HISTORY ON THE EDGE
As the climate warms, our history is not immune to the perils facing the country. In Red Bay, on the rugged southern coast of Labrador, remnants of a 16th-century Basque whaling enterprise are under threat
In the report about Canada’s changing climate, there is no mention of Blanche Bridle’s roof, and how it disappeared one January night.
The 85-year-old wasn’t home at the time, but word spread quickly, as it always does in this 149-person town. The tiles upstairs looked the same as the day they were installed, but the roof was cut clean and deposited about 100 metres away in the not-yet-frozen harbour where it sat upright before the tide took it away.
“Stranger than fiction,” says her son, Chris Bridle. His mother, who saw the “good in every soul,” died this April. She had a few health issues over the years, he says, but the stress of the roof didn’t help. She had lived in that house for 61 years.
The winter wind has become so extreme in Red Bay that many people have purchased anemometers to quantify their stories of boats flying from land into water, and shingles and siding ripped away. One registered a peak gust of 157 kilometres an hour the night Blanche’s roof vanished.
Wind and storms are difficult to analyze through a climate change lens because of limited data and natural variability, but if you talk to the locals about the weather, they mention the wind, and the shorter harbour ice season. Less ice means less protection for the shoreline, and more wind means more waves, both likely candidates for the erosion trouble on Saddle Island, a crucial part of Red Bay’s historic Basque whaling site.
Hundreds of years before Blanche Bridle and her husband raised their children here, Red Bay was a noisier, smokier place. In the 16th century, hundreds of men took over the rocky landscape every spring, hunting whales that made their seasonal migrations through the Strait of Belle Isle. They harpooned them from small chalupas and built workstations along usable shoreline, including Saddle Island, a rocky outcrop of land between Red Bay and the open water. Their stone ovens were like fireplaces, with large holes for copper cauldrons, where the Basques boiled blubber into oil.
Once their galleons were loaded with barrels, they took their lucrative cargo back across the Atlantic to light the lamps of Europe.
Amid A poor whale stocks and geopolitical turmoil, the Basque industry on the Labrador coast was finished by the early 17th century. The stone ovens were reclaimed by the earth, and the story was gradually forgotten until the late 1970s, when w it was brought back to life through t the tenacity of one woman.
Red Bay is now a Parks Canada National Historic site and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Most of the tools, pottery and a harpoons were extracted from the land and water by the early 1990s, but the stone ovens were left in place, tucked away a in the land, reburied under soil and sod for their own protection. Parks Canada staff keep a close eye on them and, in 2009, they noticed erosion near one of the t best- preserved ovens on Saddle Is- land. In the winter of 2018, it looked worse, w the shoreline gouged near the grassy mound that covers the buried treasure. When the Parks Canada site supervisor heard about Blanche Bridle’s roof, she immediately thought about this spot. The last thing it needed was a roof hurtling toward it. ( The roof didn’t land there.)
As the climate warms, history is not immune to the threats facing the country. In the western Arctic, 900- year- old Inuvialuit whaling artifacts are sliding into the Beaufort Sea as the permafrost thaws. In Cape Breton, an 18th- century ocean- side burial site is excavated each summer so remains don’t erode onto the beach. In Labrador, evidence of a 16th- century Basque whaling enterprise is nearing the edge. Elizabeth Nelson knows people can feel powerless in the face of climate change, but she is an optimist. Based in Vancouver, she was climate hired by change Parks adviser Canada as in 2016, has a PhD in the effects of climate change in Canada’s boreal forests, and leads adaptation workshops within the organization.
Climate change has intensified problems they already deal with, like coastal erosion. Nelson says that conversations about these issues are happening “quicker” than they might have thought.
Parks Canada has been considering the impacts of climate change for “at least 10 years,” a spokesperson said. They man- age a 171 historic sites across the country — a collection that includes battlefields, historic homes, and lighthouses. Since 2017, Parks Canada has had 11 climate change adaptation workshops. On day one, staff articulate the consequences of doing nothing. The statements range from “this site will not be visibly affected” to “this site will cease to exist.” e This is the “darkest point” Nelson says. “We would never do nothing.”
On day two, they talk about future challenges, current practices and brainstorm ideas. At the workshop for Bar U Ranch, R once among the largest cattle ranches in the Alberta foothills, now a National Historic Site on the banks of a creek that tends to flood every 10 years, one person suggested a series of boats tethered inside the barns, so artifacts could float to salvation during floods. (“I will say that idea didn’t make it through the cut, but it was a pretty awesome idea,” she says.) Nelson says that “protected spaces themselves are natural solutions to climate change,” noting that historic sites are often in settings that can handle flooding better than a concrete parking lot or a highway. If a historic site is underwater ( a which is not a "particularly imminent” “threat), it could be pre- served there, and perhaps there will be a 3D model of what what it once was. “I have a 41⁄ 2- year- old, and I like to think of the conversation she is going to have at those places, where they tell the story of transitional change … and the ways in which we resisted that change and the ways in which we transformed,” Nel- son says. The evidence of the Basques was always underfoot in Red Bay, an old fishing village spread around a basin and harbour on the southern Labrador coast. When Parks Canada’s site supervisor Cindy Gibbons was a girl, bits of red rock were everywhere, great for making paint and sharpening knives. Nobody knew it was Spanish tile. It was known that t Basques had fished seasonally off the Canadian coast in the 16th century, and there had been mentions of Basque whal- ing in “Terranova” v by French explorer Samuel de Champlain, but precise details did not exist until Selma Barkham embarked on an archival odyssey. Selma was born in England in 1927. Her father, Michael Huxley, was a diplomat and a the founder of Geographical Maga- a zine. ( His cousin was writer Aldous Huxley.)
