^, •>f^% IMAGE EVALUATION TEST TARGET (MT-S) 1.0 i^y^ 12.5 I.I f,"" 1^ W 116 11.25 Photographic Sciences Corporation 23 WEST MAIN STREET WEBSTER, N.Y. MS80 (716) 872-4503 -"^^ - CIHM/ICMH Microfiche Series. CIHM/ICMH Collection de microfiches. Canadian Institute for Historical Microreproductions / Institut Canadian de microreproductions historiques Technical and Bibliographic Notes/Notes techniques et bibliographiques The Institute has attempted to obtain the best original copy available for filming. Features of this copy which riay be bibliographically unique, which may alter any of the images in the reproduction, or which may significantly change the usual method of filming, are checked below. D Coloured covers/ Couverture de couleur I I Covers damaged/ Couverture endommagde Covers restored and/or laminated/ Couverture restaur^e et/ou pelliculde Cover title missing/ Le titre de couverture manque Coloured maps/ Cartes g^ographiques en couleur Coloured ink (i.e. other than blue or black)/ Encre de couleur (i.e. autre que bleue ou noire) Coloured plates and/or illustrations/ Planches et/ou illustrations en couleur Bound with other material/ Relid avec d'autres documents □ Tight binding may cause shadows or distortion along interior margin/ La re liure serrde peut causer de I'ombre ou de la distortion le long de la marge intdrieure □ Blank leaves added during restoration may appear within the text. Whenever possible, these have been omitted from filming/ II se peut que certaines pages blanches ajout^es lors d'une restauration apparaissent dans le texte, mais, lorsque cela 6tait possible, ces pages n'ont pas 6t6 filmdes. r I Additional comments:/ I — J Commentaires suppldmentaires; L'Institut a microfilm^ le meilleur exempiaire qu'il lui a 6t6 possible de se procurer. Les details de cet exempiaire qui sont peut-dtre uniques du point de vue bibliographique, qui peuvent modifier une image reproduite, ou qui peuvent exiger une " lodification dans la mdthode normale de filmage sont indiqu^s ci-dessous. I I Coloured pages/ Pages de couleur Pages damaged/ Pages endommagdes Pages restored and/oi Pages restauries et/ou pelliculdes I I Pages damaged/ I I Pages restored and/or laminated/ / I Pages discoloured, stained or foxed/ Pages d^coior^es. tachet^es ou piqudes I I Pages detached/ D Pages ddtachdes Showthrough> Transparence Quality of prir Quality in^gale de I'impression Includes supplementary materii Comprond du materiel suppl^mentaire Only edition available/ Seule Edition disponible r~7| Showthrough/ I I Quality of print varies/ I I Includes supplementary material/ I I Only edition available/ Pages wholly or partially obscured by errata slips, tissues, etc., have been refilmed to ensure the best possible image/ Les pages totalement ou partiellement obscurcies par un feuillat d'errata, une pelure, etc.. ont 6ti film^es d nouveau de fagon d obtenir la meilleure image possible. This Item is filmed at the reduction ratio checked below/ Ce document est fllm6 au taux de reduction indiqud ci-dessous. 10X 14X 18X 22X 26X 30X 12X 16X . 20X 24X 28X 32X The copy filmed here has been reproduced thanks to the generosity of: Library Agriculture Canada The images appearing here are the ^>«st quality possible considering the condition aiid legibility of the original copy and in keeping with the filming contract specif icationr Original copies in printed paper covers are filmed beginning with the front cover end ending on the last page with a printed or illustrated impres- sion, or the back cover when appropriate. All other original copies are filmed beginning on the first page with a prinieJ or illustrated impres- sion, and ending on the last page with a printed or illustrated impression. The last recorded frame on each microfiche shall contain the symbol — ^ (meaning "CON- TINUED"), or the symbol V (meaning "END"), whichever applies. Maps, plates, charts, etc., may be filmed at different reduction ratios. Those too large to be entirely included in one exposure are filmed beginning in the upper left hand corner, left to right and top to bottom, as many frames as required. The following diagrams illustrate the method : L'exemplaire film6 fut reproduit grAce d la g6n6rosit6 de: Bibliothique Agriculture Canada Les images sulvantes ont 6t6 reproduites avec le plus grand soln, compte tenu de la condition et de la nettetd de I'exempiaire film6, et en conformity avec les conditions du contrat de filmage. Les exemplaires origlnaux dont la couverture en papier est imprimie sont film^s en commenpant par le premier plat et en terminant soit par la dernidre page qui comporte une empreinte d'impression ou d'illustration, soit par le second plat, selon le cas. Tous les autres exemplaires origlnaux sont filmds en commenpant par la premidre page qui comporte une empreinte d'impression ou d'illustration et en terminant par la dernidre page qui comporte une telle empreinte. Un des symboles suivants apparaitra sur la dernidre image de cheque microfiche, selon le cas: le symbols — ► signlfie "A SUIVRE", le symbols V signlfie "FIN". Les cartes, planches, tableaux, etc., peuvent dtre fiim^s d des taux de reduction diffdrents. Lorsque le document est trop grand pour 6tre reproduit en un seul clich6, 11 est filmd A partir de I'angle sup6rieur gauche, de gauche d droite, et de haut en bas, en prenant le nombre d'images n6cessaire. Les diagrammes suivants illustrent la m6thode. 1 2 3 1 a 3 4 • 6 I i ".. ^^; ,^0m "BP^KU. Thk I'. S. Wkii.iii hei.k in imh I( k .m- Si.u'ake Island Hakiiok. iFrom a photograph by Hrailford.) /•> oniisf-itcc. 1 The Labrador Coast. 70URN.^L OF TIVO SUMMER CRUISFS TO THAT REGION. WITH Nrrrns on its harlv discovhrv, on thr fsk'.mo. ^^N ITS PHYSICAI GHOGRAPHY, (iHOl.OGY AND NATURAL HISTORY, BY [ ^ '\ i ALPHHUS SI>RING PACKARD, M.D Ph D *Wa\v1((Ij;c of the iiucrioi of tlic J.al)rador penin- sula is still so sc.mtv, owinj^ to its inaccessibility, its un- navigable rivers, the -.hortness of the summer season, and the lack of jrame, as well a« the enormous numbers of black flies and inosnuitf ts, that any description of this country must long lenain imperfect. The only scientific explorer of the inteiior is Professor llind, who ascended the river Moisie, which, however, is a confluent oi the St. Lawrence, and is in fact situated only near the borders of Labrador, m the province of Quebec. None of the larger rivers of Labrador have been explored to near their sources; and no one except Indians and but a single employe of the Hudson Bay Company (Mr. Mc- Lean) has ever crossed any considerable portion of the interior. And yet the peninsula is well watered with streams, rivers, and chains of lakes. I have been in- formed by residents that the Indians of the interior, pre- sumably the Mountaineers, can travel in their canoes from the mouth of the Esquimaux River, which empties into the Strait of Belle Isle, across the country to the Hudson Bay posts in Hamilton Inlet. So far as we have been able to gather from maps and the accounts of explorers, such as McLean and Da vies, the latter of whom published an account of the Grand or Hamilton TUK THYSICAL ( ;K0(;KAI'I1V ok I.AIJKADOK. Riv". r, and the Moraviiiii missionaries Kohlnicistcr and Knoch, who in their "Journal of a Voyage from Ok- kak" described the Koksoak River and its probable source, as well as from our own scanty observations taken from elevations near the coast, the interior of Labrador is thickly studded with lakes, somewhat as in the Adirondack region of New York, though the in- terior country is far more broken and mountainous. It is certainly most desirable that explorers should penetrate this vast and unknown wilderness, however formidable may seem the barriers to travel. These obstacles would be the rapids and water-falls, the long and difficult portages or carries, and the unceasing plague of mosquitoes and black flies. But the annoy- ance from insects might not be greater than that en- countered by explorers in Siberia, or by trout or salmon fishermen in northern New England and Canada, while the difficulties and dangers of river navigation would not compare with those of a passage through the Colo- rado River. The route which would be most i)rolific in results would be to ascend the Meshikumau or Es- quimaux River from its mouth near Salmon Bay, in the Strait of Belle Isle, to its source, and thence to connect with the probably adjacent source of Grand or Hamil- ton River to the Hudson Bay post at Rigolet, in Hamilton or Invuktoke Inlet. Another jo'rney which would be productive of good geographical results would be to cross the peninsula from Prince Rupert's Land by way of Rupert River and Lake Mistassini to Hamilton Inlet. The Koksoak River should be explored to its sources, and the low, flat, wooded region of the East Main, lying between Hudson Bay and the Labrador MAI'S OF rHK I.AHKADOK COAST. coasl-icgion, should be adequately mapped. At present, less is known of the vast region between liudson Bay and the Atlantie Ocean than of perhaps any region of similar extent in North Ameriea ; although the results of exploration might be of more value to geographical and geological science than to trade and commerce. Thanks to the labors of the Moravian missionaries, we now have a much better knowledge of the intricacies of the extreme northern coast of Labrador than is af- forded by the charts of the British Admiralty or the United States Coast Survey ; and it is to the rare op- portunity we have been generously afforded by the officers of the Moravian Society in London and Herrn- hul, Saxony, that we are able herewith to present maps which are at least approximately correct, and which must for a longtime to come be the only source of any exact knowledge of the multitudinous bays, inlets, promontories, and islands of this exceedingly diversi- fied coast. The first special map of Northern Labrador to be l)ublished was that by the Moravian Brethren Kohl- meister and Knoch. It comprised the northern ex- tremity of Labrador, north of latitude 57°, including Ungava Bay, and appeared in 1814. Previous to this, Cartwright, in 1792, had published a map of Sandwich Bay and adjacent regions. Then succeeded the general chart of the coast published by Admiral Bayfield, in 1827, and the later charts of the British Admiralty. In the United States Coast Survey report for i860, besides an imperfect outline of the coast given in Mr. Lieber's geological map of the Labrador coast, there is rv IlIK I'HVSICAL OKOGkAl'MV OF 1,AJ5KAD0K. a special map of Ecli[)se Harbor surveyed by Ivieut.- Commanding' A. Murray, United States Navy, and drawn to a scale of ^^~^, with the soundings indicated. About the year 1873 ('^i^ ^'^^e is not given on the copy of the maj) wc have received) appeared a map of that portion of the coast embracing the sites of the principal Moravian stations and lying between N. lat. 55' and 59°. It was prepared by L. T. Reichel from the sketches made In- himself, and published in the lack of any authentic maps of the coast. For a copy of this and the map of Aivektok or Eskimo Bay we are in- debted to the officers of the Society in Herrnhut, Sax- ony. On this map are given the route of the ship-chan- nel from the southward to Hopedale, and thence to the different Moravian stations up to Hebron ; also the overland sledge-routes between Port Manvers and Ok- kak, and the latter station and Hebron. There is also an attempt to give in a general way the elevation of the coast, and the elevation of Kaumajet Mt. and Mt. Kig- lapeit is given as 4,000 feet. Scales of German and of English miles are also given. The second special map was also prepared by Rev. L. T. Reichel, and published in 1873. It gives what is probably by far the most authentic map of Hamilton In- let and Aivektok, or Eskimo Bay, and the coast north- ward, the whole area mapped being comprised between latitudes 53"^^ 20' and 56° 20' ; it is of special value in giving a capital idea of the intricate fiord structure of the coast, and also a census of the white and Eskimo residents. ^\ We have also been favored by B. Latrobe, Esq., Sec- retary of the Moravian Missions in Londqn, with the :^ •t M M rHK LAliKADOR I'l.A I K AU. loan of a MS. map, by the lau- Rev. Samuel Weiz, of the coast from Hyron Hay in latitude 54^ 40' around to the mouth of (nori»e River in rnji^ava Bay, and kindly allowed to copy it. With the aid of the new maps of Messrs. Reichel and Weiz we have heen able to have compiled the new gen- eral map of the Labrador coast herewith presented ; the southern portion of the coast being reproduced from the British Admiralty and U. S. Coast Survey charts, as well as those of the llyilrographic Office, V, S. Navy Department, as ft)llows : No. 9. — River and Gulf of St. Lawrence, Newfound- land, Nova Scotia, and the banks adjacent ; Sheet "^ I. English and French Surveys. Published March, 1868. No. 731. — Anchorages N. E. coast of Labrador, Irom Br. Surveys. Published Sept., 1876. No. 809. — Coast of Labrador, Cape St. Charles to Sandwirh Bay. Br. Surveys to 1082. There are in Lt. Gordon's Report of the Hudson Bay Expedition of 1885, charts of the Ottawa Islands in Hudson Bay, and of one of the islands at Cape Chidlev. In its •2;eneral features the peninsula of Labrador i^ an oblong mass of Laurentian rocks situated between the 50th and 62d paralleL of north latitude. On the east- ern or Atlantic coast it rises abruptly from the ocean as an elevated plateau, forming the termination of the Laurentian chain, which here spreads out into a vast waste of hills and low mountains.* * Ttie mountains in the Quebec Province which appear in the accompanying map are hypothetical, and were wronf?Iy inserted by the artist. THK I'MYSrCAI, CJEOCJkAl'HY OF I-AHKADOk. This plateau of hills and mountains, with barren table- lands, rises abruptly from the sea-level, presenting a lofty but stern and forbidding front to the ocean, throughout the whole extent of i,ioo miles of coast from the Strait of Belle Isle to Cape Wolstenholme. Motiiitains. — On the northern shores of the Strait of Belle Isle the general elevation of the coast is from 500 to 800 feet, and the highest mountains are the three Bradore Hills, which are respectively 1,135, 1.220, and 1,264 f^^'t in height. From Chateau Bay and Ca[)e Charles the coast rises in height northwards, until at Square Island the higher elevations form mountains about 1,000 feet high. Going farther on, the Mealy Mountains, said to rise to an elevation of 1,482 feet, are seen forming a range extending along the peninsula situ- ated between Sandwich Bay and Eskimo Bay, with Hamilton Inlet. Still higher is Mt. Misery, which we suppose to l>e the same elevation as Mt. Allagaigai, a noble mountain mass rising to an altitude of 2,170 feet, forming the summit of an elevated plateau region lying half-way between Cape Harrison and Hopedale. It is a con- spicuous peak seen when crossing the mouth of Ham- ilton Inlet, and we well remember the grandeur of its appearance when partly wreathed in clouds, which left its summit so exposed as to make it look much higher than in reality. The highest elevations in Labrador rise from the irregular coast range between latitude 57" and 60°; and judging from the views published by Dr. Lieber in the U. S. Coast Survey report for i860, and by Professor Bell in the Report of the Canadian Geological vSurvey. rilK MOUNTAIN KANCiES OF I,AI!RAl>OR. for 1884. tlu-' scfnery of this part of the country is wonderfully wild and grand, rivalling that of the coast of Norway, and of the coast of Greenland, the mountains being about as high as in those regions. According to Prof. Bell: "After i)assing the Strait of Belle Isle, the Labrador coast continues high and rugged, and although there are some interruptions to the general rule, the olevation of the land near the coast may be said to in- crease gradually in going northward, until within seventy statute miles of Cape Chudleigh, where it has attained a height of about 6,000 feet above the sea. Beyond this it again diminishes to this cape, wher- it is 1,500 feet. From what I have seen quoted of Labrador, and from what 1 have been able to learn through published ac- counts from the Hudson [3ay Company's officers and the natives, and also judging from the indications af- forded by the courses of the rivers and streams, the highest land of the peninsula lies near the coast all along, constituting, in fact, a regular range of mountains parallel to the Atlantic seaboard. In a general way, this range becomes progressively narrower from Hamilton Inlet to Cape Chudleigh." * The highest mountains in Labra- dor were previously said by Messrs. Kohlmeister and Knoch to rise from a chain of high mountains terminat- ing in the lofty peaks near Aulezavik Island and Cape Chidley. One of the smallest of these mountains, Mount Bache, was measured in i860 by the Eclipse Expedition of the U. S. Coast Survey, and found to be 2,150 feet above the sea-level. This mountain is a gneiss elevation, and a sketch on the geological chart by * Observations on the Geology, etc., of the Labrador Coast, etc., Rep. of •Geological Survey of Canada, 1884, p. 10 DD. 8 rnr. i-iivsicai. <;kograpiiv of i.ahradok. Mr. Lieber, the geologist of the expedition, shows it t<» be rounded by glacial action, while lofty, " wild volcanic- looking mountains form a water-shed in the interior, whose craggy peaks have evidently never been ground down by land-ice into domes and rounded tops." While the highest elevations have never been meas- ured, the height of three of the lesser mountains along this part of the coast appears to have been roughly as- certained. Professor Bell states that the mountains on: either side of Nachvak Inlet, about 140 miles south of Cape Chidley, *' rise fo heights of from 1,500103,400 feet, but a few miles inland, especially on the south side, they appear to attain an altitude of 5,000 to 6,000 feet, which would correspond with the height of The Four Peaks, near the outer coast line, about midway between Nachvak and Cape Chudleigh." The mountains ar(»und Nachvak, he adds, "are steep, rough-sided, peaked, and serrated, and have no appearance of having been glaci- ated, excepting close to the sea-level." These mountains' are formed of Laurentian gneiss, " notwithstanding their extraordinary appearance, so different from the smooth, solid, and more or less rounded outlines of the hills composed of these rocks in most other parts of the Dominion." The height of these mountains was evi- dently roughly estimated from that of an escarpment on the south side of the inlet at the Hudson Bay Company's port, which "rises to a height of 3,400 feet, as ascer- tained by Commander J. G. Bolton" (p. . 4 DD). According to the British Admiralty chart and the Newfoundland Pilot, Cape Chidley rises to a height of 1,500 feet above the sea, and the highest point of the Button Islands has an equal elevation (Bell, p. 17 DD). IHK MOUNTAINS OF NORITIKKN J \MKAl)t)K. 9 Port Burwcll is situated on the island of which Caj)c Chidley is the northeastern point. This island is sepa- rated from the mainland by McLelan's Strait. " Nu- naingok is situated on an alluvial flat, extending between the two branches of the strait. The hill which rises steeply on the south side of it is about 700 feet high ; but farther in, between the branches and on either side of them, the mountains are from i,5CX) to 2,500 feet high, and have ragged tops and sides" (Bell, p. 19 DFJ). In his report for 1885 Professor Bell gives no additional measurements of mountains, but observes : " The moun- tains everywhere in this vicinity | Nachvak Inlet] give evidence of long-continued. atmospheric decay. The an- nual precipitation at the present time is not great, other- wise small glaciers would probably form among these mountains, which lie between latitudes 58" and 60^, and which overlook a sea bearing field-ice for half the year,, and from v/hich bergs are never absent. Patches of snow, however, remain throughout the summer in shaded parts of the slopes and on the highest summits, which range from 4,000 to 6,000 feet above the ocean." * Raised beaches were observed on both sides of Nachvak Inlet. South of the region visited by Professor Bell are the two mountains of Kaumajet and Kiglapeit, both of which are put at an elevation of 4,000 feet on Rev L. T. Reichel's map. Of these the former constitutes a penin- sula, off which lies the island of which Cape Mugford is the eastern promontory ; while Kiglapeit forms the great headland lying between Nain and Okkak in latitude about 57°, and of which Port Manvers is one of the in- dentations. *Ann. Rep. Geol. Surv. Canada, New Ser., vol. i., 1885, p. 8 DD, 1886. 10 IIIK I'llVSICAI. CKOdKAITIV OF I.AIikADOk. Prom these facts it will he seen that ahmg this part of the northern coast, mountains as high as the Adirondacks, and even the White Mountains of New Hampshire, plunge directly into the sea, and are as wild and suhlime as the coast mountains of Norway and Greenland. Drainage and Rivers. — Of the water-sheds and water- systems of Labrador our knowledge is mostly conjecture, on account of the lack of information regarding the in- terior. In none of the charts and maps are the rivers and internal lakes accurately represented, and there is the widest discrepancy between the different maps. The Labrador plateau has an area of about 420,000 square miles. It has a coast-line of about 1,100 miles, stretching from the Strait of Belle Isle to Cape VVolsten- holme, and its greatest breadth is said to be 600 miles. It lies between the 49th and 63d parallels of latitude, and the 55th and 79th meridians. Bounded on the east by the Atlantic Ocean, and on the north and west by Hudson Strait and Hudson Bav, its southwestern limits are defined by the Bersiamits, Mistassini, and Rupert rivers. The broadest and in general highest portion of the plateau appears to be in the southern portion of the peninsula, and it is here that the larger rivers appear to take their rise. From the northern shores of the Gulf of St. Law- rence and Strait of Belle Isle the Labrador plateau rises until it reaches a vast table-land or water-shed in the in- terior, the edge of which has been reached by Professor Hind in his explorations of the Moisie River. This elevated region is thought by Professor Hind to attain a height of 2,240 feet above the sea-level. Pro- fessor Hind savs of the table-land from which the river rill': F.AiiuADok iahlk-land. 1 1 Moisic, and also, probably, tlie Esquimaux as well as Hamilton rivers take their rise : " It is pre-eminently sterile, and where the eountry is not burned, earibou moss covers the rocks, with stunted spruce, birch, and aspen in the hollows and deep ravines. The whole of the table-land is strewed with an infinite numbei of boul- ders, sometimes three and four deej) ; these sinok. IJngava hay rcceivts two iniportanl rivn^ which im- perfect Iv drain the northwestern slope nl Western Labrador. The smaller of the two is the Kan7 the present broad rivers were only chains of lakes, and may thus be said to be in an embryonic stage, as its river-beds have never been remodelled and scooped out into gentle declivities and broad valleys, nor immense depths of sand and clay deposited to smooth over the inequalities of the rocky surface of the country, such as in the temperate zone render a continent inhabitable throughout its breadth ; while in Labrador man can only inhabit the coast, and gain a livelihood from the sea. We must distinguish two classes in the lakes of Labra- dor, viz.: the deep mountain /trr/zs, lying in the interior, directly upon the summits of the water-sheds ; and the far more numerous broad, shallow lakes and pools spread |)rofusely over the surface below the height of land. These last occupy shallow depressions and hollows, most probably excavated by glaciers in valleys which have been simply remodelled by glacial action. The deep tarns, on the contrary, evidently fill original depressions, sinking between lofty ranges of hills. Davies says that in the region about the source of the Hamilton River the lakes are very deep, and lie directly on the height of land, while the ponds on the lowlands are shallow ; and, on the other hand, those which directly communicate with the ocean or with the fiords are in general distin- guished for their depth. " This almost universal shal- lowness of the lakes is a singular feature, when the nature of their borders is taken into consideration, as they are generally surrounded by hills, which would lead one to look for a corresponding depth in the lake ; but instead of this some are so shallow that for miles there is hardly water enough to float a half-loaded canoe. I am in- formed l)y my friend, John McLean, Esq., that this is : I IS THE i^MvsiCAi, (;b:o(;raphv of labkadok. likewise tlie case with the lakes lying on the water-shed of Ungava Bay. The lakes lying on the table-land are said to he deep." He also states that the large lakes in the interior are well stocked with fish, while the shallow lakes, and, in fact, the deep ones communicating with the ocean, are in general very destitute of them. We must believe that the same causes that produce the deep fiords likewise account for these deep fissures and depressions in the summit of the water-sheds. It is evident that any amount of glacial action, however long sustained and vast in its operation, can never account for these rude, irregular, often " geoclinal," troughs which follow lines of fracture and faults, lying along the axis ot elevation of mountain chains, or at nearly right angles to them. Fiords. — The fiords on the Labrador coast are of great extent and depth. They are either original lines of frac- ture and faults, or what Professor Dana terms z^oclinal troughs, occurring at the line of juncture of two rock formations. Thus, Chateau Bay is a fissure at least 1,200 feet in depth. The western shore rises 600 feet above the sea-level, and the waters of the bay at their deepest are 600 feet in depth. This fault must have been produced at the time of the upheaval of the syenites of the coast. All the broad, deep bays and fiords on the Atlantic Ocean occur at the juncture of the syenites and gneiss. There are deep bays between Cape St. Lewis and Cape St. Michael's, where syenites rise through the gneiss, producing faults and lines of dislocation. The large bay just north of Cape St. Michael's occurs at the junc- tion of gneiss and " hyperite " rocks. Sandwich Bay "TO '1 ;k s, e <;laciai i.akks. 19 ami Hamilton Inlrl were forincd by the denudation ot the Domino <^neiss. Despair Mai hoi is a deep liord oc- curring at the juncture of the " Aule/avik |L»neiss " ot" Lieher, with syenitic rocks formin<» the coast-line between this point and Hopedale. The irregular overtlows of *„ap and syenitic rocks which enclose the gneiss rocks, produce an immense number of cross tiords and channels, from the presence of innumerable islands which line the coast, and an- composed of these eruptive rocks. These original fissures and depressions have been modified by glaciers, by frost and shore-ice and icebergs, and by the waves of the sea. The shallow lakes, formed most probably by glaciers, lie in shallow troughs, upon a thin bed of gravel and boulders. We only learn in some regions, especially in -Southern I.abrador, that the country has been covered with boulders by their presence on the banks and in the centre of these pools. Clear examples of lakes partially surrounded by walls of rock, with the banks at one end completed by a barrier of sand and gravel, are frequent. Such barriers of drift have lost entirely their resemblance to glacial moraines, to which they undoubtedly owe their origin, since the drift deposits have been remodelled into sea beaches composed of very coarse gravel and boulders, while the finer materials have been swept away by the powerful " Labrador current," with its burden of icebergs and floe-ice that has so effectually removed traces of the former presence of what we must believe to have been extensive glaciers. From all that has been published, it would seem that the entire interior of the Labrador peninsula is strewn with boulders, having once been covered with land-ice, I 20 THE PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY OF LABRADOR. which flowed into the Atlantic on the east and souths and Hudson Bay on the west and north. The forest growths sometimes clothe the lower hills, but in general are confined to the protected river-valleys and lake basins. It is to be hoped that at no distant day some skilled explorer, with a sufficient knowledge of geology, may thread the interior of the peninsula from Ungava to Hamilton Inlet, passing thence by the Esquimaux River to the Strait of Belle Isle. The region from the head- waters of the Hamilton River to Hudson Bay should also be traversed, and when this is done we shall be pro- vided with a knowledge of this vast, shadowy, gloomy, forbidding region, of which we now apparently know less than of the interior of Alaska, the tundras of Siberia,, or the plateaus of Central Africa. t > I! h .