1813–1814: the Labrador coast
before the Labrador Retriever existed.
Lieutenant Edward Chappell was an officer of the Royal Navy. In 1813 he was employed to protect the fisheries on the Labrador coast — the year in which Colonel Hawker was writing his first description of the short-haired Newfoundland dog. In 1814 he made the voyage to Hudson Bay aboard HMS Rosamond, of which this book is the official diary. Chappell therefore traversed the region of Newfoundland and Labrador at a crucial moment: the working dogs he describes are almost certainly the same ancestors of the St. John's dog that would become the Labrador Retriever.
The sled dogs of Newfoundland and Labrador:
100 miles in 24 hours.
In the chapter devoted to the visit to the Esquimaux in Hudson Bay, Chappell describes the sled dogs he sees around him. He then widens his gaze to Newfoundland and the Labrador coast, citing the direct testimony of a merchant who knew that region personally.
"In Newfoundland, and in its environs, large dogs are also used, for the purpose of transporting fire-wood, and other articles, over the snow: and I have been assured, by a respectable merchant, who resides occasionally at Lance-a-Loup Bay on the southern coast of Labrador, that he has travelled one hundred miles in twenty-four hours, in a sledge drawn by ten brace of dogs: they are not accustomed to reins, but two well-trained dogs are placed foremost, and the whole are then managed by a singular kind of whip."Edward Chappell, Narrative of a Voyage to Hudson's Bay in His Majesty's Ship Rosamond, 1817, p. 106
Chappell writes in 1817 — the same year the Royal Navy was beginning to use Newfoundland dogs systematically as retrievers on officers' shooting parties. The merchant from Lance-a-Loup Bay describes sled dogs used on the Labrador peninsula — the same region that had given the breed its name. It is not a description of the proto-Labrador hunting dogs, but it is proof that the dogs of that region were exceptional working animals, used for tasks requiring strength, endurance and intelligence. The same build and temperament that, a few years later, would captivate Lord Malmesbury and the Duke of Buccleuch.
Why this book
belongs in this library.
Chappell's book does not speak of the Labrador Retriever. It could not — in 1817 the breed had not been formalised, and the Newfoundland dogs were simply "water-dogs" or "St. John's dogs" or did not even have a name. The value of this book lies in the dating: we are seven years before Cormack's journey, three years before Colonel Hawker's description. Chappell saw those dogs with his own eyes on the Labrador coast in 1813, and in 1814 heard of them from merchants of the region. What he describes is the dog in its natural habitat, before the English had even understood what they were dealing with.