A commercial agent
on the Labrador coast in the 1850s.
Lambert de Boilieu was not a naturalist, not an explorer, had no scientific interest in documenting dog breeds. He was a commercial agent who had spent years working on the Labrador coast and who, on returning to England, wrote a memoir about that life. The chapter on trained dogs is a chapter like any other — it recounts what he had seen, with the same precision with which he described fishing techniques or the character of the local inhabitants.
This is exactly its value as a source. Boilieu has no motivation to describe the dogs' coat in one direction or another. He knows nothing of Lord Malmesbury, nothing of the Buccleuch kennels, not that a breed is forming in England. He describes what he sees: on the Labrador coast there are long-haired dogs that are sent to England, and short-haired dogs that stay because they are better suited to the work.
The dogs of Labrador:
all the same breed, all different.
Chapter XXI — "Trained Dogs and Homeward Bound" — is one of the most vivid descriptions of the behaviour of St. John's dogs that exists in the literature. Boilieu describes with precision and humour how these dogs worked as retrievers, as guard dogs, as water dogs. Then, almost in passing, he inserts the note that matters.
"During winter, for want of horses, dogs are used for the purpose of conveying all sorts of produce to and from the bays, as well as for pleasure. Some are trained as retrievers, watch, house, and water dogs. Still they are all of the same breed. The retriever is well known in England, but I fancy the duty of the Labrador watch-dog is little if at all understood."Lambert de Boilieu, Recollections of Labrador Life, 1861, Cap. XXII, p. 239
„Still they are all of the same breed" — all the same breed. Boilieu says it explicitly: retriever, guard dog, water dog, sled dog — they are all the same breed, used for different functions. There was no racial distinction between long and short coat. It was the same dog.
The long-haired ones went to England.
Forty years after Cormack, the same thing.
"The dogs sent to England, with rough shaggy coats, are useless on the coast; the true-bred and serviceable dog having smooth, short hair, very close and compact to the body. I sent to England a fine specimen of these, but unfortunately the vessel which bore it had the misfortune to be wrecked on the north coast of Ireland, and all hands were lost."Lambert de Boilieu, Recollections of Labrador Life, 1861, Cap. XXII, p. 243
This passage says three precise things. First: long-haired dogs were actively exported to England — "the dogs sent to England with rough shaggy coats." It is not a rarity, not an exception: it is a current practice, described in the plural. Second: on the Labrador coast these dogs were considered "useless" for work — not because they were inferior as animals, but because long hair froze in the Arctic climate, exactly as Cormack had described in 1822. Third: Boilieu himself had sent a short-haired specimen to England — which confirms that the dog trade between Labrador and England was a normal reality of the commercial life of the region.
Three independent witnesses.
The same observation.
Boilieu's 1861 passage completes a documentary triptych of independent testimonies covering almost half a century. In 1822 Cormack crosses Newfoundland on foot and notes that short hair is preferred by fishermen for work in frosty weather. In 1861 Boilieu, who neither knows nor cites Cormack, writes that long-haired dogs are sent to England because they are useless on the Labrador coast. In 1887 Lord Malmesbury writes that the "true" Labrador is recognised by its short coat — and feels the need to specify it, which means long-haired ones were also in circulation. Three observers, three different decades, three different perspectives. Same conclusion: the long coat was original, was present, and ended up in England.