Morning journal and courier., 1889-08-03

 cate he should be deported at once. What ever may be the temper of the East, the Ps- ci6c coast is in earnest on this Chinese aues- tion, and If the government of the United States will not protect us. we will take measures te protect ourselves"
 THE LARADOR COAST.
 An ImpromPtu Expedition Into Peo.
 Pleless Land-Wonderful Histories of
 Basque A6veR<urers-Inhabi Of
 Labrador-Aa UnaPpreciatIveYank ON BOARD SCHOONER "SopH1E," July e2.
 othe Editor of the JOURNAL AND COURIER:
 Our steamer passed Belle Isle, that huge island rock of loneliness and desolation guarding the Gulf of Newfoundland, be- tween Newfoundland and Labrador, just af- ter the light swept past us from the east and the sea, and, sailing all day within sight of those northern massive walls whose vast es- carpments of red, puce and gray, seemed get like the bases of mighty castles upon an en- erald bed, the contemplation of the yastness, mystery and desolatfon of this most useless and peopleless portion of America, Labfa- dor, prompted an impulse to at least skim it's edges in still more leisurely form Of lei tering and pilgrimage. An English tourist was easily persuaded into joining me in 6 plan for brief northern adventure; and, de barking at Rimouski, we came upon vete- ran Yankee luAberman with the fever of ex- ploration strong on him, and in less than twenty-four hours, having found many happenings to our liking, were sailing the lower St. Lawrence in snug two-masted schooner of eighty tons burthen, the clean and clipper-like Sophie, manned by fou1 Lis harbor, headed directly for tiny pur- pie cleft between stupendous headlands, which our captain, good Monsieur Des- champs, told us was the entrance to a deep and silent harbor of the grewsome Labrador shore.
 Labrador proper is that almost unknown land of unparalleled sterility and leneli- ness lying between the Gulf of St. Laws renee, the Atlantic ocean and that we'll nigh limitless inland sea, Hudson's Bay. That portion known to men is the part, or the sea-line part, we had set forth to look upon. It properly consists of two grand eoastwise divisions. The waters of the first flows from desolate solitudss into the St. Lawrence and Gulf, along the immeasurable county of Ssguenay, in the province of Que- bee; while those of the other sock the Allan tic to the north of Belle Isle straits, along the grandest but most forbidding shores of any land, to where Greenland is but . days journey ahead of favoring gales. On the one hand, all along this frightful coast, from the lofty rocks of the Saguenay, which stand like eternal sentinels of the St. Lawrence, to the bare peaks beyond ths last wretehed hut of Hebron, the renotest of the Moravian missions in North America, the entire coast human peril and suffering, of fog, iceberg and of wreck and disaster inoonceivable. On the other hand behind this rugged coast there is but waste so barren, so mighty in its immeasurable solitude of rock and stream and inland sea, so indescribably "the land given to Gain" as told by Jacques Cartier ir ! 1884, that only the imagination can traverse ! it to that awful, farthest North, where Si. lence sits frozen at the feet of God.
 Ana yet there ls more nancy ana legend III the tales our captain told of olden activities along these shores as we exhilaratingly swept | these northern waters. Tales weird and strange they were; but the warm blood oi Basque was in his own veins, and his eyes l kindled with the wondrous histories of ! Basques adventurefs here one thousand years ago-histories which could they be ! proven would compel Bancroft and Head | ley to re-write all their ea.ly pages, and l would sadly dampen the enthusiasm for the ! proposed Columbus celebration of 1893. Briefly this is how the story runs. The old Iberian race, perhaps race one thousand years older than the Egyptian, which came from somewhere and overran Europe from the Mediterranean to the Archangel and Kars seas, and finally suocumbed to other inva
 sions, blendings and assimilations, comprised a people not only cultivated In the arts, bu! ! those which gave the world its first and great ! est navigators and sea adventurers. Al | coasts and climes were known to them. The concentrated remnant of this mighty people gave to the Basque provinces and Brittany their interesting and spirited folk. From among these, more than one thousand year
 before Columbus, assisted by the willy thougl
 niggardly spirit of Spanish conquest ant domination, made the now world subiectiv, I to the old, were those Iberian or Basque nay igators who had seen every rod of ooast-line
 from Nova Zembla beyond the bowling mael
 stroms of Spitzbergen sea, around the arctic Spitzbergen groups, the far Ioelandio iorths past Greenland's four thousand miles of ic' aad Wsilense, the eternal ioe-peaks O
 Ellssmere Land and Cumberland island
 down beyond the dreary reach of Labrador
 rence's gulf and Newfoundland itself, pas
 Prince Edwards and Cape Breton islands ant
 Nova Scotia, to that dread mystery an'
 graveyard of the seq, Sable Island; wher
 during all those centuries they had chase ! the whale and taken the mackerel and cod From such as these, humble and unknow | whalsrs and sailors, Columbus undoubtedl
 gained his positive knowledge of Americt and through it his immortality of fame This these bronzed old fellows like our cay , tain have some way of knowing and bellev cite the curious fact that. underneath all th | present saintly nomenclature of every DO \ tion of the Gulf ot St. Lawrence, of the er tire Labrador coast, and in fact of all tt ! northeast American coast, are names of ol : Basque forts, Basque harbors, Basque cove 7 | capes and headlands, Basque blubber- -boilir l | and fish curing stations, and an endless val | ety of Basque names of things and place ! that were far older than American civtliz q tion now is when that civilization was b . gum And they will further recall in SUI
 | port of all this the indubitable historic ia
 that when the indomitable Jaques Cartie himself Briton, sailed up the St. Lawren
 in 1534, he found not only the men '' | Basque and Breton before him, whalers ar # fishers of maokerel and cod, but that t s | names of fish, streams, islands, coves ar V | promontories were all Basque; and that t
 ! ancestors of these whalers and sailors h. U ! perhaps annually sought these waters at y period so far and remote from his day al s time that 1t was enveloped and hid in t |, mustisst of mysteries and grayest of trae
 tions So we were sailing the old couri 'r over only; and Captain Deschsmps' Basq a legends, or veritable histories, gave us f: least in fancy the genial wraiths of the bra ' and hardy fellows of from ten to fifteen ce turies ago to keep us goodly company.
 Before evening came we were undernea the shadows of the towering Labrador eoa s. close upon the Seven Islands and Bf '. These islands are huge rocky peaks risi :. precipitously from the Gulf to imposi 5: heights, the Great Boule reaching seven hr te dred feet, few miles to the south and VI ar of the Moisie river mouth. The Bay behir at in which we anchored for the night, is flu - six miles long and two broad, and when o, 1o within, the oapaoious harbor seems lar 10 locked by the islands and vast promontt n- at It's western extremity, the latter reaohi o- an elevation of seven hundred feet. T oe