Across Unknown Labrador -Part II

Across Unknown Labrador (Part II of III (others not available)).

By H. Hesketh Prichard.

The Wide World Magazine June 1911, Vol. xxvii.—22.

Digitized by Doug Frizzle, Stillwoods, March 2018. (About 30 years ago I visited Fort Chimo and Ungava Bay to be a part of a Hydrographic survey of the area.)

Labrador—“the land that God gave to Cain”— contains an area forty or fifty thousand miles square that is utterly unexplored; even the heads of the inlets and bays are uncharted. Mr. Hesketh Prichard essayed to do what no white man had ever done before—to cross this desolate wilderness from the Atlantic to the George River. Those familiar with the conditions said that the feat was impossible; that he and his companions would share the fate of Mr. Leonidas Hubbard, the American explorer, and perish miserably of starvation amid the interminable “barrens” of the interior. But Mr. Prichard persisted, and in the series of articles which we are privileged to publish he gives a graphic account of the experiences of his party, whose sufferings and adventures constitute a unique chapter in the annals of exploration.

At the end of my last article I left our party in camp near the George or Barren-ground River, all of us well pleased that we had at length achieved success. I will begin this paper with some account of the remarkable valley in which we found ourselves.

The hollow of the valley is filled with that great widening of the George that is called Indian House Lake, and which is a mile in width and about twenty in length. On either side of its waters rise high rolling ridges, dotted with spruce, willow, and juniper, which grow freely among immense boulders and masses of rock. The whole of the land surface is seamed with the old trails of caribou that have pursued their age-long wanderings in this desolate environment.

Tradition gives this place as the spot where, in 1894, an Indian killed the last recorded specimen of the red or Barren-ground bear. The whole country is covered with the bones of long-dead deer; another noticeable fact was that rarely could one look round the sky without seeing flocks of ravens in the air. The croak of the raven, the cry of the loon, and the howl of the wolf are certainly the three characteristic sounds of this wilderness.

Concerning wolves, I was much interested in trying to discover whether these animals (which, though seldom seen by daylight, are very numerous in Labrador) chase or attack the lonely traveller or hunter, a pastime that, according to report and the illustrated papers, their cousins of Europe undoubtedly indulge in. Who cannot recall a picture of a flying droshky and its bearded driver, with the pas­senger shooting a revolver over the crook of his arm at the pursuing wolf-pack?

But on the Labrador—near the settlements, at any rate—the wolf bears a fairly good character in this respect. The only instance that I know of when wolves attacked a man I have on the authority of Bishop Martin, of Nain. A settler had killed some seals on the edge of the ice and returned to his home. Later on he went back to bring in the carcasses, taking with him only a spade, as the place was not far from the station.

While he was engaged in shovelling off the snow which had collected on the bodies of the seals, four wolves came down upon him and seemed threatening. He was rather helpless, having no gun with him, but he defended himself by cutting at the neck of one of the animals with his spade. Then, keeping his face towards them, he held them off with the spade as he retreated in the direction of the shore and the settlement. The fact that they meant an attack seems to be proved by their following him for some distance, but he escaped.

Now, in the autumn, though we often saw the tracks of wolves, only on a single occasion had I a glimpse of one in the flesh, for they seem to spend the hours of daylight in the shelter of some rock or bush.

More than ever as I sat beside the camp-fire on the day after our long-desired arrival at the George River did I regret the unfortunate accident to my ankle. The muscles near the tendon had been badly strained, and I found myself quite unable to do more than hobble about. Any attempt to travel over the rocky ranges and through the treacherous valleys choked with boulders and moss appeared to be hopelessly out of the question. Complete rest was my only possible chance. Yet, although this presented a very pleasant prospect to my weary limbs as well as to my ankle, the out­look was not so bright as it might have been owing to the fact that we were in the centre of a very sterile country, with but four days’ provisions on short rations remaining to us.

In the morning, it is true, Hardy and Porter had seen a herd of fourteen deer, but these had immediately left the locality, for their forms were later seen by all of us against the skyline of the mighty ridge above Slippery Brook—as we named the torrent by which we were camped. Having passed to windward of us, we knew only too well that the deer would put many a league of safety between ourselves and them, and would follow the herds which had already passed away on their migration. My companions had left the camp, Porter to gather wood, and Hardy— having been requested in the words of the old squaw Nokomis in “Hiawatha” :—

Go, my son, into the forest,

Kill for us a deer with antlers—

had started away into the vast medley of trees, boulders, and marshes that hemmed us in on the north. In order to try and do something towards the general support, I picked up the rod and began to fish the torrent which roared within twenty yards of the camp. On the previous night Hardy and I had taken six trout from this quick water, but when he sallied out among the mosquitoes at dawn he had failed to get a single rise. I, however, was luckier, as after a few minutes’ fishing I saw a good-sized trout rise, and before the mosquitoes drove me to bury my face in a “smudge” (the smoke of a fire of damp moss and leaves) I had caught him and three of his fellows. After this, though I tried both fly and spinning bait, I could catch no more. Just as I had returned from fishing I heard the report of a rifle, and an hour later Hardy came into camp with the greater part of the meat of a very small caribou.

Soon—very soon—the kidneys, heart, and liver were sizzling in the frying-pan, with three thin concomitant slices of our now most precious bacon. As we had been a month on rations, and the latter part of it on very short commons —having, indeed, had but one full meal since leaving Sandy Camp, and that on the occasion when I had killed the deer—we did full justice to the meat, and the pan was filled and emptied more than once before pipes were pulled out, filled, and lighted. Then we held a council.