* :,i'* CHAPIER f[. WHO FIRST SAW THE LABRADOR COAST? Those rovers of the northern seas, the Norsemen, pushing out from the fiords of Greenland in their one- masted craft, no larger than our coasters or n ickerel boats, without doubt sighted and coasted along " the Labrador," nearly five centuries before John Cabot made his first landfall of the American Continent. The Labrador coast was not, however, the first Ameri- can land visited by the Norsemen.""' Kohl states that New England was first discovered by Biarne, in 990. It appears that Heriulf, one of the •earliest colonists of Greenland, had a son, Biarne, " v/ho, at the time his father went over from Iceland to Green- land, had been absent on a trading voyage in Norway. Returning to Iceland in 990, and finding that his father, with Eric the Red, had gone to the west, he resolved to follow him and to spend the next winter with him in Greenland. " They boldly set sail to the southwest, but having * We should acknowledge that, not having access to the primitive sources in which the voyages of the Norsemen to the American shores are described, we have placed our dependence on the account given by a learned German geogra- pher, J. G. Kohl, in his History of the Discovery of Maine, as the most authori- tative exposition of early voyages and discoveries in northwestern America. Kohl's views are based on Rafn's Antiquitates Americanse. (Documentary History of the State of Maine. Collections of the Maine Historical Society. /Second Series, Vol. r. 1869). • 21 I I ti 22 WHO FIRST SAW THE LABRADOR COAST? encountered northerly storms, after many days' sail they lost their course, and when the weather cleared, they de- scried land, not, however, like that described to them as * Greenland.' They saw that it was a much more south- ern land, and covered with forest*;. It not being the intention of Biarne to explore new countries, but only to find the residence of his father in Greenland, he im- proved a southwest wind, and turned to the northeast, and put himself on the track for Greenland. After sev- eral days* sailing, during which he discovered and sailed by other well-wooded lands lying on his left, some high and mountainous and bordered by icebergs, he reached Heriulfsnas, the residence of his father, in Greenland. His return passage occupied nine days, and he speaks of three distinct tracts of land, along which he coasted, one of which he supposed to have been a large island." So much for the facts taken from the Norse records and sagas. Dr. Kohl then goes on to say : " That Biarne, on this voyage, must have seen some part of the Ameri- can east coast is clear from his having been driven that way from Iceland by northerly gales. We cannot de- termine with any certainty what part of our coast he sighted, and what was the southern extent of his cruise. But taking into consideration all circumstances and state- ments of the report, it appears probable that it was part of the coast of New England, and perhaps Cape Cod, which stands far out to the east. One day and night's sailing with a favorable wind, was, in Iceland and Nor- way, reckoned to be about the distance of thirty German miles. Two days and ' nights,' therefore, would be sixty German miles, and this is about the distance from Cap& Cod in New England to Cape Sable in Nova Scotia." IMAKNK'S LANI3FAI.I.. 23 That the land tifst seen by Biarne was necessarily so far south as Cape Cod does not, we would venture lo submit, follow from the facts we have quoted. Is it not more probable that the country was some portion of Nova Scotia, a land as much "covered with forests" :is New England ? But Dr. Kohl maintains that the second land which was "well-wooded" was Nova Scotia. In his own wt)rds : "The second country seen by Biarne musi. then, probably have been Nova Scotia. The distance from Nova Scotia to Newfoundland is about three days' sail ; and from Newfoundland to the southern part of Green- land, a Northman navi<>ator, with fresh breezes, might easily sail in four days, and thus Newfoundland was probably the third count r\ discovered bv Biarne." We should not have the hardihood to criticise Dr. Kohl's statements and conclusions, if we had not made two voyages to Labrador, in which we sailed from Cape Cod to Nova vScotia, skirted that coast, approached within a mile of Cape Ray, Newfoundland, and spent a summer on the northern shores of Belle Isle, opposite Newfoundland ; and a second summer in coasting Lab- rador ns far north as Hopedale. Henc'e the general appearances of the Nova Scotian, Newfoundland, and l^abrador coasts arc, though in a slight degree, to be sure, known to us. The records state that the southernmost land seen by Biarne was *' covered by forests ;" this would apply to Nova Scotia as well as to the coast of Massachusetts. It is then said that without landing, improving a southwest wind and steering northeast, "he put himself on the I 24 WHO FlUSr SAW TlIK I.AItUAhOK COAST? track for Greenland." This would l)e the course from Cape Cod to Nova Scotia, it is true, but such a course would also take him from the eastern end of Nova Scotia to Cape Race, Newfoundland, while from the present position of St. John's the course to the site of tht; Green- land Norse settlements is a northerly one. As Kohl states, the distance from Nova Scotia to Newfoundland is about three days' sail ; but the wind would have to be stion^ and fair all the time, for the distance from Halifax to St. John's, Newfoundland, is about 530 miles. A Vikino's ship was by no means a modern cutter either in her lines or rig. T have seen in the Sogne fiord a vessel of forty or fifty tons, her hull clumsy and broad, with her single mast pla-" d mid- ships and carrying a square sail; her stern rr, r high, and her prow rising five or six feet above the bows. A Norwegian friend observed to me at the time, " There," said he, " hang the gunwale of that vessel with shields and fill her with armed men, and you would havea Vik- ' ing's ship !" We doubt whether Biarne's craft could have made in " one day and night's sailing with a favor- able wind," more than 138 statute miles, or thirty Ger- man miles. At such a rate it would take from i\vv. to six days to go from Halifax to. St. John's, Newfound- land. The passage by a swift ocean steamer of the Allan Line requires from forty-two to forty-eight hours. Passing by Newfoundland, which is well-wooded, ex- cept on the more exposed northeastern coast, Biarne, sailing by a land " said to be high and niountainous, and bordered by icebergs, reached Heriulfsnas." This land could have been none other than the Labrador coast from the mouth of the Strait of Belle Isle northward. niAKNKS RKTUkN VOYAGF. 2S If Hiai lie's return passage occupied only nine days, Ifie could not possibly have sailed from Cape Cod to Greenland in that time. A nine days' trip from Boston to the Labrador coast at the mouth of the Strait of Belle Isle is a remarkably short one for an ordinary fishing- schooner. The distance from Boston to the Greenland coast a little north of Cape Farewell, where the southernmost Norse settlements were made, is about 2,300 miles. The southern coast of Labrador is about half-way. The exact sailing distance from Thomaston, Maine, to Caribou Island, Strait of Belle Isle, Labrador, is 910 miles. The "Nautilus," the vessel in which I first sailed to Labrador, was a staunch schooner of 140 tons. She sailed from Thomaston, Maine, June 27. and passing around Cape Breton, reached Caribou Island in ten days* (July 7th) : after leaving our party on the Labra- dor coast, she set sail for Greenland July 9th, over nearly the same route as the Norsemen must have taken. From Captain Ranlett of the *' Nautilus," I learn that he first sighted land on the coast of Greenland on the 17th, in lat. 62"" 58', and long. 52° 05'. The land next seen was about lat. 63° 10, long. 50° 45'. This is about fifty miles south of Fiskernaes, and 25 miles north of Frederickshaab. The voyage to Greenland was thus made in about nine days, as the vessel did not reach land before the i8th. The return voyage from God- ihaab to Bonne Esperance, Labrador (three miles west from Caribou Island), was made in twelve days. The * Rev. C. C. Carpenter writes me that he sailed in a fishing-smack from Cari- bou Island Oct. 3d, and made the shores of Maine on the 13th, ) '■ ii a6 WHO MKST SAW IIIK LAHKADOK COAST.'' ," Nautilus" lefl Godthaab Auj;'. 131!), and ciUcrcd ihe Strait of Hellc Isii- Aug. 24tli, anchoring at lionnt Esperancc Aug. 25111. Then sailing from Bonne Espe- rance Aug. 26th, (nvingto calms and a storm she did not reach Thomaston until September 1 itii, a period of about fifteen days. It thus appears that the voyage from th< mouth of the Penobscot River, Maine, to soulliern Greenland, through the Gulf of St. Lawrence, a shorten route than that of the Northmen east of Newfoundland, took nineteen days, not including the detention on the Labrador coast, while the return voyage from southern Greenland to Maine required 27 days. In 1864 my second trip to the Labrador coast was made in a VVelllieet oysterman, a schooner of about 140 tons, built for speed, with long spars and large sails, vShe was probably the fastest vissel which ever visited the Labrador coast. The voyage from Boston to- Mecatina Island on the Labrador coast, through the Gut of Canso, was made in seven days ; it was piobably the quickest voyage from Massachusetts to Labrador ever made. We ran from Provincetown to Port Mul- grave in the Gut of Canso in just forty-eight hours. The return trip from Caribou Island to Boston, a dis- tance of about nine hundred miles, was made in nine days. The average was therefore just a hundred miles a day. How could a Norseman's cluiDsy craft of forty or fifty tons, with but a mainsail and a jib, outdo such sailing as that ? The Norse record says that Biarne's *' return passage ©ccupied nine days," and Kohl adds that " from New- foundland to the southern part of Greenland a North- man navigator, with fresh breezes, might easily s;iil in HKI.I.Ll.AND THK MODKKN LAHUADOK. 27 four days. Hut wc have seen that with frtsh breezes a modern schooner, at least three times as large as a Viking's ship, reijuired eight or nine days to run from a |)oint but a few miles from northern Newfoundland, i.e.y Belle Isle, to southern Greenland. The distance from vSt. John's, Newfoundland, to the Norsemen's colonies in southern Greenland is not less than 1,500 miles. To perform a voyage of liiis length in four days would be an impossibility for a modern yacht. It is not impossible, however, that Biarne sailed from scjuthern Newfound- land to Greenland in a period of about nine days. But a voyage from Cape Cod to Greenland by an ordinary schooner rec^uires at least three weeks, or from twenty to thirty days at tlie most. Instead then of accepting Kohl's summary of Biarne's voyage stated on p. 63 of his work, wi' should be in- clined to believe, as the results of the expedition, that Biarne was the first European to sigiu the coast of Newfoundland, possibly the eastern extremity of Nova Scotia, while he also saw the mountainous, desolate, tree- less, rocky coast of Labrador. The next Norse adventurer, Leif. the son of Erik, not only sighted the Labrador coast but landed on it. To this country he gave the name of stony land, or " Helluland," a nairjc perpetuated in an Iceland map of '570 Iw Sigurd Stephanius. The records tell us that Leif, the son of Erik the Red, the first settler in Greenland, having bought Biarne's ship in the year 1000, manned her with a crew of thirty-five men, among whom was Biarne himself, and followed Biarne's track towards the southwest. Kohl then says: "They came first to that land which Biarne 38 VVnO IIRSr saw IIIK I.AIlRADOk COAST? }i;i(l last seen, whicli, as I have- said, was |>i<)l)al)ly (»m Ncwfoimdlaiid. Wcvc tlicy cast anchor and went on shoir, for their voyage was not the search of a son after his father, l)Ut a decided exploriiig exjK'dition. They found the country as Biarne had descril)ed il. full of ice mountains, desolate, and its shores covered with large flat stones. I^-'if. therefore, called it 'llelluland' (the stony land )," Here again we should dilfei Iroin Kohl as to Leif's lirst landfall. A southwest course would naturallv carry hini to the Lahrador coa^t, while the description — "full of ice mountains, desolate, aiul its shores covered with large Hat stones" — well describes the harren, rock-l)ound, treeless coast of Labrador, in distinction from the much lower, wooded coast of Newfoundland. Moreover, vSt. John's, Newfoundland, lies nearly due south of the southern extremity of Greenland. While it is to be doubted whether Biarne ever went south of Newfoundland, we see no reason for dis- believing the conclusions of Rafn and Kohl, that the followers of Biarne, Thorvvald and Thorfmn Karlsefne, became familiar with Cape Cod and wintered at Vin- land. There is no reasonable doubt but that they landed on Nova Scotia ; <^here is no reason to disbelieve the records which stat..' that they wintered farther west where no snow (cil, so that the cattle found their food in the open fields, and wild grapes were abundant, as they certainly are in Rhode Island and southern Massa- chusetts, as compared with Maine or Nova Scotia.* Without reasonable doubt, then, Helluland of the Norse and Icelandic records is Labrador, though it is not impossible that the bare and rocky coast of north- i ' IIKI.IAJLANI) rilK MODKRN lAlJkADOH. 29 eastern Newfouiulland was hv some rc«j[ar(lr(l as Hellu- land. It would l)e easy for a vcsscrl in those days to pass by vvithoul sceinij the openinj^ inlo the Strait of Belle Isle, and, owin^ to the somewhat similar scenie features of the two lands, to eonfoimd the northeastern extremity of Newfoundland with Lahradcn'. That, as some have elaimed, the Norsemen ever sailed throuij^h the Strait of IJellc Isle, eoasti'd aloniLi Southern Lahradoi and wintered at the mouth of thi- river St. Lawrenee, is eeitainly not supported i)y thi (;arly Norsi- reeords as interpreted hy Kohl. Their x-essels sailed to the seaward of Newfoundland. That thev did not feel drawn to sojourn in Ilelluland is no wonder. Its eoast presented no more attraetion^ than Greenland, while the jj^rapes, food, and furs, with the verdure and mild winter climate of "Vinland the Good," led to one exj)edition after another, as late per- haps as 1347, when, according to the Icelandic annals, '* a vessel, having a crew of seventeen men, sailed from Iceland to Markland." Then came the decadence of Norse energy and sea- manship, succeeded by the failure of the Greenland col- onies, which were overpowered and extinguished by the b^skimo. A dense curtain of oblivion thicker and more impenetrable than the fogs which still wrap the regions of the north, fell upon these hyperborean lands, until, in 1497, the veil was again withdrawn by an English hand.* Since the foregoing remarks were sent to the printer, !•: *Tlie voyage of Szkolney, the Pole, to the coasts of Greenland and Labrador, is stated to have been performed in 1476. See Humboldt, Kxamen Critique, ii, p. 152. (N. A. Review, July, 1838, 179.) f J .iO \VH(» MKSl SAW THK I.A15KADOK COAST? 1: ' Prof. E. N.-Horsford's address at the unveiling of the statue of Leif Erikscn lias appeared. He also adopts the general opinion that Ilelluland was Newfoundland, hut the langfuaoe of these extracts convinces us still more that Helluland was Labrador. In the first translation printed by Prof. Ilorsford of the Saga of Erik the Red, it is stated in the account of the expedition of Biarne, that after leaving Iceland bound for Greenland, he missed that country and was "borne before the wind for many days, they knew not whither," linally approaching land which "was not mountainous. i)ut covered with wood," with rising ground in many j»arts. Then sailing two days, and putting the ship about, leaving the land on the left side, he saw land again, " low and level, and overgrown with wood." This land was probably Newfoundland, perhaps the southern or eastern part. We would, however, contend that the next or third land which Biarne saw was Lab- rador, for the Saga reads : " At length they hoisted sail, and turning their prow from land, they stood out again to sea ; and having sailed three days with a south- west wind, they saw land the third time." This land was high and mountainous, and covered with ice. They asked Biarne whether he wished to land here. He said, "No; for this land appears to me little inviting." Without relaxing sail, therefore, they coasted along the shore till they perceived that this was an island. They then put the ship about, with the stern towards land, and stood out again to sea with the same wind, which blowing up very strong, Biarne desired his men to shorten sail, forbidding them to carry more sail than with such a heavy wind would be safe. " When they had thus i 1 HELI.UI AND THK MODERN [..VHRADOU. 31 sailed four days, they saw land the lourth time." To- wards evening they reached the very promontory not far north of Cape Farewell where Heriulf, the father of Biarne, dwelt. The hiirh, mountainous land. :overed with, ice, was probably Labrador near Cape Harrison, or along' the ^.oast to the northward, and a Norseman's vessel, with a strong-, fair wind, could probably sail from that part of the Labrador coast to near Cape Farewell, a distance of a little over 600 miles, in four days, allov/ing that a Vik- ing's ship of about 60 tons could sail from eight to ten miles an hour under a spanking breeze. Certainly they <:ould not have made the distance from an\' part of New- foundland, which is about 900 miles, in four days. From the account of the expedition of Leif Lriksen : " All being now ready, they set sail, and the first land lo which they caine was that last seen by Hiarne. " They made direct for land, cast anchor, and put out in a boat. Having landed, they found no herbage. All above were frozen heights ; and the whole space between these and the sea was occupied by bare flat rocks ; whence they judged this to be a barren land. Then said Leif, ' We will not do as Biarne did, who never set foot on shore : I will give a name to this land, and will call it " Helluland" [that is, land of broad stones].'" Here again we have a much better description of Labrador than of northeastern Newfoundland. From there Leif sailed to what he called Markland, or " Land of Woods," which may have been southern Newfoundland, or east- 4.^rn Nova Scotia, or Cape Breton, as it is but two days' sail from the Gut of Canso to Cape Cod ; and the Vin- land of Leif was undoubtedly the shore lying east and *-outh of Cape Cod. •r ■ ,i r i) 'V it h ■J s 3' (! i! 32 WHO IIKST SAW IIIK LABRADOR COAST." From Mr. J. Elliot Cabot's translation of the Saga re- lating to Biarnc's voyage (Mass. Quart. Rev. 1849^ quoted by Horsford), we take the following rcferenee to Helluland. As before, on returning from the south,, after turning the bow of his vessel from the land and sailing out to sea for three days with a W.S.W. wind, Biarne saw a third land ; "but that land was high, moun- tainous, and eovered with glaciers:" then the wind rose, and they sailed four days to Heriulfsness. A.D. 999, Leif set sail. "First they found the land which Biarne had found last. Then sailed they to the land and cast anchor, and put off a boat and went ashore, and saw there no grass. Mickle glaciers were over all the higher jwrts ; but it was like a plain of rock from the glaciers to the sea, and it seemed to them that the land was good for nothing. Then said Leif: 'We have not done about this land like Biarne, not to go upon it ; now 1 will give a name to the land and call it " Hellu- land " [flat-stone land |.' " The northeastern coast of Newfoundland is rather low, not mountainous, is somewhat wooded, with cer- tainly more or less herbage on the outer islands and points. The rock formations are of later age than the Laurentian. We are familiar with the appearance of the Newfoundland side of the Strait of Belie Isle, which decidedly contrasts with that of Labrador opposite. i CHAPTER III IHE GEOGRAPHICAL EVOLUTION OK LABRADOR. Junk 24111, 1497, a year before Columbus cbscovered the American continent, the crew of a little vessel, the " Matthew," bgund from Bristol on a voyage of discov- ery to ascertain the shortest line from England to Cathay, sighted land. The vessel was under the com- mand of John Cabot, who was accompanied by his son Sebastian, a lad still under age, perhaps but nineteen or twenty years old. Sebastian kept the ship's log ; but the narratives of this, as well as his other voyages, have been lost. The land was called " Prima vista," and it was believed by Biddle and Humboldt, as well as Kohl and others, that this region which the Cabots first saw was the coast of Labrador in 56° or 58° north latitude. VVhile the narrative of this momentous voyage has been lost, a map of the world ascribed to Sebastian Cabot, and engraved in 1549, contained an inscription, of which we will copv an extract translated in Hakluyt's Voyages (iii. 27). " In the yeere of our Lord 1497, lohn Cabot, a Vene- tian, and his sonne Sebastian (with an English fleet set out from BristoU) discouered that land which no man before that time had attempted, on the 24 of June about fiue of the clocke early in the morning. This land he called Prima vista, that is to say, First scene, because as 33 "^- « II: 34 II IK OKOtlkAI'MICAI, EVOI.UTfON' OF I.AHUADOU. I sui)pc)se it was that part whereof they had the first slight from sea. That Island which lieth out l)efoie the land, he called the Island of S. lohn vpon this occasion, as I thinke, because it was discouered vpon the day of lolin the Haptist. The inhabitants of this Island vse to weare beast skinnes, and haue them in as great estima- tion as we haue our finest garments. In their warres they vse bowes, arrowes, pikes, darts, woodden clubs, and slings. The soile is barren in some places, and yeildeth little fruit, but it is full of white beares, and stagges farre greater than ours." (Page 27.) Kohl seems fully persuaded that the landfall of John Cabot was Labrador, because of the presence of white bears.* But if the inscription and map are genuine, the description of the inhabitants of the island, both men and beasts, would better apply to those of the eastern or southern coast of Newfoundland. The human beings were more probably red Indians than Eskimo. On the Labrador coast the soil is " barren" in all places, while the "stagges far greater than ours" may have been the moose, which then abounded and still exists in New- foundland, and must have been rare, if it ever lived, on the coast of Labrador. Moreover the " white bears" spoken of as being so abundant may have been a white variety of the black bear, or perhaps the " barren ground" pale bear of Sir John Richardson may have been fre- quent in Newfoundland. It appears to have been of smaller size than the brown bear of Europe, because in Parmenius' account of Newfoundland, published in 1 583, * "This agrees much better with the coast of Labrador than with that of Newfoundland, to which the white bears very seldom, if ever, come down," (Page 133.): CABOT 11 IK DISCOVKUKR Ol' I.AHKADOU. 35 is said: " Beares also appear al)oul the tishers' stajj^e of tlie countrey, and are sometimes killed, hut they seeme to he white, as I eonjeetured hy their skinnes. and somewhat lesse than ours," (I lakluyt.) On the other hand, the true while or polar hear may have frequently visited the eastern eoast of Newfound- land, as it formerly ahounded on the Lahrador eoast. Moreover, nothing is said in the inseription of any ice, which at that date, the 24th of June, so ahounds from the Strait of B^Ue Isle northward to the polar re- ijions. Besides, if we contrast the account of this voy- ai^e of the two Cahots in 1497 with that of the younger Cahol the following year, it seems plain that John Cabot's "Prima vista" was Newfoundland rather than Lahrador."' in May, i49(S, Sebastian Cahot, under license of Ilenrv VII., in command of two ships, manned with three hundred marineis and volunteers, again sailed to the northwest in search of Cathay. Kohl says: "We iiave no certain information regarding his route. But lie appears to have directed his course again to the coun- tr\ which he had seen the year before on the voyage with his father, our present Labrador." Farther on he remarks : " The Portuguese Galvano, also one of the original and contemporary authorities on Cabot's voyage of F498, says that, having reached 60° north latitude, he and his men found the air very cold, and great islands of ice, and from thence putting about and finding the land to turn eastward, they trended along by it, to see * According to Charles Dean, LL.D., in tlie Critical History of America, vol. jii., John Cabot's landfall was the northern part of Cape Rreton Island. 