or coast from Cape Charles in the south to Cape Chidley in
the north is scoured as clean as the paving stones of a street. Naked,
desolate, forbidding it lies in a somber mist. In part it is low and
ragged but as we pass north it gradually rises into bare slopes and
finally in the vicinity of Nachbak Bay high mountains, perpendicular
and grey, stand out against the sky.

Behind the storm-scoured rocky islands lie the bays and tickles and
runs and at the head of the bays the forest begins, reaching back over
rolling hills into the mysterious and unknown regions beyond. There
is not one beaten road in all the land. There is no sandy beach, no
grassy bank, no green field. Nature has been kind to Labrador,
however, in one respect. There are innumerable harbors snugly
sheltered behind the islands and well out of reach of the rolling
breakers and the wind. There is an old saying down on the Labrador
that "from one peril there are two ways of escape to three sheltered
places." The ice and fog are always perils but the skippers of the
coast appear to hold them in disdain and plunge forward through storm
and sea when any navigator on earth would expect to meet disaster. For
the most part the coast is uncharted and the skippers, many of whom
never saw an instrument of navigation in their life, or at least never
owned one, sail by rhyme:

"When Joe Bett's P'int you is abreast,
Dane's Rock bears due west.
West-nor'west you must steer,
'Til Brimstone Head do appear.

"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 no