It was finally decided that Robert Porter should go back over the trail to bring up a relay of provisions while Hardy and I remained in the camp, where we were to dry the meat of the caribou. But though we tried to carry out this programme we were not very successful as regards one portion of it, as before Porter could start he must rest, and by the third day very little was left of Hardy’s deer, which, as I have said, was a small one. We were, more­over, helped in dis­posing of the meat by foxes and ravens, which found and took toll of the carcass on the night after it was killed and before Hardy could reach it the next morning with his packing-strap. The small amount that remained over we dried in a rough and ready fashion upon the flat rocks by the river, but if we left the meat for a single instant or ceased waving branches of leafy birch above it, every piece became black with botflies, blackflies, and mosquitoes. While engaged in this pleasant occupation we, for the first time, really understood how and why it is not good for man to live alone—especially in the Arctic and sub-Arctic.

In civilization it is said that a wife does not always add to her husband’s ease or render his life more supportable, but up on the Barren-grounds the worst of wives would be better than none.

There, among the heathen tribes, if a man’s wife dies—provided he be not a polygamist, in which case there is less need for hurry he often marries again within the week, and even the Christian Eskimo widowers are with difficulty persuaded by the Moravian missionaries to allow six weeks to elapse between the death and remarriage. Certain it is that on the very day after the six weeks have elapsed the hunter presents himself with a new bride, and asks that the marriage service may be speedily read.

Nor is the reason for these things far to seek. We say in civilization that “a woman’s work is never done,” and far more is that true of the helpmate of the savage and the semi-savage, the woman of the Barren - grounds or of the ice-edge. She makes and breaks camp, cooks, cuts up and carries to camp her husband’s kill; she dresses the skins of deer and seal (a laborious pro­cess, as the skin often has to be chewed to make it soft for sewing); she is responsible for the fashioning of foot-gear and clothes; on a journey she often paddles the canoe, and on portage she carries a heavy load.

In fact, it is easier to write down the duties not expected of a squaw than those which by immemorial custom she must perform. Indeed, the Northland is a country calling aloud for a woman’s movement, a crusade of emancipation; but such will never come, even in a thousand years, for in the wilderness the provider of food, Man the Hunter, has reigned, reigns now, and ever will reign. Having slain his deer or his bear, he will take his ease in the best place in the lodge, deputing all the lesser offices to the mother of his children. It is a law, and the laws of the Northland do not change.

But to return to the process of meat-drying, which led to this digression. We dried some pounds, and would have dried more had it not been that some animal, probably a fox, raided our meat supply during the night. We imagined that we had placed it in safety by sinking it in the water of the torrent, but when we awoke on the morning of the 21st a great part of it was gone, and, as we had practically no flour or other provision left, the loss was a serious one. A great piece of good fortune, however, followed close upon it, for as, on the same evening, I was sitting talking to Hardy by the fire as the sun was beginning to sink, a caribou suddenly appeared on the other side of the torrent. Seizing my rifle, I had time to get in a shot just before the deer crossed our wind. The deer collapsed in its tracks. It turned out to be a doe, with horns of thirteen points, and soon we had her carcass cleaned and sunk in a deep pool far beyond the reach of even the most cunning of foxes.

The next morning Porter got away early, and Hardy and I were left to draw our belts tight, for we decided that it would be only common prudence to keep the meat of the last deer as a precaution against unforeseen eventualities. In the wilderness only a very thin partition exists between safety and danger, between life and death, and it has been in consequence of ignoring this fact until it was too late that many have perished.

During Porter’s absence, Hardy and I spent most of our time in fishing and hunting. There were very few trout in Slippery Brook, and without a canoe it was difficult to fish Indian House Lake; but Hardy succeeded in taking two fine namaycush. These, rather to our surprise, rose in the fast water of the torrent.

Day by day the swelling of my ankle was subsiding; the weather was good and everything favourable, though the lack of all farinaceous food affected us considerably at first.

At length Porter returned, bringing with him a pack of a few pounds of flour and bacon. He had gone and come at the rate of twenty-five miles a day—a fine performance over such a country. We were at this time very thin, and more than a little run-down, so I decided that we had better indulge in a couple of days of full rations, even though that might mean real hunger later. I have always been strongly of the opinion that men working hard for a long period can overdo the ration-cutting busi­ness, and that the party who start strong and live upon what the Red Gods send can win out better than the party who never have a full meal, but eke out a small supply of provisions over endless days. But the party that eats its food must be composed of men used to every aspect of the wilderness life, and must be certain of a minimum game supply. It is a very good rule—I know of none better to estimate the amount of fish and game one expects to secure and then divide the expectation by four. If the answer to that sum is enough to take the party to safety, well and good; if not, it is common sense to be very careful of the food in hand.

Hardly had Porter arrived—certainly he had not been in camp above two hours—when a most tremendous storm began to blow from the south-east. It clean blew away our fire, though protected by a break-wind of boulders, and as it brought one or two trees near by crashing to the ground, we thought it wiser to cut down those which overhung the camp. Had this gale—one might almost call it a tornado—caught Porter upon the bare and shelterless plateau he would have had a miserable, if memorable, experience.

All night long the wind howled and roared, banishing sleep, then shortly before dawn it shifted and partially carried away our lean-to. We rose and changed the position of our camp until it was once more back to wind—a cold, bleak business.

On August 29th we broke the camp by Slippery Brook, which we had occupied since the 18th, and set out for the southern end of Indian House Lake. My ankle, though stiff and apt to swell after a long day, did not retard our speed very much.