36 THI-; (;eo(;raphical evolution ok i.AbKArxm. if it passed on the other side. Then they sailed hack again to the south." From this and other statements by Humboldt and D'Avezac, Kohl concludes that "Cabot in 1498, without doubt, sailed along the coast of Labrador and the west- ern shores of Davis's Strait. Finally, after a struggle with the ice off the Cumberland j^eninsula in Syl" north latitude, where he probably lost a number of his men,, he abandoned any further advance. He then retraced his course southward along the coast of Labrador, and probably came to anchor in some bay on the eastern coast of Newfoundland, where he rested his men and ^paired the damage done to his vessels by the Arctic ice. His vessel was probably the forerunner of the fleet >f ' ..i^lish, Portuguese, Basque, French, and Spanish fishermen which in the next two centuries visited those shores, opening to the Old World a source of revenue more available than the fabled wealth of Cathay. Still, dreams of the Indies led Cabot on southward,, past Newfoundland, past Nova Scotia, along the New England shores, and probably southward near Cape Hatteras, with the hope of finding a direct passage tt> the East. Although t)n their return from their first voyage of 1497 the Cabots believed that the land they had dis- covered was some part of Asia, to them must be given the credit of beholding the American continent before Columbus; while, with little or no doubt, vSebastian; Cabot beheld in July, 1498, the mainland of Labrador, for, says Hakluyt, " Columbus first saw the firme lande. August 1, 1498." * * Kohl, p. 131, foot-note. ■il ||[K l-OkTlMlUKSK ON THE LABRADOR ClOASI . 17 English seamen, then, were the first to reveal to a svorld which had forgotten the deeds of the Norsemen the northeastern shores of our continent, and to carry to Europe the news of the wealth of life in the seas of Newfoundland and the Bay of St. Lawrence. The Cabots were of Italian origin, though Sebastian was born in Bristol. The English did not immediately follow up their discoveries, for the next explorer who ventured near if not within sight of the Labrador coast was a Portuguese, Cortereal, who was commissioned by Emanuel the Great of Portugal, the same enterprising monarch who had previously sent out Vasco de Gama on his vovage around the Cape of Good Mope. Cortereal sailed from Lisbon in the year 1500. His landfall was Newfoundland near Cape Race, or north- ward at (Conception Bay. From this point he sailed northward, and probably discovered Greenland. He then came to the mouth of a river called by him " Rio nevado," which is supposed to have been near the lati- tude of Hudson's Strait. Here he is said to have been ^itopped by ice. He then sailed southward, resting on the east coast of Newfoundland before returning to Lisbon. The next year Cortereal returned to Newfoundland. He was unable to reach the northern regions on account of the ice, which was more abundant than the year, l)efore. On his return his vessel and all aboard foun- dered, the companion ship reaching Lisbon. The land Cortereal visited was mapped on a Portuguese chart in 1 504, and was called " Terra de Cortte Reall." Kohl 4;laims that " the configuration of the coasts and the names written upon them prove that parts of New- 'If ' t fl I ^ n. 3S llli; (.KOi.UAPIIICAl. KVs. In a I^ortuguesc map of '520, nevertheless, we have the name of " Lavrador." which, however, was applied to Greenland, while the Labrador coast and Newfoundland were confounded and oiven the name " Bacalhaos." But yet it is to the Portuguese that we owe the n.imc of Labrador. Kohl tells us that "King Emanuel, hav- ing heard of the high I rees growing in the northern countries, and having seen the aborigines, who appeared so well qualified for labor, thought he had found a new slave-coast liUc that which he owned in Africa; and dreamed of the tall masts which he would cut, and the men-of-war which he would build, from the forests of the countrv of the ('ortereals." Tlu' word Labrador is a Portuguese and Spanish word for laboni. On a i)hotograph of a xVle.xican field-hand, or |)e()n, ploughing in a field, which we lately [)urchased in Mexico, is written " Labrador." In a recent book on Cuba the author thus speaks of a wealthy Cuban planter : " He is. by his own account, a Hijo dc Labrador (labor- er's son ) from Alava. in the Basque Provinces."'"' Cor- tereal's land was thus the "laborer's land," whence it was hoped slave laborers might be exported to the Portuguese colonies. The Portuguese also, as is well known, applied to Newfoundland the name Bacalhaos, which means dried codfish or stockfish. As the result of Cortereal's voyage the Portuguese fishermen through the rest of the i6th century habitually visited the shores and banks of Newfoundland, and undoubtedly were more or less familiar with the Labra- * A. Gallenga. The Pearl of the Antilles, p. loo. 1874. m 40 rni', i;K()(;kAi'iii('Ai. kvoi.ution 01 i.AnRADOR. ■ f « . r coast, tor Scandinavian authors report their [iresencc on the Greenland coast. (Kohl, p. 190.) In a fool-note to j). 197 of his " Pioneers of France in the New VV^orld," Mr. Parknian remarks: " f.ahrador — Lahratoris Terra — is so called Irom the circumstance that (vortereal in the year 1300 stole thence a car^o of Indians for slaves," That the " Indians" were captured on the Lahrador coast, however, apj)ears to he an in- exact statement. There were prohablv then no red Indians or timber on the Labrador coast, but i,u\- tereal must have entrapped them in Newfoundland or some place southward. Kohl | }). 169 1 tells us that *• these aboriju'ines, captiued accordinij;^ to the custom of I he e.\r>lorers of that dav, are described, bv an eve-wit- ness who saw them in Lisbon, as tall, well built, and admirably lit for labor. We infer from this statement that they were not Esquimaux from the coast of Labra- dor, but Indians of the Micmac tribe, inhabitants of Newfoundland and Nova Scotia." The editor of Kohl's work adds a quotatit)n from the Venetian Pasquali^o, who savs : "Mis serene majestv contemplates deriving ureat atlvantaije from the countr\- not oidy on account of the timber, of which he has occasion, but of the in- haltitants, who an- admirably calculati'd for labor, and are the best slaws 1 have ever seen." The path t)pene(l by Sebastian Cabot was not only trod bv Portuij^uese, but the Spanish,* Basques, iMench (Bretons and Normans), and Lnglish frequented the rich tishin or « Au I ii'.k. 4» ' « «loul>t visited ihc (riilf of St. I.uvvicncc and the southern coasi ol Ivahrador. Tlieii (hscoveries were perhaps recorded in Gastaldi's maj). Labrador Hrst became clearly dilTeientiated from Newfoimdland b\' jae(ines Cartiei. Id him we <)\v<> 11. TERRA DC LABOHADOR PART New France by tt)e 3lalian 3acomo Ai Ga|'taldi in about il)» y.f our Lord '534'" " Vpon the 21 of May iIk- winde beiiijn in tlu' West, we hoised saile, and sailed tow;n(l Vorlh and l)v Fuist from the Cape of liuona \'isi;i \niil we came to the Island of Birds, which wasenuironed ahoul with a haidvc of ice hut broken and crackl : nol withstanding;' 1 he savd banke, our two boits went thillu 1 to take in sonu- birds, whereof there is such plenty, that vnlei se a man did sc-c them, he woukl thinke it an incredii)U' thing : foi albeit the [sland (which containeth about lea<»ui' in circuit > be so full of them, that they seeme t ha^ .Mie brouj^hi thither, and sowed for the ncjnce, ,et au „were an hun- dred folde as many hovering i ' out it ns within ; sonu- of the which are as big as ia' .-., bkicke and white, with t)eaks like vnto crowes : they 1. dwavcs vpon the sea : they cannot Hie very high, becaiisi 'uir wings ;ne so little, and no l)igger than halfc ones hau,' '.'et do they file as swiftly as an\' birds of tlu; aire leuell to t\w water ; they are also exceeding fat ; we n:niUMl them ApoK.th. In lesse then halfe an houre we HI led two boats full of them, as if they hatl l)ene with stones : so that besides them w'hich we did eat fresh, eury shij) did pov.'der and salt five or sixe barrels full of them. . " Besides these, there is another kinde of birds whictt houer in the aire, and ouer the sea, lesser then the others ; and these doe all gather themselves together in the Isl- and, and put themselves vnder the wings of other birds ^^ i iiii': \(»\.\(;ks ok ( akiiiu. 43 dial arc j^ri'atcr : llicsc arc luuncd Cnulci/. 1 here arc also of anolhci sort Iml l)ii»gcr, and whit*- which hilc cvc toward the land) we met her hv the way. swimming toward iatid as swiftly as we couhi saile. So soone as we saw her, we pursued her with our i)oals, and hv maine strens'th tookr her, whos(; Mesh was as jLiooc veres ohie." I to he eaten as the llcsh <>f a calfe of two ( 'artier then N.nli'd noi ill, entered the Stiait of I5elle ish ancliormu" a t \M inc Sahl on. stil I settlement east Brad« 15; of lirador*- I5ay. •' White Sand | Blanc Sablon | is a road in the which there is no place jruarded from the south, or southeast. But t(nvards south-southwest from the saide road there are two Hands, one of the which is called Brest Island, and the other the Hand of Birds, in which there is great store of Godet/, and crows with red beaks and red feete: they make their nests in holes vnder the iriound euen a.s conies." The ijreat Fn-nch naviijator hai bored in the ancient port of Brest, near these Islands; the "Hand of Birds," being the present Parroqueet Island, fifteen miles east- ward of the mouth of Esquimaux River. Our voyager then coasted along these forbidding- shores to St. James River, where he first saw the natives ; " they vveare theirjiaire tied on the top like a wreath of W 44 IKK (iKOi.kAi'HICAl KVOlAillON OK LAHKADOU. I 'ii'i ill ■A r III i 4 hay ; . . . they paint themselves with certain Roan colors ; iheir boates are made of the harke of birch trees, with the which they fish and take great store of scales, and as (arre as we could vnderstand since our cornming thither, that is not their habitation, but they come from the maine land out of hotter countries, to catch the saide seals and other necessaries for their lining." These red men must have been the Mountaineer Indians, which still come down to the coast from the warmer interior each summer to fish for seal, ('artier makes no men- tion of the Eskimo, who would undoubtedly have been encountered if their roving bands had been livinij on the coast from Chateau Bay to the Seven Isles, which he so carefully explored. This coast appeared to Cartier so disagreeable, un- productive, and barren, that he exclaimed, " It ought to be the countrv which God had piven to Cain." So he crossed the Strait of Belle Isle, sailed over to Newfound- land, coasted that Island to Cape Anguille, which he reached on the 24th of June. From there he sailed over to the Magdalen Islands, to the Bird rocks (Isles aux Margaulx), thence to Prince Edward's Island, thence to Miramichi, afterward to Gaspe Bay, and coasted Anti- costi, crossing over again to near and within sight of the Mingan Islands, Not on this voyage discovering the liver St. Lawrence, he finally turned homewards, coast- ing along the Labrador shore, touching at Cape Tien- not, now called Cape Montjoli. Thence he returned to France through the Strait of Belle Isle. The next year Cartier returned, sailing again through the Strait of Belle Isle ; and, coasting along the southern shores of Labrador, discovered the river St. Lawrence. 45 I •i f 46 IIIK t;KO(;KAFIIlCAL EVOLUTION OF I.AHRADOK. II J I ^ ! 1 1 '■ ! tlj, ( ■ Oil his ihird voyage, Cartiei entered the Gulf of St. Lawrence, ])assino in between Newfoundland and Cape Breton, thus for the first time demonstrating that New- foundland was an island and not a part of the continent. The next step in the geographical evolution of Lab- rador is seen in Mercator's great map of 1569. Kohl tells us that for the compilation of this map Mercator had collected many printed and manuscript maps and charts, and many re})orts of voyages of discovery. " Hut," says Kohl, "the best portion O''" lercator's work, and a real and valuable improvement upon all former maps, is his delineation of the large peninsula of Labrador, lying southwest of Greenland. On all former maps, that re- gion was ill-shapen and most incorrectly drawn. But here, under the name of 'Terra Corterealis,' it receives its proper shape, with a full and just development, which iiad not been given to it on any map prior to 1569. He makes its eastern coast run southeast and northwest, as it really does from about 53° to 60° N. In the north he plainly shows the narrow entrance of Hudson's Strait, and at the west of it a large gulf, called by him ' Golfam de Merosro.' This remarkable gulf may be an indica- tion of either Hudson's Bay or only the Bay of Ungava. I think that the latter was meant ; first, because the 'Gulf of Merosro' has the longitude of themouth of the river St. Lawrence, which is also the longitude of the Bav of Ungava ; second, because the said gulf is represented as closed in the west. The western coast of the Bay of Ungava runs high up to the north, where Hudson's Strait is often filled with ice. This may have led the unknown discoverers, the informants of Mercator, to suppose that it was closed in the west. If they had \h m liir. I'OKTIFCUKSE VOYACIKS. 47 k)t)kc(l round Cape Wolstenliolm into Hudson's Bay, thev would have ju-rceivt'd a broad bay and oi)cn water before tbeni. Mercatoi does not indieaie, so far as 1 Is now tl le sources from which he derived these remarkable improve- )nents for liis chart, which were not known by Homem in 1558. and of wiiich tliere are only slight indications -V I! r • ! 11 our M creator's map,'"' they have reaehed the bay,*' Hudson's, or at least Ungava Bay. ' We ean, there- fore, state with the greatest certainty that Hudson's Bay,' Hudson's vStrait as far as (Jngava Bay, . . . 'had been discovered l)efore the publication of Ortelius's at- las, which look place in 1570,' or, better, i)efore the pul)- lication of Mercator's chart, which took j)lace in 1569. ' But we are not equallv certain that the discovery falls within the years 1558 to 1570,' or, better, 1569, 'because we have only the nesjative evidence of Dieijo Homem's chart to support the latter assertion. The fact itself is, however, probable enough.* " To the English navigators of the i6th and 17th cen- turies succeeding Cartier we owe the next step in our knowledge of the geography of the Labrador peninsula. In 1577 Master Martin Frobisher sighted the coast of Northern I^abrador, which he called " Frisland,"^ using a word which frequently apjiears in the early charts. The point he first sighted was probably north of 58"", for after coasting four days along the coast for perhaps a distance of nearly two hundred miles, a voy- age of eight days, between the 8th and i6th of July, would carry him to Frobisher's Strait. Moreover his descrii)tion of the coast applies well to the northern ex- tremity of Labrador beyond Flopedale and Okkak. The narrative reads thus : "The 4. of luly we came within the making of Fris- land. From this shoare 10. or 12. leagues, we met great Islands of yce, of halfe a mile, some more, some * Dr. Asher does noi mention Mercator's map of 1569. He had before lilm the map of Ortelius of 1570, who was only a follower and copyist of Mercator, but adopted his views.) ,:', 4' THE PORTUGUESE VOYAGES. 49 i lesse in compasse, shewing above the sea, 30. or 40. fathoms, and as we supposed fast on ground, where with our lead we could scarce sound the bottom for depth. '• Here in place of odoriferous and fragrant smels of sweete gums, and pleasant notes of musicall birdes, which other Countreys in more temperate Zones do yeeld, wee tasted the most boisterous Boreal blasts mixt with snow and haile, in the moneths of lune and luly, nothing inferior to our vntemperate winter ; a sudden alteration, and especially in a place of Parallele, where the Pole is not eleuate aboue 6t. degrees ; at which height other Countreys more to the North, yea vnto 70. degrees, shew themselues more temperate than this doth. All along this coast yce lieth, as a continuall bulwarke, and so defendeth the Country, that those that would land there, incur great danger. Our Generall 3. days together attempted with the ship boate to haue gone on shoare, which for that without great danger he could not accomplish, he deferred it vntil a more convenient time. All along the coast lie very high mountains cou- t'red with snow, except in such places,where through the steepenes of the mountains of force it must needs fall. I'^oure days coasting along this land, we found no signe of habitation. Little birds, which we judged to have lost the shoare, by reason of thickc fogges which that Country is much subiect vnto. came flying into our ships, which causeth us to suppose, that the Country is both more tollerable, and also habitable within, than the out- ward shoare maketh shew or signification. " From hence we departed the eight of July ; on the 16. of the same, we came with the making of land, which land our Generall the veere before had named the EAST ■■! 1 f I ' II 1 ' ,:i ■ I'll 'I! , ' ; ISIXV : WEYMOUTH S VOYAGE. 53 the month, and the first days of September, were spent in that search. Besides the already known openings, namely, Cumberland Strait, Frobisher's Strait, and Hud- son's Strait, two more openings were found, Davis s Inlet in 56°, and Ivuctoke Inlet in 54° 30'. Davis's men had to cross the Atlantic in his miserable craft, and he per- formed the voyage through the equinoctial gales in little more than three weeks. He reached England again in the beginning of October, 1586." (Henry Hudson, cxv.) Davis was followed by Weymouth in 1602. Accord- ing to Rundall : " From the 5th to the 14th of July, the navigator appears to have been ranging along the coast of Labra- dor, where, on the loth, variation 22° 10' W., he saw many islands. On the 15th he was in latitude 55° 31', variation 17° 15' W.; and the day following saw ' a very pleasant low land, all islands,' in latitude N. 55°, varia- tion 18° 12' W. On the 17th he entered and sailed up an inlet for thirty leagues, in sanguine hope of having found the desired passage ; but he was doomed to dis- appointment. In this inlet, which has been identified with Sleeper's Bay on Davis's Inlet, Weymouth en- countered his last peril; and escaped in safety. The fly- boats were assailed bv a furious storm, which terminated in a whirlwind of extreme violence, that rendered them, for a while, completely unmanageable ; and though very strongly built, they took in so much water, for want of spar decks, that they narrowly escaped being swamped. As soon as the weather cleared up, the course was shaped for England." (Page 68.) The Labrador coast was next seen by Master John 54 IHE GEOGRAPHICAL EVOLUTION OF LABRADOR. 1 Y. ■< rif '\^ I 11 r I.' !'..^ti h.rtiuJUJkJmx*^ !!;i! ,1 l! l''l »» I!:!! i: -' :l'' ill! The following recollections of our student days are offered with the suggestion that the more adventuresome of our college boys of the present day might spend to advantage the long summer vacation in cruising on our northern coasts, and combine in agreeable proportions science and travel. In the summer of i860, while a student in Bowdoin College, I joined the WiUiams College expedition to Labrador and Greenland under the charge of Professor P. A. Chadbourne. June 27th found us on board the Nautihis^ a staunch schooner of about 140 tons, com- manded by Capt. Randlett. Soon after five o'clock of a bright, fresh morning our vessel cast off from the wharf at Thomaston, Me. The Thomaston band played a lively air, a clergyman made a parting address, calling down the blessings of Heaven upon the argonauts ; our Nestor replied, the students cheering- for the citizens of Thomaston and the band, and with a favoring northwest wind the Nautihis, gliding down the current of the St. George's River, a deep fiord, in a couple of hours reached the open sea. Our course lay inside of Monhegan, with its high, bold sea-wall. Passing on, the Camden Hills recede, and we endeavor with the glass to make out the White Moun 60 THE NEWFOUNDLAND COAST. 6l tains, said by some to have been seen by Weymouth from inside of Monhegan. The ocean swell not being con- ducive to historical controversy, we turn to watch the Mother Carey's chickens and the grampus as well as the fin-back whales sporting in the waves. By the next morning we had sailed 190 miles from Thomaston, past Cape Sable, and our northwest wind still attending, we bowl along, through schools of por- poise, while two or three whales pass within a few fathoms of our vessel, showing their huge whitish backs. The next day our seven-knot breeze does not fail us, and takes us by the 30th into a region of light winds and calms off the Gut of Canso. July I St we sail along Cape Breton Island, its red shores glistening in the noonday sun and then mantled with purple as the sun goes down over Louisbourg. As darkness sets in the lights of Sidney appear. The next morning's sun rose on Cape Ray, around which we beat, passing within a mile of Channels, a fishing-village of Newfoundland, behind which rise steep hills clothed with " tucking-bush," or dwarf spruce and larch. Cape Ray pushes boldly into the sea, its precipitous sides of decomposed sandstone furrowed by the rains which pour down it^ carred cheeks, on which still linger banks of the last winter's snows. By the next evening we pass Cape St. Georges. The 4th was celebrated in the Gulf of St. Lawrence amid fog and rain. It was succeeded by a twenty-four hours' gale, rather severe for the season, which tested the excel- lent qualities of the Nautilus as a sea boat. This being our first storm at sea was enjoyed more keenly than sim- ilar gales in after-years. The sea swept our deck, but ^ ' 1 ■ : I 62 LIKE AND NATURE IN SOUTHERN LABRADOR. I ! < I w v ■ I' ! i!i I' ' 11: h 1^ only a few drops entered the cabin. The experience was novel and interesting ; fortunately we were not sea- sick ; the long waves sloped up like far-reaching hills ; sea-birds rode on their crests, and the wind, like a swarm of furies, tore through our rigging. There were but oc- casional glimpses from the companion-way of our dark, close cabin, redolent with the stench of the bilge-water. The storm abated after sunset, and the morning of the 6th found us only fifty miles from Caribou Island. Towards noon the first iceberg was seen ; others came into view, some stranded, others floating on the sea. The evening was a glorious one ; after a gorgeous sunset, the twilight lasting until after ten o'clock, the moon rose upon berg and sea. We were in an arctic ocean; creatures born in the Greenland seas floated past our vessel, and while becalmed at night we fished up from a depth of sixty or seventy fathoms a basket star- fish {Astrophyton ai^assizii^ large enough to cover the bottom of a pail. The impressions made on our minds the next day as we approached the coast and passed in shore, winding through the labyrinth of islands fringing the main land, are ineff'aceable. That and other days in Southern Labrador are stamped indelibly on our mind. It was passing from the temperate zone into the life and nature of the arctic regions. There is a strange commingling of life-forms in the Strait of Belle Isle : the flora and fauna of the boreal regions struggling, as it were, to dis- place the arctic forms established on these shores since the ice period, when Labrador was mantled in perennial snow and ice, when the great auk, the walrus, and the narwhal abounded in the waters of the Gulf of St. Law- iiii m: THE LABRADOR FLORA. 63 rencti, and the Greenland flora, represented by the Arenaria groeiilandica, the dwarf cranberry, and the curlew-berry or black Empetrum, nestled among the snow and ice of the glacier-ridden hills. We landed on the morning of July 7th, and I was astonished at the richness of the arctic flora which car- peted the more level portions of the island. Groves of dwarfed alders, over which one could look while sitting down, crowded the sides of the valleys, watered by rills of pure ice-cold water. The groves of spruce and hack- matack were of the same lilliputian height. In the glades of these dwarfed forests and scattered over the moss-covered rocks and bogs were Cornns canadensis, two varieties in flower ; Kalmia glavca was in profusion, as attractive a flower as any ; the curlew-berry {Em- petrum nignmt), the dwarf cranberry, with other flow- ers and grasses characteristic of the arctic and Alpine regions. Particularly noticeable were the clumps of dwarf willow from six inches to a foot in height, now in flower and visited by the arctic humble-bee and other wild bees. Other insects of subarctic and arctic types were numerous, among them a geometrid moth {Rheu- maptcra hastata), which extends from the Alps and snow-fields of Lapland around through Greenland and Labrador to the mountain regions of Maine, New Hampshire, northern New York, Colorado, and Alaska. The flies, beetles, and other forms had an arctic aspect, showing that on the shores of the Strait of Belle Isle the insect fauna is largely tinged with circumpolar forms. On the 7th of July our party of seven men landed, lodged in a Sibley tent, and the Nautilus left us for the .' ii i ii I ■III «4 r.IFE AND NATURE IN SOUTHERN LABRADOR. ^f 1 ■ ' "::■' / ', !: if ;■ 1 , ■ M i ■ If \" % ii: 1 1' ' i ■ i ?, i ; 1 |:^ 11:!'' II i: fr ■■' t, 1 ' i i ■ 1 M i ' l'|. : it: t Si, r 'S 1 '\: f Is ■ 1 •il ■1 ' Hi. Greenland seas with the majority of our party. Our tent, provisions, and baggage becoming soaked with the rain and dampness, two days after, we moved over to Caribou Island and built a house of Canada clapboards, kindly loaned for the purpose by the Rev. C. C. Car- penter, missionary to Southern Labrador, for whom a large frame house, sheltering under its roof a chapel, study, and living-rooms, was building. A Canadian clapboard is twelve inches long and six inches wide ; with these and a few joists two of the party built a house twelve feet square, which sheltered us from the sun and the black flies, and only leaked when it stormed, which happened regularly twice a week, usually Wednesdays and Sundays. Six berths were put up on the north side (the seventh man was accommodated in the mission-house) ; a wide board placed on two flour-barrels at the west end served as a dining and study table, and in the southeast corner a little stove, not over fifteen inches square, with a funnel whose elbow, projecting out-of-doors, had to be turned with every change of wind, was the focus, the modern- ized hearthstone, over which hung our Lares and Penates, sundry hams and pieces of dried beef, pieces-dt- resistance of our rrteals, often alleviated by game and fish, clams and scallops or pussels {Pecten magellanicus), with entrees of seal and whale flesh. How we college boys cooked and ate, rambled and slept in those seven weeks of subarctic life is a subject of pleasant memory. They were days of rare pleasure, of continuous health, and formed an experience whose value lasted through our future lives. We made hunting, ornithological, entomological, botanical, and dredging expeditions in all Our ith the )ver to boards, '. Car- hom a chapel, and six of the eltered leaked :vvice a berths lan was board ed as a 3rner a funnel turned lodern- js and eces-de- ne and nicus), college seven emory. health, hrough ogical, in all ; i ■ l!i r I u:^ lli 11 fil IHK LAHKADOR FLORA. 