Ireland. To be honest I couldn’t make head nor tail of what my cab driver was saying on the journey from the airport to St John’s, with his heavy Irish drawl spoken in a kind of pidgin twang. Indeed, there are more varieties of English spoken in Labrador than anywhere else in the world. No wonder I couldn’t understand a word.
The Aboriginal population of what is now Newfoundland and Labrador can be divided into three ethnic groups – the Inuit (once called the Eskimos), the Innu and the Beothuk – but the current-day population owes more to its European roots, being largely the south-west of England. Fisherfolk from Dorset and Devon emigrated in the hope of making their fortunes with the cod banks, but it is more likely the small number of Highland Scots and the Southeastern Irish settlers who had the most profound effect on the culture and heritage of Newfoundland and Labrador’s current-day population. They bear the ruddy cheeked, wind-weathered appearance of island folk. Having spent so much time in Canada as a child, I was struck by how un-North American this region was. It felt they had more in common with Europe than with their Canadian brothers.
The mix-up between the names and geographical roots of the Newfoundlands and Labradors occurred once the dogs were imported into England and the Americas. The dog more commonly associated with Labrador became the Newfoundland – the giant, shaggy, bear-like dog beloved of poets Lord Byron and Emily Dickinson and immortalised as Nana in Peter Pan – and the smaller, close-coated dog (also known as the St John’s Water Dog, the St John’s Dog, the Lesser Newfoundland or the Little Newfoundler) became known as ‘the Labrador’.
The word labrador has dual Portuguese associations. For a start, the region of Labrador in Canada was named after the explorer João Fernandes Lavrador, who in 1499 and 1500 mapped the coastline, labelling the vast, scarcely imaginable area ‘Labrador’ on topographical charts that circulated during this period. Labrador or lavradore also means ‘labourer’ or ‘workman’ in both Portuguese and old Spanish.
The Portuguese predominated other European fishermen during the opening decades of the sixteenth century, and the men who subsequently undertook hazardous voyages to these inhospitable waters would have been gritty, rugged sea hands inured to working the sails around the clock and enduring cramped conditions. So the word was ‘in the air’ in any contemporary consideration of the nature of the venture. Both in terms of the region and of the prevailing sailing-cum-fishing nation which set an example of reliance on its sea dogs, the name ‘Labrador’ was wholly appropriate for a hard-working dog valued by generations of fishing crews trawling the chilly waters for bumper cod harvests.
It seems indisputable that there is a Portuguese connection, but the earliest references all seem to originate in Newfoundland. One of the earliest mentions comes from J. B. Jukes in his book Excursions In and About Newfoundland, written in 1842:
A thin, short-haired, black dog, belonging to George Harvey came off to us today. This animal was of a breed very different from what we understood by the term “Newfoundland Dog” in England. He had a thin tapering snout, a long thin tail and rather thin but powerful legs, with a lank body and hair short and smooth. These are the most abundant dogs of the country. They are by no means handsome, but are generally more intelligent and useful than the others. This one caught its own fish and sat on a projecting rock watching the water.
Could this have been one of the early forms for the Labrador? The breed that has become one of the most popular in the world? Loyal, handsome and hungry?
Newfoundland is still a rugged, bleak land. It is hard to imagine the hardships of those early settlers. This is a place dominated by the weather. Trees grow crouched and bowed to the curvature of the prevailing winds. The ocean bites into the coastline, tearing away at the cliffs. It is a region of natural wealth; where once the fish was king, today minerals and fossil fuels are the main export. The offshore oil rigs provide employment to those who still eke out a living here.
In one of the small working fishing harbours, a number of boats were tied alongside the quay – the Mystic Voyager, the Cape John Navigator, the June Gale – all weathered by the cruel ocean. Their nets lay on the harbour side, ready to be repaired.
I have spent time with trawlermen in the North Sea. It was one of the most miserable experiences of my life. A week being tossed around a mighty ocean, like a rubber duck in a washing machine. Cramped and stuffy. Hot and humid. I can feel the nausea returning just thinking about it. The sleep deprivation. The smell. The blood. The oil. The rust. The diesel fumes. It’s like groundhog day. Haul. Gut. Eat. Haul. Gut. Eat. Haul. I wouldn’t go back out on one of those trawlers if you paid me. Here, 4,800 kilometres away, on the opposite side of the ocean, are the same ships. The same fishermen. The same hopes and dreams. The same wild, violent ocean.
The skipper of my trawler had been capsized alongside his father and brother when he was just 18. They clung to one another in the frozen, black waters. Rescue came, but in the process he lost hold of his father. He was lost to the ocean – one of the many fisherfolk to perish in the cruel sea.
This part of the world holds many parallels to the Western Isles of Scotland where I have spent so much of my life. Indeed, it was here, on a remote island, that my love of the ocean and Labradors began.
The American novelist Annie Proulx gives a measure of the bleak landscape in her bestselling novel The Shipping News, which is set in Newfoundland. One of her characters muses on the landscape:
This place, she thought, this rock, six thousand miles of coast blind-wrapped in fog. Sunkers under wrinkled water, boats threading tickles between ice-scabbed cliffs. Tundra and barrens, a land of stunted spruce men cut and drew away.
How many had come here, leaning on the rail as she leaned now. Staring at the rock in the sea. Vikings, the Basques, the French, English, Spanish, Portuguese. Drawn by the cod, from the days when massed fish slowed ships on the drift for the passage to the Spice Isles, expecting cities of gold. The lookout dreamed of roasted auk or sweet berries in cups of plaited grass, but saw crumpling waves, lights flickering along the ship rails. The only cities were of ice, bergs with cores of beryl, blue gems within white gems, that some said gave off an odor of almonds. She had caught the bitter scent as a child.
Shore parties returned to ship blood-crusted with insect bites. Wet, wet, the interior of the island, they said, bog and marsh, rivers and chains of ponds alive with metal-throated birds. The ships scraped on around the points. And the lookout saw shapes of caribou folding into fog.
Walking along the coastal paths of Newfoundland, the vegetation and trees had become a vivid red, orange and yellow. I wandered among the fishermen’s pots and nets. Traditionally this is fishing country and the dozens of trawlers moored along the harbour were now wrapping up for the season, hunkering down for the winter. It wouldn’t be long until the snow and ice arrived; freezing the harbour and isolating the tiny communities further. The locals I met on my travels in the region had told me of ‘black dogs’ that still roamed these beaches; wild and untamed, some believed these were the ancestors of the Labrador.
Beyond the city limits, the weak late autumn sunshine illuminated the cliff edge on the most easterly tip of North America – Cape Spear in Newfoundland. Huge rolling waves crashed against the rocky foreshore below as flocks of gulls feasted on a passing shoal of fish. The next stop due east of here was to be Cabo da Roca, in Portugal, the most westerly point of mainland Europe, on which I had stood many times and wondered what its North American opposite looked like. Now I knew.
The mighty lighthouse is a reminder of the treacherous nature of the ocean that has cost many ships and their crews their lives. This is a hard, tough land. Newfoundland itself is a huge island, almost twice the size of Great Britain, and for many months of the year the island is buried under 3 metres of snow, but during the summer