All the morning we travelled over the ridges, and it was late in the afternoon before we reached the level of the lake at a point about a dozen miles south of our camp. Here we found each promontory set with the remains of the deserted Indian camps from which this reach of the river takes its name, for it is here that the tribe of Naskopi Indians make their annual killing of the deer, which in their migration cross the narrows of the lake in immense herds. Their course is not always the. same—if it were the problem of existence would be easily solved by the Indian—for in some seasons the migration passes elsewhere, along some other and perhaps distant route.

As it grew dark we came to an Indian camp which had only recently been deserted. All about it were scattered the bones and hair of deer, which, from appearances, seemed to have been killed a month or so previously. The Indians had departed, it being the season when they make their summer journey to the coast.

The Naskopis are one of the wildest tribes still left in North America. Their visits to the Hudson Bay posts, or to the mission settlements are few and far between. After a successful year’s spearing of the caribou, as the beautiful deer cross the lakes and rivers, they carry down over the long journey to the eastern coast enough skins to barter for the necessities and few luxuries which they appreciate. Powder and bullets, tea and tobacco, finery for their women, and a few gaudy articles of clothing, are nearly all that the posts supply to these children of the wilderness, who care little for the white man’s easements of existence. In the Naskopi camps upon the George, however, there is one belle, and at the stores whatever she desires seems to be purchased for her. I give her photograph on the next page, and, lest the reader should miss her, she is the first on the left.

To the Indians, both the Montagnais of the more wooded south and the Naskopis of the Barren-ground water, the caribou are the staff of life. By them they live; the meat feeds them; their lodges are covered with the skins; the clothes which protect them against the northern winter are fashioned from the pelts, the hair inside, against the wearer’s skin. Their moc­casins are sewn from the hides, and the very sparse store of civilized luxury which finds its way to the tents upon the promontories is largely gained by barter of smoked hides.

About the season when the caribou may be expected in their thousands-strong migration all is activity in the Indian camps. Up and down the river the scouts are watching, and when the first caribou makes its appearance he who sees it signals to his fellows—the first deer must not be turned. But, once a fair proportion have crossed the river, the Indians in their canoes slay as many as a thousand deer. There is no sport in it—merely a massacre of helpless, swimming creatures, and a lengthy description of the proceedings would serve no purpose. But for many a day after the battue the Indian warriors sit by their fires and enjoy the greatest of all the luxuries the wilderness provides—the marrow of the deer. Countless numbers of caribou have been slain by Indian House Lake; so many, indeed, that the place has become historic.

This raiding of the herds, with trapping, ptarmigan shooting, and rabbit snaring, makes up the Indians’ hunting in a successful season.

But it is a rare year when one month or another of the twelve does not see the tribes face to face with famine. Then Indian House Lake is a battle-ground, over which an unrecorded but terrible struggle is fought out. This battle has endured for many years; the antagonists are Nature upon the one side and the little tribe of Naskopis upon the other. The Naskopis can hope for no aid in their struggle. Shut in upon all sides by the mighty Barrens, help can­not reach them, nor have they sought it. Few people of white race have yet set eyes on Indian House Lake, and the half-dozen expeditions that have passed up and down the great river have spent but half an hour at the Indian camp and then boarded their canoes and voyaged

It would seem, according to the best authorities, that the Naskopis came from the far south, being driven north by the Iroquois at the date when Canada was first occupied by the French. They fled through the wooded south of Labrador, still pursued by their remorseless enemies, who were probably only shaken off when they had pushed the flying tribe north to those naked table-lands which form the roof of Labrador. These are indented with innumerable lakes and dotted with gigantic Laurentian boulders, enormous tracts being entirely timberless and exposed to the cruel forces of the Arctic.

After many wanderings, these poor hunted creatures must have found in the valley of the Barren-ground River a true Land of Promise. Here all was changed indeed. Spruce, alder, tamarack, and birch grew in the sheltered spots and woods and marshes alike were lined and crossed with the high roads of travelling bear And caribou ; the tangled brush hid coveys of willow-grouse, while the very rocks yielded the crouching ptarmigan. All these they found, not to speak of other game—foxes, wolves, hares, Canada geese, black ducks, and many more, it can well be imagined that when the Naskopis first entered this region they believed that the faces of their gods were indeed turned towards them. Game on the hills, fish in the river, wood for their fires, tepee poles to be had for the cutting.

One can almost see them seeking out a stra­tegic camping ground on a promontory running far out into the lake and there setting up their wigwams and resting from their wanderings. Neither history nor legend tells us at what time of year those long-dead Naskopis found Indian House Lake, but almost certainly it was in spring or summer while the waterways were open.

In those days the country was virgin and the deer plentiful. Even within late years it is on record that the caribou in migration passed a point near Fort Chin(m)o in solid masses of “thousands and thousands ” for a period of three days. During many years the Indians must have fared well, for Indian House Lake possesses the favourite crossing-place in all Labrador for the migrating caribou. Thus they learned to live by the deer, and so, while the deer were plentiful, all went well on the banks of the George. After 1828, when M‘Lean visited them, a veil dropped over their life by the lake for more than seventy years. No one, save one Roman Catholic priest, saw them in their home camps; the tribe lived secure behind their impenetrable ramparts. No doubt they gorged and starved alternately. At any rate, they survived in numbers not too much lessened, and so they continued to exist until the dreadful winter of 1893, when deer and game failed, and half the tribes are said “to have been found dead in their lodges by the spring.” But still some are left to carry on the age-long war with Nature, which they are still prosecuting as you read this page—a hunter-people dependent upon game for life, the only permanent inhabitants of the interior of Labrador.

