William Brooks Cabot (1858-1949)

Résumé

Between 1899 and 1924, Indian hunters in the Quebec-Labrador peninsula regularly encountered a tattered gentleman from Boston, Massachusetts, wandering about their country. ... The beginning of what Cabot called his travels in the "Indian North" came during the winter of 1899, when he made a long overland trek from Lac Saint-Jean to the Hudson's Bay Company post at Mistassini. He was accompanied on the journey by two Indian companions, one of whom - John Bastian - had previously crisscrossed the Labrador peninsula in the service of A.P. Low, of the Geological Survey of Canada. It was from Bastian that Cabot heard at first hand tales of the Labrador plateau; a land of immense lakes and unchartered rivers, where vast herds of caribou roamed and where a shadowy, little-known group of Indians still lived for the most part beyond the ken of European eyes. Cabot's life-long fascination with wilderness travel and with Indians, which had smoldered while he erected his professional career, was reignited. With the avowed goal of learning the language and the way of life of the region's small bands of Indian hunters, he spent eight summers (1903-1910) in northern Labrador among the Naskapi ..., five summers ... along the Quebec North Shore with Indians who traded out of the St. Augustin post, three summers ... with Indian families who traded at Northwest River in Hamilton Inlet, and winter cross-country trips in the Chamouchouane-Mistassini region .... During the course of his life, he had seen the last of the empty spaces on the maps of the Quebec-Labrador peninsula filled in. His own geographical contributions were relatively minor ones, based in part on the maps he had had his Indian companions draw for him. One of these maps - the original had been over 70 feet long, drawn in the sand of a riverbank by an old Naskapi hunter - was part of the evidence presented in the Labrador Boundary Dispute. In recognition of his accomplishments, Cabot's name was given to the prominent lake along the Indian route from the George River to the Labrador coast, as well as to the subspecies of caribou from northern Labrador. Cabot was neither geographer, explorer, nor scientist, although he made contributions in all three arenas; rather, he preferred to think of himself as "a minor wanderer," a man with the means to pursue his own intensely personal quest in the North.