The Labradorians: Voices from the Land of Cain

By Lynne Fitzhugh

Explorer Jacques Cartier dismissed it as the land God gave to Cain, but generations of people from widely differing cultures living in dense wilde ess conditions have forged the people of Labrador into a thriving, vital culture of their own. Here are their stories in their own voices, written by the expert hand of a person whose heart's home is Labrador.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Breakwater Books Ltd
• Release date: Apr 1, 1999
• ISBN: 9781550813098

Lynne Fitzhugh

Lynne Fitzhugh first visited Labrador in 1969 when her archaeologist husband Bill was finishing his dissertation research and their son Ben was two. In 1971 she began spending the summers on the north Labrador coast as a cook and occasional surveyor for Bill’s expedition camps. She has since been returning to Labrador on a regular basis.

Book preview

The LABRADORIANS

Voices from the Land of Cain

LYNNE D . FITZHUGH

BREAKWATER 100

Water Street

P.O. Box 2188

St. John’s, NF

A1C6E6

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Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data

Fitzhugh, Lynne D.

   The Labradorians

   Includes bibliographical references and index.

   ISBN 1-55081-148-7

1. Labrador (Nfld.) — History. I. Title.

FC 2193.4 F57 1999        971.8’2        C99-950184-4

F1137.F57 1999

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Copyright © 1999 Lynne D. Fitzhugh

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No part of this work covered by the copyright hereon may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means—graphic, electronic or mechanical—without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any request for photocopying, recording, taping or storing in an information retrieval system of any part of this book shall be directed in writing to the Canadian Reprography Collective, 6 Adelaide Street East, Suite 900, Toronto, Ontario, M5C 1H6. This applies to classroom usage as well.

We acknowledge the financial support of The Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing activities.

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador that has helped to make this publication possible.

We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP) for our publishing activities.

We also wish to thank the Jeanne and King Cummings Charitable Trust, and the Anne Abraham Memorial Fund for supporting this project.

Printed in Canada.

TO ANNE

CONTENTS

PREFACE

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

CHAPTER 1 — The Land God Gave to Cain

CHAPTER 2 — The Straits

CHAPTER 3 — North of Chateau

CHAPTER 4 — Paradise

CHAPTER 5 — Torngat

CHAPTER 6 — The Moravian Coast

CHAPTER 7 — Grande Baie des Esquaimaux

CHAPTER 8 — Nitassinan

CHAPTER 9 — The Journey to Goose

EPILOGUE

GLOSSARY

ENDNOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX AND CONCORDANCE

TABLE OF NARRATORS

PREFACE

WHEN I BEGAN SIFTING THROUGH sixty-odd issues of Them Days magazine in 1989 it was with the idea of selecting for a wider readership some of the most colourful stories published in this regional quarterly of oral histories. I found that what I had instead of a simple anthology was the raw material for a social epic, a history of Labrador as it was experienced by the people who have lived there—some of them for thousands of years.

They took control of the project early on, these Labradorians, filling my head with stories until my ears rang with voices. A persistent dream image formed in my mind of the darkly silent Labrador landscape spread out below me, a vast and seemingly uninhabited wilderness. People began to emerge, just a few at first, then more, gathering by cabin doors at the edge of the forest, pulling boats above the tide, leaning axes against woodpiles, drying hands on aprons, talking to me. By nature taciturn, by accident of geography estranged from a world most knew little of, the people of Labrador were telling their story with a sense of urgency I had not heard in my original readings of Them Days. The task they had assigned to me, it seemed, was to impose some order on the din and see that this story found the place it deserved in the collective record of human experience on this planet.

The material more or less arranged itself according to places where the people gathered on the landscape: Innu (Montagnais-Naskapi Indians) mainly in the interior; the Anglo-Celtic liveyers on the southern coasts, Inuit (Canadian Eskimo) and Moravian Settlers along the north coast, and the great mixed-race trapping clans around Sandwich Bay and Lake Melville. This arrangment became the format for the chapters in the book.

Zooming in closer, it was possible to identify communities on the landscape that shared a section of fishing and trapping grounds, a gene pool, and a common set of memories and yarns. Zooming closer yet, to cove or clearing, the gatherings were of families, generations of them reunited around ancestral homesteads where now only the persistent rhubarb patch on a hummocked bawn signals this was once a place where people lived. Lived by the grace of God in the jaws of a formidable wilderness, and died, most often taking with them to oblivion the stories of the ordeals they survived, the secrets of their own personal courage and pleasure in life, and a piece out of the collective memory of a remarkable race. Were it not for the few voices captured on tape and the memories passed on to grandchildren, there would be nothing but silence, for the modern world has finally reached this country, and the last of her frontiersmen and women are passing away.

My first criteria in selecting narratives for this collection were story, style, and character, especially the narrators’. If it was palpable Labrador talking, it made the cut. Most written articles were omitted, as well as how-to accounts, some excellent but historically superfluous local legends, and stories of the post-Goose Bay generations, since construction of the air base in 1941 and Confederation with Canada in 1949 effectively brought about the end of’them days’. Within these omitted categories, and indeed all the narratives excluded from this book, is wonderful material for other books.¹

The narratives have been arranged in regional and family groups to create a profile of the history, lifeways, beliefs, values, and character of the region. As these accounts were never recorded with any such purpose in mind, they make a patchy mosaic. In time, you will begin to sense its shape and coherence and, ultimately, to feel at home among the people.

Labrador dialects are rich with the soft percussiveness of German-laced Inuktitut, of melodic Innuemun,² and the lilting patter of old maritime brogues from the British Isles. The vocabulary reflects these influences, so you may find the glossary of local terms and usage at the back of this book helpful. It is not necessary to understand every word, but names are worth noting because they are often the threads that weave stories together. The population of Labrador has always been small and isolated. With careful research one could conceivably reconstruct the whole woodlot of family trees, Aboriginal and Settler, their roots and branches elaborately entwined. These family trees probably would not exceed three hundred in number.

