Berry Nice

We were asked what kind of jam we wanted with our toast, at one of our first breakfasts. When we asked "What do you have?" we heard "Baked apple"

Baked apple jam? Is it applesauce with cinnamon? Or something else? Of course we must try baked apple jam!

It arrived, bright yellow and not at all appley. Not too sweet, but pleasing.

It was later that we realized there was another name for the native Cloudberry. 

The other name is not Baked Apple exactly but Bakeapple.

Funny name we thought. Even funnier when we heard the origin. Apparently the French and English fishers asked each other "What is the name of this berry?" The English heard  "Baie qu'appelle?" and assumed that Bakeapple was the name.

Don't laugh. It's true.

And it's delicious. It makes a great spread and is quite expensive as each plant only grows one berry. We see the flowers everywhere right now, blooming their little hearts out.

Another extremely popular native fruit is the Partridgeberry, also known as Lingonberry, a smaller relation to the Cranberry. We see it in jam, in spreads, in syrup, in salad dressings, in desserts, in ice cream, and in cocktails.

Even cocktails with pieces or real, live iceberg in them.

Dinner Theatre in Cow Head

Dinner theatre is a real thing in Newfoundland, and very popular. We had read about it before we arrived, but unfortunately every place we went to that had one of these theatre events (and there were many places that had them) was closed. In one case it was open, but there wasn't enough of an audience so it was, in effect, closed.

A friend of a friend back home had passed on a recommendation to go to the theatre in Cow Head, on the western peninsula. In planning our route back east, we needed to find one night stopovers, and Cow Head actually fit the bill. I am not sure we could resist the urge to stay in a place called Cow Head either.

Not only that, but the theatre opened the day BEFORE we arrived instead of the usual day after. So we booked a room in the only hotel in town, and got tickets before they sold out. 

We had low hopes. But were pleasantly surprised.

The play was typical of Newfoundland dinner theatres in that is was locally written, a local story, and interspersed with music. In this case it was about the night the SS Ethie ran aground in a storm just south of Cow Head, in 1919. Miraculously everyone survived, but bits of the wreck can still be seen on the beach below today. 

ready for hungry theatregoers

what's left of the SS Ethie 103 years later

Interestingly, the story was suggested by a local man whose grandfather was Edward English, the captain of the SS Ethie. What makes that interesting is that Captain Edward English's grandson is Ed English, the owner of Quirpon Island and our host only a few days ago. 

Seven actors played all the parts, sang, and even served our food, which was also better than expectations.

Menu:

Dinner roll with molasses butter

Choice of cod with vegetables or beef stew under pastry

Choice of blueberry or rhubarb shortcake

Coffee or tea

Before entering the show you could buy local beer or a glass of wine in the foyer.

By 8:30pm it was all done and we walked across the street to our hotel, under a blazing sunset. 

Martin contemplating the fate of the SS Ethie

Cow Head sunset

The Day of the Thrombolites

Sounds like a catchy title for a 50s horror film.

But no, they are the vestiges of an ancient life form found almost nowhere on earth except - you guessed it - Newfoundland.

Flower's Cove, about 15 minutes north of the St. Barbe ferry terminal on the northwestern shore, is where a short walk takes one to see thrombolites. 

They are critically endangered microbial structures that you are encouraged to examine and walk all over (?!?!?)

The only known form of life from about 3.5 billion to 650 million years ago, they are large, bun shaped Cambrian mounds that were the growth form of millions of tiny algae and bacteria. These mounds are not exactly fossils, but are evidence of biological activity.

These creatures thrived in tidal and subtidal zones of a very warm salty sea, some being exposed at low tide and covered at high tide, which explains the mud cracks. The larger ones might be multiple communities that amalgamated as they grew.

They are so rare there is only one other known place where they can be found, in Western Australia.   

Well, check those off the list!

communing with thrombolites

Uncle Dan's Amazing 24th Birthday

The family tree research part of our Newfoundland trip is a few weeks past how, but here in sight of Belle Isle and its notorious strait, one member of my family is in my mind.

Belle Isle in the distance

I never met "Uncle Dan" Butler, as he died long before I was born. He was my great-grandmother's brother, and the first one of his family to move to BC from Newfoundland in 1888  (they had all joined him by 1891). When my great-grandmother died, Dan and his wife adopted my grandmother, age 3, to help look after them in their old age. Granny had other ideas, but that is another story.

Dan and Louisa Butler with my Grandmother Emma McCoskrie

As a young man in Newfoundland, Dan was a capable seaman, and worked on all sorts of boats for fishing, sealing, or surveying - whatever work he could get. His family were all ships' captains, and he rose to that rank as well.