65 directions, bv sea and land ; the geology and the tiora and fauna were explored with zeal, and resulted in the discovery of many new forms and the detection of y\ipine and arctic European species before unknown to this continent. We investigated the Quaternary for- mation, ice marks, drift and fossil shells; procured fossils of the Cambrian red sandstone beds, chiefly a sponge (a new species of Arclupocyatlms), which were scattered along the shore, probably derived from the red sandstone strata so well developed at Bradore, also visited by some of our party. The results were perhaps of some importance to science, but the lessons in natural science we learned were of far greater moment to ourselves. The coast of Labrador is fringed with islands, large and small, from the mouth of the St. Lawrence to Hud- son's Strait. A sailboat can go with safety from one point to the other, and only occasionally will be exposed to the ocean swell. These islands are the exact counter- part of each other, differing mainly only in size and altitude. Caribou Island was two or three miles in length, formed of Laurentian gneiss, which had been worn and molded by glaciers. Its scenic features re- called those of the more rugged portions of the coast of Maine, particularly in Penobscot Bay and Mt. Desert. 'J'he higher portion of the island is of bare rounded rock, with deep valleys or fissures down which run little rills ; these valleys are dense with ferns, shelter many insects, and where they widen out into the lower land support a growth of dwarf spruce, hackmatack and wil- low. In the more protected parts a few poplars and mountain-ash rise to a height of from ten to fifteen feet. 1 1 ■Jli ll .' I .MMt,! Sll l( !»« •11 Jil C.I •■I 66 LIKK AM) NATURK IN SOUTllEkN LAHKAUOK. The Alpine vegetation is mostly confined to the exposed bog«ry |)laces or moors, in which are pools of water, supporting water-boatmen, ease-worms, aquatic beetles and numerous watcr-Heas, and an occasional hair-worm or Oordius. Along the lower portions l)y the shores are patches of salt marsh with shallow pools of water, which in the spring and autumn are undoubtedly frequented by ducks and geese, though only a few of the former were to be seen. Indeed, I was surprised to see so few sea-fowl. The) were principally the parroquet, which abounded on the sea a mile or two away from shore. A favorite breeding-place of this most interesting of arctic birds was in the soft red Cambrian sandstone of Biadore, an island lying fifteen miles easterly from Caribou Island. With their powerful parrot-like beaks they excavate the crumbling rock, extending their galleries in to the dis- tance of several feet. Three of our party made an ex- pedition to this well-known breeding-resort, and in thrusting their hands into the burrows received an occa- sional bite from the sharp strong bills of the birds which was not soon forgotten. Ducks were occasionally seen, the eider-duck and also the coot, as well as the loon, both the northern diver and the red-necked loon. Shore- birds, particularly the ring-necked plover, and others of its family, abounded, while the most familiar bird was a white-headed sparrow which nested near our camp. It was not yet the time for the curlews. About the middle of |ulv the sheldrake and coot, which breed in the inland ponds, lead out their young and appear in great numbers. The old ones are wary and hard to shoot, but the voung will then be in fine condition. At MOUNTAINEER INDIANS. 67 this time the " 'longshoremen" abandon their diet of salt pork, bread and molasses, and feast on game, for then, we were assured, they have "great plenty fowl." In August, also, one or two families of the red Indians or Mountaineers of the interior come down to the mouth of the Esquimaux, or '* Hawskimaw" River, as it is pro- nounced by the settlers, to hunt seal, especially the young, and Jucks as well as curlew. These Indians are entirely governed in their wandering by the situation of the deer and other game. One may travel a hundred miles up the Esquimaux River without meeting them. I saw but a single Esquimau man at Caribou Island. His low stature, his prominent, angular cheek-bones, pentagonal face, and straight black hair sufficiently char- acterized his stock. The only other native Escjuimau was the wife of an Englishman, John Goddard, the " King of Labrador," who lived on a point of land three miles west of Caribou Island. She was a famous hunter, would go out in a boat, shoot a seal and dress it, making boots and moccasins from the skin. Whether these Esquimaux had strayed down from the north or, as I suspect, were the remnants of their people who may have inhabited the entire coast from the Gulf of St. Lawrence to the arctic regions, deserves further investi- gation. Few mammals were to be seen. The deer and cari- bou were confined to the mainland. On our island was a white fox, or rather a blue one, for his summer pelage was of a slate-color. His burrow was situated in a hill- side behind our house. He would prowl about our camp at night, and he might have known that it was un- safe to come within reach of our guns. His skin un- I ! !■• il I 6S 1,1 IK AM) NAIIKI. IN SOUrHKRN I.AHKADOU. 'm if' (loubtedly adorns the museum of the Lyceum ot Nat- ural History of Williams College. A weasel also visited our camp. The otter fre(juents the brooks at the head of Salmon and Esquimaux rivers. In winter they rarely come outside, /,<•., to the coast. It Is well known that in Newfoundland the bears, especially those living near shore, will eat lish, their diet being mixed, and such bears are more savage than those in the interior, which live chieHy on berries and ants. While on Caribou Island a fisherman living a mile and a half from us had his sea-trout nets invaded by two old bears accompanied by a young one ; at low water they would walk out to the nets, tearing them apart in order to eat the fish. We were told that a Mr. Hay ward, an Englishman who lives at a distance of two miles across the bay, had about ten years since shot the last polar-bear seen on this coast. Speaking of trout, there are two kinds : one living in the brooks and lakes, the other the sea-trout, a handsome lish about twelve inches in length, whose food we found consisted of a surface-swimming marine shrimp, the Mysis oculata, which lives in immense shoals. The sea- trout is taken in nets, and so far as we experimented do not, in salt water, rise to the fly. Although it was now the 15th of July, the warmer summer weather had not yet come, we were told by the people on shore. There is, however, scarcely any spring in Labrador. The rivers open and the snow disappears by the loth of June as a rule, and then the short summer is at once ushered in. Potatoes, and especially turnips, are raised without LABRADOR BUTTERFLIES. 69 much difficulty as far north as Caribou Island. Rhu- barb is said to do well farther up the coast towards the Mecatina Ishmds. Aniong the wild-Howers bloomiufi in the middle of July were the dandelion and Potcntilla anserina. Another Potent ilia was ihe /'. truicntata, the mountain trident, with its three-toothed leaf and modest white flower. It was pleasant to see this llower, so familiar from my earliest childhood, as it flourishes on the plains of IJrunswick, Me., and is common on Mt. Washington as well as on the mountains of Maine, and abounds on the bare spots about Moosehead Lake, particularly at the foot of Mt. Kineo. The wild cur- rant, strawberry, and raspberry were in flower; the straw- berry plants were luxuriant, sometimes eight inches in height, but the raspberries were dwarfed, not exceeding the strawberry in height. Up the rivers the raspberries and blackberries are abundant, but the latter low and dwarfish. The shad bush {^Anic lane hie r eanadensis) was now in flower, blossoming in southern New England in April or early May, while Rtibus ehanueviorusy the cloud-berry, so abundant in Greenland and Arctic America as well as on the fields of Norway and Sweden, and the " tundras" of Siberia, was going out of flower. With it were asso- ciated the star-flower, Trientalis aviericana, a few Clin- foniii borcalis, Smilaeina bifoliata and probably ^S". stellata, Streptopus ainplcxi folia ; one or two species of Andro- meda ; an Iris, species of Vaccinium, \\\q Arctostapliylus uva-ursi or bear-berry ; the shore-pea, a honeysuckle {Lonieera coeridea), a Viburnum, and also the buckbean ( Menyanthes trifoliata). Among the flowers fluttered the white butterfly f Mil I Ml : I ! 11 i iiii! jilii , iM'l''' i ;: :! Ml' (, " El 70 III'K AiNM) NAIUKE IN SOUTHERN LABRADOR. {Pier is frigid a), a Col i as lahradorensis, Ar^i^ynnis tricla- ris, and some g-eonictrid moths, while a few owlet moths ttevv out of the grass at the late twihght, which now lasted until near eleven o'clock at night, wiicn fine print could be read. We were told that the average tem|)eralure in June here is 48°, that of July 56". In the warmer days of summer the thermometer rises from 64' to 68°, rarely to 70'. July 17th was one of the warmest and most pleas- ant days of the month; the temperature was 60° F. The 2ist, however, was much warmer, the thermometer being 72' F. July i;^raiil<\ I Natural si/i*.) none of the distinctive characteristics of animal or plant life, and only barely earning the right to be called or- ganisms, that vague term we apply for convenience to any, even the simplest structures endowed with life. Of all the pleasures of a naturalist's existence, dredg- ing has been, to our mind, the most intense. The severe exertion, the swimming brain, the qualms of sea-sick- ness, tired arms and a broken back, the memory of all these fade away at the sight of the new world of life, or at least the samples of such a world, which lie wriggling and sprawling on the deck of the sailbo.at, or sink out of sight in the mud and ooze of the dredge, to be brought iil t*,. 1 » ii I . y' til I '1 i Up lU P IS' 1^ ! {,■ • ■! f i 1 1 'hi :■ ■-; ilii 1 k I !i ::it 1 I 78 1,IIK AND NATl'KK IN SOUIIIKKN LAHKADOK. to light by vigorous dashes of water drawn in over the side of the boat. Those days of dredging on the Lab- rador coast, where there was such an abundance and luxuriance of arctic varieties, vyere days never to be for- gotten. There is a nameless charm, to our mind, in everything pertaining to the far north, the arctic world, and we can easily appreciate the fascination which leads one back again to the polar regions, even if hunger and frost had once threatened life. Arctic exploration has but begun, and though its victims will yet be numbered by the score, enthusiasts will still attempt the dangers of arctic navigation, and fresh trophies will yet be won. Eaily in August, during the few still clear nights suc- ceeding bright and' pleasant days, wc had auroras of wondrous beauty, not excelled by any depicted by arctic voyagers. On the loth of August the curlews appeared in great numbers. On that day we saw a flock which may have been a mile long and nearly as broad ; there must have been in that flock four or five thousand ! The sum total of their notes sounded at times like the wind whistling through the ropes of a thousand-ton vessel ; at others the sound seemed like the jingling of multitudes of sleigh- bells. The flock soon after ap})earing would subdivide into squadrons and smaller assemblies, scattering over the island and feeding on the curlew-berries now ripe. The small j)lover-like birds also appeared in flocks. The cloud-berry was now ripe and supplied dainty tid-bits to these birds. By the i8th of the month the golden rods were in flower. Here, as has been noticed in arctic regions, few bees and wasps visit the flowers ; the great majority of LABRAl)f)k KOSSILS, 79 insect visitors are fiies (Muscidae), especially the flesh fly and allied forms. A bumble-bee occasionally presents himself, more rarely a wasp, with an occasional ichneu- mon fly, but the two-winged flies, and those of not many species, were constant visitors to the Au<^ust flowers. The black flies still remainci to this date terri- ble scourges in calm weather, though »n cloudy days and at night they mostly disappeared. Wandering through the fog and drizzle along the mud flats on the northern side of the island 1 pick{;d up Aporrhais occidentalism Fnsiis tornatus, Cardita bin'calis, large valves of Saxicava rugosa, Buccinum and Astarie sulcata 2iVi(S. compressa ; these dnd Pectcn is/a ndicus und other shells forming much the same assemblage as I had dredged a few days previous out in the straits in fifty fathoms. The only recent shells lying about were shal- low-water forms, such as the common clam, Tcllina fiisca and the razor shell. It was evident that hers was a raised sea-bottom, and the Quaternary formation. In the afternoon I returned to the spot and dug up many more shells mingled with pieces of a yellow limestone containing Silurian fossils, brachiopods, and corals. This horizon, then, represented a deep sea-bottom, over which the open sea must have stood at least 300 feet, while the clay fossils of the mouth of the Esquimaux River must have lived in a deep muddy bay sheltered from the waves and currents of the open sea. The drift deposits of La- brador are scanty in extent compared with those of the Maine coast. They are but isolated patches compared with the extensive beds of sand and clay which compose the Quaternary deposits of New England. On the 2 2d August we made our last excursion up I 4^ ■' Ij I t ji I i||i!i I u * i' :'!i| it 1 i I. ji r!i. I i; ■:m 80 MIK AND NArUKK IN SOUTllKKN I^AHKADOR. the Esquimaux River, j2:oing up some six miles from its mouth. From a hill-top I could look over the surface of this lake-dotted land, 'i'he surface was rugged and hare in the extreme. The river valley, however, was well wooded, the si)ruce and birch perhaps thirty feet in height. Here and there the river passed through high j)recipilous banks of sand. The hills were rough, scarred with ravines, precipices, and deep gaps, ihe syenite wearing into irregularly hummocky hills, the rough places not lilled up with drift, and thus the contours tamed down as in New England. Indeed, Labrador at the present day is like New England at the close of the ice period or at the beginning of the epoch of great riv- ers, before the terraces were laid down and the country adapted for man's residence. Labrador was never adapted for any except scattered nomad tribes. It is still an unfinished land. While the hills were l)are and the rocks covered with the reindeer moss, here and there by the river's edge in favorable, protected places were tall alders and willows, with groups of asters and golden rods. Here I saw a veritable toad, and glad enough was I to recognize his lineaments. 1 was also told that there were frogs in ex- istence, though we never saw or heard them. There are no snakes or lizards, so that our history of these animals in Labrador will be as brief as that of the Irish historian, but we did find a small salamander at Belles Amours in a later trip to this coast. On our return we found that a whaler had towed a whale into the mouth of the river and was about to try out the oil. We secured a piece of the flesh, and on reaching camp boiled it; it was not bad eating, tasting THE RETURN HOME. 8l like coarse beef. Seal's flippers we also found not to be distasteful, though never to be rej^ardcd as a delicacy. Dredging and collecting insects on fine days when not too calm filled up the measure of our seven weeks. The time passed rapidly, the days were too short for all the work we planned to do, and it was not without regret that we left the rugged untamed shores of " the Labra- dor." On the afternoon of the very day she had set for her return to Caribou Island, the Nautilus hove in sight. As she made our harbor she struck upon a sunken rock,, tore off a piece of her keel, but slid off and came to an- chor as near as practicable to the mission house, and then succeeded the mutual spinning of Labrador and Greenland yarns by the reunited party. J ' l.i- .^, ^, ^'•V, ^. IMAGE EVALUATION TEST TARGET (MT-S) fe <> ^0 :/. /. K° I/. 1.0 I.I 1^ 12.2 US f 1^ 12.0 ■yuu '^ III IL25 i 1.4 m 1.6 V] <^ /a O / %V- ^^ «i 7 /A Hiotpgraphic Sderices Corporation 23 WEST MAIN STREET WEBSTER, N.Y. 14S80 (716) 872-4S03 fV iV \\ !N' iff ^^ 6 •* I CHAPTER V. ONE OF FIFTY DAYS IN SOUTHERN LABRADOR. n ' 1 [[ m: Is t, n! I' ^1 i i : Four o'clock Saturday morning, July 7th, i860, in the Strait of Belle Isle, and that huge rampart of rock, these few icebergs stranded here and there, this occa- sional lump of floe-ice floating down with the tide, these outlandish puffins, and large flocks of eider-ducks skim- ming the surface or flying high overheard, tell us that, after nine days of sailing, we are sighting the Labrador coast. Here codfish grow largest and most numerous; so twenty thousand fishermen from the British colonies and about five thousand Yankees migrate hither every sum- mer for the cod, herring, and salmon that swarm in these icy waters. Here, in the spring of the year, num- bers of hardy Newfoundland sealers risk their lives in the ice just breaking up ; while all the year round there are estimated to be five thousand Esquimaux, Micmacs, Englishmen, Frenchmen, Jerseymen, and half-breeds, who live, thanks to the codfish, on these favored shores. Here people are born, live, and die, who have never seen a horse, cow, sheep, or cat, or a civilized dog. Wild Esquimaux dogs, savage, wolfish creatures, are the only beasts of burden. The animals and birds are half arctic and half temper- ate. Sweet, dwarfish, arctic flowers here nestle in beds of reindeer-moss, while our Alpine flora one may gather 82 APPROACHING TITE COAST. 83 on Mount Washington luxuriates with stunted growths of bushy firs and birches. So, nearly all the shells, worms, and creeping things are the same in kind and number as those that Otho Fabricius wrote of in his " Fauna Gronlandica," during his dreary life in southern Greenland one hundred years ago. As we approach land no capes run out to greet us, or sheltered harbor opens its arms to embrace. An unin- terrupted line of coast confronts the gulf. In one place alone is the intense monotony of the outline relieved by the Hills of Bradore, where the coast sweeps round fif- teen miles to the eastward, and the Strait widens out. It is a charming morning, the sun up but an hour, and just breeze enough to move us over the placid sea. Flocks of grave, enormous-hook-billed puffins sweep by us in squadrons of fifties and hundreds, or flocks of eider- ducks fiy swiftly out from the land. Coming up nearer to this strange coast, the line breaks here and there ; a few rocks and islands start out from the shore. We pass by schools of two-masted fishing-boats, with two men a'piece hooking codfish ; we hail the fellows, but they are too busy to look up. Things look a little more live- ly ; more islands appear, channels wind through them, choked with fleets of fishing-smacks. But the wind leaves us, so we put out a boat and are towed through these narrow passages, whose walls of rock rise on each side higher than the masts of our schooner, though not very precipitously, for all has been worn down and sub- dued by water. So we move along, as if on a smooth- flowing, deep, narrow river, or a Norwegian fiord ; now we round a point, and can almost jump ashore ; then a bend in the channel takes us over to the other side ; now i.iii r 'I 1 . I fi . V '■ If I 5 C 'il 84 ONE OF FIFTY DAYS IN SOUTHERN LABRADOR. we luff a little to avoid a group of Nova Scotia fisher- men, fat, sleek, moon-faced fellows, whose boats, loaded with fish, are busy discharjjing their burden, pitching up on deck half-dead cod, which are seized in a trice by gioups of " headers," "splitters," and "gutters." And then the multitudinous smells, now coming fierce and strong from deck and hold, anon gentle and spicy as the cook turns the morning fry. Now the surface is streaked with oily films, but these break away and dis- close, six or eight fathoms below, a clear, sandy bottom, strewed with fish offal, on which banks of sea-urchins feed. If we look long and steadily enough, we shall see swarms of beautiful, delicate, transparent jelly-fish, with an occasional Clio, a winged moliusk, fully as pure and beautiful, only more transparent. Suddenly the bottom is obscured by an immense shoal of capliii, slowly swim- ming just above the bottom. The rocks now reveal green, sunny declivities; little valleys, sprinkled with flowers; an arctic butterfly comes out to our vessel ; and now we open upon a house ; it is only a deserted fish- house, but a cur, keeping up an incessant barking on the other side of the hill, lets us know that there are human beings, as well as canine, not far off. If we may believe it, there is a small, stunted, homely, Quebec cow feeding on the side of the hill. Here was a clear case of unnat- ural selection. The scenic features of this coast do not demand a cow to grace the foreground. Her nautical owner informs us, in sturdy Labradorian dialect, that she had been brought up this spring. " I made her fast to her moorings, and there let her bide to eat the grass." Her husband had broken loose from his moorings, and was emulating the roar of the waves on the " land-wash." CARIBOU ISLAND. 85 The children, more used to seals and sea-cows, had not vet recovered from their astonishment at this freak of Nature. The channel now widens out into the hay of Bonne Espdrance, a fine open space of water, tolerably well sheltered from storms. Two days after I ^ot settled on Caribou Island, in Salmon Bay, three miles cast of Bonne Espcrance. Nearly the whole coast of Labrador is lined with mul- titudes of small islands, separated by deep, narrow chan- nels from the mainland, with here and Ihere a bay of some extent, where the islands are separated far apart. Thus, a small sail-boat can start from the mouth of the St. Lawrence, and take an inside j)assa<2^e up to the Strait of Belle Isle, and there will only be a few places where she will encounter the outside swell. These num- berless islets and channels are too numerous and intricate to be accurately mapped. At least, our ordinary charts ^ive no accurate idea of their location, and navigation for the whole coast is a matter of guess-work. Caribou Island is the largest within fifty miles, per. haps, of Salmon Bay. It is about two miles long and half as broad. But it is in vain to guess about the length or breadth of any part of this rough-and-tumble country, so I will measure it with my legs. It is a fresh, cool, breezy morning ; thermometer, say, at 56°. At noon it will not be higher than 65°. At the outset, it may as well be said that this is no country for slippers or calfskin boots of ordinary make. Here Jersey cowhide or native-made sealskin boots are the mode. With anything on but these, two minutes' walk out-doors will wet one's feet thoroughly, so wet ^1 If ■ i [ i f i 1 ' r i 86 ONE OK IIKTY DAYS IN SOUTHERN LABRADOR. and soaked is the boggy ground. For bog-trotting, or nioss-traniping, or climbing rocks, sealskins a la Esqtn- viaux, so light and water-tight, are indispensable. The way lies round the head of a little bay, which meets a quiet vale, filled with grass and ferns at the top» but half-way down, as it widens out, choked with a stunted spruce and fir growth, or what the people call "tucking," or " tuckermel-bush." It is in vain that we try to push through it, so dense the growth, so gnarled, twisted, and grown together in one impenetrable mass the trunks, and so flat and table-like the branches spread out above. Here is a perfectly tight shelter, should it rain. Many a hunter, belated at nightfall, has crept under these bushes and made a comfortable night of it. So the bears find good hiding-places here, and cannot be found without dogs to scent them out. Lower down, the valley extends into an alder-swamp, a lilliputian growth, perhaps three feet high, choked ^'ith rank grasses and sedges, crowding the sides of a slow-moving brook. Here mosquitoes and black-flies swarm ; we are under shelter of a cliflf, and there is no wind to keep off these horrible pests. How they rage and torment, these myr- iad entomological furies ! Now for a frantic rush out of this purgatory, and a tiresome climb of a hundred feet up this cliff ! It is high, but not very rough, for all the rocks are hidden by soft reindeer-moss, and the crev- ices are filled up with tuckermel, and the ravines that run down its sides have their dripping, mossy walls sprinkled over with Alpine flowers and their bottoms carpeted with coarse arctic grasses. Only here and there patches of the original granite show themselves. Now and then a brown or yellow butterfly flits by, or an arc- ■ \ SALMON BAY. «7 tic bumhle-bcc hums and buzzes in the Howcrs ; two or three l)eetles crawl over the fern-leaves, while a few meagre, lean-looking files lead a sort of doubtful exist- ence. There is none of that outburst and profusion of insect-life that characterizes woodland life in the States in midsummer. For the benefit of the entomologically curious, I will state that nowhere on the coast, or inland, at least within twenty miles of Salmon Bay, has a grass- hopper been seen or heard of ! The common red-legged grasshopper, that is so abundant everywhere with us all the summer, which luxuriates on the summit of Mount Washington, and is found by arctic travellers about Mel- bourne Island, spread, in fact, all through British and Arctic America, is here wanting, so scanty and parsimo- nious is the distribution of insect-life on these shores. But I must mention the wasp's nest I stumbled upon one day, about as large as one of Meenan's fists, stuck down under the moss, in a mass of roots. Well aware of the notorious temper of these insects, and fully con- scious of past sad experiences, I approached the dread precincts, extended a six-foot pole, and gave a gentle tap — no answer ; another — two individuals crawl out — a simultaneous rush of the invader to the rear ; the " com- bat deepens" — four more dabs with the six-footer — a baker's dozen issue forth and fly around, alas ! how dolo- rous and sad ! They give chase for a pace or two, and then pause, look back irresolutely, and give it up. Such was my experience with Labrador wasps. By this time we have topped the cliff, and far down below lies Salmon Bay. Seven fishermen from New- buryport find here one of the best harbors on the coast — securely landlocked, and good anchorage in fifteen /. J^ 88 ONE OF FIFTY DAYS IN SOUTHERN LABRADOR. f . 