The New Labrador Papers of Captain George Cartwright (review)

George Cartwright lived and worked on the coast of Labrador from 1770 to 1786. After an eventful army career, during which he saw service in India, Ireland, and continental Europe, he transformed himself into a merchant and trader. Cartwright spotted a chance for a lucrative career in the Newfoundland fish-and-furs trade while cruising the northern coast of the island in the company of his brother John, an officer under the activist naval governor Hugh Palliser (1764–8). John and George were commissioned by Palliser in 1768 to lead an expedition, ultimately unsuccessful, into the interior to try to contact the elusive and besieged Beothuk hunter-fisher-gatherers of Newfoundland. The experience confirmed to George that there was a place for him in the dynamic northern borderlands of this important Atlantic region. In 1770, plagued by debt and animated by a love of guns and hunting, he embarked on an eventful sixteen-year course as a merchant and trader of salmon, seals, cod, and furs on the Labrador coast, the northernmost limit of British influence in coastal North America. Like other English merchants who chose to do business in the region, Cartwright saw in the virgin trade lands of Labrador and northern Newfoundland the chance of profit through a wide variety of resource possibilities under the steady cover of an increasingly confident administrative state. This was the leading edge of British ambition in the eighteenth-century Anglo-Atlantic.

In 1979 ethnographer Ingeborg Marshall tracked down the papers that form this valuable collection. Archaeologist Marianne Stopp has performed an essential service in assembling and interpreting these ‘new’ Labrador papers of George Cartwright. While Cartwright’s Labrador diary, A Journal of Transactions and Events, during a Residence of Nearly Sixteen Years on the coast of Labrador (1792), has long been available in reprint, these additional documents form an important adjunct to the journal and establish Cartwright as a key source for those Canadianists interested in the histories of material culture, the environment, Native peoples, and the northwestern piece of the Atlantic world. The core papers in the new collection consist of the manuscripts for volumes Cartwright wrote as primers for other adventurers planning to enter the Labrador trade. It is in these documents that the reader sees Cartwright revealed as somewhat of an eighteenth-century North Atlantic Renaissance Man. In the main manuscript volume, the Additions, readers are treated to an astounding range of instructions and directions for all the necessities, and some luxuries, of sub-arctic life. Need to catch an otter on a path? Use a ‘thief-net’ (155). Looking for the optimal floor plan for a year-round merchant’s house? No problem (119). Want to stop bears from breaking your salmon racks? Use a bird rattle (150).

Stopp’s informed introductory chapters form the scholarly foundation of the book. Chapters 2, 3, and 5 amount to a cogent and long overdue history of human settlement in the land we now call Labrador. As an archaeologist, Stopp is sensitive to how Cartwright’s experiences fit into a longer story of human enterprise and migration to, and through, the region. Her success in interpreting for readers the economic context and related material culture available to Cartwright make this book more than simply an annotated collection of primary sources; it is, in its own right, an important historiographical contribution. Cartwright was a consummate collector and recorder of information related to life on the north Atlantic coast, and his papers provide more than just a compendium of interesting antiquarian notes. The book illuminates in very specific terms the degree to which ecological knowledge and an openness to Aboriginal life systems were prerequisites for survival in the early period of white enterprise in Labrador and, by extension, the eastern Arctic. Cartwright took particular interest in describing building types and technologies. The structures described often had a particular role in a given coastal enterprise, such as the...