2016/08 Newf'land trip - Red Bay |
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Across the bridge we came to Port Hope Simpson, a logging and fishing community. There wasn’t much to be seen from the road, so we didn’t stop until we got to nearby Mary’s Harbour, which looked more like the coastal villages we wanted to see. It was very quiet as we went into town until we tried to turn around before we got stuck on the narrow streets. Suddenly there was traffic everywhere, mostly official looking trucks, fisheries, police, highways, all in hurry to get around us. Village emergency? Yes, as we left we saw all of them parked outside the Riverlodge Hotel - lunch must be at 12.30 sharp!
Mary’s Harbour smelled like the sea but we couldn’t see the ocean from there, nor at Lodge Bay, which also failed the taste test – no salt in the water! But, at Red Bay, we could see the open sea, and proclaim that we’d done the “sea to shining sea” trip, Pacific to Atlantic.
We followed the main street down to the harbour, where we visited the whaling station museum. We walked in and found ourselves in the 
middle of a good presentation being given to a bus tour group. The subject was the Basque whaling operation which flourished in the area from the mid-1500s. The Basques lived around today’s France-Spain border. They would sail across the Atlantic in the spring to hunt bowhead and right whales. They’d chop the whales up and render them down to the whale oil that would light the lamps of Europe. After a hundred years the whales became scarce around Red 
Bay and whaling ceased in the area and the Basques went elsewhere. In recent years, archeologists have discovered the remains of whaling stations, Basque galleons, and whaling boats in the shores and waters of Red Bay.
The museum had relics from the San Juan, one of those galleons, and a model of the ship itself. This drawing was made by someone who’d probably never seen a whale, but it conveys the gruesomeness of turning whales into whale oil.
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Labrador's coast |
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Further up the hill was a Parks Canada building. We paid for admission there and found there was only one exhibit, which seemed a bit of a rip-off but apparently we were supposed to have paid there before going to the whaling centre – Oops. The exhibit was a chalupa. No, not one of those delicious Mexican dishes I used to cook when we had the day-care business. It’s the same word for a Basque whaling boat, the one the harpooner would throw from. The chalupa was found preserved for nearly 500 years beneath the mud and one of the galleons, and was recovered using techniques similar to those used for England’s Mary Rose.
We heard that there was a skeleton of a 54 foot right whale in town. Improbably, it was in the town hall building. We paid our admission to a young guy and his two friends, all glued to their phones. The skeleton was quite a sight, longer than a bus, but after a few minutes the guy reminded us that they closed at 5pm. That gave us over 30 minutes, plenty, but I asked what the time was now. “4.55 pm” It seemed that this part of Labrador runs on Newfoundland time, 30 minutes ahead of Goose Bay. We scurried round, quickly taking photos of the rest of the displays to read later. As we left all three guys overtook us. They’d left the parking lot before we even got there!
Our last stop was the trail to Boney Shores across the water from the Red Bay community. This was where the Basques would dump their 
whale bones. Sure enough, there were bones everywhere in the undergrowth just back from the beach. After hundreds of years they looked like rocks, but peering closer we could see the holes where the bones were joined.
Sandie was pleased that there were plenty of flowers amongst the bones and the bushes. Very unusual were the bunchberry flowers; they grow all over the north country but these looked like they were bloodstained. The orange berry is a cloudberry but in Labrador they’re called bakeapples; something to do with the English misunderstanding the French for name: qu’appelle.