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Fishing the Labrador Coast

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Introduction

BATTLE HARBOUR, between the Battle islands and the east extreme of Great Caribou island, is only fit for small vessels, being 60 yards wide in the entrance, about 150 yards within, about half a mile long, and with from 4 to 6 fathoms water in it, over mud bottom. It is generally crowded with vessels and boats of fishermen, which moor to the rocks on either side, and the shores are covered with their houses and fishing stages. Newfoundland and Labrador Pilot, 1887

Throughout the history of European exploitation, the cod fisheries of Labrador were prosecuted by different types of crews that fished down north. These included the fishing and shore crew of large mercantile rooms such as Battle Harbour, year-round livyers, and some seasonal small-scale stationers and floater crews (the floater fishery had its own distinct patterns and techniques that will be touched on briefly, but the topic will be explored more fully at another time). As well as cod, herring, salmon, furs and seals were plentiful and harvested by different combinations of these basic crews. Below we touch on the basic operations of each of these crew types and explore how mercantile rooms such as the one at Battle Harbour serviced them.

The essay then moves into and concludes with an extended nuts-and-bolts exploration of the processing routines used for the various styles of salt fish produced on the Labrador, especially the distinctive heavy-salted, Labrador cure.  The techniques used and products made in the Labrador small-boat cod fishery were undeniably different from their inshore counterparts to the south. From at least the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, south of the Battle Harbour area, into the Labrador Straits and onto the Great Northern Peninsula of Newfoundland, lighter salting techniques dominated. These emulated the light-salted methods of the Island’s fisheries still further south. (These light-salted techniques and patterns are explored in the multimedia essay "Hard Racket for a Living"). This essay explores these distinctions of method through imagery and excerpted historical accounts of fish-making in different northern locales from the early 1800s onward. These fascinating excerpts are spaced throughout the essay.

Despite the different approaches to processing fish in different places, we hope to highlight the many similarities found amongst the fishing crews-men and women, who eked out their living down north. That complex living has been excellently preserved and interpreted at the Battle Harbour National Historic District, developed by the Battle Harbour Historic Trust over the last twelve years (the Trust has kindly donated resources to the development of this essay). Because there is a great deal of material concerning this well-known place, we have used Battle Harbour to explore many of the themes found below. 

A Short History of a South-Coast Labrador Fishing Station and Mercantile Establishment: The Slade-Baine Johnston-Earle Room at Battle Harbour.

The latter part of the 18th century saw a European English mercantile expansion of the cod fishery and other resource exploitation (salmon, seals, furs) to coastal Labrador waters (there is a good chance that Basques fished here as well in the mid-fifteen hundreds, and, for centuries before that and right into the nineteenth century, the District was a much frequented fishing station for different groups of Labrador Native peoples). The coastal waters were teeming with cod, seals, and salmon, there were abundant supplies of timber for boats, casks, flakes and buildings, and fur animals inland. In short, ample resources were available to occupy merchant firms and their crews in year-round production. After the signing of the Treaty of Paris (1763), Labrador had been ceded to then Newfoundland governor Sir Hugh Palliser. With the continued French fishing rights along Newfoundland’s French shore on the Great Northern Peninsula (guaranteed by the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713), Labrador became a natural area for the expansion of British mercantile interests.  In conjunction with merchants seeking new and resource-rich areas to fish, it was also clear that even by the late 18th century certain areas of the island were becoming over-crowded. In the bays to the south, as year-round population grew, the amount of shore space for the setting up of fishing rooms grew more and more scarce and there is some evidence to indicate that bay stocks  were becoming depleted. The result of all these forces stimulated the initial expansion. The earliest known written reference to Battle Harbour comes in 1775: Captain George Cartwright’s journal describes a pirate raid on the Slade fishing station.

