LABRADOR.
_In the Newfoundland...._
In the Newfoundland outports, especially those of the northern
bays--Conception, Trinity, Bonavista and Notre Dame conversation with
any old-timer is sure to turn sooner or later to experiences on “The
Labrador”.
Soon these stories accumulate into a magnetizing force, drawing you to
explore that wonderful Northern shore of which these old-timers relate
such wonderful tales.
Our first trip to the Labrador was decided by an old fellow with a
scythe, mowing a pocket-handkerchief of hay at Exploits. He wore at the
time a pair of sabots. Upon our remarking on them as unusual footwear in
these parts, he looked down with a smile--that pleasant smile that
always flits across aged faces at the recollection of an adventure--and
said, “Oh, aye, them’s my Denmarks. I bought them from a man on a
square-rigger, on ‘The Labrador’.”
Two days after that we were haunting the telegraph office at Twillingate
for news of “The Invermore” or “The Kyle” out of Saint John’s to the
Labrador. The Invermore blew out her tubes somewhere down the coast, and
had to put back to Saint John’s, and we had to wait several days for her
substitute, who finally arrived at Twillingate in the middle of the
night, so that we went up the ladder over her side with the bags of mail
at two o’clock in the morning, carrying with us a feeling that perhaps
we ought not to be going, as two old fellows encountered on the pier the
night before, had said, in the face of a rather threatening sky, that it
was “too late to go down on the Labrador.”
However, we made that voyage safely and have since made another, proving
that wiseacres are not always true prophets or their sayings to be
heeded.
From Newfoundland to Labrador is but a step across the Straits of Belle
Isle. In winter these waters are the hunting grounds of some of the
sealers out of Saint John’s. In summer they are the hunting ground of
some of the “growlers” out of Labrador.
Navigators here in the first instance are happy at the cry of “seals!”
from the crow’s nest, but the skipper of the mailboat on this route runs
away as fast as may be from the beautiful but treacherous iceberg so
like in figure to giant Portuguese Men-o’-War “fishing with paralyzing
underseas tentacles seeking whom they may devour.” Then comes out on
deck the figure least expected, the Moving Picture man, reeling off,
like one possessed, the bergs that navigation fears. And so we land at
Battle Harbour, first of the thirty or more ports of call made by these
fine mail-and-passenger boats out of Saint John’s.
The charm of the Labrador is hard to define. That it is there all will
agree. Some say that it lies in the fact that the slightest
miscalculation on the part of those adventuring in these parts may lead
to an accident--accident that on so exposed a coast is instantly
metamorphosed into irremediable disaster, as in the case of H.M.S.
Raleigh. In other words, danger is its charm, the danger that lies so
near, around the corner of every bay and tickle; danger of hidden rocks,
of sudden gale, of fog, of bergs, washed by some fanciful twist of ocean
current out of the beaten track. Romance follows danger as a twin
sister. So, on the Labrador, many “figures” strut across the little
stage.
There is the little Eskimo that paddles off to the steamer in his kyak,
to dance on deck, while the ship rides at anchor off some port. That he
ever reaches the ship or the shore again in the little scallop-shell he
calls “boat” is a miracle. But he dances away or sings “gospel hymns”
learned from missionaries, as free from worry as any child. The words
are in Eskimo, but the old tune, sung out here on deck by the flare of
the ship’s lantern, carries with it a gripping power, the while the
faces of strong men--fishermen coming or going, traders, missionaries,
even Syrian fur-dealers--are intermittently lighted by the flare of the
lantern.
Two old acquaintances, the “fishnet drying from the masthead” and the
“pot-a-tilt” among stones of the ice-age, greet one on stepping ashore
at a Labrador tickle. Spruce beer is also here to be had, if one has the
good fortune to fall in with Liveyer’s family up from Newfoundland for
the summer-fishing and living in a hut with sodded roof, wherein the
blooms of fireplant and live-for-ever make a splash of color against the
gray background of sea and rocks.
These little liveyer homes bear a striking resemblance to the pioneer
homes of foreigners on the Prairie, with sodded roofs abloom.
Two new characters peculiar to the zone emerge along this northern edge
of the ‘Longshore road--Eskimos, men, women and children, and Eskimo
dogs; both of which Newfoundlanders invariably speak of as “Huskies”.
[Illustration:
HEARTY AT EIGHTY.]
[Illustration:
AN ESKIMO GRANDMOTHER.]
The Eskimo as hunter is the angle from which hunters, trappers, and fur
merchants, view these children of the Northland. The missionary sees in
them children to be taught; the ordinary voyager merely a new and
interesting facet of life--men and women, masters of the secret of
living under conditions under which the probabilities are the voyager
himself would come a cropper. They fire the imagination for the same
reasons as do the children of the Desert--an interesting peculiar people
wholly masters of interesting peculiar circumstances.