1 * :' f ( ■'■1 ' [ > i fathoms' mud — a beautiful dredging-ground. Large cockles, curious pelican's-feet, delicate nereids, clumsy crabs, and neat, active shrimp, abound and multiply as the sands of the sea in number. On the right is Salmon Bay settlement, one of the most populous places on the coast, consisting of seven families. And now ihe eye, s\veej)ing north, east, and west, takes in the vast desola- tion of hills, relieved only by gleaming frngments of ponds, or snow-banks of a sullen white. There is no continuous series of ranges rising uj) back of one an- other, like any well-ordered mountain group, but a chopped sea of undeveloped mountains, whose tops seem to have been ground down by water and ice when the world was much younger than it is now, but which, after this, as if a rebel horde of Titans, made seemingly inef- fectual attempts to grow up again, and only succeeded in spots ; which, bare then, have been kept bare ever since by arctic frosts and snows. If we imagine we can see forests growing among those hills, it is only because we have been told that woods do grow in the sheltered valleys, and now and then venture up the hill-sides. Thus the country runs back for hundreds of miles, the hills rising five to eight hundred feet high, bare and desolate, but the valleys are much better wooded in the interior of the country, be- ing warmer and more sheltered. There are no regular rivers in Labrador, only rows of ponds — and very crooked rows — linked by rapids, which the Mountaineers only can navigate in their light canoes. There are no water-sheds, no continuous valleys to unite into one stream the thousand ponds that gather in every depres- sion. STONE CIRCLES. 89 Hut we have feasted longenou^li upon this rare. uni(|ue scene. We speak not of the freshness of the l)reezc, of the exhilaration and inspiration it l)rin^s, and not, least of all, of the perfect freedom from every sijj^n of lly or lnos(^uito. Now, as we return, for two miles of bog- trottinjj, an hour of hlack-lly and mos(juito li,i»htinjr! While sittmg upon the hill durinii that iialf-hour's rest the breeze kept the Hies from our face ; but how secretly and in what untoward numbers iiad tin' silvery-lei»,u:ed rascals crept into our llannel shirts, covered hat and back, (\o\n[i nothiiiii but hold on for the wind ! but now, under lee of this wall, the pla;»«M. J^. ^l-^S^^ i -• ■'•■-. '■*■ ■,,..: ;. .*i*wrt^*a maailata) flew aboard the vessel. The day was spent in searching for eider nests, of which I found a dozen in the " tucking-bush," with thirty eggs, and the rude nests and eggs of the saddle-back gull. June i6th was a beautiful day, rather warm, with light winds from the east and south, or quite calm. In the afternoon a shower passea over from the west, and at night the wind was northerly ; \\iC southwest summer winds had not yet set in, the prevailing winds being northerly. We spent the day in a search for the eggs of the " waupigan " or common cormorant, and those of the shag or double- crested cormorant ; William, a very intelligent French Canadian, takingusto their nesting-place in his row-boat. The nests were situated on a high cliff, a sort of shelf. We let William down over the precipice with a rope. There were fifty-five nests in all, and over them rose flocks of cormorants disturbed at our coming; they were very shy and flew rapidly far off", wheeling about in cir- cles, but not daring to come near the nesting-place. There were five eggs in a nest ; the latter were about 20 inches in outside diameter, built of thick birch limbs, whitened, as was the rocky shelf, with the excrement of the birds, and the entire neighborhood was pervaded with a far-reaching and intolerable stench of decaying fish. The eggs of the common cormorant are said to be laid earlier in the season than those of any other bird ; they are long, pointed, and of a dirty tea-color, some nearly white. The shags' nests, mixed with those of the waupigan, were situated in another place adjoining. They are usually laid on the bare rock, and William was surprised to find them on the precipice. The eggs are t % "smmmmmmm ^, 104 A summkr's cruisk to nortiikrn i.ahrador. smaller than those of the common cormorant, are whiter and more pointed, and are laid later than those of any other bird. On our return we went by invitation into William's house ; his children were attractive in looks, with fine eyes. This family and a neighboring one were the two leading I'rcnch Canadian families on the coast. They told us that it was harder to gain a livelihood than here- tofore, the game and tish getting scarcer. Still, one family winter before last shot 1 100 partridges. William, by the way, told us that there were four varieties of part- ridge : the spruce partridge, and the white or ptarmigan, of which they distinguish the mountain ptarmigan and the river ptarmigan, the latter the rarest ; the fourth kind they call the pheasant. The partridges were said to be now laying their eggs. William raised last year twenty- five bushels of potatoes, also turnips, while barley, hav- ing three months to grow, ripens on this inhospitable coast. Sheep might be raised ; there were no cows, though to the westward they are kept the year through. We were told that a walrus was killed near St. Augus- tine within twenty-five years, and that two had been seen in this vicinity since then. It will be remembered that the walrus formerly abounded in the Gulf of St. Law- rence, having been rendered extinct by the early fisher- men on the Magdalen Islands. We saw an egging vessel at a distance. The "egg- ers " watch their chances to take great quantities of eggs of sea-birds, especially those of the eider-duck and murres. But there are now few who follow this illegal and nefarious occupation. Twenty years ago the busi- ness was at its height, and a schooner would load a cargo I \ .u i TKANSPARLNCV OK IIIK WATER. 105 of 65 barrels of c^^s ami take them to the States or up the St. Lawrence River to Quebec or Montreal. Of late years they would give half of what they ftmiul to the settlers on the coast as hush-money. When colh'cting the eggs they would make "caches" of them, covering the heaps with moss ; and if they were on the point of being caught they woidd smash the whole cargo of eggs rather than be seized with them. Many are the adven- tures which the eggers have passed through, and the stories told of them rival the tales of smugglers and pri- vateersmen on more favored shores. They still collect anr ."antonly destroy the eggs of murres. '1 lie eggs of the eider-ducks we found to make a good omelet, but those of the murres and gulls were too fishy to be palatable ; the food of the murres and puffin as well as gulls consisting largely of small fish, such as capeliii and lance fish (^Ainmoifytcs). We saw male eiders two years old ; they were brown with a little white ; we were told that the eider is four years in arriving at maturity ; the guillemot only two years ; the puffins and murres becoming adult in one year. The eider-duck is easily domesticated, and the young will follow a person to whom they are accustomed like a dog. As soon as our vessel came into shallow water,-- and in our boat excursions we were constantly impressed by the transparency of the water on this coast — we could look down for thirty or forty feet and see with distinctness the bottom with dark masses of sea-urchins and starfish. The water is more transparent than on the Florida coast. Indeed the fishermen sometimes complain of this prop- erty of the water, saying that the fish can see the nets too readily and do not enter them. The water is so clear 106 A summer's cruise to- northern LABRADOR. 1 ' :1 f .> it I :s that the Ctenophores, Idyia roseola and Pleurobrachia^ as well as another kind I could not secure, were beautifully distinct far down in the pellucid depths. Fishing had begun at this locality to-day, the cod having struck in. It is evident that the ice having disappeared for nearly a month the water inshore undoubtedly had grown warm enough to allow the cod and other fish to come into shoal- water and spawn. It was manifest that as the season opened later and later from south to north, the move- ment inshore would be la^.er and later from south to north, and this fact has undoubtedly given rise to the popular impression that the cod and other fish migrated from the southern to the northern portions of the coast of our continent. I anxiously questioned William as to the nature of the interior of Labrador. He told me that there were plains and terraces inland ; that there were toads and frogs and " lizards," which being interp 2ted undoubtedly means the salamander, most probably Plethodon glutinosus of Baird. He had been here twenty years before he saw a grasshopper, but this was not on the coast, but in the interior ; and I know scarcely a better criterion of an arctic land-fauna than the entire absence of grasshoppers on the Labrador coast, since none occur in the circum- polar regions, either treeless Arctic America, Greenland or Spitzbergen ; but the interior wooded portion of the Labrador peninsula supports a truly boreal or " Canadian" insect fauna, with grasshoppers. Among the insects found were the showy caterpillars o{ Arctia caja and a weevil. Of the more noticeable flowers, there were a pink Arenaria, and a leek-like plant which I have often seen on the summit of Mt. Washington. CARIBOU ISLAND. 107 The 1 7th we weighed anchor, and with light winds and some rain early in the morning, but a strong north- easterly head-wind in the forenoon, we made only twenty- five miles during the day. The coast along our course was of very even height, the monotonous outline being relieved by an occasional elevation. The rock was of syenite with its characteristic scenic features. It was of warm, reddish flesh tints, but full of chinks and cracks, made by the water percolating or running into them and freezing, resulting in the cracking and disruption of large rock masses. Then the continued action of the frost year after year widens the chinks into gulches, with even, precipitous sides, now filled with snow-banks ten or fifteen feet long, and sometimes a dozen or more rods in extent, their edges bordered with arctic flowers. The hills were barren on top, with mosi and dwarf spruce in the cavities or ravines. Here and there were to be seen clumps of grass, but the herbage in a Labrador fore- ground is not grasses or sedges, but low shrubby woody plants such as the dwarf cranberry, the curlew-berry {^E^tipetrum nigrunt), etc., which form a dense uniform carpet of varied but dull green hues. On the afternoon of the i8th we dropped anchor near Caribou Island, and on landing found Mr. Carpenter, the missionary of these shores, who had befriended us in so many ways while camping on this island in the summer of i860. He was well and prospering in his good work. I lost no time in borrowing a spade and digging for quaternary fossils, and was rewarded with the discovery of several species not detected in i860; among these were Serripes groenlandicus, Buccinum widatiim, etc. On the evening before June 20, the longest day of the ■ It :!f ■f 1 Ml !• I08 A SUMMP:r'S cruise to northern LABRADOR. year, I could read fine print until half-past eleven at ni^ht. The next morning I dredged in eight fathoms before weighing anchor, and was delighted to find several large specimens of a delicate bivalve shell (Pandorina arenosa)', it was afterwards dredged up the coast at Long Island in fifteen fathoms in sand and stony bottom. It had not before been found south of the polar seas ; its discovery so far south was interesting from the fact that we had found it in a fossil state in sandy strata of clay at Brunswick, Me., and had also been found in the quaternary clays at Saco, Me., by Mr. C. B. Fuller. The association of this shell with Nticula expmisa (antiqua) in the brick-yard clays gives positive proof that during the wane of the ice period the shore of Maine was the home of a truly polar assemblage of marine animals, and that then as now on this coast these shells were not con- fined to deep water, but lived in shallow retired bays in water not over fifty feet in depth. Throughout the day we were in sight of the butte-like Bradore Hills, the highest of the three mountains being 1264 feet above the level of the Gulf. As these moun- tains overlook the scene of Jacques Cartier's explorations in the Straits of Belle Isle, we would suggest that the highest of the three elevations be named Mt. Cartier. On the shores of Bradore Bay are still to be seen, it is said, the ruins of the ancient port of Brest, which was founded by the Bretons and Normans about the year 1500. The ruins are situated about three miles west of the present boundary of Canada at Blanc Sablon. Samuel Roberton states in his Notes on the Coast of Labrador : " As to the truth of Louis Robert's remarks there can be no doubt, as maybe seen from the ruins and 11 MOUNT CARTIER. 109 terraces of the buildings, which were chiefly constructed of wood. I estimate that at one time it contained 200 houses, besides stores, etc., and perhaps 1000 inhabitants in the winter, which would be trebled during the sum- mer. Brest was at the height of its prosperity about the year 1600, and about thirty years later the whole tribe e,' i-'ii^^'^^i: '-^1>%i ■ -' t'. ,*&"' '^ -.-Ki^i^J THE BRADORE HILLS, THE HIGHEST PEAK MT. CARTIER, of the Eskimos, who had given the French so much trouble, were totally extirpated or expelled from that region. After this the town began to decay, and towards the close of the century the name was changed to Bradore." I I I ' i "flr i! I m\^ \ \ li 1: ; ;■ f ; ^1 'i I i : I i II I IIO A summer's cruise to northern LABRADOR. By sundown our vessel had made only ten miles, be- ing off Belles Amours, with a southerly and very light breeze. The sunset was a glorious one, while the moon rose through the haze and mirage over the snow-banks of the Newfoundland coast. At three in the afternoon we saw several miles ahead of us the fields of ice which we were soon to encounter, choking up the straits, and enhanced in apparent extent by the mirage. The Labra- dor coast, along which we were sailing, is very bold and bluff-like, with lower points of land reaching out to us in a picturesque way, the remarkably even outline of the coast being interrupted by the Bradore Hills. The dredge was put down about two miles from shore in from ten to fifteen fathoms on a hard, stony bottom, with good success. Beautiful specimens of Lucernaria quadricornis, four inches in height and of a dull amber brown, came up in the same dredge with that superb naked mollusc, Detidronotus arborescens, which were of a beautiful amber hue, dotted with white points. From the stomachs of fishes caught by some of the party were extracted specimens of a rare arctic crab {CJiion(£cetes opilio)y which proved to be not uncommon in from ten to fifty fathoms in the Straits of Belle Isle. The next day, from nine in the morning until three in the afternoon, we moved slowly through the floe-ice, which proved to be the outskirts of the immense fields of ice which this summer lined the northern coast of Labrador. Mr. Bradford kept his photographer busily at work taking views of the more remarkable forms. The splendid green hues, so varied and striking ; the endless variety in the water-worn forms ; the weird noises, now harsh and grating, now loud and roaring, produced by the // CTENOPHORES IN THE FLOE-ICE. Ill attrition of the cakes of ice ground together by the slight swell or the conflicting currents, lent unending interest to the scene. The floes had evidently the air of tired and worn travellers ; they had been borne for at least a thousand miles from Baffin's Bay ; had been thrown upon one another by storms and ocean currents, broken and frozen together over and over again. ; they were now rap- idly melting away in the bright, warm sun, for the water was filled with bits of clear dark ice, the fragments of large floes. Our vessel, her sails scarcely filled out by the light baffling breeze, rose and fell, ploughing her way through the yielding floes. The water between the cakes was alive with bits of animated ice, myriads of transparent Ctenophores crowding the sea from the surface to a depth of a fathom or more. The roseate Iciyia, throwing ofif the most delicate reddish tints, seemed be- sides to reflect the delicate blues and greens cast off by the floes ; an Alcinoe- like form, -floating on its side, with blood- red tentacles, rose and sank among the ice- cakes, and with these in lesser numbers was associated that beautiful spherical liv- ing ball of ice, the Beroe or PleurohracJiia 1 J J 1 1 T-i Ai- Ti r ^"^''' roseola, nat- rkoaodactyla. 1 he Alcinoe-like lorm was urai size. the Mertensia ovum, a creature as fragile as it is beauti- ful. It is of a delicate pink color, with iridescent hues; the ovaries bright red, the deep purple-red tentacles in striking contrast with the delicate tints of the body itself. From this point until we reached Hopedale in lat. 55^ 30' it constantly occurred in the floe-ice, but was rarely seen in waters from which the ice had disappeared, as in harbors free from ice the Mertensia would keep out of ! I t i f! I • mr^ M .11 ! 112 A SUMMERS CRUISE TO NORTHERN LABRADOR. view near the bottom ; but as soon as the ice drifted in and choked up any harbor we were in, myriads could be seen near the surface, rising and falling between the ice- cakes, gracefully throwing out their tentacles, which were nearly two feet in length, and suddenly withdraw- ing them when disturbed. No true jelly-fish were to be seen ; the season was early for them, but the beautiful polar shell-less snail, the Clione limacina, with its long wings and bright red tints, was not uncommon. Stopped by the ice early the next morning we came to anchor at Belles Amours, waiting for a change of wind to allow a passage past or through the floe-ice. The coast is high, abrupt, and precipitous. Numerous streams well stocked with trout tumble into the sea, and the drift deposits, of limited extent, consisted of coarse gravels and bowlders of syenite. We looked for insects, finding nothing of particular interest, though noticing that the ants had just come out of their winter quarters. Glad enough were we to find a snail {Hyalina electrina), and in the mud at the bottom of the ponds a little bivalve shell (Pistdium) ; under stones in the brooks were larval stones-flies and Ephem- erae ; while a little salamander {Plethodon glutinosus) of a slate color with a paler light dorsal band ran into the water, to my great disappointment just eluding my grasp, as it is doubtful if any salamander occurs much farther north on the coast than this species. Here the alders were still in blossom, showing that the season had just opened, though the shadberry, the golden thread {Coptis) and the bunch-berry {Cornus canadensis) were likewise in bloom ; on the other hand the mountain-ash was just unfolding its buds. THE KILLEK. 113 Dredgings carried on in so shallow water as four and six fathoms revealed pelicans' feet {aporrhais) in abun- dance and very fine large Serripes groenlandica, and with thein in the mud and sand a great abundance of nemer- tean and other worms, and Amphipod Crustacea, with fine examples of Cnma bispinosa. The principal house-owner at this fishing-station was a Mr. Buckle, who had been out here for twelve years from Boston. To his comfortable house was attached a conservatory and garden. Though the scanty soil on this barren point looked unpromising enough, it was comparatively rich. He had built his own schooner, a vessel of thirty tons. On the beach was the skull of a " killer" ; it had re- cently been brought ashore and was surrounded by a number of hungry whelks {Jhiccinuui Hndaiiuii) wiiich were cleaning off the flesh from the bones. The killer is the most voracious of the smaller cetaceans, and is the bulldog among the whales. The head is very blunt, the skull thick, the jaws powerful, the teeth longer than those of the grampus. It is at once known when swim- ming in the water by its high, narrow, pointed dorsal fm, which projects five or six feet out of water. It at- tacks with great boldness and pertinacity the right and finback whales, gouging out from their lips and side lumps of flesh, and, as Captain Handy told me, is espe- cially fond of the whale's tongue. The next day we walked inland, following up the stream which empties into the Gulf at Belles Amours. We, however, took the wrong side of the brook and failed to see the cascade where the stream, as we were told, falls down over a precipice forty feet high ; but irom a li iiir i \ . r !! 1 ; i 1 , 114 A SUMMERS CKUISK TO NORTHERN LABRADOR. hill perhaps five hundred feet high, which overlooked the country, we could trace the course of the hrook for about two miles, where it ran down a steep ravine, with ponds on either side, from which flowed streams sending thin and broken sheets of water over steep precipices. The lake from which the stream issued was perhaps a mile long, situated on high land, and a foaming stream poured into it from the northwest, while farther on in another depression was probably a second lake like the one in view. Such is an ordinary Labrador stream — a chain of ponds connected by rapids or waterfalls. There was a dreary sameness to the surface of the country, relieved, however, by a few snow-banks. During our ramble we heard the familiar liquid notes of the wood thrush, anr^ saw some coots flying over the pond. In the afternor.; the wind hauled into the eastward and was followed by rain. The 24th was misty and drizzly ; the wind east veering to the northeast. We dredged all the afternoon, part of the time scraping a coralline bottom. An arctic sea-cu- cumber (^Pentacta calcigerd) was common in five fathoms in mud, with the largest Serripes yet met with. The most interesting form brought up was a beautiful hydroid {Coryne mirabilis) growing on the red sea-weed (^Ptilota elegans). It was anchored by its stalk, with bell-shaped medusae attached, which were provided with four pink eyes and short, thick, knotted tentacles, the pendant proboscis being very long, club-shaped and of a pinkish hue. While lying at anchor a few boat's lengths from shore we were visited by two or three weasels, which must have swum off to the vessel. They were exceedingly nEI.I.ES AMOURS. lis tame, approaching within a foot of my finger even when it was kept in motion. On one side of our harbor was, as at Caribou Island, a sandy beach where the fishermen could haul their nets for lance. The Newfoundlanders would come here in their clumsy boats from a distance of eight miles, where their vessels were at anchor, and seine for lance fish. Thcv made a oreat deal of noise about it, though there were only two boats ; one man would stand up in the stern paying out the net, while the full boat's crew would row rapidly around the fish, and another man standing up to his waist jn the water hauled in the net ; in this way four barrels of fish are often caught at a single haul. Mr. Phoenix, one of our party, here caught a young salmon eight inches long. The next day (the 25th) saw us still weather-bound with thick fog and rain, clear- ing up towards the evening. In codfish caught at a depth of fifteen or twenty fathoms we found large fine specimens of the lobworm (Areincola pzscatoruni) 2iV\6. a fine polar shrimp {Crangon horcas). To-day I found the first Cyanca or nettling jelly-fish, the species which grows on the banks of Newfoundland by the end of summer, two feet in diameter, with long, trailing ten- tacles sometimes six fathoms in length ; it is these feelers, filled with microscopic darts or lasso-cells, which become entangled with the lines and poison the hands of the fishermen. As yet not a common jelly-fish, the Aurelia aurita, had been seen. The next day we were released from our prison ; a fresh northwest wind cleared the ice from the shore, and our good ship made a fine run to Henley Harbor ; time from 6 A.M. to 3.30 p.m. As we sailed out of the harbor il ■ii'il \ \ I ! Ml !'!? I' ^1 r ! II ii « V. ii6 A SUMMERS CRUISE TO NORIHKRN LABRADOR. we could see that the low point running out into the Gulf from the Laurentian background of syenite was the western extremity of the basin of Cambrian red sand- stones and grits which extend between Belles Amours and Anse-au-Sablon. Skirting the coast within a mile or two of these interesting series of rocks, they are seen to rise to a height of five or six hundred feet, forming the coast line, but with a contour tame and monotonous compared with the syenitic hills of Bradore. The belt is a narrow one, and while sailing past the shore we could look up through the harbors and bays to the low coni- cal hills of Laurentian gneiss in Un interior. Passing by Bradore Bay the lofty buttes of Bradore' are seen to rise up from the low foreground of red sandstone. We then passed within sight of Greenly Island, where in 1856, during a severe southwest gale, so sudden and common in the strait, thirty-one vessels for want of good anchor- age and shelter were driven upon a lee shore. Parra- keet Island then hove in sight, a favorite breeding-place for the parrakeet or puffin, with a single house on it, the hospitable mansion of a member of the ubiquitous Jones family, where in i860 a party from our camp on Caribou Island received board and lodging for which only thanks would be accepted. We then sight Blanc Sablon. The land here is high and descends to the sea in five very distinct terraces, of which the second is much the highest. There were huge bowlders of grit on the beach ; the raised beaches were packed with bowlders and the terraces in general direction appeared in perspective, as if dipping up the strait ; like river-terraces they were parallel to each other, but the lower one gradually dips down and loses TIIK PRIMOKDIAL SANDSTONES. 