We started our day’s exploration of Red Bay on another well made trail. This is the start of two trails.
We opted not to do the 680 plus stairs on Tracy Hill. Not only would that be too much for Matey (not us mind you) but it was still quite misty so the rewarding view would not be there.
Instead we took the more level route to Boney Shore.
After reading descriptions and this warning sign…
I was expecting more recognizable whale bones than these.
I later learned that it is mostly the large bones behind the head that remain.
Since these bones have been here since they were discarded by Basque whalers about four hundred years ago it’s amazing they are still visible at all.
It would have been a nice walk even without the bones.
The larches and the mist added a bit of magic to an already enjoyable trail.
Our next stop was the Whale Exhibit in its brand new home.
Here we did find more recognizable whale bones and learned a lot more history. This is almost a full skeleton of a Bowhead whale. It was in the shallows in the harbor at Red Bay. The woman at the exhibit explained that the ribs were missing because locals would use them for making sled runners.
Bowheads are named for the shape of their huge heads, the bony protrusion is used to pound air holes through the ice in the Arctic Sea where they live. They were one of two species hunted by the Basques who journeyed here each year from about 1520 to the end of the 16th century to harvest the whale oil.
The other species was the Right Whale, so named because they were the right ones to hunt. Both species swim slowly near the surface. They are krill eaters so not at all aggressive. They have large amounts of blubber to be rendered into oil and their baleen, used to filter out the krill, was the source of “whale bone” for corset stays, collars stays, hoops for skirts, even buggy whips. Whale oil was preferred for lamps because it burned clean and bright and a barrel of whale oil was worth a lot of money. Each whale of these species would yield about 40 to 50 barrels of oil. And, when killed, these whales float making them easy to harvest.
Consequently they have been hunted nearly to extinction. Although there was still whale hunting when the Basque stopped coming, they were getting harder to find and that probably contributed to the end of the Basque whaling in Labrador.
Today there are only about 10,000 Bowhead whales and just 366 Right Whales left in the world.
The new home of the whale exhibit is the refurbished fish factory, here in a photo I took from across the bay. The Canadian government funded the remodeling and the building now houses the whale exhibit and a boat tour company. When the woman at the exhibit was young every man fished for cod and every woman worked in processing the catch. But the cod, like the whales, are almost gone. A two year moratorium on cod fishing was imposed in 1992, but the cod numbers still haven’t recovered so it is still in effect. The woman at the museum said there was only one man still fishing now.
Our museum guide also told us about the red “rocks” you see in the pile in this photo. As a kid they would find these soft rocks and use them like chalk to write on other rocks. Then in 1977 Selma Huxley Barkham came to town. She was a widow with four children. Her husband had introduced her to the Basque people he had met as a student. He died at just 34, but Selma continued his interest. Hearing about a connection to early Canadian whaling, she went, children in tow, to Mexico to learn Spanish, then to Spain to research old documents and finally, following the information she unearthed and fit together, to the south Labrador coast. When Selma Huxley Barkham saw those red rocks she recognized them as roof tiles, brought by the Basque as ballast in their ships and used to construct the roofs for the whaling works they built on these shores. After that, the children of Red Bay would bring their rocks to Selma. Our museum guide (I wish I knew her name) said there was always a kid or two trailing after Selma handing her pieces of red roof tiles.
I could have stayed a lot longer talking with her but we still wanted to go to the official historic site.
There we learned that the next guided tour was at two and we confirmed that Matey could go, too. So we decided to eat at the restaurant across the parking lot, The Whaler’s Restaurant, of course. And that’s whale bone on the far wall.
I had a nice view up the street while we ate our fresh cod (there is still very limited inshore fishing allowed).
Then we joined a group of people for a short ride in a park service boat out to Saddle Island.
There our guide led us along a boardwalk as he regaled us with tales of the Basque whalers of the 1500’s and the people of Red Bay now.
He pointed out the locations of shipwrecks…
from which underwater archaeologists recovered the artifacts seen in the park information center.
He told us how the archeologists left the excavated roof tiles sitting in heaps and how he too, as a kid, treated them like ordinary stones, skipping them out across the water.
He told us about the cooperages where the barrels, made in Basque and disassembled for shipping, were carefully reassembled by the coopers here.
He showed us the impressions of the places near the shoreline where the whale blubber was rendered into oil, here reconstructed at the information center.
And he told us that his town, Red Bay, now has just 140 people, far fewer than the number of whalers that visited each summer.
I came away with a whole lot of information and a concern for people who love their place but face an uncertain future in keeping it viable. And like the whalers, who only got a share of the profits from a voyage while the sponsors who stayed home got the most, the folks in Red Bay never got the millions made by the factory ships overfishing the cod, but they are bearing the consequences.
On the Roam Again 