William Richardson is known to researchers of Labrador history for his account of a 1771 voyage along the coast of southern Labrador. In a re-examination of the William Richardson material at the University of Toronto Libraries, an unexpected discovery was a sketch of the British palisaded blockhouse known as York Fort, drawn by Richardson during a voyage to Labrador in 1769. This paper has three objectives, each of which is descriptive in nature rather than analytical: to present and describe Richardson’s sketch; to provide historical and archaeological information about York Fort; and to present an overview of the human history of Chateau Bay.

Chateau Bay is located on the southern Labrador coast at the eastern end of the Strait of Belle Isle (Figure 1). Two large islands, Henley Island and Castle Island, protect Chateau Bay from the Labrador Sea. Each is distinguished by 55–65-meter-high straight-sided and flat-topped basaltic columns. These have served as prominent coastal landmarks since the time of the first seafarers along this coast, the Maritime Archaic Indians, and were especially important to the earliest European fishers and explorers whose initial route to the St. Lawrence followed the Strait of Belle Isle. A third sizable island, Whale Island, and several smaller islands and shoals dot the bay’s waters. Its mainland coast is indented by two deep harbours known as Temple Bay and Pitts Harbour.

In the early 1930s, a descendant of William Richardson named Sidney C. Richardson of Melbourne, Australia, donated a small collection of copies of his ancestor’s papers to the University of Toronto. These are all in the form of black-and-white photographs and include a handwritten journal, the image of Chateau Bay presented here (Figure 2), and what is thought to be a self-portrait of William Richardson.[1] The location of the originals unfortunately remains unknown. Library and Archives Canada (LAC) holds a typed version of the journal dated 1933, but whether it was received from S.C. Richardson in typed form or copied by someone else for LAC based on the University of Toronto material is also unknown.[2]

The journal describes William Richardson’s 1771 voyage to unnamed parts of the southern Labrador coast and ends with a word list of 92 Labrador Inuttitut terms. It also includes an intriguing description of an Inuit snow house that Richardson could not have observed himself and must have acquired from George Cartwright.[3] In 1935, S.C. Richardson published a segment of the journal in the Canadian Historical Review (CHR) and it is this version that researchers of Labrador history have used ever since.[4] The CHR article omits the two images and most of the Inuttitut word list.

Richardson is a minor historical figure in the context of British naval presence in Labrador, but his legacy to the region’s history has become more noteworthy with the discovery of the images and the complete word list. The self-portrait and the sketch of York Fort are both rare visual records that relate to late eighteenth-century Labrador. His journal, while brief, is one of only a few personal, non-official accounts of that time, of which George Cartwright’s three-volume journal published in 1792 is the best known.[5] In his journal, Richardson in fact refers to a visit to Cartwright’s post, Ranger Lodge, in St. Lewis Inlet.

Before making his 1769 sketch, Richardson had already served on British naval vessels in Labrador waters in 1765, 1766, 1767, and 1768. In 1769, he was very likely on the brig Grenville with Michael Lane, charged by Governor Hugh Palliser with charting the coast between Shecatica and Chateau Bay.[6] A summary of these voyages — what has been discovered of Richardson through muster rolls, log books, his passing certificate and self-portrait, and presentation of the complete Inuttitut vocabulary — has been published elsewhere.[7]

Richardson’s 1769 sketch (Figure 2) is the only known non-architectural drawing of York Fort dating to the time of the fort’s operation and is a unique historical document of Labrador’s British colonial and naval history.

Despite being a photographic copy, the image retains several details of York Fort. When he made his sketch, Richardson was standing behind the fort and facing the water. A wooden palisade built atop a man-made earthen rampart or glacis is visible in the picture. Cannons can be seen mounted on two corner bastions, three cannons at each bastion. The blockhouse rises inside and above the height of the palisade. From other records (see below) we know that this was a two storey structure, and the sketch appears to show the upper storey with four windows, a hipped roof, and a chimney. A flagstaff with flag flying stands to the right of the blockhouse. The log of the Niger contains the note that “the colours were hoisted at York Fort for the first time” on 28 September 1766.[8] The flag in Richardson’s sketch has a white field, possibly with diagonal striping, but there is too little detail to make an identification. Beyond the flagstaff is a barely discernible outbuilding or perhaps the entry gate. In the distance and beyond the blockhouse is Whale Island. To the island’s right is a gap that marks the entrance into Temple Bay, while the entrance to Pitts Harbour is the waterway on the near right. A small boat with two men is out in the harbour and another small vessel is pulled ashore at the base of the slope of the glacis on the right.

