Minipi Camps Web Log
More on Labrador
Commentaries about Labrador’s giant Brook trout have appeared over the years in magazines and books. For example, in McClane’s Standard Fishing Encyclopedia. the author writes about the big brookies of Labrador in the article on Brook trout.
Yet, usually the first question when you mention Labrador, is Where in the world is Labrador?
Mention Labrador without mentioning Canada, and the geographically compromised will say, Oh, down in South America, right?
So here’s a brief answer to this question plus a few words about Labrador itself.
Where in the world is LABRADOR?
A 16th century map shows a land called “Terra del Labrador” with this cryptic note:
This country was discovered by the people of the town of Bristol, and because he who first sighted land was a labourer from the island of the Azores, it was named after him.
No, not ‘after’ him, but after his profession as a laborer. That lavradour was named Joao Fernandes. The year was 1501.
The Northeastern Coast of Canada
The province now called Newloundland & Labrador lies on the northeastern Atlantic coast of mainland Canada. It consists of the big island of Newfoundland and the roughly pie-shaped coastal land of Labrador.
The Trans-Labrador Highway
You will not be surprised to learn that in the 16th century not one single road scarred the face of this land. But you may well be surprised to learn that today, except for one road, the hardscrabble Trans-Labrador Highway; the interior of Labrador is still, as it was then, an uninhabited, road-less wilderness.
That’s right. Today, except for one road jutting 400 miles due west from Goose Bay to Wabash and Labrador City; there is nothing but rivers, lakes, mountains and black spruce forest.
The Impenetrable Forest
Labrador’s interior is accessible only by float planes with such fanciful names as the Twin Otter and the Beaver.
During the summer Labrador is still a land penetrable only by canoe or kayak or by a few intrepid sportsmen like Rod and Brian McGrath, who venture up her tumbling rivers in wet suits astride their jet-powered “personal water craft.” And in winter by snowmobile, snowshoe and ski.
The only inhabitants of Labrador’s impenetrable interior are caribou, black bear, martin, and mink. Eagle, osprey and ducks. The rivers, like the Eagle River, are filled with Atlantic salmon. The hundreds of unnamed lakes with landlocked Arctic char, giant brook trout, and great northern pike
Its northernmost shoreline – where polar bear and Arctic fox roam—is chilled by the glacial currents of the Labrador Sea – home to whales and icebergs. And at one time the cod.
Inland, to the north, Labrador is bounded by Hudson Strait, to the west by Hudson Bay, to the south by the Gulf of St. Lawrence and the Eastmain River, and to the east by the North Atlantic.
By the 10th century AD, the Vikings had stepped ashore and established a short-lived settlement on the coast called L’Anse aux Meadows.
The Way It Was Is How It Is
This land has never lacked for sobriquets. In 1498 John Cabot called it “the land that God forgot.” Others have called it “a silent place still,” and “one of the last blank spots on the map of North America.”
But for me, Jack Cooper’s Minipi slogan says it best: “The way it was is how it is.”
Labrador lies on the 52nd latitude. The same as Britain. Thus, if you sailed due west from the British Isles, your first landfall would be the coast of Labrador, called “the most rugged coast in the world.”
If you attempted to venture further west into the interior…well, here’s what Lawrence Millan says in his introduction to the 1990 paperback edition of Dillon Wallace’s The Lure of The Labrador Wild (1st Ed. 1905): Labrador’s interior has (and still has) a well-earned reputation for being one of the great inhospitable places on earth, a patchwork of Canadian Shield granites and sphagnum moss, labyrinthine caribou trails and desolate sub-arctic barrens, all set amidst glacier-scoured hills stretching to an apparently limitless horizon.
As Jack Cooper sees it, Labrador is “one of the few challenges left in a world of wimps.”
And, so, for wimps like thee and me, he has built three fishing lodges in Labrador’s south central interior each with nearly all the comforts of home. And he’s now, 2007, added Little Minipi Lake Lodge.
Had Cooper lodges been there in Cabot’s time, he would perhaps have changed his mind about the in hospitability of Labrador.
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