It was with great interest that we examined the deserted camp and the various devices for dressing skins, and while Hardy and I were doing this Porter went on over a hill to prospect. As he crossed the brow of the ridge an eagle rose suddenly, and, going to the place, he found that it had killed and partly eaten a young black fox. The month being August, of course the skin was worthless, but had it been December the skin of this fox, small as it was, would have been worth some hundreds of dollars. Poor Porter!

When Porter returned it was growing late, and we went up from the deserted Indian camp into the twilight of the woods, where, as it was bitterly cold, we made a large camp-fire, by the light of which we set up our slender camp.

Later we took stock of our provisions, and it was almost a shock to discover how little our ravening hunger had left to us. There was a single full meal of caribou venison, with two or three small pieces which we meant to keep over. Besides this we possessed three pounds of flour, three soup-squares, about half a pound of mildewed tea, and three-quarters of a pound of bacon. This shortage did not prevent our enjoying a fair meal of meat and flour, as that night was the last we should spend in the timber, for owing to the provisions being at so low an ebb we had determined to set out in the morning upon the march back to the coast. Therefore the next night would find us once more upon the bare plateau, where we could hope for no fuel more adequate than the leaves and stems of the dwarf birch. So the motto was carpe diem, which we fully carried out, and afterwards sat long by the camp-fire smoking and discussing the journey that lay before us.

Before very long, however, the talk, as usual, veered round to the all-important topic of food. How well one knows those conversations of hungry men! Lead the talk where you will, back it turns like a magnet to the Pole to the various dishes one would order were one in such-and-such a restaurant. Nearly all one’s desires are towards plenty of fat, plenty of sweet, and plenty of rather heavy, solid bread; true hunger abhors kickshaws and seasonings. Fat mutton, strawberry jam, bread, and baked potatoes, that is the meal which tempts me in dreams when I am really hungry!

From time to time I have known real hunger in many different lands, and, as a matter of personal experience, I have found that hunger reaches its height before one begins to starve. Starvation, indeed, like other disagreeable things, is painful, and it is impossible to feel as hungry when one is suffering spasms of pain and emptiness as in the earlier stages, when the only feeling is the intense craving for food.

On this night, however, after the first comfort of our dinner had passed off, we were just in the mood to discuss what we would eat an we had it. It was late when at last we rolled ourselves in our blankets and turned in for the last sleep before we set our faces towards the east and home.

(To be continued.)

The Amphibious Suburb of St. John’s

The Amphibious Suburb of St. John’s

By W. Lacey Amy

From Collier’s magazine, January 20 1912.

Down on the Battery, Where Cod Flakes, Goats, and Children Make the Cliff Sides Picturesque

  

The Battery is that quaint suburb of St. John’s, in that oldest colony of the Empire, a scene of cod flakes and children and goats and rugged climbs, of intricate traceries, of flake-covered paths and stairways in the rock, of an undecided roadway, belligerently obstructed by houses in all degrees of whiteness, of odors and flies.

Newfoundland is synonymous with cod; and to adver­tise this fact its leading city has leased its front yard to the cod fishermen. To be sure, nothing but a fisher­man and a goat could make use of a mountainside of rock that seemed to give no foothold, but under the con­ditions that developed after the former had established himself, the evidences of wall-like rock are hidden under marvelously constructed flakes that push back into the mountain and totter precariously at the front on poles that appear to be kept up by faith and a tradition that they cannot fall.

The Real City

You enter St. John’s by what is modestly called the Narrows; and the first thing—and the second and the third, and so on—you see is not a city-crowned hill and a steeple-broken sky line, but a rugged mountain of rock with its foot hidden behind a wonderful, disjointed, unreasoning tangle of poles, up and down and across, with perhaps the peep of a house corner or gable window. At first glance it is ugly in its malformation and untidi­ness. At second glance it reveals enough to be interest­ing; and when you cut out one of the stereotyped trips of St. John’s and struggle through the entrance to the Battery road you begin to feel that at last you have come to the real city.

Fishermen have always had an attraction for me, and when I inquired where I could get in touch with them, I was invariably directed to Quidi Vidi, Newfoundland’s show fishing village. Nobody in St. John’s thought of the Battery. Probably some artist or litterateur has di­lated learnedly upon the quaintness and beauty of Quidi Vidi, and it is more inconvenient to reach; and no one with a name has found the obscure street entrance to the Battery. But I had dutifully climbed Signal Hill, had “done” Quidi Vidi, Topsail, the dry-dock, the golf links, etc., in recognition of what was demanded of the tourist; and still no one had steered me into the Battery.

So one morning—the day after the Re­gatta—I started off by myself with noth­ing in view but the Battery. And I found it—of which fact I have reason to be proud, for the entrance to the only street it possesses is at the end of a dirty fish wharf, close to the water. It has no point­ing finger or signboard; rather everything, including the police-court records, tends to direct one elsewhere. A weather-browned house standing at an angle that must have been haphazard forms one side of the en­trance. About five feet away is the corner of an equally unsightly fence, streaking off at a slant that is as irresponsible as the house wall. It looks like the acciden­tal provision for an entrance to the only door in that house, but a wheeled vehicle of some sort had squeezed through and I took chances and dived apologetically between the corners. Had I been hailed I would have retreated precipitately; but beyond the first turn there were indubitable evidences of a general passage of human feet and I felt less lone-some in my trespass.

Up a slight slope, down another, and up again, and I was in the midst of the flakes, beside, and overhead. Every available nook was flake covered, and the houses had to be satisfied with second choice. Children swarmed around me—also flies, both characteristic of the Battery.

