Morning journal and courier., 1889-08-24
THE LABRADOR COAST.


 -
 THE LABRADOR COAST.
 The RapacIty of a MoravIan MissIon-
 ary-MIssIon Churches and Relig-
 fOus Customs Among the Essui-
 maux-The1r Dress and Habits of
 Life-The Ks4uimaux Dog-Winter
 Visits.
 ON BOARD SCHOONER "SoFIIE," Aug. 12. To the Editor of the JOURNAL ANDI COURIER:
 From Hopedale we proceeded northwest, skirting the shore. continually lodging is- lands, icebergs and homeward bound fishing craft. There is no change in dreary scene. The shores present the same lofty, massive, desolate outline. At our distance occasion ally the moss upon them, under certain con ditions of atmosphere and sunlight, gave the appearance of heathery heights such as you will sec when cruising along the noble north- ern shores of Ireland, from Lough Foyle around Malin Head to Lough Swilly; but we knew there was no verdure there, and naught but stone. With that consciousness these shores are ever stern, repellant, awful; and no influence save that curious fascination to semi-Arctic exploration one may have hint of in going thus far towards eternal ice and silence, can justly prompt any rational being in following our course for aught save dan. ger and fish. Both can be got nearer home. We agreed on sailing as far as human life permanently existed along the coast, and again hac opportunity to carry passengers free without license. These were sort or novitiate Moraviaa missionary who belonged to Hebron and had come to Hopedale with homeward bound fishers, and two Esqui- maux pilots who had brought vessels to the south. was interested chiefly in the for mers narrative of life at this remotesi American mission, and in the powers of the latter to assimilate our provisions. In all my wanderings I never saw two creatures ir the semblance of humans with such swinist capacity and rapacity. We had few boxes of oranges on board. They had never seer the fruit before. I was curious to know i they could once be sated with it. We mad, the attempt but failed. These two animals actually ate ffty-six oranges, skins and all in one hour and forty minutes.
 Passing Main, an important Moravian mis
 
 @ large ship with supplies and for furs, and Okak Island and village, where there are struggling huts, few traders and trappers and where the Esquimaux come in the sum- mer to fish, we finally reached Hebron, and, without anchorage, left our strange passen- gers, who were taken ashore In a kayak-a sort of hide bottomed boat, almost precisely like the curragh of the Irish Aran Islands followed by procession of kayaks filled with grinning aud chattering Esquimaux when we proceeded on our now wholly drea- ry voyage to Cape Chudleigh. Here, as phie toward the St. Lawrence again, in sixty degrees north latitude, our eyes, if but for a brief half hour, rested upon the un-oharted shores of Hudson's Strait and could at least see along the steely blue waters the way where 80 many intrepid searehers for Polar seas had passed never to return.
 The result of the information secured during our few weeks cruise leads me to believe that the portion of Labrador east of line extending due north from the mouth of the St. Lawrence river to Hudson's Bay, is the most worthless part of the whole world. Indeed 1t Is scarcely worth visiting even as a curiosity in sterility and desola- tion. In the one thousand miles of coast upon which there is any pretense of popu- lation, the total number of resident human beings all told will not exceed six thousand souls. This number includes all Indians of the Montagnais, Nasquapee and Esquimaux tribes. Estimating the peninsula as quad. rilateral with sides averaging five hundred miles in length, moderate computation this would give an area of one hundred anC sixty million acres; and just one human be ing to about twenty seven thousand acres That there is one hundred acres of land ca pahle of cultivation within this mighty e1 panse has been remorselessly disproved fo ! over three hundred and fifty years by the of | forts of Jesuits and other missionaries, b! | those of Christianized Indians, and by al ! settlers who have been lured upon thes ! shores to starve and perish. It Is possibl that during two, and possibly three, month | of the summer forty thousand fishermen | may be found of Labrador; fifteen thou sand within the Gulf of St. Lawrence ant twenty five thousand along the Atlantic Lab | rador shores. These are residents of tn l United States, of Nova Scotia, Cape Bretol and Prince Edwards Islands, and Newfound land. They have no interest here whateve save to come and grab and go. There ar not enough standing trees in all the Labra dor district named, and that comprises all 0
 Labrador proper, available for building tim
 Der, to pay for transporting to any place an lighting the first fire in, single saw mil
 All the frantic efforts of the Dominion gov
 ernment to discover mineral deposits hay
 been unavailing.
 What then does Labrador possessi A
 unmeasured and measureless reach of ston ! and ice, covered here and there with mosi ! again occasionally patched with stunte | spruce; oftener for hundreds of miles scare
 and blackened by burned spruce stumps be
 tween which finty rocks project like crut
 spears; with countless impossible river | ploughing in ungovernable torrents throug ! hideous gorges; four thousand whites utter ly unable to leave their prisonment or bette
 the udition, living half of the year lik bed the other half little better; tw
 thd Indians subsfsting on salt fish an
 rav occasionally bit of musty dou or zee to four hundred Esquimau
 dog 4y number of wolves; and counties
 seais and fish. Now that Is all there is t
 Labrador besides climate of Greenland and even the seals and fish do not exclusiv, ly belong to it, for they are common pro duct of the ocean, and as common to all otl
 CT northeast shores. Any land so God-fo
 saken that the government possessing it car
 not survey it, or procure any form of stati tics concerning it, is veritable cast-awa
 indeed. It is impossible to obtain statistic | of even seals and hsh. But from the know
 loss in naval and commercial expedition
 and the wreckage of coasting and fisher : vessels along the coasts, since Labrador WI
 discovered, it would be a safe calculatio
 that for every dollar in value of fish or fl secured upon the Labrador coast for the pa' four hundred years. an equal or greater actl al loss by somebody has been sustaine, And when the additional frightful loss life has been taken into account, the inc pressible worthlessness of the entire penil su1a may be to some extent conceived. Il But there Is certain interest the wor | over in how even so hopeless folk as Il Labradorians may live, and in that outreael ] ing of alert religious effort, whatever i faults of method, which aspires throug
 great personal hardship and suffering to kee
 afiame the tiny lamps of Christian ligh houses along these wild and savage shore' , The Jesuit missionaries have labored alor