CHAPTER I.
THE LABRADOR.
Legend has it that in the year 986 Bjarni Herjulfson sailed back from his voyagings to Iceland, desiring to spend Yuletide at his home. But on arrival he found that his father was absent, having taken ship for Greenland in the company of Eric the Red. Bjarni decided to follow the adventurers. He fell in with fog and ill-weather, drifted through it for many days almost in the dark, and at length ran out into clear air to see the sun shining upon an unknown and wooded land. Bjarni turned northwards and skirted the coasts; presently the low shores with their forests gave place to mountains and glaciers; then a fair wind arose and the Norse sea-king swept back across the Atlantic in safety. Such is the tradition of the discovery of Labrador. More than nine hundred years have passed since the visit of the Viking ship, and to-day the country lying just behind the coast-line remains to a large extent as unknown and unexplored as it was then.
If you take a map and draw a line due west from Glasgow, the line, after passing across two thousand miles of the Atlantic Ocean, will strike the coast of the Labrador peninsula. Carry on that line some fifty or even thirty miles inland and it will enter upon absolutely virgin country. There are few large areas less known to geographers than this, and it is a curious fact that such a tract should exist under the British flag, within a comparatively short distance from our shores, and moreover situated actually next door to our oldest colony of Newfoundland. The great Atlantic liners would cover the distance that separates us from Labrador in a little over three days, but as a matter of fact only two vessels set sail regularly from England for that chilly region,—the _Pelican_ of the Hudson’s Bay Company, and the _Harmony_ belonging to the Mission of the Moravian Brethren; it was by the latter that my companions and I travelled.
The differences of climate between the West of Scotland and the land which directly faces it across the sea are enormous, for while we possess the genial warmth brought from the tropics by the Gulf Stream, the Labrador is frozen for the greater part of the year owing to the influence of the mighty current that sweeps down its coasts from the Pole. It is only possible to approach the shores of the peninsula during five months of the year. She enjoys open water from July to late November, and her summer lasts no more than two brief months. Frost continues till the end of June and begins again on the inland heights during the closing days of August; thus the deer shot in November keep as in a refrigerator till the following June.
The intrinsic interests of the Labrador settle, in the first place, round its people, who almost without exception are for ever locked, with the shortest of breathing-spaces, in a death-struggle with Nature.
The main endeavour of life is the effort to secure a bare subsistence by the capture or slaughter of things on the earth “or in the waters under the earth.” Thus the folk of the Labrador are entirely predatory people.
[Illustration: Spring.]
[Illustration: Summer.]
The settlements on the coast are few and far between and the country has always shown herself a bitter stepmother to those who entrust themselves to her keeping. These are, as I have said above, with scarcely an exception, hunters and fishers, against whom land and sea combine. The rigours of cold and hardship bear upon them without mercy. As the Emperor Caligula spoke of the sea as a tyrant, so once I heard a settler speak of the Labrador as of a woman. “Terrible hard and cruel she is.” And the words brought before the mind’s eye the seemingly endless leagues of that vast unmapped interior—a vista of snow, cloud, wind and cold during winter; of scorching Northern sunshine in summer, that hatches out into their malignant life myriads of flies for the torture of all things living; of rushing rock-rent rivers and of barrens rolling ever upward to the Height of Land.
Were it not that Labrador, the stepmother, is cruel to her own children, the Indians of the barren-grounds and the Eskimo of the coast, one might be tempted to believe that the white men who set foot on her shores are still pursued by her vengeance, still paying the inexorable penalty for the great crime of which the first navigators of white race were guilty. At that date the traffic in humanity had reached terrible dimensions, and one of the earliest adventurers to Labrador, the Portuguese Corte Real, decoyed aboard his vessel some three-score natives, whether Indians or of some other race is a moot-point, and sent them to Lisbon. Their arrival caused much satisfaction, for the King and his Court at once leaped to the conclusion that Corte Real had discovered a land of great resources in the north—a second Africa whence they might draw brown slaves instead of black. But to the Court of Portugal, Labrador supplied no more slaves, for on a subsequent voyage Corte Real was lost, or rather he and his ship were never heard of again; nor did his brother, who went in quest of him, ever come back from that mist-hidden shore.
The present population of Labrador falls naturally into four divisions. The first is the permanent white community, which includes the Moravian Brethren and their families, the Hudson’s Bay Company’s factors, and the _liveyeres_ (live heres) as the white settlers are called. These all dwell by the salt water.
The second division is made up of the men belonging to the fishing-fleets, who are summer visitors only, coming up through the ice from Newfoundland and the south in the early days of July and leaving in October. The lives of these men are hard and stern, and in them again we find the predatory record. From the day on which they put out from Newfoundland in their schooners to that on which they return, they toil savagely, catching and curing fish, living meanwhile in wooden shanties on the barren wind-swept islands or on the shores of lonely inlets. Captain Bartlett sprang from this hardy stock, and he proved the fine qualities of his training by his pioneer work with Peary.