117 itself in the water, while another slopes in the opposite direction. The higher terraces appear as if wooded or green. There were indeed three shades of green : in the lower terrace the debris is covered with a pale green herbage ; the older vegetation is darker, while the upper rusty green tint is very dark. At Blanc Sablon, which was originally so named by Jacques Cartier, the settlement consists of twenty houses ; they were painted white and from the vessel appeared like masses of floe-ice stranded on the shore. Of the houses four are "rooms," or lishing-establish- nicnts. We then pass the hshing-settlement of Forteau,'with a lighthouse on the point, besides about twenty houses, and a Catholic church. OIT the lighthouse is Shallop Island ; the harbor is two or three miles deep, walled in bv vertical cliffs, furrowed and streaked by rain and frost. Into the harbor empties a salmon stream ; one man here seems to have the monopoly of the salmon fishery, put- ting up from twenty to sixty barrels a year ; they are salted and sent to Europe. Now as we pass on, the bay opens and at its head we can see the Laurentian formation, with its low, ob- tusely pointed gneiss hills ; but the general surface of the Labrador coast is very uniform, while the opposite shores of Newfoundland now recede and appear to be much lower. The strait is about eleven miles wide in its narrowest part. Sailing on but half a mile off shore at Anse-au-Loup, we can plainly see that the Cambrian rocks are red and gray sandstones — that the strata, almost horizontal, dip a little to the west, descending to the strait by three !T i|i Ii8 A SIMMKKS CRUISK lO NoRlllKKN I.AliUA DOR. lock-lcnacL's or shelves. A lar I' i CHAPTER VII. A SUMMERS CRUISE TO NORTHERN I,ABRADOR. II. HENLEY HARIJOR TO CAPE ST. MICMAEI,. As we entered Henley Harbor the scene was unique. The strait was clear of ice, though a few days earlier the harbor had been packed with it, and remnants were stranded along the shore or carried hither and thither with the tides. The outlines of some of the pieces were beautiful ; many were painted with green tints while the sun was high, but later in the afternoon the greens were succeeded by bright azure blues, contrasting with the almost cobalt blues of the distant Laurentian hills. The entrance to Henley Harbor is very fine, the sea- cliffs being over 200 feet high, while behind are the pe- culiar outlines of the Laurentian gneiss, rising in long swells like whales' backs to a height of perhaps five or six hundred feet. Henley Harbor lies under the lofty, precipitous basaltic cliffs of the Devil's Dining Table, which caps Henley Island. We sail through a fleet of Newfoundland fishermen, whose low, thick masts, strong, ' lumsy rigging, and ironed and planked hulks — for they were sealers, and had not stopped to dofi their ice-armor — contrasted with the beautiful model, slender, tapering masts and spars of our fleeter craft. Their decks were crowded with men, women, and children, dogs and goats, for these people had, like the old Norsemen, brought their families and stock with them for a sum- 120 THE SEAL FISHERY, 121 mer's stay on the coast. Ashore, under the dark, beet- ling crag, lay the fishing-hamlet of Henley Harbor. The houses were small and mean, the flat roof of some covered with turf, the grass or moss growing on them, while the fish-houses and "stages" were of the meanest description. After coming to anchor we were boarded by the cap- tain of one of the sealers, a brigantine of perhaps 140 tons burden, lately in from Carbonear in Conception Bay. Her bows and also her sides were planked and heavily ironed to resist the ice in the spring sealing in the Gulf. The captain had, immediately after discharging his cargo of sealskins and blubber — and the smells rising up through the hold and companion-way j^roved the fact ad nauseam — only delayed long enough in port to put in 130 bushels of salt, and then cleared for the Labrador coast without stopping to strip off the outer planking. The captain was an intelligent, stalwart, English born man only twenty years old, who had been to sea for six years. He was frank and communicative, and in half an hour gave us some insight into the mysteries of fish- ing and sealing. He had inherited the business, his fa- ther having been a sealer for fifty years. He owned the vessel and had brought along a cook ; he took, pas- sage free, eleven families, numbering 130 souls, men, women, and children, with goats, dogs, cats, and provi- sions -for the whole party, and was to land them at some harbor on the coast north of the Strait, where they might spend the fishing season in their rude summer houses, called " tilts." During the voyage up the women are stowed aft and in the hold, and in a storm — and when are there two \- MA r.i ! ■ 11 ' I \... mSSm nl 11 I Ij I i i 122 A SUMMERS CRUISK TO NORTHERN LABRADOR. continuously pleasant days on this coast ? — the hatches are battened down, the food is handed to them through a hole in the cabin, and then they are left to take care of themselves as best they can until the storm clears off, when the hatches are removed, and the forlorn passen- gers can take a breath of fresh air. The captain does not take an active part in the fish- ing, but makes his profits by charging for freight on the fish. If the season is a good one and his vessel is soon filled, he goes back to Newfoundland and charters more vessels to carry back all the fish which have been caught. The season lasts from the end of June until about the 20th of October. The season for the seal fishery during the past spring was from March 25th until June 4tii. The Gulf, of course, was filled with ice, no water being in sight from shore. A successful "catch" of seals is "better than 9000." Each vessel carries fourteen boats, which are piled up on deck ; four men man a boat ; each man is provided with a gaff or boat-hook and a piece of ratline three and one-half fathoms long. On coming up to where the seals are lying, the crew land on the ice. The sealer runs up to a seal lying near its hole, which may be only a rod or so from the vessel or boat, clubs it — and it is easily stunned and killed with one or two blows — sculps it, then peals off the skin and blubber, leaving the carcass on the ice-floe. Each man can tie up five sealskins, and drag them to the vessel, and sally out again, rushing ahead and jacing with the other crews of '* bloodhounds." The scene is one of excitement and peril, the ice constantly endangering the vessel, which is liable to be " nipped " and to founder, leaving the ship- THE SEAL FISHERY. 123 wrecked sealers to burn their vessel and make their way ashore over the ice. One of Mr. Bradford's most suc- cessful paintings represents a sealer "nipped" by the ice, the crew abandoning her after having set fire to their vessel, and walking with mournful steps over the ice in the direction of land. The delicate blues of the ice, the sullen, neutral tints of the sky, the red glare of tlie flames breaking out of the burning ship, and the warm tints of the costumes of the men in the foreground, vividly portray a most tragic scene, enacted only too often on the Gulf of St. Lawrence. To return to our statistics : a " crew " of sealers im the ice is composed of fifty men ; each one, if successful, securing five seals. Two hundred and fifty pelts may be brought back after each sally from the vessel. In this way, when the seals are abundant, from 2500 to 3000 sealskins are taken in a single day, 9000 making a cargo. The shares in the enterprise are ;!^6o each man. The captain- takes half, "leaving the men in the lurch," as our informant said, which being interpreted means that the men realize little or no profits from the voyage. A sealskin is worth $4.00, a full cargo, perhaps, sell- ing in the rough to traders for $30,000 or $40,000 ; the profits on a full cargo are therefore considerable, but the men's "half," being distributed among a large number, does not amount to much for each man. This spring (1864) the seal fishery was a failure. The young seals are killed by knocking them on the head with a boat-hook or club, and the old ones by shooting them with heavily loaded old muskets. The hunters make holes in the ice and then watch for their heads to appear above water. Of all the different kinds ;'!' ! ! ii ' Ii I '■i 1 I: h'^r jj-l! ir ■I i 124 A summer's cruise to northern LABRADOR. !i|| of seals, the Greenland or harp seal is the most fero- cious. The summer at Henley Harbor was a very backward one ; the salmon had not yet appeared at the mouths of the bays and rivers ; nor had the cod and their natural food, the capelin, moved in from the deep water. The enormous extent of floe-ice which skirted the coast had lowered the temperature of the sea ; at the same time the ice-fields had prevented any icebergs from entering the Strait. The prevailing winds were cold and easterly ; the cold climate, the strong tides and the three-knot Labrador current passing around the cape into and down the Strait of Belle Isle render navigation here uncertain and dangerous. June 27. The light southeasterly wind brought into the Strait the fog which had lain all the day previous outside of our harbor, and inland the clouds rested on the hills ; the day being dark and lowery. In the morn- ing some of us rowed three miles up to the head of Pitt's Arm, in Temple Bay, a deep fjord penetrating the high gneiss hills, into which pours, over a stony channel, a rapid trout stream about five yards across. The sandy beach was an ancient sea-bottom containing deep-sea shells.* On each side of the mouth of the brook were two terraces ; on the upper terrace, which was about forty feet above the sea, were two winter houses. I par- ticularly observed the appearance of these houses. One was 21X15 feet in size, the walls of upright, thick boards, the frame of poles ; the flat roof was constructed of poles * The shells were Buccinum undatum, a variety with two ribs on the whorls; Saxicava rugosa, Mya uddevallensis, Alacoma proxima, Seriipes groenlandica, Natica clausa, of large size, and a branching ipo\\zoon, Celleporaria surcularis. A WINTER HOUSE. 125 placed near together and covered with birch and hemlock bark, the strips, which were a foot wide, being placed crosswise; the eaves were scarcely five feet above the ground, and the floor was in part of boards and in part of turf. The door, hung on iron hinges, and closed with a wooden latch and string, was only four and a half feet high, and there was a single window, 16X15 inches. Within were three beds and a settle. The lumber for these shanties had evidently, by the piles of sawdust near by, been sawn upon the spot and taken from the Labra- dorian forest of firs near at hand, which measured twelve inches through at the butt, and were about twenty feet high. In their branches a robin and a sparrow were flit- ting about. The willow bushes were here five feet in height. On the sides of the sandy terraces were blackberry and raspberry bushes, and currants, shadber- ries, and golden thread just in blossom, while i..j alders were still in flower. I dredged in water about fifty fathoms deep, in Chateau Bay, bringing up, among molluscs, fine large Leda permila, Astarte banksii, Lyofisia arenosa, Car- diu7n islandictim ; rare sandstars, and young and old arctic crabs {CJiioncecetes opilid). The 28th was almost wintry in its cold, changeable weather. A northeast storm raged, with a few drops of rain and a little snow in the forenoon, while after dinner there was a thick snow-storm, the hill-tops being whit- ened with snow for several hours, which, however, disap- peared by the evening. The water in the harbor was intensely cold, and the Mertensia and Clione, those beautiful creatures of the icy seas, abounded. The forenoon was spent in examining the trap rocks \ ■ i i I'; iill p 4 I ■ I . ^ 126 A SUMMERS CRUISE TO NORTHERN LABRADOR. I f. on the harbor side of Henley Island, and in shore-col- lecting. The rock-weeds or fuci do not grow luxuriantly on the coast of Labrador, but are stunted and dwarfed, like their more highly-born relatives of the vegetable kingdom ashore. Below tide-mark, however, though the tide on the Labrador coast rises and falls only two or three feet, the Devil's Apron or Laminaria is seen, but not so common and laro;^e as on the coast of Maine. Life between tide-marks is scanty compared with the New England coast. We never detected the common whelk that gives the purple dye {Ptirpiira lapilhis) ; but the two L .lorinas {L. rudis, less commonly L. lit- toraiis) were common ; these are circumpolar forms, abounding ai /^e \,.a2r's edjje at Greenland. In this region scarcely a sea-bird was to be seen, and rarely even a gull ; but on one occasion three ducks, while a lonely raven flew about the cliff. Insect life M^as scanty, and with the animals and plants showed in its appearance a strange intermixture of what at home would have been characteristic of early April and late May. Frogs are seen here, we were told : in the garden the turnips were just up. Thirty years ago there was but a single house at Henley Harbor, and none at Red Bay, where now there are thirty. The fish ^and birds here, meanwhile, have vastly decreased in [numbers. The fish are principally cod, salmon, and herring. Old Captain French, our pilot, never saw a hake on the Labrador coast, and only two haddock, though both kinds are abundant and troublesome to cod fishermen at Bay Chaleur, on the New Brunswick shore. (I* Detained another day by head-winds and rain in^ the DK EDGING. 127 early part of the day, the wind in the evening hauled around to the S. VV., "giving us a fine evening sky. I dredged in the morning in the rain over the side of the vessel in four fathoms, the bottom rich in the red sea- weed {Ptilota), the Desmarestia, and the sea-colander {Agarum turneri^, and besides a portly queer-spined amphipod (^Amp/u'tkonotus cataphractiis), which carried its brood of young, also bristling with spines, a fine large Crangmt boreas with other bright red shrimps came up. NEBALIA BiPES. (Enlarged six times.) In'the afternoon we sailed out two or three miles to the mouth of the harbor, and dredged in from ten to twenty fathoms on a hard, pebbly bottom, evidently the contin- uation of the beach, and showing that the land was for- merly at least from one hundred to three hundred feet higher than at present ; besides Lyons ia aretiosa, Kenne- rliaglacialis, and othei shells and crustaceans, the interest- ing A'^^^^/za; bipes was taken: it was also found in as shal- low water as four fathoms. This form is less than half an inch in length and is found throughout the Arctic Ocean, is common on the coast of Norway, and its family is now ■I '! % ^\ I 128 A SUMMERS CRUISE TO NORIHERN LABRADOR. |i i ,{' -:f regarded as the sole existing type of a distinct order {Phyllocaridd), whose gigantic fossil prototypes, some of them nearly two feet in length, occur in the palaeozoic rocks in America and Europe. The next day also we were wind-bound, but the gale was from the southwest ; the wind blew very fresh, hav- ing a good sweep over the Gulf, the breakers ran high, as nearly all the harbors in Southern Labrador, i.e., south and west of Belle Isle, are exposed to gales, from this direction. We put out our kedgc anchor, and fre- queiilly had to haul in a part of the cable to keep the vessel off the rocks. We should have put out to sea and taken advantage of the gale to go on our course up the coast, but were afraid of running upon a sunken rock at the mouth of the "tickle" or narrow passage forming our b-irbor. A part of the day was spent about and upon the Devil's Dining Table. This is amass of columnar basalt, which has been described by Lt. Baddely in the Transac- tions of the Literary and Historical Society of Quebec for 1829. The height of the rock above the sea is 225 feet, to the base of the pillars of basalt 180 feet ; the height of the columns themselves being 25 feet. The columns are quite regularly prismatic and of nearly the same size and nature as those of the Giant's Causeway. Ascending the terrace, carpeted with the mountain trident, I climbed up the cliff over the basaltic steps, by the only means of ascent situated on the eastern side, where the columns had been worn away by a little stream, on top of the flat table, which was 125 paces broad at the widest part. The ends of the prismatic columns occasionally protruded through the dense M lERRACEI) RP:ACIIES. 129 matted covering of curlew-berry or Empetrum. The air was cold, chilly, reeking with the sea-drift, and the gale buffeted my face as if a demon were trying to throw me over the cliff, down to the sea-margin of former days. From the summit of the table the view was an inter- esting one, though the atmosphere was very hazy. Belle Isle was shut out of sight by a thin bank of fog or thick- ened vapor which lay on the sea to the eastward. A few miles up the shore was another cliff of basaltic columns, the bases of the pillars wrapped in snow. There are in this bay eleven sea-terraces which mark the former levels of the sea, eight of which could be seen from the top of this rock. On the west side the terraces slope towards the north, while on Castle Island they slope towards the southwest. The most distinct example of these terraced sea-beaches lay at our feet, forming the western shore ot Henley Island (on which the Devil's Dining Table is situated). This magnificent beach rises 180 feet above the sea-level, and when the sea covered it the waves washed the base of the basaltic pillars, as indicated by the debris of broken columns forming the talus at the foot of the cliff on which I stood. This beach is com- posed of three terraces, and the two lower ones widen out into delta-like expansions on the northwest end of the island, which are free from the usual covering of moss and curlew-berry, and are so distinctly marked with windrows of pebbles and gravel that it would seem as if they had been but yesterday thrown up by the waves. Greville's Fort*, as we may name it, the ruins of which * According to a writer in Harper's Magazine for May, 1864, who describes this fort and gives a plan of it, the fortifications were, supposed to have been }, '^% t ■I i , i, t ■I It I . 1 1 ; J 'i |j t I 1 i 11 1 1 ii -5 ll U i I 130 A summer's CkUISK TO NORTHERN LABRADOR. are quite distinct, was built on a broad terrace not far above the sea. On the mainland, north a little east, are three beaches with two terraces, which were beautifully marked, and corresponded with the two lower terraces at our feet, though covered with the rich deep green of the Empetrum leaves. Pitt's Arm and Chateau Bay are also terraced, the beaches themselves of unequal size and height, but the terraces, as we should expect, are of even height throughout, as they mark the former level of the sea. One of the beaches on Chateau Bay was remarkably steep, composed of large, sea-worn bowlders, and overhanging like a precipice the winter houses below. Indeed, all along the Strait of Belle Isle from the Meca- tinas to this point, wherever there is sand, gravel, or bowlders, the sea has, when at higher levels, rearranged and sorted them into terraced beaches or sea-margins. The future geologist who visits this coast will have an interesting task in measuring the heights of these ter- races and comparing them with those of Northern Lab- rador, of Arctic America, of Greenland, and northern Europe. These beaches are also seen in inland river- courses, and by every pond and lake ; they are not, as along the coast of Maine and Massachusetts, concealed by vegetation, bushes or forest growths ; but here, owing to the absence of bushes and trees, they were as distinct as if the Labrador peninsula had been upheaved but a year ago. Darwin has studied the formation of the ter- races along the coast of South America, where the ele- vating forces were undoubtedly volcanic, but the nature of the causes which in the northern hemisphere have re- constructed by the French Canadian^, by whom it was abandoned in 1753 ; another author states that it was built by the Acadians. ii TKRKACKI) HE AC MPS. 131 suited in the secular elevations and depressions of the land, such as took place duiinjj^ and after the glacial pe- riod, is purely conjectural, and belongs to the domain of theoretical geology. To study the causes we must first learn the facts, hence the careful examination of the os- cillations of the eastern coast of America from Aspin- wall to high polar latitudes is of the first importance. The measurement and comparison of the ancient sea- beaches on a coast like that of Labrador and Arctic America, where they arc so easily perceived, will well repay the labor and time involved. Robert Chambers's interesting work on the ancient sea-margins of Norway and Sweden gives valuable data for comparison with those of the opposite coast of Lab- rador, and from the rough observations which have been made it would seem that the oscillations were about the same, both in height above the sea, and in time, on each side of the North Atlantic. I have also seen well- marked terraces in Puget Sound which are beautifully marked, and these should be carefully measured and compared in height with those in the arctic region and Labrador. It was with no little interest that we ob- served the old beaches on the Labrador coast, and we shall note their occurrence in the following pages wher- ever seen. We remained on the top of the Devil's D'a.ng Table until the sun had set and the darkness began to creep over the scene below. Whether his Satanic Majesty was concerned in the transformation which then came over the scene we will not undertake to say, but as the sun went down the rocks and hills beneath seemed to diminish in height ; an undefined, subtle, neutral tint It I li: iiif 'f " 132 A SUMMKKS CKUISK TO NOR'IHEUN lAURADOR. spread over the landseape ; a brownish haze due to the vapor in the air came in from the sea and settled over the hills far and near, and as the t\vili<»ht came on the hills were still more dwarfed in size, when the chill southwest wind from the Gulf, the coldest that blows over this '»v. posed point, sent us back to our vessel, where the t mometer at 8 o'clock in the evening was 44° F. The fishins^-hamlet of Menley Plarbor consists of a few dwelling-houses, some of them inhabited during the winter, with fish-houses and light wharves here called " stages." The winter houses are built of thick boards, with fiat tarred roofs, the sides of the houses being well battened. The domestic animal here is the dog, New- foundlanders — seven of them at one house — brougit up by the hshermen for the summer : there were no Fskimo dogs or Eskimos at this point, though in the last jent ' they here congregated by hundreds. The f.h-hc were rude structures of one low shed, roof'-J with turf and built on piles, reminding us somew^ ..t of pictures of the ancient pile-dwellings of prehistoric Switzerland. The fisherman's sail-boat is a ponderous, cit^-sy affair called a "jack." It is twenty-five or thirty feei '-^ng, with not much breadth of beam, rudely built, with shotc masts, and small sails stained red or black, or with both colors ; the oars are of spruce, and very large and heavy, and the stern of the boat is provided with two stakes, such as whalemen use for sculling. I interviewed a Mr. Stone, one of the settlers, regard- ing the fisheries and hunting at this point, and he gave me the following facts : At the height of the herring fishery in August — and it should be borne in mind that this fish is only a summer visitant, not spawning on the V- THE KISIIKRIKS. •33 Labrador coast, hut passiiiij up, as Hind in his work on the Labrador peninsula states, as far as Hudson's Strait — Stone has caus. a quintal, which amounts to ^720 for a successful season's work. He can cure the lish on this coast during the short summer, and is now building a shed for this purpose. Of salmon 180 quintals are taken in a good season ; they are pickled and sell at the rate of $5.00 a quintal (112 lbs.), so that he would realize about $900 from this fish- ery ; but considering that he had a family of ten chil- dren, it is not probable that on the average he more than comfortably supports his fai-iily, and in many sum- mers the fisheries on this desolate coast are a failure. And to show what little chance there is to retrieve his fortunes by the products of the winter's hunting, he told me that last winter nothing was shot about Chateau Bay from Christmas until the first of February. During the entire winter but a single partridge was shot, while at the same time they were very abundant at Blanc Sablon, showing that possibly these birds are somewhat migra- tory, going in flocks from one point to another in search of food. There* are now neither beaver nor otter, nor silver nor black foxes to be had ; only two or three wolves were shot, and two deer. When I asked him what the people would do if the hunting and fishing con- tinued to fall off, he replied hopefully, and in his fisher- man's dialect, "Oh, we'll have a spurt by and by." He added that the S.W. wind was in summer "the coldest wind that blows." Winter comes on in November ; by i! I § m f' 1 ' 1 I! * 1 ■■ ■■ 134 /\ SUMMERS CRUISE lO NORTHERN LABRADOR. i f H I !( VI '! the loth to the 20th of this month the lakes are all frozen over, and by the 20th the harbor is frozen far out into the Strait, while in winter they can go out in sledges on the ice to Belle Isle. The people here in general were well-mannered, though rough and out-spoken, asking freely of our stores, and commenting as freely on what they considered poor returns in trade. To return to the Devil's Dining Table, whose geology is interesting : it is a high ovate mass with vertical sides and a flat top, which slightly inclines towards the south- west, and consists of two layers, showing that the rock is the remains of two separate eruptions, the lower con- sisting of regular prismatic five-sided columns, each about two feet in diameter, fluted on the sides and curi- ously worn by transverse impressed lines. The basaltic mass rests upon the upturned edges of strata of Lauren- ".an gneiss which have been penetrated by dikes of sye- ite. North of the basaltic cap, the underlying rocks castle island from the west ; a, red syenite ; f>, gneiss ; f, basalt (the devil's dining-table) ; 1 i: loc roc svv dn pie litt chi Nj an( aw see do bo in tov » ?« !■ ( h I ii i CASTLE ISLAND. '35 looking out towards Belle Isle, the flesh-colored syenitic rocks present a rough and broken front to the ceaseless swell of the Atlantic, rising from seventy-five to a hun- dred feet above the waves, the beetling crags broken and pierced by deep ocean caves ; with jutting headlands and little pebbly beaches nestling between them — all the characteristic scenic features of this syenite, whether at Nahant, or Mt, Desert, or on the Labrador coast. The southern end of Castle Island repeats the geology and scenery of Henley Island; but a little farther down, away from the sea-cliffs, the syenite and gneiss meet, and seemed splashed together, like two masses of paste or dough which has been stirred up and baked. In places, both rocks were interstratified, dipping north and south in much disturbed strata, but with a general inclination towards the north. The first of July saw us released from oui prison ; the day was clear and delightful, and a light southwesterly breeze bore us along a remarkably bold and picturesque coast. About two miles from our harbor is another trap overflow capping and, at the southwest end, concealing from view the .syenitic base ; at the northern end the basalt is columnar. We soon came up to our first iceberg, a magnificent pyramid of ice perhaps a hundred and fifty feet high, white as Carrara marble, smooth, as if fresh snow had fallen on it during the past night, lending it a virgin whiteness, here and there brought more clearly into re- lief by the subtle azure blue reflected from the sea. Across its base ran several suggestive cracks, and though we sailed within two hundred yards of it, it was rather risky, and we remembered Scoresby's stories of the dis- i f-ihi ■y r ! It 136 A SUMMER'S CUUISK TO NORTHKRN LABRADOR. !l':§ H ll! i , -f ;^i -i^ noiili side of Ilainilion lidei, bearing one mile north. While and Black" Island near Indian Harbor: , whitish gneiss. Two parallel dikes, one forming the crest of the hill; one-half mile n. w.; />, (> . white gneiss. Three trap dikes; i, the top of "Black and White" Island forming the west- ern slope, b, b, white gneiss. m.. ^1^ ^anjcw^si^ Northern shore of Hamilton Inlet, the extreme point to the right. a, basalt; b, white gneiss. gneiss hills, and running in ridges or forming great splashes on the face of the hills, and sometimes entire hills, like craters, the hills are transformed from what (T'l t P II 170 A SUMMERS CKHISK K) NOKIHKRN LABRADOR. would Otherwise he quite tame elevations into hifjh, hold, wiId-lookin<:i^ peaks. We went into Indian I larhor, which is an island from ten to fifteen miles from the mainland, formin_<2: the northern side of the entrance to Hamilton Inlet, to find a pilot for Cape Harrison, but none could he found. Near here is Ice Tickle, wher(; the ice is usually de- tained later than elsewhere. Around one hij^h head the murres are very abundant ; it was evidently a favorite breedinii^-place for them ; indeed all through the polar regions we imagine that these sea-fowl (murres, dovkies, sea-pigeons, and guillemots) are somewhat local, breeding about certain hi^h headlands and inaccessible crairs and cliffs; Vvhile the puffins select points where they may burrow and mine in the crumbling rock. Around the head of this harbor, and esj)ecially well marked on the southwest side, is a noble beach at least 150 and most probably 200 feet high, lodged between two hills ; its shingly surface was free from vegetation, and it looked as though the waves had receded from it but the night before ; it was divided into two steps or terraces, the lowermost perhaps about 50 feet above the harbor. It was a constant source of regret that there was no means at hand of accurately measuring the height of these beaches : not an aneroid barometer was aboard, and THE COAST BKIWEKN CAPK HARRISON AND Sl.OOP HARBOR BEARING TION MILES WEST. I was quite unprepared for their accurate study. Indeed almost no attention has been given to the subject of ancient sea-margins in the United States, the terraces of rNHiAN iiAunok. 