29/07/2024 – Back Home 8

The weather was a little against us today: super-blustery and by 2pm a heavy fog had rolled in. We are told this is far from unusual. It’s one reason why so many ships wrecked nearby. We had thought to go to Red Bay, but punted that to tomorrow. Instead, we luxuriated in staying put. We woke when we woke and wandered to the only café in L’Anse-au-Clair for a very good coffee, in comfy chairs, before heading out. Then, we loitered at L’Anse Amour until the weather closed in.

Firstly, we marveled at the oldest burial mound in North America. Almost 8,000 years ago, Archaic Maritime people anointed the body of a child with ochre, placed it in a cist between two fires and buried it in a mound, marked with rocks, at, what was then, the shore. The sea is now 800m away, pushed back by the land rebounding as the glaciers of the last ice age retreated. The site remains swept by salt wind, loud with the sound of waves. Buried with the child were tools for hunting, fishing, and also a bird-bone flute, paint stones, a pestle, a pendant: his/her subsistence, creativity, identity, all supported by the grave goods chosen. One of the tools, a sophisticated toggle harpoon, would be reinvented by the Europeans in the 17th Century, when they too came hunting for seals, whales.

Our second stop was the Point Amour lighthouse. Now automated, it has been reimagined as a fascinating heritage centre. 19th Century artifacts, crafts dress the house downstairs. Upstairs, the rooms excellently present the history of the local fishing/whaling industry; of the telegram (Marconi established a 2-man telegram office beside the lighthouse); of the lighthouse keepers; of the many local wrecks. We sipped “Labrador Tea”, rich in vitamin C, with which Indigenous people cured Europeans arriving with scurvy from their months’ long voyages. We climbed the tower. I popped my head out, got spooked, stayed on the final set of stairs. Carey fearlessly explored the “snowglobe” of the top, 135 feet up. The custodian was very knowledgeable, engaging. He lavished time, information on us. He even told us a second Archaic tomb had recently been discovered, with some scandal, by a tourist, who had tried to take the artifacts and been stopped by the RCMP. He had few details, but the tourist was “a French Canadian”, which, together with his tone, spoke volumes of local historical European rivalries.

Finally, we walked the mile along the shore to the site of the wreck of the Raleigh. Former British Navy flagship, pride of the fleet, she ran aground in fog here in 1922, after less than 2 years in commission. The lighthouse team had told us the tale in gripping fashion, rich with local heroics. Apparently, the British overlords were so embarrassed by the spectacle of the ship, still jauntily upright on the rocks years later, they sent specialists in 1926 to blow her up and sink her properly!