After Icebergs with a Painter / A Summer Voyage to Labrador and Around Newfoundland.

by Louis Legrand Noble

Newfoundland now lifts its blue summits along the southeast sky, a kind of Catskill heights, with here and there patches of snow, that recall to mind the White Mountain House. In the course of the afternoon, we pass them, and find that they are the highlands of St. Johns, the loftiest, I believe, in the island, and bound the bay called by the same lovely name.

What a region for romantic excursion! Yonder are wooded mountains with a sleepy atmosphere, and attractive vales, and a fine river, the river Castor, flowing from a country almost unexplored; and here are green isles spotting the sea—the islands of St. Johns. Behind them is an expanse of water, alive with fish and fowl, the extremes of which are lost in the deep, untroubled wilderness. A month would not suffice to find out and enjoy its manifold and picturesque beauties, through which wind the deserted trails of the Red Indian, now extinct or banished. Why they should have left, with all these unappropriated breadths of solitude for their inheritance, I do not precisely understand. There are mournful tales told of their wrongs and their revenges, the old story of contests between the civilized and the savage.

Yonder, at the termination of the highlands, is a cape, no matter what is its French name, since directly behind it is a bay with an Indian name tough enough to last one round a dozen capes—the Bay of Ingornachoix, noted for its harbors, inlets, and pretty streams, another fine region for the summer tourist. Beyond the woody distances rising in the east, there lies a lengthy lake, the centre of a little world of interest to the lovers of nature and the picturesque. It is no great distance across the island here to the shores of White Bay, a remote expanse of waters, to which few but fishermen have any occasion to penetrate.

As the evening advances the wind strengthens, and bears us rapidly along the coast. Thus we are encircling Newfoundland, and finding spots of beauty, to which, if we may not return ourselves, we can direct others of like taste and sentiment. We come down from the cold air, and from looking at a fine aurora now playing in the skies, and gleaming by reflection in the waves, and sit by the cabin lights, and talk and write, inspect the sketches, and listen to the roar of winds and surges—rather melancholy music.

CHAPTER LIV.

SLOW SAILING BY THE BAY OF ISLANDS.—THE RIVER HUMBER.—ST. GEORGE’S RIVER, CAPE, AND BAY.—A BRILLIANT SUNSET.

Tuesday, July 19. We have a brilliant morning and a favoring breeze, but a vexatious current. What a net of these currents has the tyrannous Neptune set around his beloved Newfoundland! Like a web in a dim cellar window, it is perpetually entangling some fly of a craft in its subtle meshes. Buzz and struggle as we will, he has got us by the foot, and, spider-like, may look on, and enjoy our perplexity. We advance with insufferable slowness, notwithstanding the considerable speed of our rounded bows, through the water. “That is the Bay of Islands,” they said, early in the morning. It is the Bay of Islands still. We are a long time sailing by the Bay of Islands. But it gives us time to look, and talk about it with the Captain. Beyond the forest-covered hills which surround it, are lakes as beautiful, and larger than Lake George, the cold, clear waters of which flow to the bay under the name of the river Humber. It has a valley like Wyoming, and more romantic scenery than the Susquehanna. The Bay of Islands is also a bay of streams and inlets, an endless labyrinth of cliffs and woods and waters, where the summer voyager would delight to wander, and which is worth a volume sparkling with pictures.

How fine a blue the waters of the gulf are in this light! We seem to be upon the broad Atlantic. What a realm of seas and shores, islands, bays and rivers, is this St. Lawrence world, in the midst of which we now are, and of which our people know so little! Where are our young men, who have the time and money to skip, from summer to summer, in the fashionable rounds of travel, that they do not seek this virgin scenery? One long, loud yell of the black loon, deep diver of these lakes and fiords, pealing through the silent evening, would ring in their recollection long after the music of city parks abroad had been forgotten.

Late in the day, and Cape St. George in view, a bold and clifted point pushed out from the mainland twenty miles or more, and commanding extensive prospects both inland and along the coast. A month would not suffice for all its many landscapes. St. George’s River is a wild, rapid stream, and St. George’s Bay is quite a little sea, deep, and darkened by the shadows of fine mountains, and broad woodlands. Like the Bay of Islands, it is a paradise for the huntsman, and the fisher. Awake, ye devotees of the fishing-rod and rifle, and the red camp-fire beneath the green-wood trees, and know that to visit St. George’s cape and bay and river, and all that is St. George’s, is better late than never.

The sun is in the waves, and yonder we have those wonderful heavens again. The west is all one bath of colors, colors of the rainbow. And clouds like piled-up fleeces, and like fleeces pulled apart and scattered, and fleeces spun into soft and woolly threads, and again those threads woven into downy fabrics, are weltering in the glory. The wind has fallen, and the waves have put out all their white, flashing lights, and now mould themselves into the flowing lines and the sweetest forms of beauty. We go down with glad hearts, and ask protection for the night.