171 the Great Lakes haviiiff^ heen measured more aecuralelv, since they are much more distinct than those on the coast. But on my return after this experience with Labrador raised beaches, it was easy to detect them in the vicinity of Salem, Lynn, Chelsea, and Boston, as well as on the Maine coast, though ctn tiie New Lni'land shores they are difficult to distiniruish on account of the vegetable growth and forests which conceal them and prevent their ready recognition. Huge bowlders of syenite, some oval and very round, were scattered about on shore, the smalk'r ones well rounded by the waves, while tlie bottom of the harbor is paved with cobble-stones, as wc ascertained by dredging. The summits of the hills surrounding the harbor were formed of a pale, whitish, foliated syenite, with scattered specks of hornblende, while lower down on the sides the rock u^as a very dark gneiss, slightly porphyritic. I found here a dwarf willow new to me, the flowers purple, of nearly the same tint as the flowers of the cloud-berry. A species of field-mouse, which we failed to capture, was common here, its nests lined with mouse-colored fur. The head of the harbor was said to be haunted bv a ghost ; we did not attemj)t to secure it or to lay it, l)ut a more substantial, though still a fleeting treasure, was the huge, glacier-like snow-banks in the vicinity of the haunted spot, which were perhaps 20 feet thick, very hard on the surface, and much soiled : too hard, per- haps, to retain even the traces of the footprints of a Lab- rador spirit — whose tread, judging by the average Labra- dorian, must have been a firm one. One of the banks appeared to have slidden into the water, and from its edge a miniature berg had broken ofT and was floating ¥ ;JL IMAGE EVALUATION TEST TARGET (MT-S) A ^4% :/. ^ 4^ 1.0 I.I m us B^ ■ 40 lit US u 2.2 IL25 in u 1.6 ^J>' ^^^ > Hiotographic Sciences Corporation 23 WEST MAIN STREET WEBSTER, N.Y. 14S80 (716) 872-4503 I \']2 A SUMMKKS CUUISK TO NORTHERN LABRADOR. ■ i 1, 1 HI 1 J ! H|j A ■ ' ' • 1 (•I iJ . away. So well marked were the ice-worn hills about us and elsewhere on this coast, that this snow-bank seemed but the dwarfed descendant of the great multitude of glaciers which had so recently filled the innumerable bays, fjords, and "tickles" of this coast. That this is not a mere fancy is shown i)y the following facts : Mr. Licber, the geologist of the U. S. Coast Survey Eclipse expedition of i860, which went near Cape Chid- ley, the point we hoped to reach, speaks of walking over a siiow-bank on the Hanks of Mt. Bache, which " was a miniature glacier," while "a regular moraine was piled up along its edges." Captain Handy told me that on Savage Island, just north of Hudson's Strait, he saw in August ravines full of ice; and on Button Island as late as September 20 he found snow in the ravines. He called them glaciers, one patch of snow being five hun- dred feet long and two hundred feet broad. On Reso- lution Island, only one hundred and twenty miles north of Cape Chidley, he saw glaciers extending into the wa- ter, from which small icebergs fell into the sea ; and Captain Hall describes the Grinnell glacier on Meta Incognita, which was two miles long, and discharged icebergs into the sea. The next day the wind was against us, being north and very light. The day was warm and pleasant, but towards sundown cloudy, and as usual, as soon as the sun goes down it becomes cold and chilly. Though the floe- ice had now disappeared, a large number of bergs were to be seen outside slowly travelling down the coast, some of the smaller ones stranded a few miles from the shore. After this date, and beyond Cape Webuc, we were not troubled by the floe-ice ; for weeks we had TKANSI'OKTATiON • )K HOWLDKUS BY ILOK-ICK. "73 watched the pro^^ress south of this enormous c\p;insc of floatino^ ice, the stream beinj^ not less than a tliousand miles lon<» and over a hundred miles in hreadth, more or less interruptea, of course, by " leads " and open water. It will be remembered that in former years the " tloat- injj-ice " t'^eory prevailed, p^eologists almost universally be- lievin" and ij^roovingof the roeUs and distribution of drift or diluvium were produced by lloe-icc passing over the submertjed land. This theory has been almost wholly abandoned, thouii^h south of the edije of the great continental fjlacier tloatiniiU.M.MKKS CKUISK I'O NOKTHKKN LAHKADOR. ^ ' . ■■^^ ^ ■"■ \Wk\ ■ m 'H\ i ■' i ' 1 ■ \ ! ' ; N ■■: if i iiiHl in the bays and fjords; thus independent of wind and ice, one could run outside and do in good weather deep- sea dredging, scrape the bottoms of the shallower bays and reaches, measure the raised beaches, geologize, botan- ize, and entomologize. and reach the better breeding- haunts of the water-fowl, and do something toward col- lecting the nests and eggs of land-birds. A well- ecjuipped party in a steamer could, in four months spent on this coast, add vastly to what, on the whole, is perhaps the least-known portion of northern America. With the ample knowledge of polar life and nature we now |)()ssess as a basis of comparison, here is a most interest- ing field of exploration for our rising naturalists; it would at all events be an excellent training-school in physical geology and biology. This day was entirely devoted to insect-hunting, and I found myself in a new world so far as the insect fauna was concerned, many truly polar r7>ecies abounding. The spiders were thoroughly arctic, dark, dull - colored creatures, occasionally venturing out from their retreats under the growth of curlew berry, or under stones ; sim- ilar forms afterwards occurred to me in just such places on the summit of Mt. Washington, on Gray's and Pike's Peaks, showing that the Alpine summits of our mountains are but outliers, aerial islands, so to speak, detached zoogeographicallv from the frozen regions of the north. On a steep, southerly exposure of the harbor, where a long glacis sloped toward an angular precipice, which overhung patches of vegetation, between the worn and polished naked rocks of the shore, we started up a few butterflies and moths. To my genuine surprise and de- -*.~- ARCTIC MOTHS AND RIRCIIKS. 177 light, there fluttered, half skipping and half-Hying, over the lichened bowlders a butterfly I had never before seen, the high arctic bluet, (^Polyommatus fniiik/ini't), heretofore only known to occur in the arctic world, and discovered by the naturalist of Franklin's voyage. I also netted an Argynnis, not hitherto discovered so far south ; it was likewise a polar form. The moths were all arctic species, and when at rest so harmonized in color with the lichens and other vege- tation in which they nestled as to entirely deceive me. And yet what was the use of practising, even uncon- sciously to themselves, this deception ? The answer was not far off — there was a shore-lark, or some such bird, flitting about and running over the rocks, busily search- ing for just such moths as these, and the only hope of safety for the insects from their sharp eyes was in their resemblance to the lichens. The only tree seen here was the dwarf birch. Bcttiia nana; those who have seen this Lilliputian tree on the summit of Mt. Washington will well remember its humble stature and little round leaves. No tree per- haps ever underwent greater modification by climate than did the ancestor of this species, and we cannot well doubt but that all these dwarf arctic trees and shrubs, so closely allied to their congeners in the north temperate zone, only escaped utter extinction by adapting them- slvees to the extremes of their arctic surroundings. It will be remembered that the oak, gum, and tulip tree, the sassafras and maple, the cypress and sequoia, once flourished in what is now Greenland in growths as luxu- riant as the forests of the Gulf States. When the ice- period was ushered in, and climate and other circum- I ! 178 A SIMMKUS CKUISK TO XOKTIIKRN LAHRADOR. If ' I 1^ 1 V 1 ■.;«!■ •iul 1 t ^^<^| I. r a '« [ t'. r> v r stances clianijcd the inhabitants of that tertiary [)ohir hind, of which Greenland and Sj)itzi)cro[en are the rem- nants, tliey were either entirely effaced, or enii<»rated southward, becoming the ancestors of our American plants and animals, or, as in the case of a few forms, maintained their ground but changed into the present arctic animals and })lants. The afternoon was spent on the opposite side of the harbor, where there is an ancient sea-beach at least two hundred feet high, with four terraces, well defined by the windrows of pebbles left by the retreating waves — how many thousand years ago, a wise man would hardly dare to guess. On the two lower terraces the willows grew in irregular rounded j)atches ; there were two spe- cies, one growing to a foot in height, their tops of the same length, as if clipped off with scissors ; the other species was still more prone, creeping low in the rein- deer moss and curlew-berry, or spreading vine-like over the rocks. Their catkins were being investigated by bumble-bees of two kinds, one or both truly polar. During the 20th a cold northeast wind blew ; the har- bor was open to the wind and sea. so that our vessel was pitching through the livelong day, making everybody's headache, and sending nearly all to their bunks to sleep through the discomfort. No ice, however, was brought in by the wind, which showed that the coast was clear whenever the wind should be fair. The icebergs, how- ever, are seen marching ceaselessly down the coast at a distance of ten or fifteen miles out at sea. The wind and swell did not prevent the fishermen from seining for capelin, so essential as bait in fish- ing for cod. When the seine is hauled the fish are lOl) AND < Al'Kl.lN. '79 l)aik'il oiiL with scoop-nets. At siicli times these active little fish throw oil" from their juleaminu sides all the colors of the rainbow. The cotl were seen through the transparent water hoverinjj;^ about the outskirts of the school, snapping" at any which became separated from their felk)ws, and following them so near the boats that the men would drive them away with their boat- hooks. After capturing one school, they would row about near shore on th<' watch for another. 'I'he seine- boats diller from others in being narrow ami long, from twenty-live to twenty-seven feet in length. We here saw specimens of a variety of c(kI, called " duffy," which may be the same as Professor Wyman's " bull-dog cod." Its head is blunter, the under-jaw is shorter, while the fish is darker than ordinary cod ; the fishermen pronounce them " no good ;" it is possible that such as are taken are simply deformed individuals of the common species. We found, however, that at Hopedale these fish were comparatively common, and taken with the gig by the Eskimo. We left Sloop Harbor early in the morning of the 2ist with a light easterly breeze, but we made only fiv^e or six miles, j)laying about the icebergs nearly half the day. The gigantic steps or terraces carved by the shore- ice out of the lofty rocky shore of the islands about here were very remarkable, especially when we saw them in sections. We counted some thirty bergs to- day. While Mr. Bradford was industriously painting them, a party of us went in a boat to Tinker Island,, a lofty rock far out to sea, its sides sheer precipices, whose bases were washed by the ceaseless Atlantic swell ; a yawning chasm nearly divides the island in i ■ ■! t- II ;! i two, and by entering the fissure we eould effect a land- ing, and climb up to the heights above. The rock and all its belongings, with the sea-fowls tlying about or sit- ting by thousands on the projecting shelves, reminded us of the pictures, so familiar in childhood, of similar scenes in the Orkney and Shetland Islands. The tinkers and murres breeding here were in immense numbers, the females on the rock shelves, and their con- sorts resting on the waves, or Hying overhead to the leeward. This island was situated several miles from TINKKll ISI.ANli, IJICAUI.NC, TWO TO rHKI'.K MIl.KS WKST. land, remote from other islands, and consisted of a hard, coarse-grained granite, the feldspar predominating and of two kinds — one flesh-colored orthoclase, the other smoky labradoritc ; it was weathered into regular steps and shelves, and huge blocks had been detached by the frost, the angles having been rounded by the weather ; near the water's edge the waves had worn it into smooth declivities. The east wind blew chill from the direction of the ice-pack, which could be seen a few miles off en- closing a number of large bergs. The pools of water on the higher portions of the island were inhabited by case-worms, and it was evident, by the feathers at the bottom, that the murres used them as wash-basins. In a deep, narrow chink between the rocks I found a murre's Ggg, while the tunnels made by the puffins wound through the scanty soil. I started up a blue fox, which was running toward me with a murre's egg in his mouth ; CAFK WEHUC. I8l on my throwing a stone at him lie dropped his egg and scampered off. I hallooed for nearly ten minutes for some one with a gun to come and shoot him, and kept him in sight ; with more of curiosity than fear he would stop at intervals to look at me, keeping a safe distance off and harking, until he disappeared. Soon Mr. Was- son came up ; we pursued finding him on the other side of the island with another e^cr in his mouth. Mr. Was- son gave him his death-wound, though he ran some distance with the egg between his teetii before he dropped dead. His Hanks and bcUv were white, the rest of a slate-blue color, his legs very long, and tail long though not very bushy ; the more remarkable features were his short, rounded ears, as if cropped. Mr. Wasson also shot a Labradorian falcon, which Professor Baird afterward wrote him he thought might be an immature stage of Faico candicans. On this exposed spot the cloud-berry had nearly done flowering ; the cochlearia, growing from two to six inches high, was in bloom, while a pretty, gentian-like flower was found here which was not observed elsewhere. We laid to all the short night, as Mr. Bradford wanted to paint icebergs, getting up at three the next morning to secure some noble ones. Then we soon ran down and doubled Cape Webuc or Harrison, which is a lofty gneiss headland, faced with syenite, its northern face seamed with vertical trap dykes with an N.E. and S.VV. direction. Ragged Island now bears N.N.W.. and, as its name implies, is exceedingly rough and jagged, and evidently composed of syenite, as are nearly all these headlands, being probably outflows of crystalline rocks capping the Laurentian gneiss. We next came ii iSj A SL.MMKIO CRIJISK K) NOKTlltRN I.AliKADOR. M(. in siLclit of liijrli roiiiKlfd nunintaiiis near (In; shore, which appear to 1)C not less than Iwelve huiulred feet lii^ii ; far hack of tlieni were several peaks, which rose ahove a mass of clouds j)artiy enveloping them, and seemed to rise five or six thousand feet into the heavens. The highest j)eak is Mt. Misery, and Ca|)tain iMtiich MIKNI Ml>l kV, ciK .\i.i..\i;.\i(;.\i. 2,r7() ii;i.r, in i, \v. ok c.M'K iiakkison iiy tllAKI. says that in clear weather the group seems vj'ry near when viewed from the southern sitie of Hamilton Inlet. I do not doubt hut that this peak, which was obscured by clouds for two days after, was not less than two thou- sand feet hi<^h.* The view of this mountain, so trans- formed by the clouds hovering just below its peak, was the grandest coast view of the voyage. Towards the end of the day we ran into Stag Bay, some twenty miles north of Cape Harrison, after a pilot. Dredging in this harbor at the depth of ten fiUhoms was not very fruitful, except in some fine varieties or species of the very variable genus, Astarte, including A. banks ii and A. co^nprcssa, and a Gammarus new to me. The harbors on the Atlantic coast of Labrador have rather barren rocky bottoms ; sea-weeds are scanty, the shores are so steep; and there are so few large streams emptying into the bays, that no sediments are carried down from the land to form muddy or sandy bottoms. If the floating-ice theory were true, we should have expected * My guess I found to be a good one, as I find Mt. Misery is put down in the chart under the name of AUagaivaivik, with a height of 2,170 feet. -r. sii(»ki;-r1 si'diinciUs home from ilu- polar seas: hence the ahsencc of such suhinarine (lej)()sits in lliese protected harhors, as well as out to sia, so far as we could learn, — which, however, are choked with ice during June and July, is a si.nnilicanl fact. When we lay out- side we were never hecalmed, or saw the time when we could Lic't a chance to dredge over the vessel's side: and as we have already said, such work can only he thorou<;hly done by a well-e(|uipped steamer. Since leaving thi* Slrail of lielle Isle ther(* has been little chance of collecinirr the littoral species; indeed, that broad stretch of shore and tlats between hi^h and low water mark, w' .h is so characteristic of the Nova Scotia and New En^lan*' sliores. is here well-ni^h abol- ished ; the tides rise n-id tall not much over four, or at the most five or six feet, while the rocks pi unsje directly into the sea, and there is only a narrow border of fucus han^rin^r sparsely from the rocks, between tide-marks, with little life, — indeed, the only sj)ecies I noticed be- in^ the common shore-snail, Littorina rndis, and the little amphipod crustacean, GtDnniarus vmtattis. The same poverty of littoral animals obtains on the Green- land shores, and it may be thus readily understood why the starving members of the Greeley party could find nothing to eat along shore but scattered sea-weed and " shrimps," the latter undoubtedly the Gammarus nuita- tus, which is common on the shores of the polar seas. The best spots to dredge are the patches of shelly bot- toms situated in eddies at the inner end of a ** tickle " leading out from a deep harbor, where the tides and currents have no power ; for where the dead shells are gathered, the living ones are mixed with tiiem. ^^! !i' 'X i' i84 A summer's cruise to northern Labrador. ! 1 I r 1- 1 ^ .; ;| ^ 1 1 The vN'hole of the 23d, which was cloudy and raiiiy^ was sjicnt in search of a pilot for Hopedale. A boat's crew, myself included, rowed some seven or ei^^ht miles to Roger's Harbor, where in a quiet basin connected with the sea by two narrow "tickles," were about fif- teen v^essels — schooners and barks. We went aboard one, and it was indescribably filthy, above and below ; from the cabin arose a dreadful stench ; the women aboard, with one exception, harmonized in point of per- sonal apj)earancc with their surroundings. We asked for a little saleratus, and were kindly given some made from the spruce. This island is of syenite, its feldspar tlcsh-colored, and the shore is in its scenic features like that of the rocks at Nahant or Mt. Desert, with a few small beaches, the slopes leading down to them of an intense green. The cod had not yet " put in." Last year on the 26th they took a hundred quintals the first day they appeared. The fishermen talk discouragingly of thi^ year's pros- pects, and seem to be pushing " up to the nor'ard " more rapidly than usual. In fact, for three years New- foundland fishermen have gone for fish beyond the Moravian settlement of Nain. Add to the lack of cod- fish, the failure of the spring's " swile," " sile," or seal fishery, and they were doomed to fare pretty hard that winter. We found we had not gone far enough to find Tom Bloomfield,* the man we were in search of, but were near the house of Cole, a half-breed; part Englishman and part Eskimo, with an Eskimo wife and half-breed * See 21 on the map of Eskimo Bay. Cole's house is 22. EXTINCTION OF THE ESKIMO. 185 ^ lli! 1 children. The captain rowed over, and by tiie merest good luck found younc^ Cole, who agreed to pilot our vessel up to Strawberry Harbor, twenty-five miles dis- tant, where there were said to be two Eskimos who would be glad to show us the way from there to Hoj)e- dale, since they were desirous of going there, but had no boat, and would otherwise have to wait until the autumn. Never shall I forget the grandeur, the utter desolation, and the purple glories of the sky and shore as we rowed back that evening down Stag Bay, which is a wide sound, bordered with lofty terraced hills, the last rays of the setting sun lighting up the heights of the Webuc Range, as we may term it, uj) whose slopes gradually rose the purplish tints ushering in the darker shades of the twilight. Youncj Cole came aboard the vessel in the eveninjj after we had returned, in a large jack, which was decked over ; it had a small punt on it, beside his wife and child, upon whom he depends to help him row back should we be fortunate enough to reach Strawberry Harbor by noon. It seems that there were formerly a few Eskimos living in this region, but they have died off rapidly within a few years past. They had gone with the eiders, the geese, and the sea-fowl, the walrus and the fish ; their game and their race had been banished, like them, to the arctic regions. Our pilot, Captain French, said that there was now but one Eskimo where there used to be twenty. Their disappearance here seems due partly to natural causes, to the absence of abundant game and birds, and partly to contact with the civilization of this t.li I 1 '* 1 .:J I I \m 1 86 A SU.M.MllKS CKUISK 1 NUKTIIIiKN LAliRADoR. coast, unless tlicir close winter houses induce clu'st troubles : any other diseases are unknown. But what- ever may have been the cause, they arc rapidly melting away, disappearino^ by entire families. They have prob- ably faded away before the Nascopi Indians, who are belter armed, and their permanence at Hopedale and northward may be due to the absence of the red Indians from that part of the coast. But the Innuit or Eskimo is a doomed race. Whether they are the remnants of the pakcolithic race (which good authorities doubt) and for- merly ranged over northern Europe during the earlier stone age, and extended in America as far south as the border of the great continential glaciers, and were a few centuries ago driven northward by the red Indians, is a problem ; but probably long before the red man entirely disappears, the Eskimo will be represented by but a few thousands in the hicfh northern regions. Cole was not much inclined to leave home, as the salmon were just about striking in ; and, as he said, they only remained three or four days, and he might lose them, since only his father, who, as we understood, also had an Eskimo wife, would have to attend to the nets single, or rather — as his better Eskimo half would work man-fashion with him — double-handed. At the mouth of the stream where they lived were several huts tenanted by salmon fishers. About them lounged a number of full-blooded Eskimo dogs, which are quite superfluous in summer, but useful in winter, when they can draw sledges at the rate of a hundred miles a day should the travelling be good. Th'e early morning of the 24th of July found us with our pilot aboard ready to start for Strawberry Harbor ; but th lUt <;a.mi;. IS; there was a dead calm. However, at about lo o'clock a north wind sjirang up, so that we j)ut to sea and sailed until within eioht miles of St rawheirv Harbor, when it blew hard and became too thick to run fartlu^r ; so we put back three miles and ran under a lee-shore, where the northeast wind blew a cold, fierce gale, with fog and rain. (Jur vessel dragged her anchor, which was down at a depth of twenty fathoms, so that the larger one was dropped down, making ninety fath(;ms of cable to iiaul in on the morrow. Our pilot was a very intelligent half-breed who could read and write, his wife als(j a half-breed Eskimo. He said that the ice had only cleared off the previous week, and up to that time since March they have steadily had in Stag Bay cold easterly and northeasterly winds. Near where we anchored was Cole's brother, who had built himself a new house. Yesterday he took six and to-dav eight salmon in his nets, which were stretched across the mouth of a little brook. He shot eleve.. deer during the winter, one of them sufficient to supply the family with food for two weeks. They had plenty of deer and other game when too late in the season for obtaining fur ; he predicted an abundant supply of game during the commg autumn. We will give his statement regarding the varieties of foxes here, which may be taken for what it is worth. There are {< ur varieties of foxes which he said crossed among themselves, i.e., the red and white, which are the two most common ones ; then the patch fox, which is blue with red on the rump, and the black fox. Whether the red and white or arctic fox interbreed we do not know ; the blue fox is undoubtedly the white fox in its summer pelage ; the short ears and long tail ',- ?=l m 1 ' i, ■ 1 t i ' ■' I ■ ,' ". 1 i88 A SUMMKRS CRUISK TO NORTIIEKN LAHKADOK. sufficiently distinguisli the arctic fox and its varieties from the red or Virc^inian species. They had never seen tlie walrus about here. The spruce-trees up in the interior are quite larire, Cole said, some of them reaching a diameter of thirty inches at the butt ; but the birches are small, none large enough to make canoes. Of the red Indians of the interior but little could be learned. The reader will find the best account of them in Hind's Labrador, while the subjoined extract will convey some idea of the Labrador Indians as they were.