Labrador Peninsula
Labrador is a largely sparsely populated North American peninsula in eastern Canada . Administratively it is divided between the two provinces of Québec and Newfoundland and Labrador .
Surname
The name of the peninsula goes back to the late medieval Portuguese title and part of the name Lavrador , which several Portuguese explorers carried. It probably comes from the Portuguese navigator João Fernandes Lavrador . The word "Lavrador" adopted from the Azores means "farmer" or "landowner" in Portuguese.
location
The peninsula borders in the north on the Hudson Strait and Ungava Bay , to which the Baffin Island adjoins, in the west on the Hudson Bay and in the east on the Labrador Sea belonging to the Atlantic Ocean with the island of Greenland opposite . To the southeast, Labrador is bordered by the Belle Isle Strait , which is joined to the island of Newfoundland , and the Saint Lawrence River . In the southwest it goes south of James Bay into the Canadian mainland.
Terminology
Labrador is usually used to denote the entire Labrador Peninsula. In some contexts, however, only the part within the province of Newfoundland and Labrador is meant; then the part lying in Québec is called North-du-Québec . The northern part of the peninsula is called Ungava .
size
Because the south-western delimitation of the peninsula is obviously not one hundred percent determined, its size is put in various reference works at 1.3 to 1.5 million km² ; With these different information it is nevertheless the fourth largest peninsula on earth . The south-western demarcation should, however, correspond approximately to the air line from the southern end of James Bay to the northeastern outskirts of Quebec ; The latter refers to the place where the St. Lawrence River becomes a sea bay .
The part located in the province of Newfoundland and Labrador has an area of 294,330 km² and is about the size of Italy. The population is 27,860 (2001), with about 30% indigenous people, ( Inuit , Innu and Métis ). The part located in the province of Québec has about 1.0 to 1.2 million km². The population is 300,000.
Climate and vegetation
Most of the peninsula consists of tundras and subarctic shrub and shrub formations ; in the south there is also boreal coniferous forest . Around 25% of their area is taken up by lakes , streams and rivers . The climate is arctic and sub-arctic .
geology
Labrador is the eastern part of the Canadian Shield , which consists of gneiss and granite here and rises from Hudson Bay from sea level in an easterly direction to an altitude of 1652 m . To the east of the plateau-like center of the peninsula, the Atlantic coast, characterized by deeply incised fjords , connects . The northeast tip of the Labrador Peninsula with the Torngat Mountains forms part of the Arctic Cordillera .
Discovery from Europe
After the Native American and Inuit people, the first European explorers of the Labrador coast were Norwegian Vikings, who came from Greenland around 1000 under Leif Eriksson .
The first verifiable (re-) discovery of the Labrador Peninsula were two expeditions in 1497 and 1498 under the Venetian seaman Giovanni Caboto (John Cabot), who was in English service and who was looking for the sea route to China, followed by a Portuguese expedition in 1499 under João Fernandes, called Lavrador and João Gonsales , to whom the name probably goes back (both were landowners in the Azores ), and who declared the region to Portuguese possession after the Treaty of Tordesillas , which Portugal later did not pursue any further. They were followed by two more Portuguese landings under Gaspar Corte-Real in 1500 and 1501.
