"The tickle's narrow, not very wide;
The deepest water's on the starboard side
When in the harbor you is shot,
Four fathoms you has got."
It is an evil coast, with hidden reefs and islands scattered like dust
its whole length. "The man who sails the Labrador must know it all
like his own back yard--not in sunny weather alone, but in the night,
when the headlands are like black clouds ahead, and in the mist, when
the noise of breakers tells him all that he may know of his
whereabouts. A flash of white in the gray distance, a thud and swish
from a hidden place: the one is his beacon, the other his fog-horn. It
is thus, often, that the Doctor gets along."
Labrador has an Arctic climate in winter. The extreme cold of the
country is caused by the Arctic current washing its shores. All winter
the ocean is frozen as far as one can see. In June, when the ice
breaks away, the great Newfoundland fishing fleet of little schooners
sails north to remain until the end of September catching cod, for
here are the finest cod fishing grounds in the world.
In 1892 there were nearly twenty-five thousand Newfoundlanders on this
fleet.
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