months, Atlantic Canada is reminded of its Arctic geography, as swarms of icebergs descend on the island. Locals make good use of these icebergs, though, by making iceberg water, iceberg beer and iceberg vodka. They even collect washed-up shards which they then use in their gin and tonics.
Perhaps the most astonishing industry, here, is that of the iceberg ‘movers’, those individuals tasked with either blowing up or tugging away mighty icebergs that are blocking harbours or are in danger of damaging property. There is even a website called Iceberg Finder where ‘iceberg ambassadors’ track the movement of these mighty bergs, which are more than 10,000 years old and can weigh in excess of 10 million tonnes. Icebergs also bring polar bears – which use them as ocean rafts, sometimes depositing the fearsome predators close to human habitations – which has given rise to another local expert, the polar bear ‘relocator’. Today, though, there are no signs of icebergs, polar bears or the sperm whales that migrate through these waters, just a vast grey ocean.
In another strange twist in the tail and connection to yet another country, the Labrador – now the most popular pet dog in the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Israel and Australia – ultimately owes its status to John Cabot, the famous Italian navigator and explorer whose name is honoured in streets, towers, academies, universities and golf courses around the world. Cabot’s ‘discovery’ of parts of North America under the commission of Henry VII in 1497 is believed to have been the first European encounter with the shores of North America since the Norse Vikings landed in around 1000 BC. Some historians think that either Nova Scotia or Maine was the location of his landfall, but the official position of the Canadian and British governments is that Giovanni Caboto – to give him his proper Italian name – landed at Cape Bonavista, a rugged headland on the east coast of Newfoundland. He found a Utopian land of plenty and his discovery heralded an era of heavy European fishing traffic which, in turn, brought about the development of the versatile sea dog we know today as the Labrador.
On 24 June 1497, Cabot set sail from the port of Bristol, then the second most important seaport in the country. About 3,500 kilometres later, his ships gingerly negotiated the rugged sea stacks and steep cliffs of a terra nova to touch land at Cape Bonavista. By all accounts, he made a quick turnaround, excited to share the news back in England that his expedition had indeed found, discovered and investigated something unknown to all Christian folk – an incredible wealth of fish stocks off these shores. His crew reported ‘the sea there is full of fish that can be taken not only with nets but with fishing-baskets’.
Today the cod or ‘baclau’ is still the regional dish. Fish and brewis, which is pronounced ‘brews’ is the most popular. The meal consists of cod and hard bread or hard tack. With the abundance of cod it became synonymous with many Newfoundland households as a delicacy to be served as a main meal. The recipe may vary, but the primary ingredients are always the same. Typically baclau uses salt fish which is soaked in water overnight to reduce the salt content, and hard bread which is also soaked in water overnight. The next day, the fish and bread are boiled separately until tender, and then both are served together.
The traditional meal is served with scrunchions, which is salted pork fat that has been cut into small pieces and fried. Both the rendered fat and the liquid fat are then drizzled over the fish and brewis. It tastes like … fish. Very, very salty, chewy fish. I had eaten the same on the island of Taransay when I was marooned there for a year. It was the only fish we ever caught. We were hopeless. We were living on what the local fishermen described as a fish roundabout. But we had no boat; no nets and no rods. All we had was a crate of salted fish. To be honest, I hated it and I still do. It makes me retch. The last time I had it was in the deserts of Oman; we took it in homage to the old explorer Wilfred Thesiger, who took salted shark meat. It was foul, but I ate it nonetheless.
I made my way through a hearty bowl of baclau as I sat looking out over a tiny harbour. A colourful, wooden-stilted fisherman’s hut stood out against the gunmetal waters, the hard granite cliffs towering behind it. It was at once utterly beautiful and hauntingly severe. The view certainly helped the digestion.
The abundance of cod would be a turning point for the region and the emergence of the Labrador. Word spread quickly about the new-found lands and their bounty, and by the early sixteenth century, fishermen from Europe were regularly setting sail in a north-westerly direction and converging in the harsh and squally North Atlantic waters to fish for cod. The French, Spanish and Portuguese fishermen tended to fish on the Grand Banks of Newfoundland and other banks out to sea, where fish were always available. They carried an abundant store of salt and processed their fish on board ship, laying it down in layers strewn with salt to cure the fish. They did not attempt to dry it until they returned to their home ports. Without access to an indigenous source of salt, the English fishermen – travelling in fleets of vessels from West Country ports in Devon, Dorset, Somerset and Cornwall – sailed each spring and brought home a harvest in autumn. To eke out their meagre salt supplies and preserve their hauls, they developed a custom of salting the fish with a light paste, washing and drying it on long wooden racks onshore. This process required fish-curing stations to be set up on land. This meant they concentrated on fishing inshore (where the cod were only to be found at certain times of the year, during their migrations) and used small boats to return to the Newfoundland shore every day. In their chosen seasonal locations, English fishing captains at the turn of the seventeenth century reported cod shoals ‘so thick by the shore that we hardly have been able to row a boat through them’. Some even talk of walking across them – during my short stint as an offshore fisherman I once saw a net of cod pulled from the North Sea, so full of fish that the trawler men could walk between the two trawlers on the fish.
Once dried, the fish were then loaded on board the ships and sent back home. A winter crew was left behind each year to stake out the shore, maintain the curing facility and protect the fragile and lucrative toehold that England had established in the cod-fishing industry. Permanent settlements were discouraged, so it is easy to imagine how those left behind would have relied on their dogs not only to hunt for food and guard their base, but also for companionship.
The cod moratorium of 1992 nearly devastated the region. The Canadian government declared a halt on the northern cod fishery, which for nearly 500 years had shaped the lives and communities of Atlantic Canada. The biomass of cod had fallen to just 1 per cent of its early levels and was in danger of complete extinction. Better fishing technology and trawlers had decimated stocks. It was a brave and bold decision by the Canadian government, and one that caused untold misery and hardship for the local people. More than 35,000 fisherfolk from 400 communities were left unemployed overnight.
Some communities never recovered. The effects of the moratorium are still obvious; there is an air of sadness that clings to the region like an Atlantic fog. A large imposing museum that soars into St John’s skyline like an ugly carbuncle is symbolic – like a giant fish factory, there for all to remember. The museum is crammed full of fishing gear and boats. Photographs of weathered faces hauling, processing and salting cod. Huge piles of fish. Nostalgic photos of a bygone era when the cod was king and the community thrived.
By the 1620s, tiny, isolated settlements on the coast of Newfoundland became home to fishermen and their ship dogs – mainly from England, but also from Portugal, Spain, France and the Basque Country – as competition over the best waters hotted up and everyone was eager to stake their claim on the fishing rights.
The first sightings in Britain of the ‘St John’s Dogs or Little Newfoundler Dogs’ were in the late eighteenth century. They had been brought back across the Atlantic aboard the ships carrying their precious cargoes of dried and salted fish.
In 1785, Robert Burns’s poem, The Twa Dogs, refers to a creature, ‘His hair, his size, his mouth, his lugs/Shew’d he was nane o’Scotland’s dogs/But whelped some place far abroad,/Where sailors gang to fish for cod.’ Could this have been the loyal Labrador?
In 1814, Colonel Peter Hawker, a
