and the rugged Atlantic to the east, it covers more than 29,000 kilometres of coastline. At nearly 150,000 square kilometres, it is the same size as Japan.
I had come here, not for the landscape, nor the people, but in search of a dog famed for its fierce loyalty and ferocious love of food. A dog intricately tied to British culture. A dog beloved of families across the world and championed by countless prime ministers and presidents. A dog both used to sell loo roll and owned by royalty: the humble Labrador Retriever.
The story of the Labrador is as intriguing as it is complex. It is estimated that there are between 300 and 400 different breeds of dog in the world – the exact numbers are disputed by various kennel clubs which have yet to recognise certain breeds that have been crossbred over time. Of course, all breeds began with some sort of crossbreeding, but how did the Labrador evolve?
Breeds of dogs are variously broken down by the English Kennel Club into Hound, Terrier, Gundog, Utility, Pastoral, Toy and Working. While many will class breeds according to what they were bred to do, you can also categorise them according to geography: Welsh Corgi, Yorkshire Terrier, Afghan Hound, Bernese Mountain Dog, the Maltese, Rhodesian Ridgeback, English Setter, Hungarian Vizla, German Shepherd, Irish Setter, Spanish Water Dog, Manchester Terrier, Norfolk Terrier … The list of dogs with a geographical tie is long so I won’t bore you, but you get the gist.
The heritage of the Labrador, however, is much more complex and confused. Indeed, dozens of books have been published over the years with conflicting stories about the history of the world’s most popular breed.
While it is widely accepted that the Yorkshire Terrier, for example, was developed in the nineteenth century to catch rats in the clothing mills of the historic county in Northern England, and the Border Collie was a working dog cultivated to herd livestock in the borderlands between England and Scotland, the Labrador does not actually originate from Labrador, the bleak northerly mainland region of Canada. I, like many, had always assumed it was named after its geographical namesake in Northern Canada, but in fact the breed has its roots, by way of Europe, in the Atlantic island of Newfoundland where, in the late eighteenth century, fishermen relied on a working sea dog of similar appearance to retrieve fish. In researching this book and the history of this humble breed, I have ventured from Portugal to Labrador, Newfoundland, and then full circle back to Europe.
The origin of the Labrador is a slightly confusing issue, not least because ‘Newfoundland and Labrador’ is the umbrella name given to the vast easternmost province of Canada. The two distinct land masses that make up the province are separated by the Strait of Belle Isle, a hazardous, ice-choked, fog-wraithed, treacherously tidal channel approximately 125 kilometres long and ranging between a maximum width of 60 kilometres to 15 kilometres at its narrowest.
In all probability, the nineteenth-century Britons lumped the far-flung area and its associations together just as writers of that era indiscriminately use the words retriever and spaniel. But there are two distinct territories under one geographical title and – just to complicate things – two dog breeds associated with the province, each named after the wrong region. The short-coated Labrador is actually from Newfoundland; and the shaggy-coated Newfoundland emerged at about the same time in Labrador.
The early settlement of Labrador was tied to the sea by the Inuit and Innu people. It is widely assumed that the Vikings were the first Europeans to sight the land but it wasn’t until the Portuguese explorer João Fernandes Lavrador mapped the coast that the region was settled. Today the region is sparsely populated, with around 27,000 residents, most of whom work the land for its iron ore.
So how did this popular family dog, with its lust for food and cuddles, come to live in such an inhospitable terrain and climate?
To further confuse the mystery, another ‘geographical breed’, the Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever, comes from Nova Scotia, just south of Labrador and Newfoundland. All three dogs have distinctive webbed feet, a water-resistant undercoat and incredible swimming abilities – they evidently share some genetic stock. Most historians agree that the native inhabitants of Newfoundland, the Beothuks, did not have dogs. Nor did the pre-Inuit settlers, the Dorset Eskimos. Others insist there would have been Inuit, Innu and Mi’kmaq dogs left by the region’s Aboriginal peoples, as well as descendants of the Norse dogs. We must assume therefore that the Labrador descends from a mix of genes from the various dogs taken on board ship by fishermen from Spain, Portugal, France and England when they set sail to fish for cod in the waters off Newfoundland.
Dogs were needed to guard the camps, to hunt for game and to kill rats and mice. They were a useful bit of kit. Breeds traditionally taken on ships from the early sixteenth century onwards included mastiffs, bloodhounds, spaniels and terriers. It is probably fair to assume there would have been a number of crossbreeds. Residents of Newfoundland kept no records or census of the dogs on the island so there aren’t many clues for breed enthusiasts to mull over. In a footnote in his Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication (1868), Charles Darwin states that the Newfoundland dog is believed to have originated from a cross between an Esquimaux dog and a large, black St Hubert hound. Others point out that Inuit dogs thrive in cold weather, but not cold water.
It still seems amazing to me that some of the world’s most prolific swimming dogs came from some of the world’s coldest water. But then maybe that was the point. The people had to find an alternative to getting in the water themselves.
But the Labrador is a dog that loves to curl up on the sofa or sprawl on the bed. They are never happier than with their heads lolling out of the open window of a Land Rover speeding along a country lane. Newfoundland and Labrador? Surely this was the land of the hard-working pastoral collie – a dog happier outside and often without human contact. There seems to be a great contradiction in provenance and character.
Today it is very fashionable to mix breeds together; the Labradoodle is a Labrador and Standard Poodle cross, the Puggle is a Pug and a Beagle, but what breeds might have mated to create the Labrador as we now know it?
Many canine historians believe their genetic make-up owes something in particular to the Spanish Black Pointer (the aptitudes of obedience to a master and of being hard-wired to follow a scent) and to the Basque or Portuguese Shepherd Dog, which is notable for a herding instinct and a close sense of territory. But it was from a very large gene pool that dogs were bred on an ad hoc basis and trained over 300 years to meet the specific needs of the fishermen. ‘There were many ways in which they could be useful,’ wrote Wilson Stephens, in an article entitled ‘The Lost Years of the Labrador’ in The Field in December 1989. ‘The slippery decks of trawlers, heeling when the nets were being hauled overside on the cod banks of Newfoundland, sent many a hard-won fish sliding into, and often through, the scuppers. Retrieving out of water may have been the ships’ dogs’ first and basic role. Not retrieving fish only. A sailing ship’s rigging included many small components also likely to be washed overboard – blocks, pins, lines, and so on; a fetcher-back was more than worth his keep. Who ever saw a better dog in water than a fit and confident Labrador? It is bred into them.’
The harsh, rugged isolation of Newfoundland and the specific traits required of the dogs allowed the ancestors of the Labrador to evolve into fine, shapely dogs. The terrain and climate required them to be sure-footed on land and broad-chested to swim strongly and surf the strong and choppy Atlantic waves. They needed to be sturdy enough to haul wood on land and drag fish nets ashore, yet small enough not to overpower a fisherman’s two-man dory craft. The fishermen bred these dogs, presumably matching sires with exceptional traits to dams of a similar calibre. Or maybe it was more rudimentary, simply monitoring the accidental intermixing. Whatever the technique, it somehow produced the much-loved, distinctive, water-loving retriever of today.
Like their namesake, the people of Labrador bear a unique mix of cultural heritage, borne of their historical roots. Their accent and language is a mix of Scottish, Irish and