The lower edge of the sketch paper carries the image title “View of the Fort or Blockhouse of Chatteau on the Coast of Labrador,” and the added information “By William Richardson. 1769.” The font style is a sampler of different types that include Italianate flourishes mixed with round hand, the word “Chatteau” in Germanic type, and the word “Labrador” in print lettering. Richardson may have created the elaborate title to demonstrate his penmanship and the social information it conveyed (education, class, artistic ability).

The black-and-white photograph of Richardson’s sketch nevertheless leaves much to the imagination. It is, for instance, difficult to tell if the image in the photograph was an original or a print, or whether it was drawn or painted. Its original size and colour tones are unknown, and close-up examination is limited by photographic quality. There may have been information written on the back of the sketch, and what appears at first glance to be a frame around the image is in fact a series of carefully drawn borders.

York Fort was built in a short span of time, between 10 August and 30 September 1766, and it was manned year-round until 1775. Its location well inside Chateau Bay on the small peninsula known as Barrier Point was chosen by Sir Thomas Adams, commander of the Niger, in 1765, because Pitts Harbour was “the only one for His Majesty’s Ships to Lye in.”[9] The location was also chosen because Chateau Bay was a long-established hub of cod, seal, and salmon fisheries. Following the 1763 annexation of the coast by Britain, a number of merchants already operating in the Strait of Belle Isle (henceforth, the Straits) and in northern Newfoundland expanded into Chateau Bay and took over former French stages and storehouses as well as Inuit resource and settlement areas. It was a destination for Inuit who had been trading valuable peltries, seal oil, and baleen there since at least the 1730s, when we have the first record of a French post (but Inuit were likely trading there earlier, in the Basque period). Large groups of Inuit from northern harbours made annual protracted visits to the region to obtain European goods at both Chateau Bay and at French fishing establishments on Newfoundland’s French Shore. These were lucrative trade events for European fishers and merchants, but fraught with altercations, theſts, and destruction of property — the latter continuing after the autumn departure of fishing crews.[10]

The purpose of the fort, as officially related by both Governor Palliser and his successor, Molyneux Shuldham, was to protect both the people of the coast (Inuit and British) and the British fishery. Because of frequent damage to equipment by Inuit and New England crews, the establishment of this small fort was intended to allow a year-round presence of naval personnel to ensure that buildings, wharves, small boats, and equipment were safe. The fort’s presence was also a reminder to the French of their treaty rights. Ships from Newfoundland’s French Shore, which extended from Bonavista to Point Riche, had to keep to their own fishing grounds, and French fishers could not carry out commerce with British on the Labrador shore. Of particular concern were the many vessels coming from New England and other colonial regions with their “far more mischievous plundering Crews.” These vessels came for the cod and whale fisheries in Labrador waters, but also brought cheaper American goods to sell illegally to British fishers, and aggressively took over harbours and ransacked British stations. Of utmost concern to Palliser were their attacks on the Inuit. The fort’s presence also put British fishers and merchants under the lens, who were required to purchase goods from Britain but actively sought cheaper French and American food and materials.[11]

As a defence of British territorial waters, York Fort’s effectiveness had always been debatable. Lieutenant Roger Curtis of the sloop Otter noted in early 1772 that, “It is sufficient if its being built induced [merchants] to continue on the Coast, and whether it be really necessary or useless is of no consequence.”[12] George Cartwright, who in 1770 began a trapping and fisheries operation in nearby St. Lewis Inlet and was the fort’s nearest neighbour, considered it an uncomfortable place to stay but was grateful for its resident medic and for the judicial service it provided. On one occasion he brought a sawyer who had committed an unspecified “capital crime” to the fort, where the accused received a dozen lashes and was imprisoned for later trial in St. John’s.[13] In another assessment, Curtis remarked that it “was never meant to be a safeguard against a European enemy,” that “its want of strength and situation render it utterly useless for that purpose,” and that “it is our Happiness that a few Salt fish will never induce a Privateer to visit this Coast at such a Distance from Home.”[14]