But the one voyage that is top of mind right now is one he took in 1886, as he was turning 24. He wrote about this adventure, on the survey ship Alert (curiously the ship that BC's Alert Bay was named after), in his retirement years living in Victoria. 

He describes sitting atop the masthead, and back then this is what he would have been standing on most likely. Imagine all those hours in the freezing, windy, open Atlantic standing in a barrel! 

What an amazing 24th birthday that must have been, high atop a sailing ship's mast, charged with picking a safe way through the ice, in 24 hour daylight, up and over the top of Labrador and into Hudson's Bay in order to survey a land never surveyed before. 

Going out to the pub with friends seems pretty lame in comparison.

part of Uncle Dan's article
published in the Victoria BC newspaper of the day
 in the early 1940s

Labrador coast

As we found in Newfoundland, so we found in Labrador. Museums were shut, sites closed, and cafes had signs that read "closed for the season" placed there last September.

We could not go inside it (closed), but the 2nd largest lighthouse in Atlantic Canada is wonderful in the strange light of this mid-June afternoon. It's rare to see a lightkeeper's house attached to the lighthouse, and the cunning blending of shingles was much appreciated.

Nicely blended shingles

look up, look way up!

What surprised us was the beautiful, pink sandy beaches everywhere. Unfortunately it was too cold and windy to enjoy them except from the window of the car.

One site we did get out of the car to brave the wind was a little pile of rocks among the sand dunes, right by the side of the road. 

Saying this unique mound was an understated monument is an understatement. A simple plaque indicates that this is the single oldest burial mound in the entire new world!

A small boy was buried here about 7,500 years ago. Of the first peoples to settle in this area, the Maritime Archaic, he was only discovered in 1973, when archaeologists asked if there was anything interesting in the area and a local showed him this mound of rocks. Where would this place be without its elder citizens who know something is unusual but just live near it without curiosity?

The boy was found to have been covered with red ochre, and buried with weapons and, poignantly, a toy bone whistle. Fires had been lit of either side of his body. Was he the son of someone important? Were all children buried with this much care and ceremony? Or were children and adults treated the same? No one knows.

At the time, he would have been buried only a few metres from the sea, but with that glacier that had started receding at that time and lifting the land, the grave is now almost a kilometre away from the shore. The sandy soil seems to have preserved the grave extremely well. After it was excavated and studied, it was replaced.

seashore distant from the grave

The Maritime Archaic peoples gradually moved north, but by 4,000 years ago they started to disappear, and were gone entirely less than a thousand years later.  

Labrador has the oldest rock in the world. Almost 4 billion years old to be clear. Its sedimentary rocks contain the oldest known evidence of life anywhere on earth. In the south here, it is undulating mounds that look flat from a distance, and contain water and plants that can bear being under snow and ice for months every year. Its beautiful and terrible, and I am glad I am heading back to a warm bed and breakfast. 

Old rock

water.....

....and snow

 

Still, these big open spaces, barren and yet teeming with life, home to drifts of snow and caribou, inhospitable to humans and yet supporting communities, inaccessible but for one lonely road occasionally or via boats able to brave the ice and currents of the open Atlantic, they speak to me. Even the Vikings left this place largely alone, and master French mariner Jacques Cartier said "I believe this is the land God gave to Cain." 

I felt the same way after visiting Canada's high north - Inuvik, Aklavik, etc. - and I wish I could spend a little more time in Labrador.

Red Bay

Canada has 6 time zones. Newfoundland and Labrador are on the half hour, which was always a bit of a joke growing up and watching the CBC:

"5 o'clock Pacific time, 8 o'clock Eastern, and 9:30 in Newfoundland."

The ferry to Labrador actually arrives in Quebec, and for less than 5 minutes of driving we are an hour and a half out of whack, as the port town of Blanc Sablon does not observe Daylight Savings Times (I am with Blanc Sablon on this decision). If one didn't know this and looked at the car clock at the wrong time, one's head might explode.

Bienvenue

What time is it???? 

Never mind

We are only able to squeeze in two nights in Labrador, and the ferry was very late getting in this evening due to the house on boat drama (see previous post), so we chose to spend our one full day going as far as Red Bay, which is still on a paved road about 80 km away. Apparently the road on to Battle Harbour has just recently been paved, but we did not know that and did not want to take a rental car on a gravel road in Labrador while there is still snow about.

This province has more than its fair share of UNESCO sites - this is our third one in a week! - and Red Bay is one. In the mid-16th century - that is almost 500 years ago - whalers from the Basque country made this their seasonal economic hub. For about 70 years, groups of men from the region that overlaps Spain and France left home in about April, taking several weeks in their small galleons to get to Labrador, hunted and rendered whales which provided oil for lighting Europe, then left before the ice came.

