Catching seals by wireless
61
We only made one stop after we left St. Johns and that was at Cartwright, near the mouth of the Hamilton River, on the bleak coast of Labrador. And wireless, let me say right here, has been a big factor in changing life, such as it is, in this wild, forbidding country.
Labrador, you know, is a narrow strip of coastland along the edge of the province of Quebec. It is from 10 to 50 miles wide, but a thousand miles long, reaching from Belle Isle Strait which separates the lower end of it from Newfoundland to Hudson Strait which lies within the Arctic Circle.
The inhabitants live only on the coast and these are made up chiefly of Eskimos in the north and Indians in the south, and all along and in between are trappers, fishermen and live yeres. The trappers push into the interior a little way to run their lines of traps and in the spring of the year thousands of fishermen come up from Newfoundland to take the codfish, which abound off the coast at this season of the year. If you ask one of the poor, ignorant white inhabitants about himself he will say that he lives yere, hence the nick-name of this fixed part of the population. The condi-