growing out of the depths with the irresistible vigour of youth. But its titanic tablelands consist of those azoic rocks which form the very roots of all the other mountains in the world, and which are so old, so immeasurably older than any others now standing on the surface of the globe, that their Laurentians alone have the real right to bear the title of "The Everlasting Hills". ”

“ We had every reason to hope, this morning, that we should be through these perilous narrows and upon the broad gulf by midnight.
The breeze touches us at the last moment, and we are gliding through the narrow pass between high craggy banks, over a comparatively shallow bottom, visible from the deck, into what appears to be a lake surrounded by mountains not unlike those about West Point, barring their fine woods. Really Labrador can show us, at last, a little forest greenery. Without a point of grandeur, this is the most picturesque scenery we have found on the coast. ”

“ WE LOSE THE TRAIL
Saturday morning, August fifth, broke with a radiance and a glory seldom equaled even in that land of glorious sunrises and sunsets. A flame of red and orange in the east ushered in the rising sun, not a cloud marred the azure of the heavens, the moss was white with frost, and the crisp, clear atmosphere sweet with the scent of the new day. Labrador was in her most amiable mood, displaying to the best advantage her peculiar charms and beauties. ”

“ Fresh from the more momentous problems of great cities, the interests and misunderstandings of small isolated places bias the mind and make one censorious and resentful. But from the position of a tight corner, that of needing help and hospitality from entire strangers, one learns how large are the hearts and homes of those who live next to Nature. If I knew the Labrador people before (and among such I include the Hudson Bay traders and the Newfoundland fishermen) , that summer made me love them. ”

“ Such a spectacle, I suppose, one might chance to see anywhere, though the chance certainly never occurred to me before. It could scarcely have escaped me through want of attention, for I could well believe myself a child of the sun, so deep an appeal to my feeling is made by effects of light and color: light before all.
But the atmosphere of Labrador has its own secret of beauty, and charms the eye with aspects which one may be pardoned for believing incomparable in their way. ”

“ Meanwhile, let us away to Torquay. Here a steep and rugged path, leading up the face of the cliff, brings us to Labrador. Every visitor to Teignmouth goes also to Labrador, a name not usually coupled with sunshine and sparkling sea, al fresco teas, and roses at a penny a piece. He was a romantic mercantile Jack, who, retiring from the Newfoundland and North American seas, laid out his precarious little estate and built this little house on it, and named his domain after an inhospitable coast. ”

“ The desolation of Labrador at this time is easy to understand. No Newfoundlanders were left north of us; not a vessel in sight anywhere. The ground was all under snow, and everything caught over with ice except the sea. I think that I must describe one house, for it seems a marvel that any man could live in it all winter, much less women and children. It was ten feet by twenty, one storey high, made of mud and boards, with half a partition to divide bedroom from the sitting-room kitchen. ”

“ Moved by one of those inexplicable caprices which keep most of the wild kindreds from too perilous an enslavement to routine, this pair had been attracted by the vast, empty levels of marsh and mere, and had dropped out from the ranks of their northward-journeying comrades. Why should they beat on through the raw, blustering spring winds to Labrador, when here below them was such a nesting-place as they desired, with solitude and security and plenty. ”

“ Lower Labrador is visited by near forty thousand fishermen annually, and vessels there are often more frequent than in Boston Bay. But at a point not far from the fifty-fifth parallel of latitude you leave all these behind, and leave equally the white residents of the coast: to fishermen and residents alike the region beyond is as little known as the interior of Australia. There their world comes to an end; there the unknown begins. Knowledge and curiosity alike pause there; toward all beyond their only feeling is one of vague dislike and dread. ”

“ There is no stranger country anywhere than this Canadian Labrador. Dr Grenfell's Labrador, which has nothing to do with Canada, is known to everyone. But the very existence of our own Labrador, with its 200 miles of coastline and its more than 20,000 islands, is quite unknown, as a separate entity, to all but a very few outside of its little, but increasing, population of 1200 souls. ”

“ In all the earth there is no coast so barren, so desolate, so brutally inhospitable as the Labrador coast from Cape Charles, at the Strait of Belle Isle on the south, to Cape Chidley on the north. Along these eight hundred miles it is a constant succession of bare rocks scoured clean and smooth by the ice and storms of centuries, with not a green thing to be seen, save now and then a bunch of stunted shrubs that have found a foothold in some sheltered nook in the rocks, and perchance, on some distant hill, a glimpse of struggling spruce or fir trees. ”