It's never a good idea to look at history with a modern lens without exploring the entire story. Over seventy years, about 25,000 whales were killed for their oil, as well as for meat and baleen. This definitely took a toll on whale numbers. However, since the whaling moratorium in 1986, almost 40,000 whales have been killed, and not for lighting or necessary nourishment.

In 1565 a galleon sank in the harbour during a storm, and 400+ years later it was found still in very good condition given the cold waters. What was a real find, though, was a small boat, a chalupa that was trapped under the galleon and thus almost pristinely preserved. The galleon was raised in sections, studied fully and then resunk for future generations. The chalupa, the oldest surviving example of these small boats, was conserved over decades, and is now on display in a brand new building. Next to the boat is a whale jaw bone, just to show the scale of these little boats that held 6 or 8 whalers, who worked with hand-forged harpoons in rough waters.  

There is a good interpretive museum displaying the pieces recovered from the sunk galleon, as well as models of the operations, called "trys" We were able to take a little boat across to Saddle Island, where so many of these tryworks were located, and it was easy to see the indents in the soil where they lay so many centuries ago. 

boat to Saddle Island

Huge trypots over fire pits were used to render the fat, which was poured into barrels made onsite. 

artist's rendering of a rendering tryworks

excavated trypot ovens

indents of try ovens grown in

One of the guides told us that, as a boy, he saw all these bits of terracotta on the beaches and assumed they were old sewage tiles. But it turns out he was playing amongst 16th century Basque roof tiles! These tiles are still lying in piles or scattered on the beach, which is amazing to me.

bits of old tile among the mussel shells on the beach

heap of 16th century tile bits

model of old tryworks with ceramic rooftiles in place

Red Bay from Saddle Island, now home to only the seabirds
and a long ago cemetery of unlucky Basque whalers

A Remarkable Man

In our pre-trip reading, one of the names that came up again and again was Dr. Grenfell. There are streets and buildings galore named after him. As St. Anthony was his hub, this is the right place and time to talk about this man.

statue in front of Grenfell Museum,
St. Anthony

Dr. Wilfred Grenfell was one of those men who have the good luck of being the right man to live in the right place at the right time. He was sorely needed and he gave more than what could have even been dreamed of. 

Born in a English fishing village, in Cheshire, and educated at a sporty old-school boarding school in the 1870s. Being a young man of financial privilege, he spent a bit of time trying to find his purpose, and settled on medicine. He trained at London Hospital, which was located in one of the poorer neighbourhoods. This was a sign.

Sent off to Newfoundland in 1892 to treat the poor, he found his calling. Devastated with the extreme poverty he found in Newfoundland and, particularly, Labrador, he made it his life's mission to treat as many people as possible in the short season his medical boat could travel before the ice came. He built hospitals and clinics up and down the coast (his first was in St. Anthony, near the top of the Western peninsula of Newfoundland), and recruited other doctors and nurses to add more capacity than he himself could. 

Seeing children orphaned and abandoned because of Tuberculosis, he built an orphanage. He built schools. He started a fishermen's cooperative to help these families built their own security rather than having to suffer the horrific debt and treatment that the British merchants imposed. He treated the Inuit along Labrador's coast, otherwise neglected. 

He wrote books. Lots of them. He was a religious man, and preached, apparently kindly and effectively. He had pithy sayings, like this one:

There was a famous event that secured his heroic star even more, when he raced out with his dog team in a storm to try to save a young boy's life and got caught on an ice pan that broke away and started to float out to sea. Knowing he would die otherwise, he sacrificed three of his beloved dogs to make a warm coat for himself (In the dark! In a snow storm! With just a knife!) until, days later, he was rescued. And yes, he went on to successfully operate on the boy.

He founded the International Grenfell Foundation to further his work, and went all over the world giving talks about Labrador and Newfoundland and seeking donations to build more and hire more and train more. We went on book tours, which he loathed, because he knew it would help. He was knighted for his work, has a feast day in his honour and inspired fictional characters. There is even a Grenfell cloth brand, a hard-wearing cotton gabardine.

Dr. G in stained glass, next to J,
in the Physicians window,
Washington Cathedral, Washington DC
(Louis Pasteur is on the other side)

In his 40s, he met his wife on a transatlantic boat and proposed to her before he knew her name. She gave up her life in Chicago to join him in the wilds, and was his partner in all things. She hid her own illness (cancer) to help him, and died in 1938. He died shortly after. Their ashes are together up in the hills behind their lovely house in St. Anthony, even though they worked so hard they hardly ever spent time there. 

You can imagine how excited we are to be staying in one of the Grenfell Nursing stations in Forteau, Labrador! 

our Labrador home, the Louie A Grenfell Hall B&B