62 LIFE AND NATURE IN SOUTHERN LABRADOR. 



only a few drops entered the cabin. The experience 

 was novel and interesting ; fortunately we were not sea- 

 sick ; the long waves sloped up like far-reaching hills; 

 sea-birds rode on their crests, and the wind, like a swarm 

 of furies, tore through our rigging. There were but oc- 

 casional glimpses from the companion-way of our dark, 

 close cabin, redolent with the stench of the bilge-water. 

 The storm abated after sunset, and the morning of the 

 6th found us only fifty miles from Caribou Island. 

 Towards noon the first iceberg was seen ; others came 

 into view, some stranded, others floating on the sea. 



The evening was a glorious one ; after a gorgeous 

 sunset, the twilight lasting until after ten o'clock, the 

 moon rose upon berg and sea. We were in an arctic 

 ocean ; creatures born in the Greenland seas floated past 

 our vessel, and while becalmed at night we fished up 

 from a depth of sixty oi seventy fathoms a basket star- 

 fish {Astrophyton agassizii) large enough to cover the 

 bottom of a pail! 



The impressions made on our minds the next day as 

 we approached the coast and passed in shore, winding 

 through the labyrinth of islands fringing the main land, 

 are ineffaceable. That and other days in Southern 

 Labrador are stamped indelibly on our mind. It was 

 passing from the temperate zone into the life and nature 

 of the arctic regions. There is a strange commingling 

 of life-forms in the Strait of Belle Isfe : the flora and 

 fauna of the boreal regions struggling, as it were, to dis- 

 place the arctic forms established on these shores since 

 the ice period, when Labrador was mantled in perennial 

 snow and ice, when the great auk, the walrus, and the 

 narwhal abounded in the waters of the Gulf of St. Law- 



