Place names around the Straits of Belle Isle

West St Modeste, the Labrador fishing village where, after asking three times, we found one of the very few public phones on that coast, was not its original name, but a corruption. It used to be Saumaudet, named by the Basque whalers who first established a settlement there, as well as another one in what is now Red Bay (the furthest place reachable by surfaced road). At least that is one version of the history. The Labrador Coastal Drive website has a different story. The names of these places and the islands and coves around them are fascinating, reflecting a proper mixture of inhabitants. We visited an Info centre in Blanc-Sablon that had an exhibit on this theme. If it weren't the Vikings, a millenium ago, it seems that the first Europeans to discover this area, at the beginning of the 16th century, were Breton fishermen. Later on, Channel Islanders and west country Englishmen arrived, some marrying women from Newfoundland of Irish stock, and a few of the persecuted Acadians, driven out of Nova Scotia, also ended up here, not to mention the nomadic aboriginal tribes who had been coming and going for thousands of years.

The French word for bay, or “cove”, keeps cropping up: L'Anse, although the modifier that went with it was sometimes misunderstood by people who weren't familiar with French. The famous Anse aux Meadows, for instance, was originally L'Anse aux Meduses (Jellyfish Bay... we saw some jellyfish on the beach at Lourdes de Blanc Sablon ourselves). L'Anse Amour, where we lunched at a picnic spot, used to be L'Anse aux Morts. The lighthouse on the headland there is the tallest in Atlantic Canada. It's seen its share of fatalities, although it could have been worse. HMS Raleigh, with 750 men aboard, was swept into the path of an iceberg that “got in the way” off Point Amour on a foggy night in August (yes, August!) 1922. All but 11 of the men were rescued. We found their memorial in a tiny graveyard, and met a young Labrador man who told us more: “It must've been an unlucky current” that carried the ship off course, he said. “Before they realised where they were to, they'd hit a shoal... The men went out in dories and stuff to help her in.” To our surprise, he also mentioned that few of the local fisherman can swim, though the whole of their lives is, or was, centred around boats for bringing in the salmon, seals and cod. In L'Anse Amour, most of the surnames since the 1700s have been Davis, as is clear from the stones in the graveyard, this family having been granted the land cost free in gratitude for their life-saving and hospitality. The piano on board the Raleigh was rescued too and is now to be found in the living room at the Bed and Breakfast.

St Barbe, on the Newfoundland side of the Straits, was named after a martyr honoured in Roscoff, Brittany. L'Anse aux Diable is devilish hard to navigate, and the name Forteau, if you're from the Channel Islands, means “strong currents”. In 1855, the typical church congregation was 15 people in the morning and 6 in the afternoon, so we learned from a priest's letter that is now in the little museum near L'Anse Amour that's run by the Women's Institute. The letter also mentioned the black flies and the “pungent liniments” the settlers used in their attempt to deter the flies; they had to fumigate their houses with tobacco smoke and wear “crape veils” which didn't get rid of them either. It was probably the women who had to deal with the infestations. While their men fished, the women left on shore became doctors and midwives, teachers, tailors, carpenters, merchants ... The priest, who was the most educated person around and “ran the town”, would have helped; churches doubled as schools and town halls. We saw a little home-made altar and couple of faded wedding dresses, very simple in style, but which used to be dyed blue, a special colour for weddings. Everything, of course, was home-made: hooked mats, saws, bear traps and skates (their blades screwed onto a pair of worn-out boots).

We drove past a Fish Interpretation centre at Brador (La Brador from Labrador, or vice versa?) which was closed, just as well, as Chris was making jokes about Babelfish, but at Brador we did observe the fishermen joshing one another over a truckload of fish they had just caught, their voices carrying across the water in the bay. Then we drove on past the Brador Falls along the scenic road past Rivière St Paul towards Old Fort Bay and back. Jacques Cartier was the first explorer to chart this coast. His crew discovered an island full of puffins then as now and named it the Ile aux Perroquets (parrots) because they thought that's what they were.

The reason why we had to make a phone call from Labrador, by the way, was to find out whether our grandson Alexander was OK after a hernia operation in England. He was, and our daughter was very pleased to be able to tell us so. The only cellphone coverage in this part of Canada is through Telus. If you come here without a Telus account, hard luck.