350 LABRADOR 



Hake or haddock are rarely seen in Labrador. The former 

 fish is easily distinguishable by his silvery armoured coat, 

 and the latter by the black marks on his shoulders, irrev- 

 erently attributed to the fingers of St. Peter, who is said 

 to have pulled him out of the water to pay taxes, with the 

 money in the fish's mouth. Why the spots are black, 

 tradition does not say. 



It seems to surprise most people that the shark is found 

 in Labrador, as he is always associated with tropical waters. 

 The variety we have is the sleeper, Somniosus microcepha- 

 lies, the little-headed, sleepy shark. He has a large body 

 up to fifteen feet long, and fully lives up to his name. He 

 feeds on offal thrown overside, earning the name of gurry 

 shark; he is the most despised of our ocean fauna. He 

 frequently gets caught in the sunken nets for seals, though 

 not nearly as often as he deserves, for he browses along the 

 nets, eating out the seals. In most cases his energy is not 

 sufficient to make him push into the net. A ten-foot shark 

 has a mouth contour of two feet, and a gullet proportional. 

 It is said that he eats live whales, biting huge pieces out 

 of the abdominal blubber ; but I cannot believe him smart 

 enough to do this. So sharp are his teeth that he will sculp 

 all the fat and skin off a dead seal, without taking two bites 

 at one piece. I have taken from his stomach nearly every 

 bit of a seal's skin and fat in one long string the width of the 

 shark's mouth, almost as one takes off the peel from an 

 orange or an apple. On one occasion we found in a shark" 

 the carcass of a red dog, which we had left on a pan of ice 

 to drift out to sea a week previously. The sleeper shark 

 seems to have little capacity for pain. Captain At wood 

 reports that after driving a scythe right through one's 