* U I * " As for the interior parts of the Lahroiiore, it is wholy occupied by the northern Indians before taken notice of, who live and depend mostly on fish and deers flesii ; woolves, foxes and otters, affords cloaihinij; and as these are to be had by traps, and K""s, and other contrivances, their necessities nor ambition (hint promjit them to desive many things from us: our twine, fish- hooks, ice chizxels, ketles, and stnall wares, make up the ultimate of their wants. As for guns, powder, and sholt, their are numbers of them don't know their use. The moulted fowls at proper seasons, and what else may be had with the bow and arrow, procure enough for change of dyett, who live in great plenty other- wise, do reduce tiiese peoples wains into a narrow compass. " The skirts and boniers of Labrotlore are hilly and mountainous on every side (a small part excepted); but the interior parts is covered with lakes and morassis to a wide extent, which affords an easy communication into all our principal rivers; but as above, these people have their food and rayment on so easy terms, that hardly one in twenty have ever taken the trouble to go to ours, or any of the French setlements. Indolence and idleness has a good share in this indifference: but surely lis a mark of great wisdom in them. " However, those few that has frequented the setlements, begin to like our commodities better; their women like our nicknacks and guegaws, and the men begin to love brandy, bread, and tobacco, so that a little address and manage- ment will bring these happy drones out of this profound lethargy. You'll say these people would, froin their manner of life, have incressed faster than the other Indians; but the reason I gave before has, in some measure, prevented them; and now it will be a good motive to apply themselves in earnest to the use and defence of the gun, who, by the aid and convenience of our setlement at Richmond Fort, will be enabled to keep in a body, and repell force by force, without being divided, or under a necessity to travell a great distance from tl.eir familys, by having all those things brought to their own doors. " All the hilly and mountainous parts of Labrodore are occupied by the Usquemews, from the bay of Saint Lawrence on the southern, eastern, and THE MOUNTAINEER INDIANS. 189 i They arc called Montaignais hv the French Canadians, Mountaineers by the Kn<»lish, but refened to the Nas- copi trii)e by the more intellijj^ent of the latter. The tribe is a branch of the Algonkin stock, and is the onlv tribe known to inhabit the Labrador peninsula. They are more commonly met with at Riu^olet, the trading port of the Hudson Bay Company up the Hamilton In- let (Aivektok Bay); they are also tlescribed by Hind, who encountered them at the mcjuth of the Moisic River, which empties into the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Along this part of the coast they are rapidly diminishing : last winter many of them starved to death — several hundred, according to Cole's statement.* It now appeared that the larfve tire, the smoke of which we saw before reach- ing Dumplin Harbor, was from an area of over forty square miles situated back of where we were lying at anchor, and it burnt up some of the traps belonging to northern borders, and all along the east main to 5O ami 57 latitude, and on all the ijlands adjacent, who are the seamen and fishermen on salt waters, as those are on inland lakes and fresh water rivers. Hotii one and other getts great quantities of deer; but whales, seels, and sea-iiorses, are the priiicii)le s-iipport of the Us(|uemews; wether these retreat and retire to any distance from the sea- side uppon the approach of winter, or are wearid witti their long summer day, and creep into their winters cave to rest, this is certain, we never saw but once or twice a single Uscjuemew in many years experience in the homeward bound passage, allho we have been detained by contrary winds at all their haunts. ■'The interior parts of Labrodore affords g(jod shelier, and woods plenty for the northern Indians, who dress their victuals as we do; and dry'd fish supply the want of bread; they are very nasty in their persons, as all the Indians are; but not offensive in their filth, as the Usquemews," (^Coat's Geography of Hudson's Bay, pp. 88-go.) * " Returns of the Hudson Bay Company show that about 4,000 Indians frequent the company's posts throughout the whole of Labrador; and this ac- count probably includes nearly their whole strength; nineteen twentieths of them are nominally Roman Catholics." (Encyclopredia I3rit'anica, article Labrador.) Undoubtedly since this count was -made their number has con- siderablv diminished. f s il ■;: 1 s n t: i'it- STIii II I I 190 A MMMi;US CKL'ISE lO NOKTIIKKN LAlikAIif)R. IimI h 1 ' ■ { ,J ! I Cole's brother. The fire was ascribed to Indians, wlio probably set the woods in a bla>:e to drive out the iranie ; it was preceded by two unusually warm and dry days, at the time when the wintl turned westerly and we were let t)Ut fiom our prison at Scjuarc Island. The iceberiis were still neiiihborlv, two lariie ones in the ofhniu:, one like a church steeple, the boily submerj^ed beneath the waves, while the other suggested the form of a huge S(iuirrel sitting on his haunches with his tail over his back. According to Cole the snow and ice clears off from the coast at this point about the 20th of June ; at least that is the date when he leaves his winter house for his residence on shore ; the first of October, when the snow begins to fall, he moves back into the interior. The early part of the next day it stormed, blowing almost a gale from the north, with heavy rain ; we still held on to our rather exposed anchorage under a high point of land; not the least bight or indentation near at hand for harborage. In the afternoon the weather moderating, we got under way, and reached Strawberry Harbor at ten o'clock in the evening. On our way here we were boarded by an Eskimo in his kayak, who had been living in this bay during the summer. We first caught sight of the little craft two or three miles astern. It looked as it came up, bows on, like a large puffin sitting on the waves ; soon we could see the paddle describing a trajectory such as the wings of a puffin n ght make, and eventually we could recognize the human apart from the kayak, though an Eskitno seems an integral portion of his kayak, — one as human as the other. We throw over a rope, the kayak disgorges the Eskimo, the latter gi- STKAWHKRKV HARHOR. 191 deftly climbs up over the rail haiul-ovei-luiud, and then we take aboard the kayak. Whether the little box of a harbor we swiui^ in was called Strawberry* because it was but little larger than that berry, history does not record ; but it was the (jueer- est of the (|ueer harbors we had entered, and by this time the monotony of leavinu; one harbor in the morn- inir and entering its counterfeit presentment the same evening- had been a matter of remark by the ij-rumblers aboard. There was not room enou|Lih to swing by our cable, so we made fast to the rocks ashore, which rose in cliffs reaching nearly to our topmasts. Another ves- sel shared these narrow quarters with us. She had had tolerably good luck in fishing, her hole being packed two or three feet deep with codfish. Deep and seemingly inaccessible to outside life as Strawberry Harbor promised to be, the next day, which was nearly calm and sunny, with a little breeze from the east, the mosquitoes, swarming from land and peering over into our den, swooped down upon us and made life miserable. Ashore with my insect-net, they fairly drove me off the hunting-ground, which proved to be richer in arctic insect life than any yet experienced. So with the plants, showing that this spot was warmer and more protected than anv harbor we had visited for the past two weeks. In the gulches and ravines tne mountain-ash, alder, and willows grew to the enormous height of three feet ; the white spruce-trees were perhaps twenty-five feet high and one foot in diameter near the ground. This species of Abies, called in Maine the " cat" * This harbor is very near Ford's Bight or Nisbet's Harbor, and about ten. miles from Anderson's house, 16 on the map of Eskimo Bay. iti^ • f 192 i:>ii' A SUMMERS CRUISE TO NORTHERN LAHRADOR. li ; ) or " skunk spruce," from its peculiar odor, is a more hardy tree than the black spruce and grows farther north. We have seen it growing luxuriously in Aroos- took County, Maine, but it is rarely found farther south than Mt. Desert. Violets were in bloom, and one or two were new to me ; Ledum palustre was now out of flower, while the Labrador tea (^Lcdum latifoliiivi) was still in blossom, as were the bunch-berry, the mountain- trident, and the golden-thread ; Kahnia glaiica was nearly done flowering, and the green fruit of the curlew- berry was of full size ; evidently the short Labrador sum- mer of six weeks had come. The rocks about us were syenitic, with numerous thin trap dykes, both vertical and horizontal ; some of them had weathered away, leaving deep vertical fissures ; where the horizontal dykes had disappeared, great blocks of syenite had fallen down, giving a dismantled appearance to the shore. The south side of the harbor ran in rock- terraced heights to an elevation of nearly five hundred feet, the huge rocky shelves falling away seaward as if laid a. id smoothed with cyclopean hands. Climbing about over these hills was almost imi)osriblc ; streams rushed foaming down the ravines, some in sight, others only known by their rumbling, stifled roar under the bowlders concealing their bed. We learned that some Eskimos were spending the summer on an island hard by, and. we tried to get one to pilot us to Hopedale, but were unsuccessful. Land- ing on another flat islet near by, where this or some other Eskimo, with perhaps his family, had been sum- mering in his tent or tepic of seal-skins, as evidenced by the circle of stones used to weigh down the bottom of SALMON. •95 ii ^1 ci- ne Ti- the: tL'|)ic ; the marks of his temporary sojourn were in- dubitable, as witnessed by the stones whieh had been used to prop up his tent, the feathers and bones of sea- fowl he had sliot or snared, and by the seattered seal bones and skins and other unmistakable signs of Eskimo occupaney and of Eskimo personal uneleanliness. July 27th and 28th we had a severe ^ale from the north, with snow and rain. All through the day the poor women on the other vessel had to do their eooking on deck without shelter. On the 28th the thermometer went down to 34" P., and we had nearly two inches of snow on our deck, while on the hills above us were drifts a foot deep which lasted for a day or two, as meas- ured by Mr. Willis, who explored on the following day the heights above us, and reported tracks of foxes in the snow. Two deer were also seen by some fishermen. On the 29th it cleared off, and at sunset the wind changed to the west. At last we picked up an Eskimo pilot for Hopedale. He had been partly educated, and was living with a Norwegian who had been on the coast for eleven years, during seven of which he was in the employ of the Hudson Bay Company, his pay being fifty dollars a year. He brought us two salmon of dt species I had not before seen, and which proved to be Saimo znnnaculatus of Storer. He nets more of these, which he calls salmon trout, than of the true salmon, fishing for them with a twenty- foot net. The salmon come in usually on the 2 2d of July, and continue to run up the streams until about the 20th of August. The " salmon trout" is found nearer shore, while the large true salmon is more abundant at the mouth of the bay than ten miles inland, where our ^i/i;p: i !! ' i :li Ill ^ A SUMMERS CRUISE TO NORTHERN LABKADOK. Norwegian friend lived. He lieard to-day, as he re- marked to us, a wolf howling, and supposed it had killed a deer, as "after feeding upon one they usually begin to howl." During the winter he shot fifteen deer, enough for the winter's supply of fresh meat. We found here fresh traces of the polar bear, an Englishman, named Tom Oliver, having shot a small one last winter. Part of this day was spent ashore, and on the side of a deep ravin we recognized an old acquaintance in a low white golden-rod like a familiar White Mountain species. The star-flower ( Tricntalis amcricand), also a dwarfed yarrow {Millefolinni) and an Andromeda were seen to-day in addition to the flowers we picked before the storm ; also a dandelion-like flower. More land shells (including the slug, Limax agrcstis) were found here than at any other point we visited; they occurred under spruce bark and chips in the damp verdure : all of them i^Pupa Iioppii, Helix fabricii^ and Vitriiia angcliccB) were Greenland vshclls, never before found south of that arctic land, and this fact bears witness to the interesting intermingling of Greenland life, animal and plant, with the Canadian or boreal forms indigenous in the forest- clad interior. There are in Labrador two climates, the arctic on the coast, the boreal or north-temperate in the interior. The Greenland and arctic forms occurring on the coast are the remnants of the glacial or arctic flora which were formerly spread over the entire territory of British America, New England, and the northern cen- tral United States during the supremacy of the ice, and which were, so to speak, pushed out to sea by the migra- tion northward of the temperate forms, only retaining their hold on the treeless and exposed islands and head- .I'jiB.' he l)n Ira of n- id- 1. V.FUnvm Wh7f7ipldtz,i^ (ler rveissai' AnsirAIar \uitL S-a^vtvi^ Z. JofmSortl jj, U. Johrh Iione ♦■. £dn>.Milf7itl •S- JohnJimi e. WJBrom/'Li7J. e. CJ.yaa iZ.frnrJc Cov Si.SJftUiJfftntBeOatjt- tftLa&aa ■ Z» . AMiihMT 33. a* ffHi^r^'™'^ *J>IeaiJa t2- AJ'iroaJ.a 13. JTtJbnvBlMiar QO. TirmJ/Uirtr am 30,Xam I . r i ■■; '4r«iit': p. i i |H. f > H 1 fflH !■ \ ti i broad bay or sound, we nearly overhauled the Moravian supply ship " Harmony," just out from London. She was a bark of 300 American tons, very neatly kept, thor- oughly well-appointed, and well-officered and manned, her chief officer, Captain Linklater, a Scotchman. As she approached the harbor and before we discovered the mission building ashore, she fired a salute from two nine- pounders, at the same time sending her flag up to half- mast : both announcing her arrival and signalling disas- ter — the death in London of Rev. Mr. Latrobe, Secre- tary of the Society of the United Brethren. A salute from a small gun near a flagstaff on the rocks not far from the mission, and an irregular volley from the fowl- ing-pieces of the Eskimos answered ; then a dory and a kayak put off from shore, followed by a hcav^y, clumsy boflt with a square block tiller, which bore the three mis- sionaries, clad in seal-skin frocks with capotes, who greeted the others aboard with a kiss on each cheek. The boat's flag was also at half-mast, as the oldest mis- sionary. Superintendent Kruth, had died at Hopedale but a few days previous. The " Harmony" had brought over besides a missionary who had been absent for two years, the agent or supercargo, Herr Lintner, who had been educated as a civil engineer, and was the son of the owner of the vessel ; he visits the three mission stations^ and reports to the Society at home as to their condition and progress.* * This was the only vessel which visited Hopedale while we were there. Since that date this part of the coast has been visited by fishermen from New- foundland and Nova Scotia, attracted northward by the greater abundance of codfish. Dewitz states that up to the year 1S79 nearly 2,200 vessels had visited Hopedale, from 500 to 600 annually reaching the port, while in the year 1879 800 vessels touched at Hopedale, and on one morning 72 vessels lay in Hope- dale Bay. msm^ ESKIMO WOMKN. 199 |e- Meanwhile we were boarded by a large delegation of the squat, square-faced aboriginals ashore, full of curios- ity and interest, quite ready to accept any offering from our dinner-table, or even the scullion's waste-pail, and examining our spars and deck with approving glances. We returned the visit, and it may be confessed that we fully reciprocated their interest in our surroundings when we inspected their own. There are six Moravian settlements in Labrador, the oldest being Nain, which was founded in 1771 ; Okkak was founded in 1776; Hopedale in 1782; Hebron and Zoar in 1830. Hopedale is situated in kit. 55° 25', Nain in lat. 56° 25', Okkak in kit 57° 2,2,', and Hebron in lat. 58° 50'. At these stations there were in all, in i860, twenty missionaries and about 1,400 Eskimos. Rama was founded a year or two after our visit. The new science of anthropology was not so generally cultivated in 1864 as now, and we took no notes of the height of the Eskimos at Hopedale and elsewhere ; but in "Science" for July 29, 1887, we find the following statements by Mr. VV. A. Ashe as to the mean height of the Eskimo at North Bluff on Hudson Strait, taken from measurements of "60 families," the exact number of persons measured not being stated. The men aver- aged 5 feet, 3.9 inches, and the women approximately 5 feet, in height. And here it may be said that the condition of the women, whether the effect of their semi-civilization and Christianization or not, was certainly not that of subjec- tion, but of normal equality. They were certainly sharper at a bargain than their husbands, and within doors, at least, appeared to be mistresses of the mansion. Ml - ii ■M I w A SUMMERS CRUISE TO NORTHERN LABRADOR. m The women's dress differs from that of the men in the lonc^ tail to their jacket-hke garment ; some wore an old calico dress-skirt over the original Eskimo dress, — a thin veneer of civilization typical perhaps of the educa- tion they had been receiving for the past few generations, wliicii was not so thoroui^^h-i^oin"' as not to leave extcinal traces at least of their savage antecedents. But may this not be said of all of us ? For only a few centuries ago our ancestors were in a state of semi-barbarism, and the An- glo-Saxon race can date back to Neolithic Celts and bronze-using Aryan barbarians. However this may be, the Eskimos at Hopedale were a well-bred, kindly, in- telligent, scrupulously honest folk, whereas their ances- tors before the establishment of the Moravian mission- aries on this coast were treacherous, crafty, and murder- ous. To be shipwrecked on this inhospitable coast was esteemed a lesser evil than to fall into the hands of wan- dering bands of Labrador Eskimos. The natives have evidently been well cared for by the missionaries, kept from starvation in the winter, and their lives have been made nobler and better. Even in an Eskimo tepic life has been proved to be worth living. Fishermen and cruisers are (1864) not welcomed here, and it was not until a day or two had elapsed and the object of our ex- pedition made known that we were cordially welcomed- There were four missionaries at Hopedale : Brothers Shutt, Kreuchmer, Vollpracht, and Samuel Weiz, the latter, who died in 1888, a good botanist and interested in the zoology of the coast. They were now living with their families under one roof in the new mission house — a red-roofed yellow building of wood, of two stories and a half, a large, convenient, warm house — A FrM.-i!i.(i(ji>i- h Eskimo Faiii\ \i llMn.pAi.r, Lm'.raiok. iSf)_|. (From a phoioi;i;iph Ky P)ra'lfonl. i wmmm m 1: • ■ I' - :\ ^^_-<$^. f -^.-^t- ' T": '■ ■ Mai THE NORTHERN LIMIT OF iRKES. 201 there beinj^ seven buildings in all, including the unfin- ished new chai)el ; at a distance from the others was a small powder-house. The servants in and about the sta- tion were Eskimo, neat, cleanly, and intelligent. There was plenty of lumber, judging by a pile of spruce-logs, which were about fifty feet long and twenty inches in thickness at the butt.* We were also told that the Eskimos had built and manned a schooner of fifty tons. The mission is in part a trading-post, but at present 's paying only half its ex- penses ; the missionaries dealing in furs and curiosities, which they sell in London. Mr. VVeiz kindly gave me a list of the plants and vertebrate animals of Labrador, accompanied with notes, and his herbarium was very complete in the plants of Okkak, which he said was warmer, more |)rotected, and had a more luxuriant flora * The northern limit of trees on the Labrador coast appears from the state- ments of L. T. Reichel to be not far north of Hebron, as he says that while the extreme northern part of the coast is treeless, the bays south of Hebron are well wooded with spruce and larches, and south of this point with birches. Although situated considerably more to the south than Greenland, the winter is longer and the cold greater than in Greenland, since the southern extremity of Greenland is warmed by a branch of the Gulf Stream, while the winter <:limate of the Labrador coast is lowered by the floating ice borne by the Labrador current from Baffin's Bay. In Greenland the water becomes open in April, while in [Labrador the bays are not free from ice till the first of July. On the other hand, the summer months are considerably warmer than in Greenland, and hence there is a forest growth, since the interior of Greenland is buried in ice. In Dewitz's pamplilet it is stated that in the deep bays between Zoar and Hopedale birches occur, also willows, stunted bushes of the mountain-ash, and alders, until south of Hopedale the vegetation passes into the forest flora of Canada. But we observed that the outer islands are nearly bare from Cape Harrison to Hopedale, the shrubs and stunted trees mentioned only growing in protected valleys. Dewitz adds that there are rem- nants of forests on the coast, but that the missionaries have been unable to plant forests, and they think that the existing forest growth owes its origin to an earlier, warmer period. N 'I 'ih w I i ' ! ; 1 I 202 A SUMMERS CRUISE TO NORTHERN LABRADOR. than Ilopedale. Mr. Vollpracht told me that a large fresh-water snail (^LimiKva, near elodes) was abundant in a lake at Okkak. The collection of birds' eggs was a good one, and they also had skulls of the polar and black bears and of seals, which they sold to us. I also purchased a valuable collection of insects, principally butterflies and moths, obtained at Okkak. We visited the rather large cemetery, well laid out and fenced in, situated in a level spot where the soil was deeper than elsewhere : at one end were the graves of the mission- aries, over which memorial slabs were laid ; a large mound marked the last resting-place of Superintendent Kruth, while among the others was an infant's grave; at the opposite end of the yard were the short grpv-s of the Eskimos. There were six little gardens, each perhaps belonging to a separate family. They were laid out like those in the fatherland, with clumps of spruce and larches, em- bracing a summer-house, a rustic seat, and a grass-plot. There were also rows of hot-beds, where they rear let- tuce from plants raised in the house, yielding them salad in May. Turnips were well forward, onions were in bud, currant bushes two feet high were in blossom, as well as potatoes, which were six inches high, and the rhubarb was quite luxuriant in its growth, its flowers having been open for some time. The Eskimos were ready enough to traffic, though slow at first to bring out their wares, which consisted of birds' eggs, principally those of robins and murres, models of kayaks and oomiaks, as well as sleds in bone and seal-skin. From one of them, named Caspar, a lame boy who had lived ten years in Hamilton Inlet KVKNINfi PRAYERS. 203 and knew a little English, I was told tiiat a narvvhale was seen many years ago on this coast. It appears that this polar animal occurs now as far south as Hudson's Strait. Captain Handy told me that on the north side of Hudson's Strait the narvvhale commonly goes in herds of thirty. Malmgren, a Finnish author, says that the narwhale leaves Spitzbergen in summer for more northern and colder latitudes.* None of them, however, had ever seen a walrus, but the white bear was said to be not uncommon ; and he mentioned the wolverine as occurring; in the neic^hbor- hood. Showing Caspar the picture of the lobster in my Gosse's Zoology, he said it, with the shore crab, was not found here, but south of Grosswater Bay (Hamilton Inlet); the salmon (kavishilik) were taken in nets; he was also familiar with the starfish, which he called ougiak. At sunset the chapel bell rang for evening prayers, and all left their work or houses and made their way to the sanctuary. The men and women sat separately and at opposite ends of the room, even entering )y a sepa- rate door ; and the oldest members of the coiigregalion sat back on the higher benches, probably to overawe the juveniles on the front seats ; although these must have been duly restrained by the presence of the seven mis- sionaries who sat against the opposite wall on the right side of the leader's desk, their seven wives on the left. The service was brief, lasting twenty minutes, consisting of an invocation or address in Eskimo, and a few chants to German tunes, the congregation joining in the music * Wie^mann's Archiv fiir Naturgeschichte, 1S64, p. 96. w !^; i I M ■■yi' * t i ) 1 204 A Sl'MMKRS CRUIIjK lO N'ORTIIERN LABRADOR. of the oi'fTan, which was well jilayed by an Eskimo hoy. From the chapel all dispersed to their (piarters, and the settlement long before dark was buried in profound silence. Sunday, the 31st July, was a warm, sunny day, unfor- tunately as much enjoyed by the moscjuitoes and black- flies as by us. In the forenoon we went to the service, which was simple and brief, the natives not being wearied with a long discourse ; like the yesterday even- ing prayers it consisted simply of an invocation or ad- dress, congregational singing and the litany, and in half an hour the assembly dispersed. The day was observed by the natives and all others with more reverence than we have noticed in Lutheran countries. The evening by invitation was spent aboard the " Harmony." Captain Linklater, an unusually in- telligent man, was, as he told us, six weeks on his voy- age from London here ; he generally first sights Cape Webuc, though steering for " The Beacon" below Hope- dale. In sailing from Hopedale to Nain the " Harmony" takes an inside course. Above this point the coast is still more deeply indented by bays and fjords, their mouths checked with islands which extend fifty miles or more out to sea. The captain is ordered by the company or gov- ernor to take two Eskimo pilots from each port ; he gen- erally leaves them to return when fifteen miles out from harbor, as they are unacquainted with the rocks and shoals. Navigation to Nain is represented to be difficult ; at one place the vessel has to double two points closing in one beyond the other. The captain while in harbor is gradually making charts of the coast, which at best can THE I'T-OK-ICK. !0S only l)c approxlniatlvc ; the missionaries liavc also, by as- ccn{lin<>;' the hii^hcst points near their respective stations, taken the hearinos of the islands about, Ca|)tain I.. i)y a patent \o^^ takinij the distance between them.''' For ninety years a "Harmony" — the name bein