Much of the roadway ran beneath the flakes, and from the side ran more flakes out over the water. A group of children burst up seemingly out of the flakes themselves, and then, upon closer investigation, I discovered that down there was a network of paths, with steps cut in the rock, assisted here and there by a crude bit of woodwork. Gates swung in the center of steep stairways, either to keep the babies out of the water or to designate the limits of a squatter’s domain. And down there was the real life of the place. Fishermen half-heartedly climbed down the stagings and cleaned their boats a hundred feet below where I stood gazing through a network of poles and drying fish.

Women and children dodged backward and forward across the narrow openings through which I looked, call­ing to each other of the stranger that had broken into their seclusion. Two little girls came toiling up the countless stairs to where I stood, opening and closing the gates as they grew larger and larger in approach, I stepped back and placed my camera, calling to them to stay where they were so that the picture would catch them.

“Does it cost nothing?” asked the larger of the girls.

I laughed in sympathy with the mild joke, as I thought it.

“There was an Eyetalian at the races yesterday charged twenty cents to take yer picture.” she ex­plained, gratified with the abundance of my philan­thropy in doing it for nothing. Then I remembered to have seen a foreigner at the Regatta races with one of those cannonlike affairs by which he supplied a tintype for twenty cents.

The End of the Road

Of a Sudden the road came to an end and I was forced to struggle up a steep path that disappeared around the face of the cliff over the water’s edge. I had remembered that beyond, nearer the mouth of the Nar­rows, was another stretch of fishing town, and this was the only path that could lead to it. A man from the city sauntered out on one of the highest stages and pro­ceeded to undress, and I climbed down with some awe of him who would leap from that height into the icy water of the deep harbor. He leaped calmly enough, and again, and then hustled into his warm clothes. Feeling cooler in sympathy, I reached the path again, only to find that it ended abruptly in a sheer cliff edge. The closest investigation failed to reveal any way of reaching the village beyond, and I climbed downward to look under the stages and cod flakes to see the life more intimately.

It was dark down there, and cool and damp, and fishy and mysterious. The fishermen stood out at the edges of the stages in sunlight, working at their boats, or cleaning out their fish houses; and out of the darkness children and women would come to draw water and to exchange a word of banter with the men. Clothing was drying wherever the sun could reach, trousers and smocks and sweaters and mitts that had been soaked with the spray of the fishing boats; the house washing flaunted up above in the streaming sunlight. At each staging a boat lay tied, or a sculling fisherman would push the nose of a boat into an empty place, and after tying it clamber up the ten feet of poles to the level above.

Again in the upper path I passed back, looking for a way up the cliff to reach the village beyond. Two girls lay outstretched near a spring that bubbled from the rock, waiting for their pitchers to fill, while I took my life in my hands and plowed up a field of loose rock that needed only a glance to roll on to the water below. A hundred feet up I reached a path, and, walking around, came in full view of the scene I was after. But still another dangerous climb to a higher level was neces­sary to place me on the path that led down to the flakes just within the Narrows.

The Fisherman’s Request

Down in the roadway a fisherman besought a picture of his cod flakes and wife (the order is his), and to get it I was forced to pass through a fish house that still retained many evidences of the last catch. Across a rickety pole staging I stumbled, and down the irregu­lar ladder of poles to a boat waiting below. And the woman, with a baby in her arms, came out on the flakes twenty-five feet above the staging, and stood on its very edge, with a straight drop of thirty-five feet to the water below.

“I can’t get anyone to come over here to take the pic­ture,” he remarked. “I’ve never had a picture of them before.” And he waved his arm at the flakes rather than at the family above.

He rowed me around the harbor, slouching in the stern of the boat and sculling, as is the custom of the fishermen, but putting up a small sail whenever our direction made the use of the slight breeze possible. And he talked of the fishing, and the ambition that lived with him always of owning a gasoline engine to put in his fishing boat so that he would not be dependent upon the uncertain wind for reaching and leaving the fishing grounds.

“You don’t know of anything in your country, do you?" he asked somewhat piti­fully, as if every traveler must carry a few loose positions in his pocket suitable for a man whose life for generations had opened each year with the preparation of the net or tackle, and ended with the delivery of the last quintal of cod.

Later I met the rest of the dissatisfied returning at noon from their work in the city. Already there was a change in their faces from the new contact with life, and to me it was not very pleasant. Dreamy desire had given place to frank discontent. The scanty, unconcerned attire of the fish­erman was replaced by the mixture that denotes a pocket unable to keep up with the ambitions. The slow, loose saunter of the lifelong fisherman was gone and had come the definite, peevish step of commerce. My last impression of the Battery, as I brushed through between the corner of the drab house and the corner of the untidy fence, was less agreeable than the first. But before I left I turned to the utmost plank of the near-by wharf and looked again into the life under the flakes, and saw the children play­ing up and down the half-hidden paths, flashing in and out through the streaks of sunlight.

A British Eskimo

A British Eskimo

From the Arctic to Death.

From The Veteran Magazine, Sept. 1921.

This is obviously a republication, but this The Veteran Magazine of Newfoundland would get more local readership/drf

IT came to me only yesterday—the hardest blow of the war. A “re­turned postal packet,” and inside a letter of my own sent him several weeks ago. On its face was the soulless stamp “Deceased.”

Six years ago we met, John Shiwak and I, in the most detached part of the Empire—the hyperborean places where icebergs are born, where seal grunt along the shore, where cod run blindly into the nets of ad­venturous fishermen gone north in a mid­summer eight weeks of perilous, comfort­less, uncertain industry.

