Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Icebergs, large and small, drift by the austere Labrador coast for much of the year.
For generations Newfoundlanders have gone “down on the Labrador” to fish for cod in the summer. The
first European to document life on the coast was George Cartwright, trader and explorer, who lived there from
1770 to 1786. A self-taught naturalist, he provides us with an accurate assessment of the character of the land
and sea:
All the east coast . . . exhibits a most barren and iron-bound appearance; the mountains rise out of the sea,
and are composed of a mass of rocks thinly covered in spots with black peat earth, on which grow some
stunted spruces, Empetrum nigrum [crowberry], and a few other plants, but enough to give them the ap-
pearance of fertility; such lands therefore are always denominated Barrens. As some compensation for the
poverty of the soil, the sea, rivers and lakes abound in fish, fowl and amphibious creatures . . . All those
kinds of fish which are found in the Arctic seas abound on this coast.
The Eurocentric view of a barren land is not borne out by the long history of Aboriginal occupancy. Archae-
ologist William Fitzhugh of the Smithsonian Institution has written of the Labrador coast that “it seems impos-
