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 Fréres 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. 
