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Labrador’s Elemental Appeal, New York Times Travel section

by Kathleen Kearns

The ferry Northern Princess emerged slowly from a fog bank hanging off the Labrador coast. On this bright, windy September morning, the deck was empty except for my 6-year-old daughter, Annie, and me. The other passengers, most of them apparently accustomed to the 10-mile ride across the Strait of Belle Isle from the island of Newfoundland, were sensibly spending the cold crossing in the cafeteria or the lounges below decks. We stayed bundled up on deck, scanning the surface of the water with binoculars in a fruitless search for whales. A piercing blast from the foghorn sent my daughter down below, but I stayed on alone. I wanted to see the coastline the Vikings had stumbled upon over a thousand years ago, the fierce, barren terrain of Labrador that the 16^th-century French explorer Jacques Cartier had called “the land God allotted to Cain.”

As the fog gave way to sunshine, a line of low, glacier-scrubbed hills became visible, underlined by a placid strip of sandy beach. This mild coast was nearly bare of trees, but in the sunlight, the rounded tawny-green hills looked remarkably benign.

Then, just offshore, appeared the twin pinnacles of a gleaming, blue-white iceberg—a stray chunk from the ancient ice fields off Greenland, and a reminder of the hold the northern climate has on this territory. Labrador, a huge slab of Precambrian rock, stretches north to a mountainous tip that points onward to the Arctic. The mainland part of the Canadian province of Newfoundland, it lies between Quebec and the North Atlantic.

Abundant seals, whales and codfish brought successive waves of visitors and immigrants to Labrador for thousands of years, and its people have always lived mainly on the coast. The Dorset Eskimos and Maritime Archaic Indians were here long before the Vikings happened along; Basque, French and English whalers and fishermen came later. But no one gained much more than a toehold, and even today Labradorians make up a tiny population in a vast wilderness, with 30,000 people spread over an area almost as big as New York and New England combined. Clearly this wilderness had a benevolent side, though. By the time the ferry landed, we were down to our shirtsleeves and in fact spent most of our four autumn days in Labrador in balmy sunshine.

We drove off the ferry and straight to the nearest headland to see just where that iceberg was. It turned out to be standing off the cove at L’Anse au Clair, originally a French fishing station and now an English-speaking town of 267 souls, many of them the descendents of seasonal fishermen from the island part of Newfoundland.

As it happened, we’d already arranged to spend the night at the Beachside Hospitality Home in L’Anse au Clair, and though we moved on as planned the next night, we ended up returning and making it our home base. Beachside’s owners, Norman and Gloria Letto, welcomed us as though we were family and—as they would have done for anyone who expressed interest—readily agreed to take us out in Norm’s fishing boat so we could get a look at the iceberg up close.

The next morning, Norm took us over a stretch of sea where he once had fished for cod. (A regional moratorium recently shut down the cod fishery, with devastating effects on the local economy.) The iceberg, which looked pure white from shore, had shimmering highlights of blue and green when seen from the water.

Icebergs are known for their tendency to move unexpectedly, or to turn themselves upside down, creating a vortex that can pull a boat down under the icy water. But Norm was familiar with icebergs and told us that this one had been grounded on a shallow ledge for days. He brought the boat right alongside it, close enough for us to touch its soaring side and to see a jellyfish stranded in a pool within its walls.

Once we were all safely back on shore, Gloria fixed us a Sunday dinner of Thanksgiving proportions and talked about berry-picking expeditions her family had made over the years. A festival in the nearby town of Forteau every August (Aug. 11 to 14 this year) celebrates the bakeapple, or cloudberry—a tart, golden berry that flourishes in the area. During our stay, Gloria served us delicious bakeapple jam on home-baked bread. She often had homemade partridgeberry jam on the table, too, and served us other local specialties, including caribou stew and freshly caught fish.

After our lunch, I set out with Annie and the Lettos’ granddaughter, Jessica, for the lighthouse at Point Amour, a 20-minute drive. In a landscape of low hills and stunted trees, it is an impressive structure. Built by what was then the Province of Canada to protect the shipping passage to the British Isles, the 125-foot-high stone lighthouse has stood at Point Amour since 1857. Now freshly painted white with red trim and a broad black band around the tower, it is well along in the process of being restored.

The guide on duty, Keith Tucker, was clearly glad to see the day’s only visitors and spent well over an hour showing us around. We started in the lightkeeper’s quarters, bright, airy rooms with an impressive collection of maps on display. (Before the summer ends, the keeper’s dwelling will house exhibits on the maritime history of the Straits, the section of Labrador that borders the Strait of Belle Isle.) Then, beginning underground at the tower’s massive foundations, we climbed up to the light, much of the way on a winding wooden staircase along whitewashed stone walls. We emerged onto a narrow metal catwalk that ran around the light chamber, a vertigo-inducing 109 feet off the ground.