There are also hypotheses and legends based on evidence of a discovery before Columbus 1492 , which are not certain because the evidence can be explained differently. In 1473 an expedition on behalf of the Danish-Norwegian-Swedish and Portuguese kings to look for the connection to Greenland, which had not been used since about 1406 , reached Hans under Didrik Pining (probably from Hildesheim, then from 1478-90 Danish governor of Iceland) Pothorst (also from Northern Germany), the navigator Johannes Scolvus (origin very controversial, maybe Polish, maybe Danish, some speculated that it was the young Columbus) and the Portuguese envoy João Vaz Corte-Real (afterwards 1474-96 Portuguese governor of the Azores and Lavrador on Terceira ) the island of Greenland again. Because the Azorean priest and historian Gaspar Frutuoso wrote in 1590, Corte-Real had its possessions in the Azores as a reward for the discovery of Terra Nova do Bacalao (= new land of cod / stockfish received), which after subsequent cards most likely Newfoundland is , but does not appear on the atlases, which were often redrawn at the time, until 1508 (after the landings of Cabotos, Fernandes Lavrador and Gaspar Corte-Real), the information often led to the formation of hypotheses that are particularly popular in Scandinavian countries, Germany, Portugal and Poland. Because the deed of donation to Corte-Real does not mention this reason either, many historians believe that Frutuoso, who wrote 120 years later, confused the consequence of this appointment with the cause. With Corte-Real's governorship, Portuguese search and discovery voyages began after 1474 in the north-western Atlantic on behalf of the Portuguese king, but often organized by Corte-Real and his sons. The expedition of Fernandes and Gonsales in 1499 was also sponsored by the Corte Real family, information from contemporary cartographers and the customs authorities of the port of Bristol can also be interpreted in such a way that Fernandes Lavrador and Gonsales had participated in the English expedition under Caboto and because of it were inspired to their voyage of discovery. In the years 1500 and again in 1501, the son Gaspar Corte-Real went on expeditions himself, on the second he went missing. A search expedition by his brother Miguel Corte-Real in 1502 also disappeared , and the king forbade another search by the third brother, Vasco Anes Corte-Real . Thus, neither the name Terra de Labrador , nor the alternative name Terra Corterealis (Land Corte-Reals), which was used until the 17th century , nor the Portuguese name Newfoundland's Terra Nova do Bacalao is evidence of the Portuguese discovery in 1473, as proponents believe. The first name most likely means Fernandes, perhaps also Gonsales or Gaspar Corte-Real, the second name could refer to one of the discovering sons and the third name can only be traced back to 1500 in sources. The fact that Vasco Anes Corte-Real maintained family ownership claims to Labrador ( Terra Corterealis ) also does not prove claims since 1473, because the king had granted Miguel Corte-Real the privilege of private ownership of the discoveries. Also the information of the Swedish archbishop and cartographer Olaus Magnus on discoveries by Pining and Pothorst ("high mountain, called Hvitsark", "between Iceland and Greenland") and the mayor of Kiel Carsten Grypp ("nye insulen und lande", including the "klippen Wydtszerk vor Gronlandth ”) refer in context to regions and islands on the fjord coast of Greenland. In the opinion of most historians, the evidence in the up-to-date sources, which are not yet so heavily transformed by misunderstandings and legends, is insufficient as to whether the 1473 expedition saw other countries besides Greenland.
Against the background that the island of Greenland, which geographically belongs to America, was never unknown in the medieval Scandinavian countries , and that it had a small Scandinavian population group until the 15th century , it cannot be ruled out that there were small milieus in Northwestern Europe that had semi-legendary knowledge of countries beyond Greenland, such as the Vinland sagas from Iceland, and from which there may be individual sightings or landings on Labrador, such as perhaps Basque whalers and fishermen in the North Atlantic. The first unequivocally proven European landings after Leif Erikson on Labrador and Newfoundland are those of Caboto in 1497 and 1498, of Fernandes Lavrador and Gonsales in 1499 and of Gaspar Corte-Real in 1500 and 1501.
literature
- Bernhard Hantzsch : Contributions to the knowledge of the northeastern Labrador . In: Communications from the Geography Association in Dresden . Issue 8 and 9, 1909, pp. 168-320.
Web links
- Project Gutenberg e-text from Dillon Wallace's The Lure of the Labrador Wild
- Them Days. Preserving the History of Labrador
Footnotes
- ↑ Entry about Cabot in the Dictionary of Canadian Biographies (DCB)
- ^ Entry about Fernandes in the Dictionary of Canadian Biographies (DCB) .
- ↑ Article about Gonsales in the DCB
- ↑ Article about Gaspar Corte-Real in the DCB
- ^ Alan G. Macpherson: Pre-Columbian Discoveries and Explorations in North America In: John Logan Allan (Ed.): North American Exploration. , Vol. 1, Lincoln & London 1997.
- ↑ The fact that Corte-Real not only stimulated the expeditions, but that the discoverers were all residents of the small, then sparsely populated island of Terceira, one of whom was even a former employee, mentions the DCB article on Gaspar Corte-Real .
- ↑ As interpreted by the author of the article on Fernandes in the DCB, Arthur Davies .
- ↑ a b Article about Miguel Corte-Real in the DCB.
- ↑ Report by the Kiel journalist Peter J. Gollnick about the 1473 expedition from a north German perspective.
- ^ Thomas Hughes (German Historical Institute): The German Discovery of America: A Review of the Controversy over Didrik Pining's Voyage of Exploration in 1473 in the North Atlantic. Contribution to a symposium at Johns Hopkins University in 2003.
- ↑ See e.g. B. Ivan Valiela: Global Coastal Change. Singapore 2006, p. 247. However, sites and place names that can be clearly assigned to the time before the discoveries of the 16th century have not yet been found here either.
Coordinates: 55 ° 0 ′ N , 70 ° 0 ′ W