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 EKurope 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 