Nor must it fail to be understood that every voyage taken to the Labrador is in a sense a stake in the huge sea-game or gamble for existence, for 95 per cent. of the schooner crews are hired for the season on the share system by the captains of the fishing stations. The same system holds good in the seal-fishery, where from master to boy, each individual aboard draws, instead of pay, a certain defined and allotted share in the profits (if any) of the venture. Some hint of the chances of this life may be gathered from a newspaper extract, dated May 3rd, 1910. Under the head “Newfoundland Fishery” comes the following:—
“The seal fishery ended last Saturday and the remainder of the fleet are returning to-day. The _Adventure_, which arrived this morning, narrowly escaped being lost with all hands in Belle-isle Straits on Friday last. The steamer _Aurora_, which was the subject of a sensational report in the Press last week, namely, that she had struck an iceberg and had sunk with the whole of the crew, has passed Cape Bonavista to-day, looking deeply laden, having probably secured a large catch of seals in Northern Labrador.”
[Illustration: Autumn.]
[Illustration: Winter.]
If the _Aurora_ was so lucky as above reported, her captain stood to make a comfortable sum, and each of her crew their share in proportion. But the other side of the picture is dark enough. When there comes a failure in the year’s fisheries of seal or cod, it means that months of labour and hardship have been spent for which no return can be found, and the _personnel_ of such unlucky vessels must depend for their winter’s provision upon an advance from some merchant, who looks to recoup himself from the result of the next or a future season’s success. At one period it would hardly be an exaggeration to say that many of the fishermen were born, lived and died in almost hopeless debt; but the present generation has seen a great improvement in this respect.
As first come is ever first served along the Labrador coast, the schooners, in their haste to arrive early on the fishing grounds, run many risks in passing through the ice, which clings to these inhospitable shores until late into the summer, yet accidents are remarkably few. For one reason the sealers and cod-fishers are wonderful sailors, their local knowledge has been won in small boats, so that they know the position, depth and contour of almost every reef; for another reason the coast is fortunately well provided with harbours. They are fine men, these “slaves of the sea.” Yet they are but summer migrants, they never penetrate the interior or pass beyond sight of sea-water, and, after all, the chief interest of this forbidding land lies with those who remain when the days are dark and snow and ice cover land and sea alike.
With the third division we reach the real children of the coast, the Eskimo tribes. All along the eastern littoral, from Makkovik northwards, they exist, cared for and preserved by the Moravian Brethren, whose wise policy it is to encourage them to live as nearly as possible on the lines that Nature intended. The Moravians have done a great and heroic work, to which I have tried to bear witness in the latter part of this book.
The Eskimo are altogether predatory, a race of hunters and fishers. Fish in the summer, fur in the winter, and seal, walrus and white whale are their quarry from one year’s end to another. In the early springtime also, while ice still holds the land iron-bound, they make long journeys by _komatik_, or dog-sledge, after the herds of Barren-ground caribou, the branch of the vast reindeer family which inhabits the barren uplands of North and Central Labrador.
[Illustration: A Nascaupee Indian of the Barren Grounds.]
Now we are left with the fourth, the Indians of the interior. Their numbers were, some time ago, computed to be four thousand in all, but the large majority of these hunt and trap in the southern part of the peninsula, massing at various points, and coming out with their furs to the waters of the St. Lawrence. More to the north, in the central country are the lodges of two tribes, the Montagnais and the Nascaupees. Here we find the dominant instinct of Labrador, the predatory instinct, at its fullest development. These tribes owe their food, clothing and their habitations to the creatures of the chase, and they live a life of hardship and freedom such as was more common in the world of a hundred years ago.
Horses and cattle there are none on the peninsula, except at Hamilton Inlet, but all along the coast, at every Eskimo encampment and about the cabins of the _liveyeres_, are numbers of husky dogs. In winter these animals pull the sledges and form the sole means of communication between the settlements. During the summer they are in many cases not fed by their owners, but are left to seek sustenance as they can. Hence the hungry brutes range the land near the coast and add to the problems of Labrador, as they permit no creature to live that they can pull down.
Unfortunately the brief delicious summer of Labrador is rendered terrible—I use the word advisedly—by flies of many kinds; the mosquito, the black-fly, the bot-fly and others rise in countless swarms over the wilderness and harass the traveller by day and by night.
The term “barrens” must now be explained. It is the name given to the vast terraces which roll from salt water to salt water across the plateau of the interior. In some parts of the country their monotony is broken by groups of wind-torn trees which grow upon the shores of unnumbered lakes and beside the waters of shallow rivers. No portion of the King’s dominions is wilder, more inhospitable, more rugged than this land, where the wind for ever cries and the air is filled with the sound of upland waters lapping on stony shores.
It may be asked why any human being should wish to visit such a wilderness as the interior. The answer is that there a man can enjoy the true life of the open, because the land has a charm all its own; perhaps because there is a faint feeling that in some such surroundings our fore-fathers lived out their lives; there are, in fact, many reasons cogent enough, for the Labrador has many very definite attractions. Her climate is vitalising to an extraordinary degree, and the atmosphere brilliant and clear in the summer, during which there is not usually much rain and the dense fogs which trouble the coast further south do not in most seasons extend to the north.
As to the scenery of the coast, nothing can well be imagined of its grandeur and impressiveness. As the ship moves along, sometimes between the deep fringe of islands and the mainland, sometimes opening out upon the vast distances of the Atlantic, the outlook changes with every moment. Round each headland and rock some fresh grouping of mighty cliff, deep water and iceberg greets the eye. As the degrees of latitude mount, the precipices, ever rising, tower higher and higher until they reach an altitude of four thousand feet sheer from the sea, dwarfing Norwegian glories.