Genealogical recitations with which many Settler accounts begin are important both because of the significance narrators ascribe to origins and the historical information they contain. Unfortunately, these are usually absent from the narratives of families whose European progenitors came before 1835, perhaps because these men perished too soon, or changed their names, or their children were raised by Inuit mothers who spoke little if any English. Or maybe they did not wish to acknowledge or remember their origins. In these cases the name alone survived, indifferently spelled, providing a single imprecise clue for genealogists to track in merchant logs, shipping manifests, and British church registries. There is almost no written genealogical information about Aboriginal families, although José Mailhot has done some excellent research on the Innu, many of whom have retained their traditional histories orally. The Christianization of Aboriginal names during the conversion period effectively eradicated the traces of Aboriginal families in early written records, and the tendency of some Settlers to refer to less Europeanized Inuit by ethnic type rather than personal name has had a corresponding effect in the oral narratives. However, these families have equally rich and venerable histories which, for all their invisibility in the accounts available for this book, remain strong threads in the social fabric of mixed-race Labrador.

Many of the accounts in this book describe life during the first half of the twentieth century. These narrators (most born between 1890 and 1920) had known the early generations of Settlers and historic-period Natives. They also knew one another. Geographic groupings allow you to encounter them as characters moving through each other’s stories, since generations that never met in life mingle as freely as neighbors in the multi-dimensional, temporal and spatial environment of isolated communities.

As the pattern of existence in every Labrador community, and indeed, most every family, has the same basic components, a certain redundancy is inevitable in the narratives. I have tried to minimize it by elaborating on different components in each chapter. For example, most Settler families fished in the spring and summer, trapped and hunted in the fall and winter, and experienced the Spanish Influenza of 1918-19, but to degrees varying by community. While there are allusions to these topics in every chapter, the fishery is developed fully in the chapters on the south coast, trapping in that on Lake Melville, and the great Influenza in the Torngat region, where it was most devastating.

With few exceptions, the narratives in this book are transcribed exactly as published in Them Days. No alterations have been made in the dialect or wording of sentences,³ although some adjustments were made in punctuation and spelling of transcriptions. A very few accounts have been shortened, and some by the same narrator excerpted and combined. Occasional citations from the historical record provide what I hope is an interesting counterpoint to the personal stories. Many of these have also appeared in Them Days Magazine.

The story of Them Days is worth a chapter in itself. Started in 1975 by members of the Labrador Heritage Society concerned that a unique way of life was slipping away undocumented, it has done more than anything else to give the region a sense of pride in its own history and unique character. And it has given us outsiders a more profound understanding of the inhabitants of this marvelous terrible place⁴ than we could possibly derive from books or artifacts or even years among the people.

Them Days came into being at a time when Labrador’s cultural integrity and pride appeared to be disintegrating. Old-timers were disillusioned or bewildered by the changes in their lives. Their children and grandchildren seemed adrift between a culture with no future and a future in which they seemed to have no part. When television reached the country in the late 1970s, the Labradorians could no longer escape the realization that, relative to the world they saw on screen, their beloved country and the lives which they had proudly made with their bare hands, generation by generation, were not only impoverished but irrelevant.

The founding editor of Them Days, Doris Saunders, is a Martin from Cartwright whose family belatedly joined the great exodus to Goose Bay in the 1960s. Her mother, Harriet Pardy, was the infant Spanish Flu survivor from Mountaineer Cove of whom you will read in Chapter 4. For nearly twenty-five years, Doris and a handful of dedicated volunteers have collected most of the narratives, manned the office, provided reference services for students of Labrador history, welcomed visiting tourists, transcribed tapes, developed photographs, typeset and laid out issues, serviced subscriptions, raised funds to cover remaining publication and administrative expenses, and created a valuable archive of written and photographic records on Labrador history. Doris’s capable daughter Gillian has taken over the administrative and fundraising duties. But the vagaries of public grant funding and below-cost subscription rates have kept the magazine from attaining the kind of financial security a now venerable enterprise should have, especially one which is celebrated across Canada and has contributed so greatly to Labrador’s sense of identity.

While the economic dilemma of a people with little control over use of their country’s natural resources persists, it can no longer be said that they lack a sense of cultural identity and pride. Much of the credit goes to the resilient spirit of the Labradorians, but some must go to Them Days. In recognition of her achievements, Doris Saunders received the prestigious Order of Canada in 1986. She has also earned the affection of her fellow Labradorians from L’anse Eau Claire to Nain.

In 1994 Memorial University awarded Doris an honorary doctor of letters for her contributions to the cultural life of the province. In her convocation address she said:

Them Days came into being because Labrador and its people were not often portrayed honestly in books written about Labrador. I was given an article some years ago written by John Moss, a writer and critic teaching at the University of Ottawa. He wrote, ‘For people native to the North—native to any place—landscape is the extension of personal being, as intimate and far-reaching as genealogy. Inuit and Northern Indians have lived within the landscape...as an existential fact.’ He went on to explain that for writers from outside, the experience of a place—such as the North—becomes a world made of words, and again I quote,’almost all those words are devoted to the articulation of alien imperatives and dreams.’ Moss said,’Anyone who features himself in his own narrative, whether implicitly like Mowat, explicitly like Peary, or surreptitiously like Stefansson, will inevitably document the landscape and its people as extensions of his own experience.’

Joe Goudie, Mike Martin and others responsible for setting up the Labrador Heritage Society never read John Moss’s article, but they knew that so many books written about Labrador went from being quite good to absolute rubbish. And thus an idea for a Labrador book by Labradorians was born. The idea was to let the rest of the world and, in particular, the island portion of our province understand the real Labrador as experienced by the people of Labrador.

Labrador’s association with Newfoundland goes back a long way. Before Europeans came, aboriginal people lived in Labrador and on the island of Newfoundland. The aboriginal people on the island were wiped out in one way or another, which meant that Newfoundland started over again, as far as human population was concerned, as an extension of the Old World.

The Natives of Labrador, by that time, were—according to explorers and colonists—Indians and Eskimos. However, their own names for themselves were Innu and Inuit, both meaning ‘The People.’

The Labrador Natives went from being people in their own eyes to being ignorant savages in the eyes of the newcomers. Many were killed and others were taken as curiosities to the homelands of their tormentors. When the Labrador Natives tried to defend themselves they were called murderers and thieves.

When the first white men came to Labrador they had to marry native women in order to survive. First they gave their wives Christian names because they looked on Native names as ‘heathen names. Then they forced them to give up whatever they—the white men—considered heathen customs. They could, however, do whatever was necessary to provide comfort for their husbands, such as chewing skins to make clothing. My own greatgreat-great-grandmother, renamed Susan, was beaten by her husband when he caught her eating raw meat or doing anything else that he considered heathen acts. The children were raised to think of themselves as white and were encouraged to marry whites.