Far “down” the desolate coast of Labra­dor, a thousand miles north of my New­foundland starting point, I came on him in a trifling settlement that hugged, shivering and unsteady, about a long white building, a trading post of the Hudson’s Bay Com­pany—the merest collection of windowless boards that housed human beings only in the less harrowing summertime.

For John Shiwak was an Eskimo.

Just one week 1 knew him, and then we separated never to meet again. But in that week I came to know him, better than from a year’s acquaintance with less simple souls, and his record to his glorious end proves how well I did know him.

There, where the bitterness of ten months of the year drives the two straggling thousand human beings of half as many miles of coastline to the less grim, less bleak interior, John Shiwak had awakened to the bigness of life. He had taught himself to read and write. Every winter he trailed the hunter’s lonely round back within sound of the Grand Falls, which only a score have seen—often alone for months in weather that never emerged from zero.

And every summer, when the ice broke in June, there came out to me in Canada his winter’s diary, written wearily by the light of candle hemmed in by a hundred miles of fathomless, manless snow. And no fiction or fact of skilled writer spoke so from the heart. He was a natural poet, a natural art­ist, a natural narrator. In a thumb-nail dash of words he carried one straight into the clutch of the soundless Arctic.

And then came war. And even to that newless, comfortless coast it carried its message of Empire. John wrote me that he would be a “soljer.” I dismissed it as one of his many vain ambitions against which his race would raise an impossible barrier. And months later came his note from Scotland, where he was in training.

I followed him to England, but before we could meet he was in France. When, last summer, he obtained sudden leave, I was in Devon. His simple note of regret rests now like a tear on my heart.

But I have heard from him every week. He was never at home in his new career; something about it he did not quite under­stand. Latterly the loneliness of the life breathed from his lines. For he made no friends, in his silent, waiting way. His hunt­ing companion was killed, and the great be­reavement of it was like a strong tornado. He was cold out there, even he, the Labra­dor hunter. But the heavy cardigan and gloves I sent did not reach him in time. . . .

In his last letter was a great longing for home—his Eskimo father whom he had left at ten years to carve his own fortune, his two dusky sisters who were to him like crea­tures from an angel world, the doctor for whom he worked in Labrador in the summer time, his old hunter friends. “There will be no more letters from them until the ice breaks again,” he moaned. But the ice of a new world has broken for John.

He had earned his long rest. Out there in lonesome Snipers’ Land he lay, day after day; and the cunning that made him a hunt­er of fox, and marten, and otter, and bear, and wolf brought to him better game.

And all he ever asked was, “When will the war be over?” Only then would he re­turn to his huskies and traps where few men dare a life of ice for a living almost as cold.

John Shiwak—Eskimo—patriot.

LACEY AMY.

London Daily Mail, Jan. 11, 1918.

******

[John Shiwak, as is well known, was a member of the Royal Newfoundland Regi­ment, and was killed at Cambrai, November 21st, 1917.—Eds.]

The Magdalen Islands, Part 1

The Magdalen Islands, Part 1

By W. Lacey Amy

Illustrated with photographs by the author.

From The Canadian Magazine, Feb. 1911. Digitized by Doug Frizzle, Dec. 2015.

 

Year by year in Canada it is becoming more difficult to find a spot with the fascination of the “new.” The advent of the tourist, Canadian and foreign, as such an important factor, has covered the country with a people who, while ever anxious to discover nature at its origin, are not content to leave it so.

But there is still one accessible spot, far removed from the dust of the automobile, the studied négligé of the summer tourist and the commercialism of the tourist-spoiled servant—a place where the people, the life, as well as the scenery are yet unspoiled. As such it is not advertised with pictured folder and enticing description. It has had no recommendations of pleased patrons; but it has provided for the privileged few who have visited it the rest from turmoil and rush that makes it almost vandalism to assist in introducing it to the average traveller.

It was by mere chance that a talk with Kellogg, “the bird man,” several years ago, and the casual remarks of the Intercolonial folder aroused the wish to spend my holidays in the Magdalen Islands. And further attempts to learn more of these out-of-the-way Islands but added to the attraction. An exhaustive search in the Toronto reference library revealed but three articles on the Islands, two of them in United States magazines more than twenty-five years old, and the other written by one who had not left the steamer that makes the semiweekly trips between the mainland and the Islands.

Correspondence with the owner of the steamer brought nothing but the names of a number of possible houses at which board might be secured, and inquiries addressed direct to these houses added information of varying importance. One woman was unable to take boarders because “my husband has been drowning since—.”

Another answered the requests for information by saying that her rates were “six dollars a week. When are you coming?” A man in a little French village, where, I discovered afterwards, only two or three could speak English, assured me that: “The rate of board is generally five dollars a week and fifteen dollars a month, this is what tourist give, but will say, what, being you are from, we may reduce it some.” And this delightful unconventionality continued to the last moment of my stay on the Islands.

In many ways it is difficult to discover why this group of Islands is neglected by the tourist. Easy of access they are, and the transportation comforts are surprising. The Intercolonial carries one to Pictou, Nova Scotia, in the unsurpassed accommodation it affords. From Pictou a staunch little 650-ton. 165-foot steamboat runs twice a week to the Islands, just making both ends meet by means of a $15,000 subsidy from the Government. From the obliging Captain Burns to the single waiter the service is surprisingly good.

