142 LABRADOR 



The inlet gradually widens above the narrows into Lake 

 Melville, which is fifteen miles across in its widest part. 

 The eastern third is full of wild, rocky islands. The Mealy 

 Mountains rise directly from its southern shores. The 

 northern side is also high, but there is often a wide margin 

 of low land between the water and the rocky wall of the 

 fiord. Northwest River enters on the north side, about 

 eighty miles beyond the narrows. The stream is only 

 about one hundred yards wide at its mouth, but averages 

 fifteen feet in depth. Half a mile upstream it expands 

 into a small lake, which, three miles farther up, again con- 

 tracts for four hundred yards to form the outlet of Grand 

 Lake, a large body of fresh water extending westward some 

 forty miles, in a deep valley between high, rocky walls. 



A Hudson's Bay post is situated at the mouth of North- 

 west River. It consists of some half a dozen small log 

 buildings. Early in the last century this was an im- 

 portant place, the residence of the chief factor in charge of 

 Labrador. It then had a large farm attached, where oats 

 and vegetables were easily grown. Its importance was 

 greatly diminished by the abandonment of the inland 

 posts in the seventies, and later the Indians trading there 

 were induced by missionaries to take the proceeds of their 

 winter's hunt to the posts on the north side of the 

 St. Lawrence, so that at present the trade of the post 

 is exclusively with the whites living about the inlet. 

 Here also is a fur-trading station of Revillon Freres of 

 Paris. 



Almost opposite the mouth of the Northwest River on 

 the south side of Lake Melville is Carter's Basin, a small 

 bay into which empty the Kenamou and Kenamich rivers. 