So you see, people who were secure in their identity and who were selfsufficient, were made to feel inferior by the intruders. Women who married white men lost their names.... They were forced to speak a foreign language, and their children were raised to ignore the heritage of their mothers. As a result, many of the descendants of those mixed marriages grew up being ashamed of their Native roots, some totally denying they even had Native roots. Fortunately some—like my great-great-grandmother Lydia Brooks, then Blake, then Campbell—passed stories on to her children and grandchildren, who passed it on to theirs and so on, until today, and I am now passing those stories on to my grandchildren....

Since the start of Native land claims negotiations, people in Labrador have become very interested in their roots and are accepting the fact that they do indeed have aboriginal roots—and that is good. They are accepting their true identities and will once more become people with pride in their heritage, proud to be The People....

John Moss’s indictment of authors whose descriptions of alien cultures are more self-descriptive than perceptive is glaringly, and embarrassingly, evident in the work of virtually all the outsiders who have written about Labrador, however eloquently. I knew from the start that it would be true of any introductions I wrote about these narratives. There is no way around it. Not only did I bring to Labrador a most un-Labradorian optic, I was bringing to this project two decades of my own emotionally charged experiences there. However, my husband and friends convinced me that introductions were necessary to make the narratives in this book accessible to readers from outside the region. Since that was my goal, I agreed to give it a try. Having accepted the responsibility, I have attempted to make the introductions as accurate, concise, and useful as possible and to let my inevitable subjectivity show. I hope these words help set the stage for the real authors of this history, the people of Labrador telling their own story in their own words, just as Doris Saunders and the co-founders of Them Days envisioned.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

IT GOES WITHOUT SAYING THAT this book would not exist but for the hundreds of Labradorians willing to share their stories with the readers of Them Days Magazine. Nor would it exist without Them Days staff, volunteers, and donors for whom this has always been a labour of love. Doris Saunders above all deserves special thanks not only for publishing such an important historical record come hell or high water, but also for her unstinting support of this project. Her generosity in allowing me to use copyrighted material, and her assistance in finding historical information, compiling maps, producing photographs, and proofing drafts has been humbling. She has shared her home with me, made me an honorary member of her family, and extended a friendship I consider among my most treasured possessions.

In addition to providing photographs, Doris also contributed to the illustrations by locating place names in the narratives that are not found on published maps. Her informants included Roland Baikie, Ruby and Pat Cabot, Robert Davis, Stella Fowler, Joe and Horace Goudie, Tom and Pearl Holwell, Chesley Lethbridge, Lawrence O’Brien, Ray Oliver, Janice Penton, and Calvin Poole. Thanks also to Gilbert Hay and Bill Ritchie for supplementing published works by Tony Williamson (1997) and Carol Brice-Bennett et all (1977) identifying Inuit place names on the north coast (see also E. P. Wheeler, "List of Labrador Eskimo Place Names" National Museum of Canada Bulletin 131, Ottawa, 1953.).

I would like also to acknowledge some of the people who provided the encouragement and resources necessary for an amateur historian with a demanding fulltime job in an unrelated field to complete a project like this. First, of course, there is my archaeologist husband Bill, who has always taken me more seriously than I take myself. He gave me the courage to try to produce historical introductions of academic caliber, shared his Labrador library, read and edited sections on archaeology, and encouraged me when the going got rough. His colleague and our friend Stephen Loring joined in urging me on and gave me access to his private book collection and extensive archive on Labrador history. Tony Williamson reviewed an early draft of the lengthy manuscript and, in addition to providing valuable suggestions for the final draft, became a tireless promoter of the book to potential publishers in Canada. Lynn Noel was also supportive and helpful. Wally McLean, who will someday write the ultimate multi-volume history of Labrador, never hesitated to answer my inquiries. Had we corresponded earlier than the weeks just before this manuscript went to the publisher, it would have been a better book. My son Josh, bless him, is to be thanked for patiently solving my endless computer problems and letting me turn his now-vacated childhood bedroom into ‘Labrador South.’

I wish to thank my employers, colleagues, and staff at the Folger Shakespeare Library for their extraordinary indulgence during the four years it took to complete the manuscript. In awarding me a part-time sabbatical (probably the only one in history ever awarded to a fundraiser) and another six months in various leaves of absence, they added considerably to their own workloads and inconvenience. To Werner Gundersheimer and Jane Kolson, thank you for approving these leaves, and Jane for taking on the extra burden of responsibility it entailed. To Jeff Cronin, Matt Hoenck, and Bianca Beckham, thank you for keeping the Corporate and Foundation Relations Office running so smoothly when I was away and for indulging my Labrador enthusiasms when I was present.

Finally, the publisher and I wish to join in thanking the King and Jean Cummings Charitable Trust of the Maine Community Foundation for helping support the publication of this book. Thanks also to the Arctic Studies Center of the Smithsonian Institution for supplementing this contribution with funds collected many years ago in memory of Anne Abraham, whose spirit remains my inspiration and a part of the magic of Labrador.

CHAPTER One

THE LAND GOD GAVE TO CAIN

…it should not be named the Newland, but the land of stones and rocks, frightful and ill-shaped. -Except at Blanc Sablon there is nothing but moss and stunted wood; in short, I dream rather than otherwise that it is the land God gave to Cain.

— Jacques Cartier, 1534

THIS IS A BOOK ABOUT the hard, wild country at the northeastern extremity of the North American mainland called by early European mapmakers Baccalaos—motherland of the cod, or Terre des Esquimaux, or simply Labrador—labourer in Portuguese. No one is certain why or how it got this name. Some say it was that of the seaman who sighted land, or the prospect of harvesting Native slaves. Either way, it was oddly portentous.

This was one of the first-found regions of the New World, but European adventurers thought it so austere that most moved on to more hospitable environments, letting Labrador drift into a forgotten backwater of history under the shadow of Jacques Cartier’s unflattering epithet. The few white people who stayed—petty entrepreneurs, hopeful emigres, loyal tradesmen, fishermen, seekers of solitude or adventure, outcasts and castoffs, the sons of Cain, and the merely destitute—were left to fend for themselves armed with little more than hope for better lives than they had known abroad and a dogged determination to survive from one day to the next. Unable to negotiate a truce with the natural and institutional forces arrayed against them, they faced the same struggle day after day, generation after generation. Unimaginable hardship became normal. So did an unaccountable buoyancy of soul. Perhaps it was introduced by Aboriginal mates, or imported from abroad like the seed of flowers that thrive in poor soil. Perhaps the awesome beauty of this stark land proved more nourishing for the human spirit than Cartier could possibly have imagined from the railing of his ship. Whatever the reason, the Labrador described by its people often resembles Eden more than exile.