On the Islands themselves the visitor experiences all that quaintness of people and life that is the result of long generations away from the toil and competition of the outside world. Seven thousand French and a thousand English, the former the descendants of old French-Acadians exiled from the Annapolis Valley in the time of history, and the latter offspring of the immigrants brought by the English Admiral who owned the Islands for so many years, thickly cover the group. These families have grown up together for generations, or have lived side by side in different sections of the same island, working at the same business in the same indifferent, satisfied way.

Perhaps not one out of a hundred of the present population has ever been on the mainland. The fishing grounds are the limits of their wanderings. Even those who have taken the steamer over to Pictou know only that town, or perhaps Halifax, where the store supplies come from, and Quebec, the seat of Government, hundreds of miles away.

The location of the Magdalen Islands may have been more or less familiar to us when the name came in the list of Canadian Islands, but geography does not keep fresh unless business or public affairs revive it periodically. And assuredly the Magdalens would provide no reason for remembrance, except to those who visit them.

Away out in the middle of the Gulf of St. Lawrence they lie, a series of mountain tops that managed to get above the water. And, without a break in their fury, the wild waves of the Gulf sweep down for two hundred miles from the cold shores of Labrador. Eastward a hundred miles stands the bleak western coast of Newfoundland. Cape Breton is seventy miles to the south, and Prince Edward Island noses out into the Gulf the same distance westward. From Pictou, the mainland port, to Amherst, the nearest port of the Islands, is 127 miles.

At high tide there are thirteen islands, but when the slow-moving ebb is completed, with three feet of water lost, seven islands are joined by a low strip of land, making a continuous stretch of fifty-three miles. Over this sand road, treacherous with its quick-sands and dangerous to any but the resident, it is possible to drive from Amherst Island at the southwest, over Grindstone, Wolf, and Grosse to Coffin in the northeast. The disconnected islands are Deadman, on the west, Entry and Alright, on the southeast, and Bryon and Bird Rock, far away to the northeast.

Deadman Island is but a long peak of rock with but sufficient shore to allow the erection of a few rough shacks for the sealers in the spring. Entry is peopled exclusively with English, has no port, and is worthy of notice only for having the highest peak in the group, 530 feet high. Alright is divided from Grindstone by a mere channel over which a rope ferry makes the transfers. The convent is situated here. Bryon Island is a small fishing island eight miles north of the main group, where but a few families remain in the winter.

Most interesting of the smaller islands is Bird Rock, a tiny peak of six acres, 125 feet above the water, accessible only by means of windlass and bucket. On its top the birds flock in white clouds, and the only human beings are the light-house keeper, his wife and two assistants. All year round they are forced to remain, since the ice of early spring and late fall prevent access to the rock, and in none but the quietest weather and water can a boat approach. Twice a year the supply boat carries provisions, but for the rest of year the lonely family is cut off from the outside world.

All that is geography; but there is most interesting history to make the Magdalens worthy of more attention than they receive. It need but be touched here. Cartier himself made the first visit to the rocky, inhospitable shores in 1534, but it was not until 1663 that the first settlement was established by Honfleur fishermen. A Frenchman placed them there, and, sailing away to France, returned in the spring to find that a Cape Breton official had sent a colony over and the two groups had combined and sailed away to Gaspe. The Frenchman tried again and was more successful. His son attached the name “Madeleine Islands” to the group, using his mother’s name; and, although this was gradually changed officially to Magdalen, most of the people still call it “Madalens.”

In the course of time Admiral Coffin acquired the Islands for services rendered, and to his descendants they belonged until three years ago, when they were sold (or at least what remained to sell) to the Magdalen Island Development Company, a group of Montreal men who are even more anxious to dispose of their rights than was the English family.

Now the only remnants of the M. I. D., as the company is called, is a group of large, deserted buildings, into which $200,000 was sunk to develop fishing in cod, mackerel and lobster, sealing or anything else in which there might be money. Now but one man remains on the Islands for the company; he is anxiously looking for a purchaser or a re-organisation scheme.

Each island is but a peak of soft sandstone into which the wild waves are gradually eating their way. Small, vari-shaped mounds rise from the water along the shores in all directions, the remains of what were at one time stretches of solid land. Every storm claims its piece, and in time the serious inroads of the water will leave the Islands but a memory.

On Entry Island the former lighthouse was engulfed by the steady wearing away of the rock at its foundation. The present beacon is a quarter-mile inland from the sheer cliff over which it sends its light to add to the other dozens of light-houses that make navigation possible amongst the dangerous shoals and islands.

My first sight of the Islands was in the early morning as we cast anchor off Etang du Nord, a small French village on the west coast of Grindstone Island. Just back of us loomed the forbidding rock of Deadman, its cold whiteness standing out mysteriously against the lighting sky of the morning. Over the peak of grindstone the sun was just showing, scattering little rays through the clouds on the rippling water. In under the shore the fishing fleet was stringing out for a mile—a hundred of them—on its way to the fishing grounds. The black sails, prepared with a tamarack solution, made them like phantom ships in their strangeness.

From the shore a dozen herring-boats were paddling leisurely out to us, or moving along under small sails. The fishermen were coming with their boxes of fish and would unload the salt, which is the principal freight. Lazily they came, and my first impressions of them were fully justified by further experience. From both sides of the boat they unloaded, handling their awkward craft in the ocean swells with careless ease.

The passengers for this stop were unloaded with some difficulty into one of the boats, and, with the mail, they set out for the shore. The mail would be taken by a driver four miles across to Grindstone, then fifteen miles to the top of the Islands and return to Grindstone by the time the boat made the trip of forty miles around Amherst Island to Grindstone in the afternoon.

