Red Bay

On the way to Red Bay I stopped at the oldest known ritual burial site in the American continent, of a child, buried with a number of artefacts 7000 years ago. The sand protected many of the perishable artefacts so some things found here haven’t been seen in other places. The artefacts included a multipart harpoon that wasn’t developed in Europe until the 1800s.

Although the road was supposed to be paved, there were more km unpaved than paved, but all of it was being worked on. The road included a lot of really nice scenery.

The basques came to Red Bay to hunt whales in the early 1500s. This was unknown until a Canadian woman was interested in why there were Spanish basque people in Labrador. She went to Mexico to learn Spanish, and then to Spain to find documents. She pieced together documents in Spain that showed a big whale fishing industry at Red Bay (along with many other lesser sites along this coast), and she financed an expedition to find evidence in Red Bay.

As a result the enormous whale fishing operation here was discovered. It’s now a world Heritage site. 

I went out onto the island where many of the operations were located. There was a cemetery with quite a number of graves, and they have reproduced some of the clothing found in the graves. The local irises were flowering. A number of ships were wrecked in the bay (one relatively recently) and archeologists have used the extensive remains of the San Juan and a whaling boat to create reproductions of these.

The bones from one of the whales (which must have drifted away before being broken up and rendered) have been put together and it’s on display in the town.

Although this was very well done, I was disappointed that the display didn’t include any suggestion of the indigenous contribution nor of the division of labour. I talked to one of the rangers about these, and he mentioned that each ship worked for itself - had their own enormous caldrons, their own coopers, priest, doctor, harpooners... and their own work area. They probably didn’t need much wood, because they used blubber from after its oil was extracted to keep the fires going to rend more blubber, but they still needed food gathered - and this would probably have been done by natives.

They brought a lot of stuff with them - precut barrels (a flat pack), terracotta roof tiles to cover the caldrons, the caldrons themselves (I don’t know how they fitted on the ships).