The coming of the steamer from Saint John’s and the ports of the Northern Bays of Newfoundland, once every ten days or so, is an event in these little settlements of summer-homes, clinging like so many crabs to the rugged shores of this outpost of Newfoundland, lying across Canada’s great Northeast and shutting it off from an Atlantic harbour north of Cape Breton.
Missionary work among the Eskimos has been maintained here for several centuries by the Moravians. Trading posts have been maintained for as long by the world-famous Hudson’s Bay Company. Sometimes the mission station and the H.B.C. Post occur at the same outport, as if in this northern land the desire for company had drawn them irresistibly together. But of course the mission must have decided that a fur-purchasing centre would concentrate the natives and they could be more easily reached, since the one sled-journey would answer all needs.
At Hopedale Mission there is a pathetic little “greenhouse” with a few flowers; and out in a corner of a garden, which is almost comical as gardens go, are seen a few struggling lettuce-plants though last year’s snow lies thick on the rising ground scarcely twenty yards away. If the tide of Canadian trade ever sets “full” out of Hudson Bay, who knows but a century from now many gardens will flourish here, descendants of this little pioneer straggler, hardily holding its own, to give the missionary-table vegetables.
To the Moravian Missionaries of early days belongs the credit of reducing the Eskimo tongue to a language. The large, well-bound grammar which the Missionary shows you becomes indeed a character in itself, as it is shown that this is not merely a key to a language but the humble means upon mastery of which hangs the missionary’s ability to interpret the “Old, Old Story” to these Nimrods of the North at home in Igloo, Komatik and Kyak.
Herein is the key to the hymn-singing, dancing figure that strikes such a colourful note on deck when the ship first makes this land of the Labrador.
At Hopedale, beside the Mission and the H. B. C. Store, with its simple stock of groceries and its pelt-rooms, sometimes packed and sometimes almost empty, according to the season, there are a few Eskimo wooden houses and a big community kitchen with a score of these short, round men and women gathered in the steam about the pot a-stew.
Here and there an old grandmother attends to coarse socks a-drying and knocks the kinks out of skin boots and komatik harness on a sloping roof concentrating the weak sun from the South, the while she minds the children and keeps a wary eye on the few old dogs that pace wolfishly and unceasingly up and down.
Labrador, like Newfoundland, has an interesting list of place-names. A harbour with two openings, usually made by an island lying close to the mainland or to another island, is called a “tickle”. Not the least romantic feature of voyaging along the Labrador coast are these odd and appropriate place-names. Think of sailing by “The White Cockade Islands”, “Run-by-Guess”, or “Tumble-down-Dick”! Or of seeing the surf bursting over “Mad Moll’s Reef”! Or of steering past “Lord’s Arm”, “Lady’s Arm”, and “Caribou Castle!”