On 2 June 1775, Lord Dartmouth of the Board of Trade wrote Newfoundland’s Governor Duff inquiring whether the detachment of men at York Fort should be withdrawn and replaced with a non-commissioned officer and a few privates. Duff sent a Captain Parker to assess the fort and to determine if “the Adventurers consider it as of little moment to them.” It is entirely likely that merchants along the coast were initially ambivalent about the fort’s presence since it brought undue scrutiny over their efforts to keep crews in place throughout the winter, in their dealings with French and American vessels, as well as in their trade with the Inuit (who were not supposed to come southward).[15] Duff’s eventual response to Dartmouth was that “the blockhouse is not, at the present period, of any moment to the settlers of Labrador,” and the fort was closed. Duff’s final instructions to Captain Parker were “to procure a person among the winterers to … take care of the said fort, or to secure the same in such manner as will answer its preservation, till I have obtained directions what shall be done with respect to it.[16] Curtis’s doubts concerning the fort’s usefulness were probably well founded. The Straits and Newfoundland’s waters continued to be effectively monitored by a sizable squadron in 1776 and an even larger one in 1777, proving that even without York Fort there would be naval presence. Only in 1778, when Admiral Montagu failed to send ships to western Newfoundland, was Curtis’s prediction proven wrong. In that year the American privateer Minerva under Captain John Grimes destroyed all of the fishing establishments in the Straits, including Chateau Bay, as far north as Sandwich Bay, with total losses to merchants in the tens of thousands of pounds. In the years thereafter, naval patrols remained in these waters, and in 1779 and 1780 merchants such as Noble and Pinson, Coghlan, and Cartwright were given armaments that included cannons to protect their Labrador posts.[17]

Ships’ logs in the Admiralty records contain many references on the building of York Fort, not all presented here, but their level of detail is notable. The cutter Wells, for instance, landed “all the bricks, artificiers, tools and baggage” at Barrier Point on 11 August 1765, a year before construction began; the ship then went back to St. John’s to reload, returning with lime, bricks, “guns and gunners stores” in the last week of August.[18] Governor Palliser leſt a thorough description of the fort, including measurements and an architect’s drawing. He considered it “too formidable to be ever attack’d by the Savages of the Country.” The blockhouse was a two-storey machicouli structure where the upper storey was designed for defence by being 14 inches wider all round to overhang the ground floor. It had windows and ports for 20 small cannon, swivel pieces, and small guns. The whole was rectangular in shape (34 x 16 feet) built of dovetailed and tree-nailed timbers with two rooms on each floor. Palliser maintained that there was space enough for 40–60 men, which seems an overestimate, and no more than 20 or 21 men ever stayed there each winter. A stone powder magazine adjoined the blockhouse, and the living area was heated by a fireplace built next to an interior well. The blockhouse was surrounded by a wooden stockade with four bastions, each with mounted cannons. The ditch surrounding the palisade was never completed “on account of the great difficulty in Digging it” (Figure 3).[19]

Remnants of York Fort could still be seen nearly a century after its closure. Charles Hallock, a late nineteenth-century American fly-fishing enthusiast, published a detailed description of the fort in 1861, along with a plan drawing that later appeared in Prowse’s A History of Newfoundland in 1895.[20] Hallock’s description is as follows:

It stands upon a high gravelly bluff, and is a star-shaped enceinte with salient and re-entering angles, the outer defense being an earth-work with a stockade or clievaux de frise. Inside of this was another similar barrier; next a fosse: and then a wall of masonry ninety feet square, with bastions on each of the four corners, in which were run-ways for hauling up cannon. Occupying a central position within the inclosure are the stone foundations of a building, at one end of which was a magazine of cemented masonry, whose walls are still standing. There are also beds of earth separated by trenches two feet wide and a foot deep. From the inner square a road, ten feet wide, crosses the ditch by a stone bridge to a gate on the western side of the outer stockade, and thence descends the bluff to the water’s edge, where is a stone pier for vessels. Just inside the gate are the walls of a block-house eighteen feet square. The whole fortification is surrounded by an irregular gravel walk. Some portions of the stockade were standing twenty years since, and the butts of many of the spruce pickets are still visible above the earth-works, but so rotten as to crumble at the touch. The whole place is overgrown with grass, moss, and juniper bushes.[21]

