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Volume CXXXIII, Number 9 |
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Bowdoin adventurers work, live on the serene coast of Labrador
KATHRYN OSTROFSKY
COLUMNIST
In August of 1860, the Nautilus, under Captain Ranlett's control and Bowdoin Professor Paul Chadbourne's command, stopped in Labrador on its return trip from Godthaab, Greenland. On its way up, the Nautilus had dropped a party of seven college students, including Bowdoin senior Alpheus Spring Packard, Jr., on Caribou Island to collect samples from the southern coast of Labrador. Now, after about two months, the schooner anchored there again to retrieve the boys and see what they had accomplished.
Twenty years later, Alpheus Packard wrote a book titled The Labrador Coast, about this and another of his trips to the area. He dedicated the book "to the memory of Paul A. Chadbourne, late president of Williams College, and for some time professor of chemistry and natural history in Bowdoin College, and who conducted the first students' expedition from Williams College to Labrador, this book is gratefully inscribed by his former pupil and friend, the author, who gladly acknowledges the encouragement and many kindnesses received from him in his early student days." Packard's book provides the account on which this article is based
The evening of July 6, as "the moon rose upon berg and sea" on the night before the boys were dropped on the island, while the schooner was "becalmed at night we fished up from a depth of sixty or seventy fathoms a basket starfish (Astrophyton agassizii) large enough to cover the bottom of a pail."
The next day, as they landed, the college boys were amazed at the beauty and splendor of the sub-arctic flora. He described the "lilliputian height" of "groves of dwarfed alders, over which one could look while sitting down, crowded the sides of the valleys, watered by rills of pure ice-cold water."
It was on this beautiful island that Packard and six other college boys said a temporary farewell and Godspeed to their colleagues as they waved the Nautilus off. This newspaper series has already given an account of the Greenland leg of the Greenland/Labrador expedition, and the following is the account of the Labrador party at the same time-summer of 1860.
The beautiful Labrador coast is "fringed with islands" so that a sailboat "can go with safety from one point to another and only occasionally will be exposed to the ocean swell." Packard found the rocky coast reminiscent of the "more rugged portions of the coast of Maine, particularly in Penobscot Bay and Mt. Desert." It was here, among the bare and rounded rocks, deep fissures, valleys dense with ferns, and poplars and mountain ash that the college boys set up camp.
Shelter for the Labrador party was originally a Silbey tent, but seeing as the boys were to live on this island for several months, they soon built a more permanent shelter. Canadian clapboards, according to Packard, were 12 inches long, and six inches wide. "With these and a few joists two of the party built a house 12 feet square, which sheltered us from the sun and the black flies."
The little house was not bad, but it was not perfect, either. It "only leaked when it stormed, which happened regularly twice a week, usually Wednesdays and Sundays." The furnishings in this cramped cabin consisted of seven bunks, and a makeshift table crafted out of a wide board on two flower barrels. On this table the boys had a diet mostly of sundry hams and dried beef, although the monotony of their diet was often supplemented by game and fish, clams and scallops, and "entrees of seal and whale flesh."
Besides eating and sleeping, the boys spent most of their time gathering samples and specimens for study. They went on hunting, ornithological, entomological, botanical, and dredging expeditions. They "detected Alpine and arctic European species before unknown to this continent," and "investigated Quaternary formation [1.6 million years ago to present], ice marks, drift and fossil shells."
They also "procured fossils of Cambrian [570-506 million years ago] red sandstone beds, chiefly a sponge (a new species of Archaeocyathus)." Their excitement in their research never waned-it couldn't! These college men were experiencing life and work in such a beautiful, serene setting as the coast of Labrador, looking out on the cool blue waters of the northern Atlantic Ocean.
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