But the difference in soil does not wholly explain the difference in vegetation. In the mission-garden at Caribou Island next to nothing will grow; in the garden at Hopedale, four degrees farther north, though the rock here is very hard, I found half an acre of potatoes in blossom, the tops about six inches high, together with beets, carrots, cabbages, onions, nice currant-bushes, and rhubarb growing luxuriantly. These are all started under cover, and are not set out in the garden until toward the end of June, and a great deal of Esquimaux labor must go to their production; yet it is doubtful whether the same pains would bring about the same result at the Caribou station.
It is the sea that dooms Labrador, and the relation of the coast to this does much to determine its fertility, or rather its barrenness. Half way across the ocean, in latitude 54°, Captain Linklater found the temperature of the water 54°, Fahrenheit; near the Labrador coast, in the same latitude, the temperature was but 34°, two degrees only above the freezing point! It is in facts like this that one gets a key to the climate not only of Labrador, but of Eastern North America. Out of the eternal ice of the North the current presses down along the coast, chilling land and air wherever it touches. Where the coast retreats somewhat, and is well barricaded with islands, the rigor of the climate is mitigated; where it lies fully exposed to the Arctic current, even though much farther south, the life is utterly chilled out of it. Now Hopedale lies behind a rampart of islands twenty miles deep; while the portion of the Arctic current which splits off at the head of Newfoundland, and pushes down through the strait, presses close past Caribou Island. This explains the sterility of the latter.
The Arctic current varies much in different years, not only in the amount of ice it brings, but also in its direction. Unexpected effects depend upon this variation. It will be remembered that in 1863 several ships were wrecked on Cape Race, owing to some "unaccountable" disturbance of the currents. The Gulf Stream, it was found at length, ran thirty miles farther north than usual. Was this unaccountable? When Captain Handy, our whaling Mentor, was penetrating Hudson's Strait in June, 1863, he found vast headlands of floe ice resting against the land, and pushing far out to sea.
"Mr. Bailey," said he to his mate, "there will be many wrecks on Cape Race this year."
The prediction was fulfilled. Do you see why it should be?
The floe ice rose ten feet above the water; it therefore extended near one hundred feet beneath. At this depth it acted upon the current precisely as if it were land, pushing the former far to the east. The current, therefore, did not meet and repel the Gulf Stream at the usual point; and the latter was thus at liberty to press on beyond its custom to the north. Captain Handy not only saw the facts before him, but reasoned upon them. Even when these immense bodies of ice do not rest upon the land, they produce the same effect. At the depth of a hundred feet they go below the current into the still water or counter current beneath, and thus still resist the surface flow.
The coast of Labrador has no fellow for sternness and abruptness on the earth. Huge headlands, stubborn cliffs, precipitous hills rise suddenly from the sea, bold, harsh, immitigable, yet softened by their aspect of gray endurance. Hacked and scored, tossed, fissured, and torn, weather-beaten and bleached, their bluntness becomes grave, their hardness pathetic. About their caverned bases the billow thunders in perpetual assault, proclaiming the purpose of the sea to reclaim what it has lost. Above, the frost inserts its potent lever, and flings down from time to time some bellowing fragment to its ally below. The shores, as if to escape from this warfare, hurry down, and plunge to quiet depths of ocean, where the surge never heaves, nor frost, even by the deep ploughshare of its icebergs, can reach. It is, indeed, a terrible coast, and remains to represent that period in Nature when her powers were all Titanic, untamed,—playing their wild game, with hills for toss-coppers and seas for soap-bubbles, or warring with the elements themselves for weapons.
The harbors are very deep. In some twenty that we visited there was but a single exception. In fact, it is commonly only in little coves boxed up by high walls of rock, where one side threatens the ship's bowsprit and the other her stern, that an ordinary cable will reach bottom. You anchor in a granite tub, where one hardly dares lean over the rail for fear of bumping his head against the cliffs, and see half your chain spin out before ground is touched. Jack sometimes wonders, as the cable continues to rush through the hawse-hole, whether he has not dropped anchor into a hole through the earth, and speculates upon the probability of fishing up a South-Sea island when he shall again heave at the windlass.
A Labrador summer has commonly a brief season during which the heat seems to Englishmen "intense," and even to an American noticeable. Captain French, the old pilot, told me that he had been at Indian Harbor (far to the north) when for three weeks an awning over the deck was absolutely necessary, and when a fish left in the sun an hour would be spoiled. Last summer, however, was the coldest and rainiest known for many years. Once the thermometer rose to 73°, Fahrenheit, once again to 70°, but five days in six it did not at nine in the morning vary more than two or three degrees from 42°, and half the time the mercury would be found precisely at this mark. The lowest temperature observed was 34°. This was on the 28th and 29th of July, when we had a furious snow-storm, which lasted twenty-four hours, with twelve hours of wild rain, sleet, and hail interposed. In consequence of this rain and of the constant melting, there remained on the steep hillsides only three inches' depth of snow when the storm ceased, though in the hollows it was found a foot deep. In the deeper ravines the snow of winter lasts through the year, and was found by us in the middle of August.
We were, however, treated to a few days which left no room for a wish: for the best day of a Labrador summer is the best day of all summers whatsoever. Herodotus says that Ionia was allowed to possess the finest climate of all the world; and in Smyrna I believed him, for there were May days when each breath seemed worth one's being born to enjoy. But all days yield to those of Labrador when the better genius of its climate prevails. Then one feels the serenity of power, then all his blood is exalted and pure, and the globules sail through his veins like rich argosies before trade-winds. Then an irritable haste and a weak lassitude are alike impossible; one's nerves are made of a metal finer than steel, and he becomes truly a lord in Nature.