With the Harmony to Labrador: Notes of a visit to the Moravian mission stations on the north-east coast of LabradorLa Trobe, Benjamin
History
With the Harmony to Labrador: Notes of a visit to the Moravian mission stations on the north-east coast of Labrador
La Trobe, Benjamin
Indians of North America -- Missions; Inuit -- Missions; Labrador (N.L.) -- Description and travel; Moravian Indians -- Missions
Missionaries all over the world are perhaps too fond of multiplying
Scripture names of their stations. In our own fields we have already
three Bethanys and three Bethesdas. We should have had three Ramahs
too, had not the natives of Australia themselves greatly improved the
appellation of theirs by adding to it a syllable meaning "home" or
mother's place. It seemed so homelike to the Christian Aborigines, who
moved thither from Ebenezer, the older station, that they at once
called it Ramahyuck (Ramah, our home). Perhaps as the Ramah on the
Moskito Coast is also known as Ramah Key, the northern station in
Labrador, founded in 1871 to mark the cenutry of that mission, should
abide plain, simple "Ramah," otherwise the above combination would, I
understand, have suited the genius of the language, and its
significance. "Neat little Ramah" certainly expresses the character of
the lonely missionary settlement.
The village, if one may dignify this small group of human dwellings by
that name, stands on a little plain evidently won by degrees from the
sea for the successive beaches can be traced. The mission premises,
the old house, the new house, and the church with its little belfry,
are one continuous building facing the bay southward, and exactly one
hundred feet in length. Behind are the store buildings, and the low
turf huts of the natives stretch westward along the strand. They are
so like grassy mounds, that from any distance one would ask, "But
where do the Eskimoes live?"
The missionary dwelling is primitive enough, even as enlarged. During
our brief stay here, I have the honour of occupying the original
house, built about twenty years ago. It is but a room divided by a
curtain, but it served the first missionary couple here as
dwelling-room, bedroom, church, and everything else. What a grand view
there is from the window over the deep land-locked bay, in which the
"Harmony" is lying at the only available anchorage. No one would guess
that it would take more than half-an-hour to row across the smooth
water, or in winter to walk over its frozen surface to the opposite
shore, where, as on this side, precipitous bluffs rise almost from the
water's edge. All nature around is on a grand scale, and those
snow-clad mountains, which look over the shoulders of the nearer
cliffs, are quite Alpine in effect. Climb to the dizzy heights, which
tower threateningly six or seven hundred feet above the station and
you find you are not half way to the summit of the nearest hill. It
must, indeed, be a magnificent view from thence towards the great
mountains in the interior, whose everlasting snows cover long ridges
at least five or six thousand feet in height. Seawards, the Ramah
Hill, a remarkable perpendicular rock, surmounts the nearer cliffs. It
looks as if, standing on the crag, one could drop a stone into the
water at its base, 1000 feet below.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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