During a brief visit to York Fort by the author in June 2000, it was still possible to discern the crumbled vestiges of the powder magazine, which shared a wall with the back of a brick fireplace. Much of the area was wet and swampy. The outline of the blockhouse is visible, as is the fort’s earthen embankment, or glacis (Figure 4). Hallock’s reference to beds of earth separated by trenches could be seen to the west of the main entrance, inside the fortification, and these appear to be garden drills. No palisade pickets were evident, although archaeological excavation would very likely find remnants preserved in the wet soil. Measurements taken during the 2000 visit correspond roughly with the original plans: both the fort’s east-to-west distance as well as its north-to-south distance, from the top points of the embankment, were 94 feet (28.7 m). The approximate height of what remains of the northwest corner (flanker), taken from the top to the bottom of the outer ditch, was 6 feet, 3 inches (190 cm), which differs from Palliser’s description of “Flanks 16 Feet.”[22] A small commemorative plaque by the provincial government is set into the centre of the blockhouse. The brief plaque text describes the fort as a starshaped ditch and ramparts surrounding a two-storey wooden blockhouse and masonry magazine designed to house a 20-man detachment.

Like other harbours in southern Labrador, Chateau Bay has a long history of human occupation dating to the earliest period of human settlement in the Northeast, around 8,000–9,000 years ago. Few harbours, however, share its exceptionally rich history, tied to the span of European exploration of the North Atlantic, to seafaring, centuries of fisheries, and eventual colonization. The discovery of the sketch of York Fort is a fitting venue for an overview of the history of the place where the fort was built, and fills a gap in the historiography of southern Labrador.

The imposing landscape of Chateau Bay has captured the imagination of all visitors. Butte-like basaltic formations on both Castle Island and adjacent Henley Island, the latter also known as “the Devil’s Table,” are conspicuous from a great distance. They resemble hilltop “chateaux” or castles, but the name may also originate as a comparison with the “chateau” of a great ship, being the raised portions of the bow and stern of early European vessels. These formations marked the eastern entry of the Straits (Figure 5). Mariners through the centuries have appreciated the bay’s deep waters and its relatively protected setting. British naturalist Joseph Banks, visiting in 1766, noted that “there is at all times the difference of a Coat” between the outer harbour and its inner bays.[23] Although protected, fog off the Labrador Sea and persistent winds can keep vessels harbour-bound for lengthy periods. The castle-like geological formations, like the icebergs in these waters, stretched the descriptive capabilities of many an early visitor. Amateur naturalist Winfred H. Stearns sailed into Chateau Bay in 1882 and described “stony sentinels” that maintained “their ceaseless vigil, year by year, century by century.”[24] Charles H. Farnham, who voyaged to Chateau Bay around 1885, described the place as the “eastern elbow of the continent, and the elbow is anything but dimpled and rounded.”[25]

The area of Chateau Bay was frequented by the first settlers of Labrador, the Maritime Archaic Indians, and almost continuously thereafter by different Amerindian cultures, also by Palaeo-Eskimo peoples, and then by Inuit beginning sometime in the late fiſteenth or sixteenth century.[26] It is very likely that Greenlandic Norse voyagers took advantage of its harbours while exploring the Straits in the eleventh century, during the short span of years that L’ Anse aux Meadows was in use, only 50 km due south on the opposite shore of the Straits.

Jacques Cartier is the earliest European on record to mention Chateau Bay. On his first voyage to North America, Cartier recorded the arrival of his two ships at the mouth of the “golfe des Châteaux” on 27 May 1534. The toponym referred broadly to the eastern end of the Straits and signified the status of Chateau Bay as an important landmark and destination for early Atlantic crossings (Cartier’s record does not reveal if he ever entered Chateau Bay). High winds kept the ships at anchor at “Carpunt” (today’s Quirpon, at the tip of the Great Northern Peninsula of Newfoundland) before resuming a westward voyage through the Strait of Belle Isle in the direction of the Gulf of St. Lawrence on 9 June.[27]

That the Straits were already known to European cod fishers at the time of Cartier’s arrival is indicated in his reference to meeting a St. Malo vessel near Brest in today’s area of Bradore/Blanc Sablon. By the mid-1400s, Europe’s need for new sources of fish sent seafaring countries well beyond former fishing territories. An active English cod fishery was underway in the waters off Iceland and Greenland and Bristol ships were searching for rumoured fishing grounds further to the west. These northern fisheries used routes established during more than 400 years of voyaging by Norse fishers and traders travelling between Iceland, Greenland, the British Isles, and Scandinavia. John Cabot, sailing for the English, may have followed such a historic sea route in 1497, departing from Ireland heading northward and using existing knowledge of prevailing winds and currents to bring him towards Iceland and then southward to Newfoundland waters; but to be clear, there is no record of his having seen Chateau Bay.[28] Sometime between Cabot and Cartier, Breton fishers began to sail past Chateau and fish in the Straits.

