File:The continent we live on (1961) (20658124576).jpg

Title: The continent we live on
Identifier: continentweliveo00sandrich (find matches)
Year: 1961 (1960s)
Authors: Sanderson, Ivan Terence, 1911-1973
Subjects: Physical geography; Natural history
Publisher: New York : Random House
Contributing Library: New College of California
Digitizing Sponsor: Internet Archive

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Lemmings, Meteorites, and Belugas The Labradorian Peninsula. Tundra, Spruce Forests, and the St. Lawrence Valley and Gulf When Leif Ericson missed his way home to Greenland from Europe in the year 995 A.D., he came upon a long, grim shore that he called Helluland, or the Land of Flat Stones. This is the earliest date recorded for the European discovery of the North American mainland. According to his later accounts, it appears that he had run into the coast of what we now call Labrador, which is indeed for mile after mile a land of flat stones—and very little else, as seen from the sea. Leif did not land, and he seems to have taken a dim view of the place. Later Norse expeditions went a-viking to and down this coast and penetrated some of its deep fjords, where they found to their utmost delight great forests of straight trees that they needed so much for ship- building and other purposes in treeless Greenland. Today, if you fly over Labrador, you will probably sympathize with Leif, for it at first appears to be utterly barren. What is more, behind the rugged, rocky, and everywhere deeply indented coast stretch two forms of desolation that are quite overwhelming in their seemingly lifeless infinity. One is the mighty taiga or spruce forest, a four-hundred-mile-wide belt that goes on and on for three thousand miles, making a great sweep to the south and then to the north, and reaching the mountain barrier of the Rockies just beyond the Mackenzie River. As this country is not particularly mountainous, it is covered to the horizon with an uninterrupted blanket of somber green so dark as to appear almost black under a cloudy sky. The other is a belt of treeless, true tundra lying just behind the coast. This is of even more depressing appearance when seen from the air, for the whole world appears to be covered with a vast, irregular maze of waterways interspersed with meandering curlicues of lowland. This tundraland stretches right around the northern periphery of the province, across the northwestern peninsula from Ungava Bay to the Hudson Bay coast, where it merges with the vast marshes that ring the southern shore of that inland sea. Great colonies of gannets—here shown on St. Bonaventure Island—as well as gulls and other sea birds nest all along the Atlantic coast of this province and especially around the Gulf of St. Lawrence, where fish is plentiful inshore. 26
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