Labrador is not a country in the political sense. In 1927 when the governments of Britain and Canada finally troubled to establish a boundary between the Quebec and Labrador sectors of the great Labrador Peninsula, Labrador was assigned to the British colony of Newfoundland, since independence was not an option. But Labrador is a very different country from the island to its south, and in the minds of Labradorians the union has never been consentual. Many consider Newfoundland’s relentless exploitation of their resources as tantamount to rape. Some of the Innu feel the same about Euro-Canadians in general, including the metis Settlers who have for so long shared both the landscape and their bloodlines.¹

As defined by the Boundary Settlement, Labrador is approximately 112,000 square miles of nearly virgin wilderness, an area larger by far than all the British Isles, inhabited by a population that would fit comfortably in a single English fishing town. Them days, before construction of Goose Bay air base in 1941, even before the coming of Europeans and their diseases, the head count is thought not to have exceeded five thousand. Today it is barely thirty thousand, much of it concentrated in the sandy town of Happy Valley-Goose Bay under the shrieking wings of NATO jets, and in the iron-mining towns of Labrador City-Wabush on the Quebec border.

Labrador is a far more arctic land than its almost temperate latitude (51-60°N) would suggest. Its climate is governed by exposure to winds sweeping down from the polar ice fields and by the notorious Labrador Current, which drains the Arctic Ocean. Winter temperatures can drop to minus 60°F, snowfall reach ten feet or more. From January to June a collar of storm-buckled sea ice up to a hundred miles wide hugs the coast, scouring the shoreline bare and consuming whatever mankind has left within reach of its rafting slabs as it tears itself loose in the spring. The sea ice breaks up in May or June, choking fishing grounds and shipping lanes with migratory packs that in a bad year can pin the fishermen in their harbours until August. Once clear, the Current becomes highway for a procession of majestic icebergs on route to their dissolution in the Gulf Stream off the Grand Banks of Newfoundland. It was one of these that took the Titanic.

Summers can be quite warm in the interior and inner bays but cool enough on the coast to render wool caps, gloves, and parkas indispensable. August snow showers and freezing nights are not uncommon on the north coast. The occasional’T-shirt days’ are plagued with hoards of mosquitoes and black flies fierce enough to drive most sentient creatures to the mountain tops, the edge of the sea, or mad. But even on the north coast, some days—maybe two or three a season, maybe a whole week— are so glorious that the insects themselves take a holiday. Then children from the villages flock to favorite swimming ponds, families pack their small boats with plastic buckets and head for the berry islands, and expedition members wander from work sites to find the perfect bathing pool or abandon themselves to the lure of distant hills. These are the days of innumerable solitary epiphanies, days when journals and sketchbooks are pulled from backpacks, thoughts take the shape of poems, and humming tunes rise from the syncopated rhythm of a trapboat engine or weave like a water skier through the harmonics of a 20 hp. outboard.

Labrador’s is among the most lethal climates on the continent not because it is the most harsh, but because it is so utterly disarming. The balmy southwest breeze that glorifies a summer morning can slam around in a heartbeat—dark shadows racing across the limpid sea like chills, stripping the skin from the flattened water and hurling it against the land so hard it makes the ledges flute and scream. Within minutes waves are leaping and foaming like a pack of mad wolves on the deepening swells. In October 1885, one of many gales to hit the Labrador that fall claimed sixty-four vessels and three hundred souls in about an hour. Even now, people hear the spirits of drowned mariners cry from the shore on stormy nights, and every headland, they say, has its ghost ships, phantom lights on the dark void.

Weather in Labrador is dramatic, capricious, and omnipotent, ruling the lives of residents like a band of outlaw gods. Temperatures in a single day can span sixty degrees, winds spin a full 360, and weather switch in minutes from thickest fog to brilliant sun to driving rain. But there is a terrible beauty in such unfettered wildness—and the sky shows are spectacular: lenticular clouds that drift in from the great bergs like a fleet of space ships; white ice fog that rolls over islands and hills like a heavy blanket, keeping the shapes of the land beneath; evening landscapes chiming with larks and stagelit by the lingering golden dusks of northern summer; double rainbows radiant against the dark back of a retreating storm; burnished sunsets in four acts; northern lights that begin as gently flowing neon curtains and end in storms of pulsating energy fierce as the trumpets of the apocalypse.

From a hilltop surrounded from horizon to horizon by unbroken, unbounded wilderness, the Labrador sky is the biggest, most transparent, wide-open sky imaginable, dwarfing even the Torngat Mountains beneath the fathomless blue of midday. If you let it, it will absorb you, stripping you of perspective and subjectivity until you become whatever you can see, to the farthest humming atoms of the zenith. In a terrain devoid of human frames of reference, you are one moment a giant astride Lilliputian forests of moss and evergreen, the next a micro-speck on a speck of a planet adrift in a dizzying void. In the brief deep blue nights of summer, stars hang in a three-dimensional space like tiny crystals, so close you want to reach among them with both hands and set them tinkling.

Sound travels like light in the thin clear air of a northern country without noise, and you begin to hear whatever you can see—like fog and auroras—and feel what you cannot see or hear, like tension building in a distant berg about to calve. The poof! of a lazy whale blowing as he rolls far out in the bay ricochets across the water, sharp and immediate as the rock beside you. The scrabbling traffic of insects in the understories of the tundra, the hum of mosquitoes outside a cabin, become discernible elements of silence on a windless afternoon. These qualities of atmosphere and space— clarity, purity, majesty—are perhaps what pass as beauty here. It is so seductive many visitors find it difficult to shake off, and the people who have made this their home can rarely be induced to leave. It has become part of their souls, whether Aboriginal or Settler, and of the culture that binds them together, willingly or not.

Cartier can be forgiven his hasty judgment because there is probably little on this earth less seductive than the coastline Labrador presents to the sea. Rocky and barren from one end to the other, much of it is aggressively mountainous, rising in elephantine promontories from a snarling surf. Island clusters near the bays and capes are guarded by myriad razor-backed shoals. Even today there are few navigational markers, and one threads these archipelagos with a sharp eye on the water. Arctic seas are much like the sky, even to the nocturnal galaxies of phosphorescent plankton that sparkle in the wake of a passing boat. Although dense with cold, the bottle-green water is clear enough by day to reflect light off a sinking penny at six fathoms. But when the visibility is poor, the best mariners in Labrador have run afoul of her submerged rocks. Ships large enough to take the full brunt of the North Atlantic keep well outside the islands between their ports of call.