After four hours unloading, the fishermen going back and forward to the shore as if the boat had the whole day ahead of it, we got away for Amherst. At Cabin Cove, a small group of houses snuggled under the highest peak on Amherst Island, another stop was made for the fishermen to unload salt.

Rounding between Entry Island and the long Sandy Hook of Amherst harbour, which extends but a couple of feet above the water for three miles, we approached the first wharf on the Islands. There are but three of these, and the unprotected harbours expose them to the waves to the dangerous sinking of the ends. At the other calling-places the weather is the deciding factor, weeks elapsing before some of the stops can be made.

There is but one protected harbour among the Islands, Grand Entry, and the entrance to it is so shallow that it can be made by the steamboat only in calm weather and at high tide. In a storm the bottom of the entrance shows up through the waves, and a visit is impossible. Pleasant Bay is a nice-sounding title for the large body of water enclosed in the instep of the long boot that is the general shape of the group, but a wind from the east makes it more dangerous than the open.

It is in these storms that rage so frequently around the Islands that lies one of the reasons for the limited number of those who make the trip out. Within two hundred yards of the house where I stopped for a week were the wrecks of four large schooners driven on the shore last year. A quarter of a mile out in Pleasant Bay the spars of another protruded from the water, the result of the shifting of a load of loose herring purchased for bait. One day during my visit the fishermen brought in on their little charettes cod thrown overboard from the wreck of a 100-foot schooner that was being lightered by the owner in the hope of saving the hull.

Just a mile away the Lunenburg, the predecessor of the present steamship, ran ashore in a snowstorm of late 1905. Only five of the sixteen on board were saved. And all along the shores as we steamed could be seen the hulks of former wrecks, not many seasons old, for the drifting sands quickly cover them up.

Light-houses adorn every point as the limit of precaution, but the shoals and reefs, the hundreds of projecting bars and points, the shifting winds and fierce waves of this district prove too much for the most experienced of mariners. Pleasant Bay has been the scene of one of the most disastrous calamities of fishing experience. The Lord’s Day gale of 1873 caught in this deceptive harbour hundreds of fishing schooners fleeing from the wind outside. The sudden shifting of the gale caught them in the trap, and the shore was strewn with the hulls of boats and the bodies of fishermen. Within sight of the boarding-house mentioned a stretch of four hundred yards of beach was covered with forty-five schooners.

So many old hulls lie under the water and on the sands that the fishermen claim the clams of Amherst harbour are unfit for use because of the rusty poison they have drawn from the metal. Whether this is the reason or not, the fact remains that the clams caught on the shore are poisonous and of a rusty colour, fit only for bait.

There is little that is attractive in the distant appearance of the Islands. At one time covered with large trees, the inhabitants cut so recklessly for shipbuilding and firewood that entire islands are without so much as a shrub. Grindstone Island is the prettiest, because of tracts of short spruce and fir, unfit for use, but taking away the bald look that makes Amherst Island, for instance, appear so bleak.

Approaching the landing-place it is a pretty sight to see the white-washed houses stretched out irregularly over the land. There are no villages, as we understand them, the houses being placed without regard to the location of the stores or post-offices. In fact, there is little of the Islands that is not peopled. The population is much too numerous, and it can only be a year or two until migration must take place to make room. The tiny farms that occupy the fishermen between fishing seasons are not large or productive enough to support the rapidly-increasing population.

The houses are whitewashed, and with few exceptions shingled all over. The roofs are treated with a coat of whitewash or tar, not only to preserve them, but to assist in keeping out the bleak winds that roar over the Gulf in the long winter. Inside, many of the houses are papered over cloth which blows and waves in the winds outside.

When the winter comes the Islanders are cut off from the outside world save for the cable which connects the north-east point with Cape Breton. (During the past fall a wireless connection has been established). For five months no boat can weather the ice-floes and storms of this section of the Gulf. The Magdaleners must provide their own amusement, with only such information of the outside as comes over the wire to the little telegraph stations that are used only in emergency. The boat runs as long as the ice will allow, usually being forced to stop before the first of December. In April it sometimes starts again, but May more commonly sees the break in the long isolation.

There are sixteen telegraph offices under the direction of M Le Bourdais, a French sailor wrecked thirty-nine years ago, in winter, on the north shore, his legs cut off above the knees owing to the exposure. He was obliged to take this means of earning a living. And the number of messages does not overwork him. One office had not sent or received a message for fifteen months, but the operator received $150 for his share of the idleness. Another operator was paid $100 for one message.

Two years ago the wire broke in December. It was impossible to mend it at that time of year, and the isolation after years of cable connection which was seldom used worried the islanders. At last one of them rigged up a molasses cask with a tin sail and set it adrift, with letters sealed in lobster tins. Ten days later it was picked up at Post Hastings, Cape Breton, and the letters were delivered. From the first of December to the first of May that was the only connection the Islands had with the mainland. Then the government ice-breaker smashed its way through the unusually late ice-floes and brought relief.

And what of the simple, quaint fisher folk who inhabit these Islands, who fish for cod and lobster and receive little for their labour? Their life, their happiness and innocence, their limited wants, their toils and sports are worthy of separate attention. Living in all the dangers of ice and storm and wind, content with little and not working hard for it, their life is the relief from strain and struggle that would send a business man back to his work with renewed energies and revived strength, with a mind that has been unable to do anything but rest. A quaint, old-fashioned people, I found them, as yet unspoiled by the outside world, uncommercial, unambitious, and ignorant of life as others know it, but unique in their simplicity, friendliness and habits.

This is the first of two articles by Mr. Amy on this interesting part of the Dominion. The second will appear in the March Number.