The first Europeans known to have leſt their mark on the landscape of Chateau Bay were Spanish Basque whalers who referred to Chateo, Xateo, or Chateus in their mid-sixteenth-century notarial records.[29] Chateau Bay was a well-established whaling centre by 1566 and one part of a larger Basque presence that included whaling centres throughout the Straits but also a very considerable cod fishery in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Clusters of red roof tile fragments can still be seen on Henley Island where whale oil was processed at shore-side tryworks. At least two Basque whaling ships, the Madalena and the Maria, are known to have gone down in the harbour.[30] Chateau Bay is notable as the site of the second-oldest civil document drawn up in what became Canada. This was a bond signed in 1572 by Joanes de Leço for the purchase of four shallops from a Joanes de Landagorrieta.[31]

Basque whalers continued to use Chateau Bay until the mid-seventeenth century. For another half-century it was probably fished by the French and then became part of the vast concession granted in 1702 to the Sieur Augustin le Gardeur de Courtemanche that extended from the Kegaska River to Hamilton Inlet. Courtemanche’s business interests were the fisheries and trade with Labrador’s Innu from a base in Bradore, Quebec, and there is no evidence that Chateau Bay was ever exploited. The first concession holder on record to establish a post in Chateau Bay was Louis Bazil, who held it from 1735 to 1737 at a cost of four beaver pelts a year. The post’s boundaries were a half-league southwest of Chateau Bay and 3½ leagues to the northeast and all the islands. Its purpose was to trade with Inuit and to carry out a seal fishery. Sealing was an important French resource industry in the Gulf of St. Lawrence and by 1730 had expanded into the Straits. Unable to cover the many expenses of establishing a sealing post, in 1737 Bazil, along with his wife, Charlotte du Roy Bazil, went into partnership with François Havy, Jean Lefebvre, and Louis Fornel. It is most likely that a post was first built somewhere in Chateau Bay after 1737. It was supplied by a vessel owned by Fornel, Havy, and Lefebvre until its closure sometime between 1745 and 1747, when these three men founded a post in Hamilton Inlet. In 1749, the Chateau Bay concession changed hands and was granted to doctor and naturalist Jean-François Gaultier, who held it until his death in 1756. It was run by Gaultier’s brothers-in-law and, despite high operational expenses, became relatively lucrative. Gaultier eventually partnered with Charles-François Tarieu de la Naudière (a brother-in-law and son of the famous Madeleine de Verchères), who may have held the post after Gaultier’s death. It is unlikely that either man ever visited Chateau Bay as both were members of the government (la Naudière, for instance, was in Acadia in 1756 as the Seven Years’ War began), but the post was operated by a third party until the 1763 Treaty of Paris, when Labrador was ceded to the British.[32]

Some evidence suggests that the French called Temple Bay St. Benoit harbour.[33] Sealing, the salmon fishery, and the cod fishery were the chief resource activities carried out by the crews sent to Chateau Bay on behalf of the different grant holders. Trade with the Inuit was a fourth business activity that brought in furs, baleen, and seal oil and was the source of some of the French pottery and other items of French material culture recovered in recent excavations of early Inuit sod houses in southern Labrador.[34] Fornel claimed to have “humanized” Inuit at Chateau Bay following the deaths of two Canadiens at the hands of Inuit in 1743.[35] The first non-Aboriginal people to overwinter in the bay were these Canadien crews, employed by the succession of grant holders who needed workers experienced in northern living, sealing, and fishing and who would, importantly, ensure that an enterprise requiring enormous capital outlay would turn a profit for its absentee, but influential, grant holder.

William Richardson’s sketch of York Fort at Chateau Bay is a rare pictorial resource related to eighteenth-century Labrador. York Fort was a small and isolated wooden defence that may have given more comfort to the emerging merchant base than actual support. Along with Placentia, it was nonetheless one of only two naval defences maintained by the British outside of St. John’s in the years following the 1763 Treaty. A description and history of the fort have been followed here by a long overdue history of Chateau Bay to accompany the presentation of the sketch and to fill a historiographical gap. Chateau Bay is a historical landscape of note. It was a key landmark during the earliest European voyages of exploration, and throughout the history of human settlement of Labrador.