For smaller boats, the archipelago provides an infinite number of excellent harbours and access both to the ice edge where marine mammals congregate in winter and to what was once among the most abundant sources of marketable protein known to man—the great tide of Atlantic codfish that came to feed along the coasts of Labrador each summer. Inuit seal hunters frequented the islands long before white men arrived. Later they became staging grounds for a codfishery that attracted fleets from England, France, Portugal, Spain, America, Quebec, Nova Scotia and, most of all, Newfoundland to the Labrador Banks each summer. Today they are all but deserted.

Anyone fortunate enough to visit the archipelagos of Labrador will find an array of landscapes and adventures worthy of Odysseus. One island has a cove that winks with multicolored eyes of iridescent Labradorite.² Another yields a yawning shaman’s cave near a bald hilltop where three human stick figures sketched in lichen-crusted stones stare into space with large round eyes. Yet another has a lush hidden valley ringing with birdsong, and a sun-warmed rain pool atop a cliff where one can bathe within arms reach of breaching whales. Another has an arctic hare that holds its ground, big and bony as a goat, its eye too certain for a beast. Tolkien himself could not have invented a more enchanted universe.

Island and coastal hills alike were sculpted in the conflict between the continent’s upwelling crust and seaward-moving glaciers. On summits and promontories rubbed smooth as the backs of ancient pachyderms by the elements, rain pools mirror sky from ice-carved pits and cracks, and the hills are littered with the glacier’s cargo of boulders spalled from inland bluffs. Hillsides today weep all summer with melting permafrost, and eternal snowbanks in high, sunless clefts feed rivulets that nourish bank-side thickets of fern and willow. In the coastal valleys, streams tumble from pond to boggy pond, pure as moss-filtered arctic rain can be and variable in flavour as fine wines.

Inland far as the frigid breath of the Labrador Current holds sway—at least several miles in most places—the land is mantled in tundra. During its brief summer, this nappy coat is as lush as a Persian carpet, an infinitely variable tapestry of colour and texture in elegant combinations, busy with insects, spicy as Christmas air, springy-firm underfoot—a joy to the walker. By September it has intensified to blazing reds and orange, palest sage and darkest green, everywhere imbedded with colourful berries that make a pre-winter feast for bird and beast and wonderfully savory pies.

This exquisitely minimalist vegetation is also useful. Radiant tufts of cottongrass that nod in the marshes once served as wicks for Inuit lamps; sphagnum moss and rotten stump wood became diapers, menstrual pads, and chinking or insulation for log cabins. Labrador tea, dwarf juniper, larch, birch, alder, willow, spruce, and fir provided Labradorians with the active ingredients for infusions and antiseptic salves. Tundra sods made thick, cold-proof walls and roofing for Inuit huts. Scurvy grass, rich in vitamin C, revived sailors after a long voyage. The local beach or sweet grass (Elymus arenarius) was dried, dyed, and fashioned into delicate baskets and warm insoles for skin boots. Edible plants like Scotch lovage, sweet cecily, dock, fireweed, roseroot, angelica, puffballs, and delicious boletus mushrooms grow near shore—as do the poisonous amanitas and deadly hemlock. Berries have always been an important winter staple for Labradorians, and the mats of crowberry (Empetrum nigrum)—roots, soil, and all—are what impart to Labrador-smoked fish a flavor unrivaled by any commercially available product. In fact, like much of Labrador’s gourmet fare—among which I count above all else the common red-fleshed arctic trout, wild Atlantic salmon and salmon roe, bakeapples (cloudberries), redberries (lingonberries), the tiny ground-hugging blueberries, mussels, soft-shell clams, and the liver of the bedlamer seal—it is hard to find outside the region.³

The shoreline itself is incised with bays fed by rivers off the high inland plains. The longer ones cut deep into the forest zone, but others too have been colonized by thickets of spruce, birch, and larch that spill down the river valleys toward the sea. In sheltered places one can still find hoary old-growth trees over thirty inches in diameter and a hundred feet tall. These watersheds were home bases to the Innu bands that travelled seasonally between hunting grounds at the headwaters and summer fishing camps at the river mouths. They became the main resource areas for Settler families, who wintered at the mouths while their men trapped the upstream valleys and highlands.

Behind its rim of hills, the interior of the Labrador Peninsula is a rolling plateau nearly two thousand feet above sea-level, a vast wilderness strung with lakes, rivers, beavered ponds, and emerald bogs set amid legions of shoulder-to-shoulder spruce, erect as bayonets against the sky, their branches knit together stiff and unyielding as barbed wire. This is Nitassinan, the Innu’s homeland and hunting ground. Over much of this land, the forest parts only for fire, rock, or water, but the network of waterways is so extensive that one can traverse the entire Peninsula in almost any direction without a portage longer than five miles.

On the hilltops and northward, where the country begins to point towards the Arctic Circle, the forest is overpowered by the elements and breaks rank, fanning out across pale carpets of caribou moss, backing to the wind, crouching in sheltered crannies and, finally, prostrating itself altogether in the warp and weft of the tundra. In the desolation of far northern Labrador, nothing remains of the mighty spruce but pale green rings of wind-blown pollen around the rain pools. Over six thousand years have passed since the continent’s mile-thick mother glacier retreated from this, its final stronghold, plowing long U-shaped fjords into the sea through an Archaean bulwark five thousand feet high. In all that time, the threadbare veil of moss and lichen has barely begun to cover her tracks across bedrock that is among the oldest on the planet. This is the land of Torngak and Te-pe-nam-we-su, the deer god of Inuit and Innu. From its mountain fastness a great flood of caribou—called deer by all Labradorians—is said to have spilled each year across the high barrens and into Nitassinan.⁴ The George River caribou herd, recovered at last from two centuries of over-hunting and massive loss of feeding areas to forest fires, is now the largest in the world.

Mountainous northern Labrador is a terrifying, fanged, decaying land, abode of the Inuit’s dark spirits and seemingly every other malign god banished from the world of modern man. Yet even here, the guileless pink faces of the river beauty nod beside crumbling boulders, and nesting phalaropes spin giddily in the high ponds, coralling a meal of water bugs. Even here, ancient tent rings mark the places where people found some narrow purchase for their families, places where stories were told and love was made under the radiant aurora.

