Our Boston Whaler charges and smacks the waves rolling in from the northeast. There’s a pod of low-lying islands on the horizon. As we head for one of them, Battle Island, we maneuver around a giant chess set of carved icebergs. Closing in on a point of land, we hear the chatter of whitecaps around a nearby shoal where an enormous iceberg has grounded. It’s listing. Yet more surprising is what we find around the corner. Across a tiny blue slip of water is a perfectly restored red-roofed village seemingly frozen in time. Battle Harbour, Labrador. A two-hundred-year-old community-resettled, restored, rebirthed.
Fishing from Battle Harbour dates back several centuries, with fierce competition for the rich fishing grounds coming from Nova Scotia, New England and Quebec. But it was a British merchant that eventually established a sealing and fishing station at the sheltered harbor in the mid-1700s. As Battle Harbour grew to become the nucleus of the all-important fish trade, it also attracted people like the adventurous doctor Wilfred Grenfell who built the province’s first outport medical facility there. And it was the port of call for other adventurers. It was from Battle Harbour that arctic explorer Robert Peary wired “The Pole is ours” to the New York Times, sparking the controversy surrounding his and Cook’s almost simultaneous claims to the North Pole.
For two centuries Battle Harbour was the hub of Labrador, its waters a forest of schooner masts. But with a declining inshore fishery, the outport was resettled in the 1960s.
Fast-forward to the late nineties. After a decade-long monumental restoration project including the saltfish mercantile buildings, St. James Anglican (the sole surviving church designed by the ecclesiastical architect William Grey), the Grenfell clinic, homes, flakes, wharves, and walkways, Battle Harbour was designated as a National Historic Site. Soon after, it became a National Historic District, a distinction is shares with only one other community in Atlantic Canada, that of Lunenberg.
Today, it represents the only intact salt-fishing village left in the province of Newfoundland and Labrador. Run by the Battle Harbour Historic Trust, the village and its surrounding environs are becoming known as a place for sustainable tourism and research. But while it’s getting international recognition for heritage tourism – a World Legacy Award by National Geographic Travel Magazine and Conservation International – Battle Harbour remains uncharted territory for many North Americans.
But for the adventurous traveler who lands there during the season (June through September), Battle Harbour delivers the ideal hybrid adventure/cultural destination.
Part of the adventure is getting there. If you start at Blanc Sablon, at the Quebec-Labrador border where the Newfoundland ferry docks and planes arrive, you’ll be looking at two different time zones – the ferry arrives on Newfoundland time, the plane one-and-a-half hours later on Quebec time. Add a few miles past stretches of sand dunes, the Red Bay national historic Basque whaling site, and the extended Trans Labrador highway dotted with sun-bleached kometiks (winter sleds) until you reach the picturesque and prosperous port of Mary’s Harbour. Then it’s a nine-mile boat trip beyond the fringe of the continent.
Once at Battle Harbour, you can fill your boots gazing at a parade of icebergs, searching out killer whales and humpbacks, hiking the nearby deserted islands, or taking interpretative tours of the village buildings each redolent with their own characteristic smell of salt and twine. In the evening, you can lay your head down in one of several meticulously restored heritage homes. Yes, you can actually stay at this historic site overnight.
And that changes the whole experience, according to Battle Harbour Historic Trust’s Managing Director, Gordon Slade. “It allows you to reflect on something in a different way than just viewing it and walking away. You’re sleeping, eating, looking out the windows as opposed to looking in the windows.”
At the antique-furnished Battle Harbour Inn, once the merchant residence, visitors can soak up a sunset on the ocean while swilling an iceberg-soaked beverage. Other accommodations include the delightful turn-of-the-century ginger-bread-trimmed Grenfell cottage; the Isaac Smith house – the oldest surviving residence in Labrador – with its wood stove and oil lamps; the Spearing Cottage, once the light-keeper’s home now relocated from a nearby island; and the RCMP house, including four-bedrooms and the original jail. The Bunkhouse, renown for its impromptu kitchen parties, provides hostel-style accommodation for the budget traveler.
Add to this setting no televisions, no telephones, no streetlights and one is whisked away, like a time traveler. But Battle Harbour is more than a historic site. For many of its staff, Battle Harbour is their ancestral home and they are eager to share a rare glimpse into the history and rebirth of this community.
Like Terry Smith. As one of Battle Harbour’s interpretive guides Terry now lives, in the summertime, in the house his parents had to abandon years ago. On weekends he is joined by his family. Walking around the outport paths with him or the other guides as they share stories and sights makes one feel like the special guest at a family dinner.
As fog smudges out Great Caribou Island across the tiny tickle, Battle Harbour appears to be set further adrift in the Labrador Sea. But on this side of the tickle the evening sun glazes the red roofs around the wharf. Life in this old community is being rekindled.
Alison Dyer is a writer/researcher based in St. John’s, Newfoundland.
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Getting There:
Overland: Drive up the Northern Peninsula of Newfoundland to St. Barbe, then take the Marine Atlantic ferry service to Blanc Sablon, and drive the Coastal Labrador Highway to Mary’s Harbour. Regular boat charters to Battle Harbour available at Mary’s Harbour.
By air: Regular scheduled flights into Mary’s Harbour from St. John’s, and St. Anthony’s, Newfoundland and from Goose Bay, Labrador, by Air Labrador.
For further information contact: Tel: (709) 921-6325, www.battleharbour.com.