“ This point is that certain parts of Labrador are bound to become ideal public playgrounds, if their wild life is only saved in time. The common conception of Labrador as being inaccessibly remote is entirely wrong. It is accessible all round a coast line of 3000 miles at the proper season and with proper care; and its vast peninsula lies straight between the British Islands and our own North West. So there is nothing absurd in expecting people to come to Labrador to-morrow when they are going to Spitzbergen, far north of the Arctic Circle to-day. ”

“ If people only knew that Labrador contained a hundred Saguenays, wild zoos, Thousand Islands, fiords, palisades, sea mountains, cañons, great lakes and waterfalls, if they only knew that they could get the enjoyment of it for a song, and make it an heirloom for no more trouble than letting it live, they might do all that is needed to-morrow. ”

“ A hasty chorus of shouts to the helmsman resulted in an immediate altering of the course to parallel the land, instead of heading straight at it as we were when we first sighted it. It was in this dramatic manner that we made our acquaintance with The Labrador, and it was in a setting typical of this rugged country. One usually becomes acquainted with The Labrador by nearly running on it every time one approaches it during the early summer months, for at that time the land is almost perpetually shrouded in fog. ”

“ Life cannot be expected to last long in Labrador under those conditions. There were four children, one being a big boy who could help out. The rest were offered as a contribution to the Mission. A splendid Newfoundland fisherman and his wife had a summer fishing station here, and with that generous open-heartedness which is characteristic of our seafarers, they were only too anxious to help. "Of course, she would make clothing while I was North"—out of such odd garments as a general collection produced. ”

“ Immediately opposite us lies Labrador, with an average temperature the same as that of Greenland; a coast almost destitute of vegetation, a country of snow and ice, whose principal wealth consists in its furs, and a scattered population, mainly composed of Indians and Esquimaux. But the Atlantic would not alone produce so great an effect. We owe our mild and genial climate mainly to the Gulf Stream—a river in the ocean, twenty million times as great as the Rhone—the greatest, and for us the most important, river in the world, which brings to our shores the sunshine of the West Indies. ”

“ Such observations as are here assembled are the raw material for the Doctor’s inimitable tales of life on the Labrador.
The great fact of life here is the sea, and much of existence is in giving battle to it. The little boys practice jumping across rain-barrels and mud-puddles, because some day they hope to get a “ticket” (a berth on a sealer) and go to the ice, and when it is “a good big copy from pan to pan”—that is to say, a considerable distance from one floating ice-cake to the next—their ability to jump like their own island sheep may save their lives. ”

“ What interesting scenes of human life as well as fine views of Labrador scenery are visible from its windows south and west! Grand rocks from five hundred to eight hundred feet in height rise nearly perpendicularly from the opposite shore of the bay. Here comes a man paddling his kayak past the "Harmony" as she lies at anchor. What is up among the dogs? They are all howling and running along the beach, and now they have set on one unfortunate, which is hustled and bitten until he escapes and hobbles away yelping. ”

“ Pitiable indeed would be the condition of the poor folk on The Labrador were it not for Dr. Grenfell and his brave co-workers of the Deep Sea Mission. For hundreds of miles along the coast they travel on their errands of mercy, braving the violent storms of the bitter Arctic winter, sleeping in the meanest of huts, and frequently risking their lives in open boats on the raging sea. Many is the needy one for whom they have found work, many is the stricken soul that they have comforted, and many is the life that their medical skill has saved. ”

“ Labrador will never be a "vineland," a land of corn and wine, or a country where fenced cities will be needed to keep out the milk and honey. But though there may be other sections of the Empire that can produce more dollars, Labrador will, like Norway and Sweden, produce Vikings, and it is said that the man behind the gun is still of some moment. ”

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

“ Next year the vessel Hope re-visited the coast of Labrador, under the command of Captain Goff. He heard that some dead bodies had been found and buried, and that the missionary station had been burned, but no further particulars were ever learned. In this manner ended the first commercial [46] adventure and first mission to Labrador—enforcing, in a salutary and impressive manner, the fundamental maxim of the brethren, that worldly speculation ought never to be joined with Christian enterprize. ”