Europe’s earliest armchair explorers reflected high expectations for Labrador in their maps, but most storm-weary mariners gave her comfortless shores a wide berth. In point of fact, for all its subtle charms and seeming abundance of forest, fish, and wildlife, the country is no more generous than her initial visage suggests. She exacts a high price for her resources, which took many thousands of years to accumulate and are not readily renewable. The history of human settlement, whether by Aboriginals from the West or Europeans from the East, must be read with that in mind, and with enormous admiration.

Since 1968 my husband has led a team of archaeologists in search of information about the aboriginal peoples of Labrador. He and his colleagues now believe that occupation began about nine thousand years ago on the heels of the last ice age. The first inhabitants appear to have been a vigorous branch of seafaring North American Indians who painted themselves in red ochre and buried their dead in headland mounds with spectacular ceremonial tool kits and panoramic views. The Maritime Archaic Indians had Labrador to themselves for over four thousand years, a longer residency than any single culture since. Evidence suggests it was warmer then than now.

The Maritime Archaic vanished from Labrador when the climate chilled and foreigners appeared—a new Indian culture from the southwest, and the first small bands of proto-Eskimo from the north. Archaeologists call the paleoeskimo culture Pre-Dorset. Like the Innu and Inuit after them and the Maritime Archaic before, they may have called themselves the People. They hunted sea mammals on the edge of the winter ice as well as deer in the interior. Their houses, soapstone lamps, and tools are small and refined, their dwelling places few and far between. They left little behind.

About the time of Christ, the Dorset Eskimo, named for the Baffin Island cape where their culture was first identified, began moving into Labrador along the same route. Reputedly large and peaceable, giants some say, their feats of strength may survive in the tales of the Tunit that Inuit still tell their grandchildren. Among other things, we know they hunted sea mammals, carved exquisite figurines in soapstone, and lived in skin tents and semi-subterranean sod huts with well-made stone foundations. Dorset culture vanished around 1500 AD, replaced by the aggressive, whalehunting Thule Eskimos, named for an archaeological site in Greenland. With their skin boats, dogsleds, and advanced maritime technologies, the Thule were well equipped for life in the eastern Arctic. As they spread down the coasts of Labrador and Greenland, they encountered and possibly exterminated the last of the Vikings and watched with apprehension as European sails again began to approach the New World two centuries later. The present-day Inuit of both continents are their cultural descendants.

In southern and interior Labrador, the Maritime Archaic Indians were succeeded by other proto-Algonquian cultures, some of which shared interior and coastal regions with their Pre-Dorset and Dorset contemporaries. The present-day Innu seem to have emerged from the last of these Indian groups concurrently with the arrival of the Thule Eskimo from the north. By this time the Innu lived almost exclusively in the interior, while the Thule and their Inuit successors kept mainly to the seacoast. In spite of having had economic and spiritual ties with Europeans since the sixteenth century, the Montagnais Innu of southern and western Labrador, like their Naskapi (Mushuau, or barren-ground, Innu) cousins to the north, managed to retain many of their traditional lifeways well into the third quarter of the twentieth century. The last of North America’s aboriginal people to leave the bush, the Innu of Labrador are still finding the transition painful and disorienting.

Until the arrival of Europeans, Labrador’s human populations were kept in check less by inadequate food resources than by temporary vagaries of game populations and climate, a dangerous terrain, and the limitations of their technology. It is not even clear that the Inuit’s reputed propensity for bloodshed, and Innu-Inuit conflicts over access to coastal resources predated European contact. Infectious diseases were virtually unknown, and neither Aboriginal group had the means or inclination to exterminate even vulnerable game species like the Great Auk so quickly dispatched by Europeans. As a result, white explorers found fish as thick as black flies near the shore, bears by the dozens feeding on the spawning salmon, and hillsides alive with deer. Labrador was a veritable garden in this respect, and our species remained an integral part of its ecology as long as our harvests did not exceed what the land and sea could annually renew.

Norsemen cruising the coasts of Labrador in 1000 AD would have encountered the precursors of the Innu whose culture has been named Point Revenge by archaeologists. They may also have met Beothuks, Late Dorset or, by 1400 AD, Thule Eskimos and Innu. It is difficult to say precisely which groups peopled the Sagas, as they were all indiscriminately called skraelings, a term roughly equivalent to ‘savages.’ Although there was some trade and perhaps even linguistic influence as suggested (at least to a non-linguist) by Inuit place names like -vik, the meetings were often unfriendly, and atrocities were committed on both sides. The most illustrious victim on record, Leif Eriksson’s brother Thorvald, has long taunted would-be discoverers from a hidden coastal grave near a west-flowing river supposedly on the coast of Labrador, which was called Markland by the Norse. When John Cabot and his son Sebastian re-discovered Newfoundland and Labrador (and thereby North America) in 1497, the last of the Vikings were but recently gone from the western Atlantic.⁵

Neither the Cabot voyages in 1497 and 1498, nor the Natives they brought home as potential slaves, nor the tales of codfish so thick they hindered navigation, inspired King Henry VII to pursue England’s claim to the Newlands. For the next two centuries official England remained obsessed only with locating a northern passage to the riches of Cathay. In 1586 explorer John Davis poked his bow into Tasiujatsuak Bay, later known as Voisey’s Bay (Emish by the Mushuau Innu), describing the very fayre woods on both sides and the abundance of fish and game. Several days later he discovered the Labrador Banks, to which he escorted a fleet of British fishing ships the following year. But Davis was disappointed by his failure to reach a Northwest Passage and never appreciated that the annual harvest of cod from the Labrador and Grand Banks would ultimately have an economic impact far greater than the China trade, for it sustained the working classes on whose backs the empires of Europe were built. George Weymouth and John Knight followed Davis in 1602 and 1606 respectively. Knight was slain by Inuit upon landing to repair his ship near Nain. Like Frobisher, Hudson, Button, and Gibbons, Britain’s finest invariably headed for Hudson’s Straits, paying scant attention to the ragged land off their portside rail. The seamen of Bristol who followed Davis to the Labrador Banks seem to have been less shortsighted.

Sixteenth-century references to English fishing ships on the Labrador are sparse and off-hand, but it is more than likely that the captains engaged in this profitable enterprise, preferring wealth to glory, simply cloaked their trans-Atlantic ventures in secrecy. The probability of inscription in England’s endless wars with France and Spain would have offered further incentives for silence, as even before Shakespeare’s time the Crown considered the fisheries, particularly the small English fleet sponsored by Bristol merchants that began working the banks off Newfoundland in the early sixteenth century (if not before), to be the principal source of experienced mariners and ships for the English Navy. Conscription was seldom voluntary.

