The traditional meal is served with scrunchions, which is salted pork fat that has been cut into small pieces and fried. Both the rendered fat and the liquid fat are then drizzled over the fish and brewis. It tastes like … fish. Very, very salty, chewy fish. I had eaten the same on the island of Taransay when I was marooned there for a year. It was the only fish we ever caught. We were hopeless. We were living on what the local fishermen described as a fish roundabout. But we had no boat; no nets and no rods. All we had was a crate of salted fish. To be honest, I hated it and I still do. It makes me retch. The last time I had it was in the deserts of Oman; we took it in homage to the old explorer Wilfred Thesiger, who took salted shark meat. It was foul, but I ate it nonetheless.
I made my way through a hearty bowl of baclau as I sat looking out over a tiny harbour. A colourful, wooden-stilted fisherman’s hut stood out against the gunmetal waters, the hard granite cliffs towering behind it. It was at once utterly beautiful and hauntingly severe. The view certainly helped the digestion.
The abundance of cod would be a turning point for the region and the emergence of the Labrador. Word spread quickly about the new-found lands and their bounty, and by the early sixteenth century, fishermen from Europe were regularly setting sail in a north-westerly direction and converging in the harsh and squally North Atlantic waters to fish for cod. The French, Spanish and Portuguese fishermen tended to fish on the Grand Banks of Newfoundland and other banks out to sea, where fish were always available. They carried an abundant store of salt and processed their fish on board ship, laying it down in layers strewn with salt to cure the fish. They did not attempt to dry it until they returned to their home ports. Without access to an indigenous source of salt, the English fishermen – travelling in fleets of vessels from West Country ports in Devon, Dorset, Somerset and Cornwall – sailed each spring and brought home a harvest in autumn. To eke out their meagre salt supplies and preserve their hauls, they developed a custom of salting the fish with a light paste, washing and drying it on long wooden racks onshore. This process required fish-curing stations to be set up on land. This meant they concentrated on fishing inshore (where the cod were only to be found at certain times of the year, during their migrations) and used small boats to return to the Newfoundland shore every day. In their chosen seasonal locations, English fishing captains at the turn of the seventeenth century reported cod shoals ‘so thick by the shore that we hardly have been able to row a boat through them’. Some even talk of walking across them – during my short stint as an offshore fisherman I once saw a net of cod pulled from the North Sea, so full of fish that the trawler men could walk between the two trawlers on the fish.
Once dried, the fish were then loaded on board the ships and sent back home. A winter crew was left behind each year to stake out the shore, maintain the curing facility and protect the fragile and lucrative toehold that England had established in the cod-fishing industry. Permanent settlements were discouraged, so it is easy to imagine how those left behind would have relied on their dogs not only to hunt for food and guard their base, but also for companionship.
The cod moratorium of 1992 nearly devastated the region. The Canadian government declared a halt on the northern cod fishery, which for nearly 500 years had shaped the lives and communities of Atlantic Canada. The biomass of cod had fallen to just 1 per cent of its early levels and was in danger of complete extinction. Better fishing technology and trawlers had decimated stocks. It was a brave and bold decision by the Canadian government, and one that caused untold misery and hardship for the local people. More than 35,000 fisherfolk from 400 communities were left unemployed overnight.
Some communities never recovered. The effects of the moratorium are still obvious; there is an air of sadness that clings to the region like an Atlantic fog. A large imposing museum that soars into St John’s skyline like an ugly carbuncle is symbolic – like a giant fish factory, there for all to remember. The museum is crammed full of fishing gear and boats. Photographs of weathered faces hauling, processing and salting cod. Huge piles of fish. Nostalgic photos of a bygone era when the cod was king and the community thrived.
By the 1620s, tiny, isolated settlements on the coast of Newfoundland became home to fishermen and their ship dogs – mainly from England, but also from Portugal, Spain, France and the Basque Country – as competition over the best waters hotted up and everyone was eager to stake their claim on the fishing rights.
The first sightings in Britain of the ‘St John’s Dogs or Little Newfoundler Dogs’ were in the late eighteenth century. They had been brought back across the Atlantic aboard the ships carrying their precious cargoes of dried and salted fish.
In 1785, Robert Burns’s poem, The Twa Dogs, refers to a creature, ‘His hair, his size, his mouth, his lugs/Shew’d he was nane o’Scotland’s dogs/But whelped some place far abroad,/Where sailors gang to fish for cod.’ Could this have been the loyal Labrador?
In 1814, Colonel Peter Hawker, a well-known sportsman, watched Labradors at work on the trawlers in Newfoundland, describing them as the St John’s breed of Newfoundland. In the first published account of a Labrador, his diary describes the dog as ‘by far the best for any kind of shooting. He is generally black and no bigger than a Pointer, very fine in legs, with short, smooth hair and does not carry his tail so much curled as the other [meaning the Newfoundland, which had a rough coat and a tail that curved over its back]; is extremely quick and active in running, swimming and fighting … The St John’s breed of these dogs is chiefly used on their native coast by fishermen. Their sense of smelling is scarcely to be credited. Their discrimination of scent … appears almost impossible … For finding wounded game of every description, there is not his equal in the canine race; and he is sine qua non in the general pursuit of waterfowl.’
Eight years later, in 1822, the Scottish-Canadian explorer William Epps Cormack, who was born in St John’s, crossed Newfoundland by foot. He was the first European to journey across the interior of the island and it was during this expedition that he noted small water dogs, writing in his journal: ‘[they are] admirably trained as retrievers in fowling, and are otherwise useful. The smooth or short-haired dog is preferred because in frosty weather the long haired kind becomes encumbered with ice on coming out of the water.’
The earliest known depiction of the St John’s water dog – owned by a Mr Alsop – was on the canvas of the famous animal painter Edwin Landseer in 1822. Initially entitled Watchful Sentinel and known now as Cora. A Labrador Dog, the commissioned portrait of a much-loved pet shows a black dog with white paws and chest lying inside a stable yard or carriage house, with horses and grooms working in the background and, interestingly, no water in sight. (The earliest portrait of a yellow dog is believed to be in the Bowes Museum at Barnard Castle in County Durham – a portrait in oils of Mrs Josephine Bowes painted in the late 1840s with a yellow dog called Bernardine at her side.) This seems to be the moment these early ‘Labradors’ made the transition from sea to land. These dogs, seen and admired for their eye-catching skills in West Country ports and harbours, were being purchased for use on land.
For a land famous for two world-class dogs, there was a distinct lack of canine activity as I wandered the tiny fishing ports. I spotted a single working Collie. In the absence of either of the region’s namesakes, I arranged to meet two of the region’s living mascots. Gus the Labrador and Felix the Newfie are both employed by the State to greet people arriving in the remote territory, predominantly by cruise ship.
We arranged to meet in a tiny harbour that is now home to an artisan collective where artists produce paintings and knitwear. It was a picture-postcard, perfect location. Bright yellow fishing houses with faded red piers were reflected perfectly in the calm waters. Here, away from the rough Atlantic surf, I could image Labradors plying