to me a stateroom. Finally, he surrendered his own room. The
ventilation was poor and the atmosphere vile, but we managed to
pull through. Our fellow-passengers were all either prospectors or
owners of fishing schooners.

There was much ice to be seen when the heavy veil of grey fog
lifted sufficiently for us to see anything, and until we had
crossed the Strait of Belle Isle our passage was a rough one. It
was on the Fourth of July that we saw for the first time the bleak,
rock-bound coast of Labrador. In all the earth there is no coast
so barren, so desolate, so brutally inhospitable as the Labrador
coast from Cape Charles, at the Strait of Belle Isle on the south,
to Cape Chidley on the north. Along these eight hundred miles it
is a constant succession of bare rocks scoured clean and smooth by
the ice and storms of centuries, with not a green thing to be seen,
save now and then a bunch of stunted shrubs that have found a
foothold in some sheltered nook in the rocks, and perchance, on
some distant hill, a glimpse of struggling spruce or fir trees. It
is a fog-ridden, dangerous coast, with never a lighthouse or signal
of any kind at any point in its entire length to warn or guide the
mariner.

The evening was well upon us when we saw the rocks off Cape Charles
rising from the water, dismal, and dark, and forbidding. All day
the rain had been falling, and all day the wind had been blowing a
gale, lashing the sea into a fury. Our little ship was tossed
about like a cork, with the seas constantly breaking over her
decks. Decidedly our introduction to Labrador was not auspicious.
Battle Harbour, twelve miles north of Cape Charles, was to have
been our first stop; but there are treacherous hidden reefs at the