Azorian-Portuguese brothers Gaspar and Miguel Corte-Real sailed the Labrador and Newfoundland coasts in 1500, 1501, and 1502, followed soon after by Portuguese, Basque, and Breton fishing vessels. Basques and Bretons immediately established shore stations on the Labrador side of the Strait of Belle Isle. The port of Brest, erected at Old Fort Bay around 1504, reportedly served a large volume of traffic to the New World throughout the sixteenth century, although the absence of building remains suggests that it was little more than a garrisoned harbour.

While Portugal and France took an early lead in the Newfoundland and Labrador fishery, most nations regarded the Newlands as England’s by right of discovery, and the minority British fleet held sway in any harbour on the coast in which it had a presence. While France planted its flags along the Gulf of St. Lawrence, Britain established stations on the island of Newfoundland, which Sir Humphrey Gilbert officially accessioned for the Crown in 1583 to reinforce Cabot’s ambiguous and by then suspect claim. The port of St. John’s rapidly eclipsed Brest as the principal staging ground for the multinational North American fishery. Later, the island of Fogo and the old Basque port of Carpunt (now Quirpon) off the northeast tip of Newfoundland joined St. John’s as bases for English trade in Labrador. While Newfoundland served as a bargaining chip in the duels between England and France for two centuries, the Avalon Peninsula and Conception Bay around St. John’s remained definitively British by occupation and usage. Settlement began in that area as early as 1610.

Within decades of discovery, the Newfoundland and Labrador fisheries had made both Portugal and the Norman city of Rouen wealthy. It was also taking such a high toll in boats and lives (including both Corte-Real brothers) that in 1541 the King of Portugal withdrew his financial support for these voyages. Portuguese captains who continued to cross the Atlantic did so at their own considerable risk and expense. As the number of Portuguese voyages declined, those from other European countries increased, and with them the skill of the seamen and boatbuilders engaged in this demanding enterprise. The North Atlantic fisheries did, in fact, play a significant role in the development of the great European navies. Notwithstanding Britain’s low profile in the annual migration to the American Banks, her victory over the Spanish Armada in 1588 was no coincidence.

Basque mariners pursuing the whales that ran through the Strait of Belle Isle established shore posts for rendering blubber in Buttes (Red Bay), Pinware, Pleasure Harbour, Cape Charles, and Henley Harbour.⁶ Skilled seamen though they were, the Basques went down with Portugal and Spain in the Armada and their trans-Atlantic fisheries declined. Red-roofed storehouses, galleons, iron vats, tankards, pipes, plates, and even fellow countrymen were abandoned. A century later, when European shore posts of any substance were again attempted in the eastern Straits, the only visible traces of the Basque outposts were sea-worn roof tiles among the beach stones and the thick tufts of grass and fireweed that luxuriate in the footprints of ancient dwellings. Recent evidence suggests that a few vessels continued to harvest Labrador’s whales until around 1640, and others returned to the French shores of the Gulf in the eighteenth century, but the era of the Basques in North America had ended. This venerable nation-less people had lost the opportunity to establish a country of their own in the New World.

The Dutch also took Labrador whales and were probably the first to engage in a floating trade with the Inuit in the seventeenth century. They garnered little in the way of useful products, as Inuit were not in the practice of spontaneously stockpiling goods marketable in Europe. However, Dutch descriptions of the native people and rough charts of the coast made valuable contributions to Labrador’s ethnography and cartography. As navigational charts improved and became more widely available, ships from virtually every maritime nation in Europe gave at least an arms-length glance at this strange, forbidding territory.

It was the one-time Breton fisherman from St. Malo, Jacques Cartier, who, on entering the St. Lawrence River as captain of his own boat in 1532, first claimed the wild Canadian mainland for a European country, a claim the English did not immediately trouble to dispute. By 1600, French ships accounted for some two hundred of the 350 European vessels reported on the Newfoundland-Labrador fishing grounds each summer. Unlike England, which was ambivalent about settlement in her Canadian colonies, France actively promoted it. The first French families began clearing land near what is now Quebec City around 1620. By the end of the century, small French farmsteads clustered around all the King’s Posts west of Mingan on the Gulf, and there were sealing stations as far as the St. Augustine River near the entrance to the Strait of Belle Isle.

Management of the King’s Posts and eastern seigneuries alternated between government representatives and private lessees operating under government contract. All were subject to the King’s policies regarding fair and respectful treatment of the Innu, who were viewed as potentially equal citizens of France. Stewards of the posts were instructed to encourage the work of missionaries among their affiliated Innu bands, outlaw or discourage the distribution of alcoholic beverages, trade fairly, and allow distribution of goods on credit. At the same time that France was developing the fur trade and exploiting marine resources, it promoted agricultural colonization as a way to solidify French claims to the territory and create a self-sufficient local economy.

It was during a period when the King’s Posts were leased to well-connected private entrepreneurs that development spread into Labrador. In 1702 the King granted a seigneurial holding of all lands between Bradore and Hamilton Inlet to Augustin Legardeur, Sieur de Courtemanche. His station at Bradore—Fort Pontchartrain— served as the base for the first French trading operations into Labrador and a southern destination for Inuit seeking opportunities to obtain European goods by trade or theft. We know from historical accounts that the post was fortified, and archaeologists have uncovered foundations of over two hundred buildings. Courtemanche’s stepson Brouague tried to promote goodwill between his people and the Inuit, but there was little one man could do to stop what had by then become a full-blown ethnic war.

