DO PEOPLE LIVE IN LABRADOR? 55 



women, many of whom have children with them, are 

 often very bad sailors. As a rule, they are not 

 allowed on deck except in port, and this voyage is a 

 nightmare all summer to numbers. They are pillars 

 of pluck, many of these women. They can handle 

 an oar and sail a small boat with the best, and 

 among them are " Grace Darlings " only wanting an 

 opportunity. They work chiefly at cleaning fish and 

 keeping the huts for the men, though some, I think 

 very wrongly, form part of the crews of the green 

 fish catchers. The Canadian schooners are larger- 

 carry about eighteen men and no women. The 

 people consider Labrador very healthy, which I at- 

 tribute to their comparative immunity there from 

 epidemic diseases. The damp mud huts, often filled 

 with snow till the very day they go in, the entire 

 absence of any sanitary provisions, combined always 

 with either cold draughts or too little ventilation, 

 have, without any doubt, an ill effect on the people, 

 but more especially on the women, who occupy them. 

 The fishermen are tall men, and broad to match, 

 born to the sea, and are accustomed, from their 

 training at the seal fishery on the ice, to be quick 

 and active. No lighthouse, no buoy, no landmark 

 aid navigation on the Labrador coast. The charts 

 are old, bad, incorrect, incomplete and unreliable, 

 while north of Hamilton inlet, where nearly all the 

 schooners go for green fish, there is practically no 

 chart at all, most of the surveying having been done 

 by the keels and bilges of devoted fishing schooners. 



