COAST SCENERY.—FAREWELL TO LABRADOR.
THE coast of Labrador was really fine, all the forenoon, and sometimes
strikingly grand. It has lost something of the desolate and savage
character it has about the Capes St. Louis and St. Charles, and seems
more like a habitable land. There are long and graceful slopes and
outlines of pale green hills slanting down to the sea, along which is
the craggy shore-line, black, brown and red. The last few miles, and
which is near the Canadian border, the red sandstone shore is
exceedingly picturesque. It has a right royal presence along the deep.
Lofty, semicircular promontories descend in regular terraces nearly
down, then sweep out gracefully with an ample lap to the margin. No art
could produce better effect. The long, terraced galleries are touched
with a tender green, and the well-hollowed vales, now and then
occurring, and ascending to the distant horizon between ranks of rounded
hills, look green and pasture-like. All, you must bear in mind, is
treeless nearly, and utterly lonely. Here and there are small
detachments of dwarf firs, looking as if they were either on their
retreat to the woodlands of a warmer clime, or on their march from it,
in order to get a foothold, and make a forest settlement remote from the
woodman’s axe. Anyway, in their lonesome and inhospitable halt, they
darken the light greens and the gray greens with very lively effect.
The Battery, as sailors call it, is a wall of red sandstone, of some two
or three miles in extent, with horizontal lines extending from one
extreme to the other, and perpendicular fissures resembling embrasures
and gateways. Swelling out with grand proportions toward the sea, it has
a most military and picturesque appearance. At one point of this huge
citadel of solitude, there is the resemblance of a giant portal, with
stupendous piers two hundred feet or more in elevation. They are much
broken by the yearly assaults of the frost, and the eye darts up the
ruddy ruins with surprise. If there was anything to defend, here is a
Gibraltar at hand, with comparatively small labor, whose guns could
nearly cross the strait. Beneath its precipitous cliffs the debris
slopes like a glacis to the beach, with both smooth and broken surfaces,
and all very handsomely decorated with rank herbage. Above the great
walls, there is a range of terraces ascending with marked regularity for
quite a distance. Miles of ascending country, prairie-like, greet the
eye along this edge of Labrador. “Arms of gold”—is it? Possibly these
promontories, golden in the rising and the setting sun, may have
suggested to Cabot or some other explorer, before or since, the
propriety of christening this dead body of a country by some redeeming
name.
Among the very pretty and refreshing features of the coast are its
brooks, seen occasionally falling over the rocks in white cascades.
Harbors are passed now and then with small fishing fleets and dwellings.
Forteau has a church-spire pointing heavenward among its white buildings
and brown masts, and is the most eastern place in the diocese of
Newfoundland visited by Bishop Field. It is not unlikely that he is now
there engaged in the sacred duties of his office, and certainly would
have attracted us thither, could we have spared a day. On the point from
which we took our final departure from the north shore, stands a high
lighthouse, erected at great cost, and around its base are clustering
the greens of a kitchen garden! Adieu, bleak Labrador! They tell me that
the warmest of summers is now upon thy honeyless and milkless land. If
this is thy July—I say it under an overcoat of the deepest nap—spare
me thy December.
But why, at parting, should I speak roughly unto thee, and whet the
temper to talk ill of thee, in the presence of rich gardens, yellow
fields, and ruddy orchards? Hast not thou thy horned cariboo, thy
reindeer, thy fox of costly fur, and thy wild-fowl of wintry plumage?
Hast not thou thy bright-eyed salmon, graced with lines as delicate and
lovely as those of beauty’s arm, and complexioned like the marigold
“damasked by the neighboring rose”?—thy whales and seals to fill with
oil the lighthouse lamp, to fill with starry flame the lighthouse
lantern?—thy pale green capelin, silvery-sided myriads that allure the
“fish,” calling their millions to the hooks and seines of thy toiling
fishermen—hardy, hospitable people, whose kentles of white-fleshed cod
buy the ruby wine and yellow fruits of Cuba and Oporto? Hast thou not
dealt kindly with us, and shown us these thy fat things, and all thy
richer, nobler treasures? Hast thou not uncurtained thy resplendent
pictures of the sky, the ocean, and the land? And have we not gazed
delighted and awe-struck upon the grandeur of a great and terrible
wilderness, upon the gloom of its shadowy atmosphere, upon the
brilliancy of its sunlight? Have we not heard the footsteps of the
billows marching to their encampment in the grottoes of the cliffs; and
seen the silent, inshore deeps; the imprisoned islands and grim
headlands armed with impenetrable granite; the vales and dells, and
hill-sides with their mosses and their flowers, sweet odors, and sweet
melodies?—most beautiful, most wonderful of all, thine icebergs, and
thy twilight heavens? All these, and more, of thy greatness and thy
glory, have we looked upon, and they will have their reflections, and
their echoes in the memory forever. Beauty may watch, and supplicate,
and weep sometimes upon the crags now receding from our view, but she is
surely there, and native to the wildest pinnacle and cavern. And while
to the careless eye and thoughtless heart thou art verily dark and
bleak, yet art thou neither barren nor unfruitful. Old Labrador,
farewell!