Some of the features of Eskimo coastal life are portrayed in the pelts
brought in to swell the large collections at the several Hudson’s Bay
Company’s posts, and in the evidences of “native art” as shown in ivory
and wood carvings brought down to sell to the ship.
These latter articles are of interest from two points of view. They were
taken from life and so, have pictorial and story value--little ivory
komatiks or sledges drawn by dogs in harness and little wooden dolls
with typical Eskimo features of old man or woman dressed in sealskin,
cut in the same model always in vogue with these people; the men with
trousers and short middy, the women in trousers and middy, short in
front but often with a sort of longer rounded effect at the back. These
vendors to the ship display in addition seal-skin port-monies for women
and tobacco-pouches for men, but these are less interesting because the
idea is imitative, caught from things of similar intent in the hand of
voyagers from the south and civilization.
Eskimo dogs are not seen to advantage in summer. Only a few appear at
each outport, more at some than at others. But under the boardwalk,
climbing to the post office, a half dozen roly-poly puppies will snarl
and snap under your feet like little wolves. And these “miniatures” of
the pack--away at this season on some island out of harm’s way and busy
foraging for a scant support to life among fishheads cast up by the
incoming fishboat--are merely little point-fingers of the road of the
great untamed that stretches from here to Hudson’s Bay.
Except in the neighbourhood of the Hudson’s Bay Posts and the Moravian
Missionary settlements, evidences of the native are comparatively few.
The many outports of this rugged coast are posts held firmly in the
strong capable hand of Newfoundland. It is said that thirty thousand
Newfoundlanders yearly fish “The Labrador”. And romance lies in the
wake of this yearly pilgrimage to the Northern Shrine of Cod.
As the landing mailboat rounds the barren headlands, vistas of schooners
and fishboats stretch before, lying at anchor in the harbour or
“tickle”. And if it be Sunday, as it is sure to be if the schooners are
in port, a group of men and women are at the water’s edge to pick up
news that the boat brings, or eagerly await at the Post Office the
letter from home.
The coming of the steamer from Saint John’s and the ports of the
Northern Bays of Newfoundland, once every ten days or so, is an event in
these little settlements of summer-homes, clinging like so many crabs to
the rugged shores of this outpost of Newfoundland, lying across Canada’s
great Northeast and shutting it off from an Atlantic harbour north of
Cape Breton.
Missionary work among the Eskimos has been maintained here for several
centuries by the Moravians. Trading posts have been maintained for as
long by the world-famous Hudson’s Bay Company. Sometimes the mission
station and the H.B.C. Post occur at the same outport, as if in this
northern land the desire for company had drawn them irresistibly
together. But of course the mission must have decided that a
fur-purchasing centre would concentrate the natives and they could be
more easily reached, since the one sled-journey would answer all needs.
At Hopedale Mission there is a pathetic little “greenhouse” with a few
flowers; and out in a corner of a garden, which is almost comical as
gardens go, are seen a few struggling lettuce-plants though last year’s
snow lies thick on the rising ground scarcely twenty yards away. If the
tide of Canadian trade ever sets “full” out of Hudson Bay, who knows but
a century from now many gardens will flourish here, descendants of this
little pioneer straggler, hardily holding its own, to give the
missionary-table vegetables.
To the Moravian Missionaries of early days belongs the credit of
reducing the Eskimo tongue to a language. The large, well-bound grammar
which the Missionary shows you becomes indeed a character in itself, as
it is shown that this is not merely a key to a language but the humble
means upon mastery of which hangs the missionary’s ability to interpret
the “Old, Old Story” to these Nimrods of the North at home in Igloo,
Komatik and Kyak.
Herein is the key to the hymn-singing, dancing figure that strikes such
a colourful note on deck when the ship first makes this land of the
Labrador.
At Hopedale, beside the Mission and the H. B. C. Store, with its simple
stock of groceries and its pelt-rooms, sometimes packed and sometimes
almost empty, according to the season, there are a few Eskimo wooden
houses and a big community kitchen with a score of these short, round
men and women gathered in the steam about the pot a-stew.
Here and there an old grandmother attends to coarse socks a-drying and
knocks the kinks out of skin boots and komatik harness on a sloping roof
concentrating the weak sun from the South, the while she minds the
children and keeps a wary eye on the few old dogs that pace wolfishly
and unceasingly up and down.
Labrador, like Newfoundland, has an interesting list of place-names. A
harbour with two openings, usually made by an island lying close to the
mainland or to another island, is called a “tickle”. Not the least
romantic feature of voyaging along the Labrador coast are these odd and
appropriate place-names. Think of sailing by “The White Cockade
Islands”, “Run-by-Guess”, or “Tumble-down-Dick”! Or of seeing the surf
bursting over “Mad Moll’s Reef”! Or of steering past “Lord’s Arm”,
“Lady’s Arm”, and “Caribou Castle!”