Newfoundland and Labrador, which form the easternmost
province of Canada, is the land where the Viking Leif Erikson first came to the
shores of North America. Newfoundland, an island, and Labrador, the mainland,
are about 405,000 square kilometres, which makes the province one of Canada’s
smallest (not Prince Edward Island small, but compared to the massive territory
Nunavut, it’s tiny). Newfoundland became a Canadian province in 1949 (up until
then it was still a British colony) and in 2001 included Labrador into the
name. The population of the province is not large, at 526,000 people, which is
about the size of Tucson, Arizona. The province is made up of coastline,
forestland, World Heritage rock formations and mountains; the Long Range
Mountains are the northernmost arm of the Appalachians. Famous people from the
province include arctic explorer Robert Bartlett, one of the fathers of the
Canadian confederation Sir Frederick Carter, the last surviving member Beothuk
people Shanawdithit, inventor of the gas mask Dr. Cluny MacPherson and actress
Natasha Henstridge. Then there’s the Nennorluk.
Labrador Nennorluk
For centuries, an enormous sea monster capable of treading
on land terrorized Inuit tribes from Labrador to Greenland – the Nennorluk.
This creature, that’s name roughly translates to “evil polar bear,” was first
seen by Europeans in the 1700s. David Crantz’s “History of Greenland” (1773),
describes the Nennorluk as huge, with ears “large enough for the covering of a
capacious tent.” Inuits claimed the white creature was as large as “a huge
ice-berg.” The monster’s diet was largely seals, which the Nennorluk would
completely devour, but it didn’t shy away from eating humans if they happened
to be in the way when it was hungry.
The Inuits believed the Nennorluk to be even larger than
Crantz described. According to legend, the Nennorluk does not swim; it walks on
the bottom of the ocean and is so large it can often be seen on the surface.
One-legged Natives
vs. the Vikings
When the Vikings came to Vinland (the area of Newfoundland
where Leif Erikson landed in 1000 C.E.), they encountered something they didn’t
expect – native tribes of einfæting, or one-legged people.
When Eirik the Red’s son Thorvald Eiriksson, spied an
einfæting one day, the meeting was deadly, according to the book, “Wonderful
Strange: Ghosts, Fairies, and Fabulous Beasties,” by Dale Jarvis (2005).
“One morning Karlsefni’s people beheld as it were a
glittering speck above the open space in front of them, and they shouted at it.
It stirred itself, and it was a being of the race of men that have only one
foot, and he came down quickly to where they lay,” Jarvis wrote. The einfæting
shot an arrow that pierced Thorvald’s body, killing him.
The einfæting ran and Thorvald’s men gave chase, but the
one-legged native escaped.
Cressie
First Nations people who lived near Crescent Lake in Newfoundland
had legends of the Swimming Demon, a giant eel-like creature that could appear
in human form and would seduce people to follow it into the depths where it
would devour them.
The first European settlers who saw something unexplained in
the lake was in the 1950s when fishermen reported what at first appeared to be
an overturned boat. When they coasted toward it in an attempt to right the
craft, the monster flipped over and dove beneath the waves. Other notable
sightings occurred in the 1980s when scuba divers encountered a school of
enormous eels, and in 2003 when people saw something at least five metres long
swimming on the surface of the lake.
Fairies
When people immigrate to an area, they don’t just bring
their personal belongings, they bring their language, their customs and their
legends. Early settlers from the British Isles found their fairy stories didn’t
stay home in Britain. They followed them to the New World.
European fairies aren’t Disney fairies. They are more often
described as gnomes, although they can appear smaller, larger, in animal shape
or as glowing lights. They’re also mischievous. According to the book “Strange
Terrain: The Fairy World in Newfoundland,” by Dr. Barbara Rieti, encounters
with fairies can turn deadly. “They play tricks and lead you over the edge or a
cliff,” Rieti wrote. “They’ll change people. Or you’ll get a fairy blast when
they hit you, and then nasty stuff comes out of the wound, like sticks, balls
of wool and fish bones.”
These fairies, like their European counterparts, have also
been known to swap their sickly babies (known as changelings) for a healthy
human baby, tie together the tails of livestock if they feel slighted in some
way, or spirt people into the fairy realm.
In an article written by Burton K. Janes in The (Carbonear)
Compassnewspaper, back in the early days, a Newfoundland and Labrador woman
walked into the hills to find a missing cow and vanished. Despite extensive
searches by the townspeople, after fourteen days the woman was still missing –
until a person in town had a dream of where the missing woman was. A search
party went to this spot and found the woman who claimed she was, “taken astray
by the fairies.”
Sea Monster of
Bonavista
The waters that slap the coastline of Bonavista,
Newfoundland, may be home to a monster. In 2000, Bonavista resident Bob Crewe
drove along Lane Cove Road near Dungeon Provincial Park when he saw something
he couldn’t explain. “I saw its body in the water measuring about nine metres
across, just lying there and moving slightly,” Crewe told the UK’s Telegram.
“It looked something like a rock in the water, but I knew there was no rock
there.”
Wanting to determine if what he saw was alive, he honked the
vehicle’s horn and discovered that yes, it was. The beast pushed its head out
of the water. It rested atop a slender neck about one-and-a-half-metres long.
Crewe told the newspaper the neck looked like a gigantic snake. Startled by the
horn, the creature took off swimming. “It seemed like it was using its body to
push itself along and it was going very fast,” Crewe said.
A similar creature with “grey, scaly skin” was reported by
fisherman Charles Bungay in Fortune Bay, in May 1997. The monster had a
horse-like head on a nearly two-metre-long neck. Another fisherman said he saw
what looked like a dinosaur in Bay L’Argent in the early 1990s.
Kraken
Legends of squid so large it can entangle sailing ships and
drag them beneath the waves have existed since man sailed the seas. Those
legends are taken a bit more seriously in parts of Newfoundland and Labrador
because tentacled monsters of nearly-Kraken size have been seen on its shores.
A squid measuring six metres washed onto the shores of
Portugal Cove, Newfoundland, in 1873 and was photographed by Rev. Moses Harvey
of St. Johns, but that specimen was dwarfed by one that washed up on the shores
of Glovers Harbour in 1878 – it was nearly 17 metres long, according to the Nov.
26, 1949 edition of The Illustrated London News. Seventeen metres is nearly as
long as a bowling lane.
The existence of such creatures in the area appear in the
work of Danish zoologist Japetus Steenstrup who recorded evidence of squid of
enormous size from whalers who retrieved jaws, tentacles, and eyes from the
belly of sperm whales. Science has discovered a large species of squid – the
giant squid – to live off the coast of Newfoundland. These squid grow to
approximately 14 metres long.
Adlet
The Inuits of Newfoundland and Labrador spoke about the
Adlet, the offspring of a woman who had sex with a gigantic dog. The Adlet
appear human, but have dog legs which allow them to run as fast as dogs.
The woman gave birth to ten puppies; five of them (as legend
has it) ran across a great sheet of ice all the way to Europe and became the
first Europeans. The other five fell into depravity and fed upon the Inuits.
Bigfoot
Why not? Canada is rife with them.
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