In my last week in Labrador, I met a bear who was undecided whether to eat me or run for it. For me, the options were less obvious; official advice is to confront bears, sing loudly and climb a tree. No song came, nor could I muster a tree. In fact, along this entire 1,000 mile wind-cracked, ice-chiselled, bear-infested coastline there was barely a twig to be had. God built the world in six days, say Canadians, and on the seventh he pelted Labrador with rocks. Here is the geological front-line in the Atlantic’s attempts to reduce America to pea-gravel - and no place for a twiglet. It is one of the most magnificent coasts in the world, a perfect spot to be a bear’s lunch. But for teddy’s indecision, I would have been his picnic. An absence of trees was one of the first things my great-grandfather noticed when he landed here in 1893. Dr Eliot Curwen arrived on a tiny hospital ship, the Albert, with 27 boxes of luggage including chickens, guns, knickerbockers and ‘exploding bullets’. He and another youthful doctor, Wilfred Grenfell, were on a mission - to bring health, God and sobriety to the thready West Countrymen who fished these shores. By then, these ‘livyers’ (literally, “We live ‘ere”) had merged their scrawny fortunes with the ‘Esquimaux’ women, producing litters of bony waifs. In good times, they ate molasses and seabirds. In times of unusual scarcity, they dressed in sail-cloth and killed their children with axes. Eliot’s photographs of his adventures - painful, beautiful and reproachful - have fascinated me all my life. Now here I was, bobbing around in the same frozen, black surf. Like him, I arrived in Labrador in a ship and ‘bounced’ northwards from outport to outport up the coast. Our voyages began in the narrow ‘tickles’ of the inner islands. Here, the water was inky calm and flecked with puffins and seals, and the rock had cuddly names like Rabbit Point and Beaver River. Then, we were out in ‘Iceberg Alley’, riding against the great towers of ice that had ripped themselves off the flanks of Greenland. Every year some 3,000 of these exorbitant powder-blue stacks come cracking and groaning down the Labrador Sea. In their two years of roaming there are moments of serenity and then, with a boom like naval guns, 10,000 tons of ice shears away. The giant, unbalanced by the loss of a cheek, totters for a moment and then throws itself face-down into the sea. Eliot often tried to provoke these spectacles with his explosive bullets, but nature would not provide its tantrums on demand. Let no-one think that an iceberg is just a lump of cold water. Here were exquisite crowns, hands, cathedrals and pyramids. Eliot even saw Fountain Abbey floating out of the mist. By day, the hulks often tormented the horizon with absurd mirages; mushrooms and hammers and Dali’s ears. By night, they glowed like planets. The Labradoreans had their own language for the ice, which often reflected their anxieties; slob, blocky, growlers. They were right to be anxious. The ice was forever disembowelling the government’s ferries. In Eliot’s time a filthy little tub called the Windsor Lake was crushed like a tin of clams before it sank. The latest to go was the Carson, sliced open in 1977. I was dependent on its successors, the Bond and the Northern Ranger. I asked Captain Stuckless about our prospects. “Unsinkable,” he said. Hadn’t the Titantic been ‘unsinkable’? So she was - until she lost her belly to Labrador ice. On board, much had changed since Eliot’s day. Scurvy, lice and sectarian fist-fights were now part of a rich past. There were hot showers and videos and aircraft seats from which to watch the whales and frozen abbeys. Most people had cabins although there was still scope for camping. Only the food had remained obstinately nineteenth-century; salt beef, pease pudding, boiled cod, hard tack and figgy duff. With only forty passengers, the crew tended to regard us as family, addressing everyone as either ‘Boy’ or ‘Girl’. The Americans loved it. Some were on a second or third cruise. Only one missed the point. “There’s nothing here but rocks,” she sobbed. It might have been different in dirty weather. The naturalist, Sir Joseph Banks, would remember his 1764 Labrador cruise as ‘one continual puke’. For us, however, the days were calm and warm, the surface creased only by dolphins and potheads. Only once did the seas rise up like hills of blackened glass, and our singer turned to chalk. Through waves of nausea she belted out her songs, ballads of whalers and ‘salt-water cowboys’. In the final rousing choruses, the boy always drowns. But Labrador life was not all singing and drowning. Our cargo spoke of cosy cottagey lives, well-defended against winter; we carried onions and double-glazing, huskies, pallets of cake-mix, skidoos and wallpaper. For the outports, our visits were their only contact with the world, a fleeting twenty minutes every week. For me, this wasn’t enough and so I’d disembark and watch the ferry puff away. I, like Eliot, always enjoyed my time among the outporters. They were congenitally generous and spoke with the curly West Country burr of their ancestors. They still said things like ‘Hearken!’ and ‘Dout the lights!’ and their homes were like the boats they’d arrived in, clinker-built with ‘funnels’ and ‘bridges.’ Every man had a moose-head, a root-cellar and a bible the size of a mounting-block. Even their moustaches and names were redolent of the schooner age; Alphaeus, Julius and Job. In time, I realised that life itself still moved to a rhythm of hunting; seals in the spring, fish all summer, turrs in the autumn, caribou in winter. Dependence on an angry ocean had left the outporters fatalistic but they seldom grumbled. Whenever they did, I wrote it down; “You can’t go out at night for the freckin’ bears”; or “The wolves ate my dog”. Life had never been frilly; for six months a year, their sea froze solid; behind them the Labradorean wilderness stretched out the size of Britain but inhabited by only 30,000 people. Small wonder that the meagre gossip had a distinctly Victorian flavour. Many still remembered Eliot’s patients, their ancestors; Sam Holwell, ‘King of the Esquimaux’; Hannah Michelin who hunted into her late eighties; ‘Aunt Lucy’ of Black Tickle, a witch who repaired wounds with cobwebs and turpentine. I hopped onwards, sometimes by ferry, sometimes by plane. Eliot adored Labrador but the experience of aviation would have left him speechless; a vast pewter landscape gouged by ferocious rivers of tea; bays of peacock-green trimmed with beaches of bleached shell; the ocean scattered with colossal crumbs of ice. Such grandiose isolation was a sure sign of the eccentricity to come. At Mary’s Harbour, I attended the coronation of the Crab Queen and the Blessing of the Fleet. Cartwright, meanwhile, had retained all the flourish of its extraordinary top-hatted founder, Captain Cartwright. He was the first European to survive the murderous Esquimaux (and to enjoy their wives). In 1772, he took some back to England, to visit the King and Dr Johnson and to ride to foxhounds. This excursion might have been one of the most charming in sub-Arctic history had not London smallpox claimed all but Cartwright. Of these outports, my favourite was Battle Harbour. It was once a centre for the mighty British Atlantic fishery, an enterprise more profitable even than Spain’s conquest of Peru. But, by 1992, the cod was gone and pretty Battle almost lost. The Victorian woodwork began to unbuckle itself; cavernous fish-sheds, wharves, salt warehouses, a church and the Doctors’ House (which the Mission shipped out from England, complete with gingerbread gables). Then, unable to watch it perish, the Labradoreans restored it. To my astonishment, I found Battle much as Eliot had described it (without, of course, the fish and tuberculosis). There were even some refinements for its visitors; linen and polish, caribou cutlets and William Morris wallpaper. Eliot’s tiny hospital was long burnt down but his photographs had survived, a reminder that the past was not always so well-cushioned. Without trying, I found I was re-living Eliot’s Battle. I decided to stay in the fisherman’s bunkhouse, sharing it with two metís or mixed-blood locals. They looked like babies with red whiskers and hardly slept. We were up all night, feasting on rum called Screech and tinned meat called Klik. By day, I’d set off across the islands, breezy hikes before the Klikking and Screeching began again. These were remarkable walks: hot wind seething through lichen, yarrow and vetch; an osprey snatching at the surf; fifteen dazzling storeys of ice. Then a storm would erupt, drenching everything black in its roar. I was caught in such an outburst at Indian Cove, looking for the Rumbolts, a family Eliot knew. I found their rotting cabin but years too late. In the mid-80s, little Anthony drowned in the cove and his parents simply abandoned the cabin, Mr Rumbolt’s glasses on the table, the chamber pot under the bed. I continued northwards on the ferry, into Inuit territory. It took four days to reach the old Moravian Missions, squeezing through rock and ice. Although saturated in brilliant flowers and magnificently wild, this coast was once thought home to ‘the most savage people in the world’. In 1762, London delegated the ghastly task of civilising it to the Moravians. The slaughter eased and - in prayer - the Inuit became doggedly German. Even now however, they still tended to refer to the whites as ‘settlers’. Most of my fellow-passengers were ‘settlers’. Most too had mixed blood and had been part of this wilderness for centuries; Horace the Trapper survived the thirties on a diet of squirrels; Bert built cabins and shot polar bears; Johnny Neville was an Irish Inuit and a sculptor of whalebone. Other characters from coastal society soon joined us; a coastguard, a separatist and an archaeologist off to rouse the long-extinct Dorset Eskimos. Most of the day we spent in the sun, calling out names in Labradorean - “Jumpers!” (Dolphins), “Tinkers!” (Razorbill auks) or “Turnavik!”. It was there, on this lichenous outcrop in August 1893, that Eliot held an inquest into the deaths of three Inuit women, poisoned by their husband Tom Brown. Hopedale was the northern limit of Eliot’s adventures. Although the Germans had now gone, the town was still dominated by their prim white mission, with its surgery and choir-stalls and hymnbooks printed in Inuktitut. Unfed huskies kept up their menace; in Eliot’s time they rushed the church and ate the hymnbooks. There were no cars and Arctic char still hung in the street to dry. I hired a boatman to take me out to an island where Eliot had reported some ‘heathen tombs’. Together, we found them again, skeletons piled with rocks. Even in death, the persistence of the Inuit was astonishing. But Eliot saw trouble ahead. Hopedale was now in the grip of the epidemic he’d foreseen: alcoholism. For all their gentility, I began to realise that, for the Inuit, their emergence from the Stone Age, had not gone according to plan. The Moravian period had been one of hiatus, a time of German teas, ‘love feasts’ and nursery rhymes. Now Hopedalers faced a form of adolescence, eased only by moonshine. As the hotel was full, I stayed with the wreckage of a family on the hill. Although their kindness was humbling, I knew that their lives had lost their shape. I never saw the teenagers; they were out all night. roaming the town with the bears. Nain took all this to extremes. It was the most picturesque of the Labrador outports, set in a deep fjord of silvery rock. It was the oldest of the Moravian missions, at various times the most quaint and the most flawed. Now all that remained was a lonely Silesian church and Nain was in the grip of anxiety. The ferry crew called it ‘Viet-Nain’ but this was hyperbole: Nain bore its trauma in silence. Mostly I had the town to myself, just me and the dogs and the dried fish. Some days, I clambered out of the fjord, up into the bog laurel and poppies. It was brutally beautiful. Then I’d look back at Nain and turn over a question that often troubles me as I travel; was it right to be enjoying this? It was at such a moment that I was found by a bear, undecided just like me.