For 250 years the Inuit of Labrador had witnessed the annual parade of sails on the horizon and spars in outer island harbours from a wary distance. They had learned early that whites could not be trusted, and sporadic European attempts to amend the transgressions of their predecessors had little effect. By the eighteenth century, ship captains on official missions usually forbore insults to the native people, but the fishermen, whose vulnerability to attack was great and whose qualms about killing ‘heathen savages’ were minimal, are said to have shot Inuit on sight. In open warfare with fishermen, Inuit cunning gave them the advantage, even over firearms. Raiding parties allegedly made a sport of ambushing the shore posts at night or under the cover of fog, terrifying the fishermen with their war cries and making off with abandoned boats and iron implements. Anyone who remained to defend them was killed. So fearsome did the Inuit’s reputation for violence become that it effectively inhibited development of shore stations north of the Straits until the 1740s, by which time the Inuit’s preference for European iron and boats too dearly acquired in raids had begun to erode their independence.⁷

As long as Canada’s more hospitable regions rewarded the burgeoning population of entrepreneurs and fishing fleets, there was little incentive for them to challenge determined aboriginal defenders for a land as worthless as Labrador. No one even bothered to draw boundary lines on the evolving map of Canada until the 1660s, when proprietors of Nouvelle France, on finally reaching Hudson’s Bay from the south, discovered that the newly chartered British Company of Adventurers was already established in the Bay. But even when the nasty war over Rupert’s Land ended in 1713 with the Company firmly in control of its territory to the west, jurisdiction over Labrador remained not only unresolved but essentially uncontested. In 1752, a group of English merchants petitioned for a grant of the country called Labrador not at this time possessed by any of His Majesty’s subjects or the subjects of any Christian Prince.⁸ The Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC), fearing that bases there would be used to poach on its territory, tossed off a perfunctory objection on the grounds that its original charter included most of the peninsula, an assumption eventually dispelled by the Lords of Trade. In any case, none of these British parties seemed aware that the traders and sealers of Nouvelle France had by then been active in the Terre des Esquimaux for decades.

Permanent French settlement of the Gulf Coast reached the Strait of Belle Isle around 1715, when Sieur la Vallee Constantin, active in concessions on both sides of the Straits for nearly two decades, established outposts at what is now West St. Modeste and Pinware, and at L’anse au Loup several years later. Sieur Antoine Marsal’s concession at Charles River, established in the early 1730s, was the end of the line. Beyond it lay the forbidding ‘Land of the Esquimaux.’ For nearly two centuries after the Inuit threat subsided, Cape Charles remained the boundary between the Labrador Straits, with its Old World/Newfoundland orientation, and the wilder lands beyond, where the mixed-race culture that evolved was unique, the orientation internal, and the outside world little more than a rumor.

While fur trade with the Innu was conducted at many of the French posts in the Straits, most were headquarters for fishing, whaling, and especially sealing operations, employing men and women who would begin to settle not only the shores of what is now eastern Quebec, but also the southernmost harbours of Labrador. New Englanders quickly dominated the whaling industry, taking seals and walrus as well, and there were always vessels from Nova Scotia among the offshore fishers. During the Napoleonic Wars, they infiltrated some of Labrador’s prime salmon streams. But as settled residents of the coast, the French were able to specialize in the seal fishery, which is best conducted in the spring and fall from stationary posts. The French period in Labrador (1702-1763) is therefore characterized by year-round rather than seasonal establishments.⁹

In 1734 Sieur Jean-Louis Fornel of Quebec, already sealing in southern Labrador, asked the French Crown for rights to operate in Baie des Esquimaux—Hamilton Inlet. His petition again refers to Marsal’s post as the frontier beyond which no one, previously, had ventured near shore for fear of the Inuit. Fornel leased Louis Bazil’s post at Chateau in 1736 and, in 1742, finally obtained a concession for the Baie.

Primarily hoping to capitalize on the abundance of seals in Hamilton Inlet and on the access Lake Melville offered to the hunting grounds of the northern Innu, Fornel also hoped to initiate trade with the Inuit.¹⁰ In 1743 he sailed to Ivuktoke, their southernmost homeland in the narrows of Hamilton Inlet, claimed the Baie des Esquimaux for Nouvelle France, and left a small crew with Innu guides on shore to establish stations.¹¹ Within the next few years Fornel erected what are probably the first outposts at all Lake Melville’s principal salmon and trapping rivers, including North West River and Rigolet. After his death in 1745, Fornel’s widow, Marie-Anne Barbel, assumed management of the Esquimaux Bay concessions. These endured, if not thrived, for another decade, evidently spared the barrage of Inuit raids to which the coastal outposts were subjected at this time.

In 1756 the European conflict known on this side of the Atlantic as the French and Indian War allegedly brought commercial activity in Labrador to a halt. For the next seven years the reportedly peaceable Innu, deputized by the French, used guns to further the territorial aims of their allies while dominating old rivals—the Iroquois to the west (allies of Britain) and the Inuit of Labrador, whose access to firearms was still limited. The Labrador coast as far north as Nain is peppered with Battle Harbours and Massacre Islands dating from this period. In their conflicts with the Innu, the fearsome Inuit were more often victims than aggressors. Scattered skulls with bullet holes confirmed survivors’ tales of genocide on an Ivuktoke island around 1760, just a few years after a legendary slaughter at Battle Harbour and others near Nain. These assaults conspired with European diseases to hasten the demise of the southern Inuit during the eighteenth century. By the time the French and Indian War ended, only a few Inuit families remained near the outposts their people had established during the seventeenth century at Bradore, Cape Charles, and Sandwich Bay. They (and northern kin who gravitated toward the southern trading centers between 1780 and 1850) were gradually absorbed into the advancing Settler population.¹² Their influence is still discernible, however, in the features of families from Fox Harbour, Indian Tickle, and Sandwich Bay. Their technologies, transhumance lifestyle, and many characteristic social behavoirs and customs infused Settler culture south as far as St. Augustine, just as it did in northern Labrador.

With the Treaty of Paris in 1763, Canada officially became English—almost three centuries after John Cabot planted the British flag on her shores. Before the ink was dry on the treaty, a handful of gentlemen merchants, seeing profits and adventure in the long-disdained territory of Labrador, hastened to stake their claims on the land. Almost immediately, those bearing grants from the Crown would find themselves in fierce competition with aggressive firms already established in Newfoundland as well as with French Canadians holding long-standing title and grants to the same stations. Their legal suits would lead the governors of Quebec and Newfoundland in a fortyodd-year tug of war over jurisdiction of the Labrador coast. However, before resolving international disputes, the first priority must be to subdue what remained of the nettlesome Esquimaux Indians. By happy coincidence, a band of Inuktitut-speaking Moravian brethren from the Greenland Missions were petitioning to establish stations among the Labrador Inuit. If these instruments of God could accomplish what guns and fortifications had not, the authorities reasoned, the temporary sacrifice of as yet unvalued Crown lands would surely prove a worthwhile investment.

The Moravian Church—or Unitas Fratrum—was part of the reformist tide that sprang from fifteenth-century Bohemia and, forced underground and westward, seeped across Europe nourishing the seeds of reformation. By the time Luther nailed his ninety-five theses