The Hudson’s Bay Company post at Cartwright, Labrador at the northern extreme of the South Coast, ca. 1900. Fur and salmon were key resources exploited here dating back to George Cartwright’s time, ca 1775. His first station was in the Cape Charles area, very near Battle Harbour. PANL e1-40 (PANL)

'The [Town]-House that Poor Jack Built:' The John Slade Residence in Poole, Dorset, England built for its owner and his descendants ca. 1760. Poor-Jack was a term used in the Elizabethan era for salted cod. (Photo courtesy Gordon Slade)

By the early 1770s John Slade and Co. of Poole, England and Twillingate, Notre Dame Bay had developed a definite mercantile presence at Battle Harbour, employing sixteen men. Independent fishermen were very small in number and the majority of workers were employed directly by the station and paid by an annual salary. Much of this salary went straight back to Slade and Co. as these wages were spent on rum, beer, brandy, and tobacco, perhaps giving some indication of the difficulty of life in the early Labrador fishery.

In the next few decades the role of Slade and Company at Battle Harbour changed. Employees of the Room began to establish themselves and their families as independent fishing and sealing crews along the coast. There was a good deal of intermarriage between European employees and native Labradorian women (mainly Inuit, but also likely Innu women). These year-round inhabitants were known as livyers.

Livyer family at Seal Islands Harbour on the South Coast of Labrador, ca. 1932. PANL va92-219 (PANL)

Beginning in the late 18th century stationer crews from up in the bays that lined the east coast of the island of Newfoundland began arriving down north to fish for cod from small-scale fishing stations all along the Labrador coasts. The Battle Harbour mercantile room serviced these stationer families to a lesser extent than it did the livyers in the area as stationers were often outfitted by merchants from their home communities. Nevertheless, some products and equipment were bound to be required during the season and the stationers would exchange their fish products for these.

Venison Tickle ca. 1875.  A prosperous, well-established station.  It was originally operated by Slade & Co. who built it as a fishing and sealing outpost soon after establishing Battle Harbour.  At the time of this sketch it was likely owned by John Rorke, a merchant of Carbonear who had his main station at St. Francis Harbour. At about this time, Rorke brought down over 100 stationers from Carbonear each season.   Pen-and-ink sketch by George Gladwin from his Coast and Harbors of Labrador: Summer of 1876... (Courtesy the Centre for Newfoundland Studies, Memorial University of Nfld. Library)

As this establishment of small scale livyers and stationers proceeded, the Room began to shift its focus away from the  processing of fish and wildlife resources on the premises to collecting and purchasing the same products of these new settler families and stationer crews, while supplying them with provisions and European goods. Around 1830 the Room carried on in both regards: its own crews continued harvesting and processing the wildlife resources, but the company also bought the products of local families and some from the stationers. By 1850 much of the transition was complete – local fishing families and stationers dominated the harvesting of cod, salmon and seals and the processing of cod and salmon. The mercantile room purchased these products and in return supplied them with the basics: flour, salt meat, molasses, and fishing supplies imported from Europe and the Americas. Nevertheless, the Room employed some fishing and fish-processing crews at least into the early 20th century.

This basic exchange pattern continued for the firms that owned Battle Harbour post-1850 (Baine Johnston & Co. purchased the room in 1871. It was subsequently purchased by The Earle Freighting Service in the 1950s). This system was known as the truck or barter system and dominated the micro-economics of fishing families for good or ill from the 1830s right into the 1980s.

Another type of migratory fishing developed in the 19th century known as the floater fishery. It too originated from the island and was a seasonal, small-schooner, mobile cod-fishery

Floaters underway.  One in foreground tows a skiff. PANL va17-12-1 (PANL)

From the late 1800s up until its final demise in the late 1940s, the schooners’ crews used cod traps for the most part. The Newfoundland crews remained aboard their schooners all summer following fish from place to place.  These crews were typically composed of men and one or two young women who did the cooking and helped to process fish.

Many floaters went much further north on the Labrador coast than the stationers. These crews generally brought their schooner loads of heavy-salted fish back to the Island to have it dried in the fall.

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