Handholds bolted to the outside of the window frames made it all too easy to picture the keeper trying to replace a broken pane up there in the high winds. But we had a calm day and the leisure to spot more icebergs lingering on the horizon. In the blue water just offshore, black dorsal fins signaled the arrival of a group of minke whales, each about 15 to 20 feet long, their spouts showing white against the sea.

On the stone beach a quarter-mile away, the children climbed around the twisted metal wreckage of a ship the light couldn’t save. The Raleigh was a British Navy gunboat that grounded in 1922 when the crew, so the story goes, decided to make an unauthorized fishing trip to the salmon river at Forteau. The hulk sat right side up on the rocks for four years, to be pointed at from the deck of many a passing ship, until Britain finally blew it up.

Coming back from our tour of the lighthouse, we stopped at sunset at one of the oldest burial monuments in North America, just off the dirt road (watch carefully for signs). The large, round pile of lichen-covered boulders high on a sand terrace overlooking Forteau Bay marks a 7000-year-old Maritime Archaic Indian grave.

The next morning, we drove north-east along the coast to Red Bay, a trip of about 50 miles on a good, paved road from L’Anse au Clair. We were off to see the remains of a Basque whaling station built nearly 500 years ago and recently excavated. Under blue sky and high clouds, we drove through a minimalist landscape of low, almost barren hills until the road dipped down along the Pinware River and up again into more dramatic mountain scenery. Here there were plenty of trees—deep green balsam and spruce and gold-green tamarack—seeming massive at 20 feet high.

But as we neared Red Bay, the landscape became bare again, almost eerily stark. Massive granite boulders, the splendidly termed glacial erratics, perched imposingly on hilltops. Near the road grew abbreviated trees and the dense, springy groundcover of the subarctic: Labrador tea, thick mosses, short-stemmed Queen Anne’s lace. In between were bald patches of ground, low, worn, lichen-covered rocks and weather-bleached twigs, the detritus of long-gone glaciers and centuries of unforgiving climate.

The Basques cannot have had an easy time of it here. For all the elaborateness of their enterprise—their station was a full-fledged industrial complex by the standards of its time—it had only a transitory glory. But from about 1550 to 1600 it was a thriving affair, with tryworks for rendering whale blubber and cooperages that made casks for the resulting oil.

At the tryworks, on tiny Saddle Island, just off the current village of Red Bay, huge copper cauldrons were fitted onto round stone foundations that served as fireboxes. Also on the island were shore stations where whales were flensed, and wooden frame houses with red tile roofs. Those red tiles, brought from Spain’s Basque country as ballast and left behind at Red Bay when the whalers departed, were one clue that led to the excavations there. Another was the record in Spain of a 16^th-century court case over the loss of the San Juan, a galleon loaded with a season’s worth of whale oil.

The archeological work turned up not only fragments of Basque shore life, right down to olive pits and articles of woolen clothing, but also the remains of a sunken 16^th-century ship believed to be the San Juan. Many of the current inhabitants of Red Bay worked on the digs and helped create the visitor’s center, in the process becoming quite knowledgeable about their predecessors; one such is Penny Butt, who showed us around the displays. Scale models revealed how the Basques hunted and processed whales, and numerous tools and personal effects from the digs hinted at the details of the whalers’ rugged life.

Penny led us to the center’s wharf, where an open boat waited to take us to rocky Saddle Island, a five-minute ride away. There we followed the white posts marking a self-guided walking tour. Much of the dig had been re-covered to protect it, but still visible were the foundations of the tryworks, the outline of what was probably a cooperage, and thousands of scraps of red roofing tiles.

At the northeast tip of the island, we paused at the whalers’ cemetery, where rows of boulders—barely visible in the grass—mark the graves of those who never made it back to Europe. Then we climbed a rise of rock and stood where the Basques used to keep watch for whales, looking out over pans of ice floating on the cold sea and hoping, as they did, to see a telltale white plume rising from the water.

Our last full day in Labrador dawned cool and gray, and my daughter and I decided to follow the local example and go inland to pick partridgeberries, relatives of the cranberry. On the dirt road in, we passed what looked like a father and son preparing for winter, cutting the low, sparse trees for firewood and stacking them to be retrieved later by snowmobile and sled. Other families were scattered over the red and white mounds of the barrens, filling gallon pails with berries, one of the few products of Labrador’s short summer. The air was tart with the smell of berries and thick with the unmistakable moldy smell of the change of seasons.

The wide open berry grounds gave us a glimpse into the vast interior of Labrador as the barrens we stood on gave way to rugged mountains in the distance. I found myself eager to go farther inland, farther north, to see more of what John James Audubon described with awe as Labrador’s “wonderful dreariness.” As the Straits hunkered down for winter, I could see the beauty of the region’s bleaker side.

[original article accompanied by sidebar of local information]