12 LABRADOR 



Captain Gibbons was ice-bound for twenty weeks in "a 

 Bay called by his company Gibbons his Hole"; it is 

 supposed to -have been what is now Nain Bay. In 1610 

 Henry Hudson passed through Hudson's Straits to Hud- 

 son's Bay, and so demonstrated the true nature of the 

 Labrador peninsula. 



In the seventeenth century the French Canadians began 

 to explore the Labrador coast. In 1657 Jean Bourdon of 

 Quebec tried to reach Hudson's Bay by sea. He sailed 

 up the Atlantic seaboard until he reached 55 north lati- 

 tude; there he was compelled to turn back on account of 

 the icebergs. Twenty-five years later Jolliet, the discov- 

 erer of the Mississippi, also sailed on a voyage of exploration 

 up the Labrador coast. The chart which he made of 

 Hudson's Bay and Labrador is still preserved in the 

 Archives of the Marine at Paris. 



It is, however, only within recent times that anything 

 like an exact cartographical knowledge of the coast of 

 Labrador has been arrived at. This has been due, on the 

 one hand, to the British admiralty surveys, the first of 

 which was carried out by the great Captain Cook, and on 

 the other hand to the excellent charts of the Moravian 

 missionaries. The interior of Labrador is still to a large 

 extent unexplored. 



The great industry of the coast has always been its 

 fisheries. In the middle ages fish played a much more 

 important part in the economic life of Europe than it does 

 to-day. The number of fast days in the year, and the way 

 in which they were observed all over Europe, made fish 

 one of the great staples of existence. Until the sixteenth 



