The only people living in the interior of Labrador are a few wandering Indians who live by hunting.  There are still large parts of the interior that have never been explored by white men, and of which we know little or no more than was known of America when Columbus discovered the then new world.

The people who live on the coast are white men, half-breeds and Eskimos.  None of these ever go far inland, and they live by fishing, hunting, and trapping animals for the fur.  Those on the south, as far east as Blanc Sablon, on the straits of Belle Isle, speak French.  Eastward from Blanc Sablon and northward to a point a little north of Indian Harbor at the northern side of the entrance of Hamilton Inlet, English is spoken.  The language on the remainder of the coast is Eskimo, and nearly all of the people are Eskimos.  Once upon a time the Eskimos lived and hunted on the southern coast along the Straits of Belle Isle, but only white people and half-breeds are now found south of Hamilton Inlet.

The Labrador coast from Cape Charles in the south to Cape Chidley in the north is scoured as clean as the paving stones of a street.  Naked, desolate, forbidding it lies in a somber mist.  In part it is low and ragged but as we pass north it gradually rises into bare slopes and finally in the vicinity of Nachbak Bay high mountains, perpendicular and grey, stand out against the sky.

Behind the storm-scoured rocky islands lie the bays and tickles and runs and at the head of the bays the forest begins, reaching back over rolling hills into the mysterious and unknown regions beyond.  There is not one beaten road in all the land.  There is no sandy beach, no grassy bank, no green field.  Nature has been kind to Labrador, however, in one respect.  There are innumerable harbors snugly sheltered behind the islands and well out of reach of the rolling breakers and the wind.  There is an old saying down on the Labrador that “from one peril there are two ways of escape to three sheltered places.”  The ice and fog are always perils but the skippers of the coast appear to hold them in disdain and plunge forward through storm and sea when any navigator on earth would expect to meet disaster.  For the most part the coast is uncharted and the skippers, many of whom never saw an instrument of navigation in their life, or at least never owned one, sail by rhyme: 

    “When Joe Bett’s P’int you is abreast,
    Dane’s Rock bears due west. 
    West-nor’west you must steer,
    ’Til Brimstone Head do appear.

    “The tickle’s narrow, not very wide;
    The deepest water’s on the starboard side
    When in the harbor you is shot,
    Four fathoms you has got.”

It is an evil coast, with hidden reefs and islands scattered like dust its whole length.  “The man who sails the Labrador must know it all like his own back yard—­not in sunny weather alone, but in the night, when the headlands are like black clouds ahead, and in the mist, when the noise of breakers tells him all that he may know of his whereabouts.  A flash of white in the gray distance, a thud and swish from a hidden place:  the one is his beacon, the other his fog-horn.  It is thus, often, that the Doctor gets along.”