After studying in Paris and R London, Selma moved to Canada, where she had roots. Her great- grandfather had been premier of Quebec in 1878. In 1953 she met Brian Barkham who was studying for his master’s in architecture at McGill, when she was w the librarian at the Arctic Institute of North America across the street in Montreal. Brian had studied Basque architecture before as a student at the University of London, and when the newly married couple visited Spain in 1956, they heard stories about old Basque whaling expeditions to Canada — but there were no details on time or place. The Barkhams settled in Ottawa and had four children. After Brian died in 1964, Selma worked as a researcher for Canada’s National Historic sites, including the Fortress of Louisbourg, where she again bumped into Basque fishermen in 18th- century documents. She wanted to follow the trail to Spain to see if there was archival evidence of earlier voyages, but she didn’t speak Spanish.
In 1969, Selma and her children piled into the station wagon and drove to Mexico so she could immerse herself in the language ( she taught English there to support the family). In 1972, they boarded a ship bound for Bilbao, Spain. “It was really a step into the dark,” says her son Michael, who was 10 when the family moved to Mexico and is now a historian of Basque studies in Spain. There was bad news once they arrived: an expected grant didn’t materialize.
Jack Richardson, then in charge of architectural history at National Historic Sites, believed in her work. His friend, an anonymous donor, sent $ 1,000, which allowed Selma to pay the rent and travel to archives across the Basque region. In Burgos, she found insurance policies for ships bound for whaling in the “Gran Baya” of Terranova in the 16th century. In Valladolid, she scoured through hundreds of lawsuits, reading about old grudges in old Spanish, like the 30- year battle one captain waged when he claimed that a rival had stolen a dead whale his crew had left tied up in a cove for safekeeping. In Onati, she found a treasure trove of records for specific ports, detailing financing, crews and equipment, like the thousands of tiles packed on board to build roofs over shore ovens.
“You must feel like Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon at the door of Tutankhamun’s tomb!” Richardson wrote to her in January 1973.
Selma cross- referenced the strange port names with an old map at the British Library and sailing directions at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. The ports weren’t near Halifax or New Brunswick. They were in the Strait of Belle Isle. “Butus” looked like it was Red Bay. She figured there must be shipwrecks, tile, and all matter of physical evidence e still there.
They arrived on the Labrador coast in the summer of 1977. Red Bay was “the end of the road of North America,” Michael, who was then a teen, remembers. They found tile, harpoons, and baleen along the shoreline of many coastal communities.
“It was extraordinary,” says 92- yearold Selma Barkham, who now lives in England.
The discovery changed Red Bay forever. Based on Barkham’s research, archeologist and Memorial University professor Jim Tuck led the digs, along with the province, and Parks Canada underwater archeologist Robert Grenier and his team found all kinds of treasures in the harbour, including the shipwrecked galleon believed to be the San Juan.
“It’s our story, and people here are very possessive of it,” says Cindy Gibbons, the site supervisor who was a child when the town’s story changed. She became a “history nerd,” she says, standing in the basement of the museum that juts out over the water, lapped by more waves than t ever before.
Trudy Taylor- Walsh, the manager of National Historic Sites for the Western Newfoundland and Labrador field unit, believes the erosion at Saddle Island is “a perfect example of climate change.”
She’s not a scientist, she says over the phone, but this has long been a sheltered harbour. “It was why the Basques picked it in the first place.”
Bundled up against the brisk wind, Cindy Gibbons looked over at Saddle Island on a recent May day. Parts of it were w still covered in snow, and she didn’t know k what the winter damage would be. She thinks the erosion is caused by higher tides and more wave action. The harbour, it seems, is not as sheltered as it once was.
As the earth warms, global sea level is rising, but in Red Bay the rise is not as noticeable as other parts of Canada, because the land is also rising, rebounding from f removal of the downward pressure imposed by a hefty glacial ice sheet that existed up to about 10,000 years ago. ( In Halifax, which was at the edge of the ice sheet, the pressure has already been relieved, and the land is subsiding. That makes the relative sea level rise more dramatic, explains one scientist at the Bedford Institute of Oceanography.)
Looking ahead to 2100, Canada’s Bedford Institute made projections for relative sea- level rise across the country, using emissions scenarios from the United Nations. ( Current atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are around 413 parts per million.) In a “medium emission” scenario, where atmospheric carbon dioxide peaks at 650 parts per million, Red Bay’s relative sea level rise is 21 centimetres by 2100. In the high emission scenario ( 1,370 parts per million), there is a 40- centimetre rise. ( Halifax, where w the land is subsiding, has a pro- jected 61- centimetre and 85- centimetre relative sea rise, respectively.) Most of the Newfoundland and Labrador coast is bedrock that erodes much more slowly than the province’s “unconsolidated” coast, where you’ll find “unsorted sediment” left by the glaciers. “From the Parks Canada perspective that’s where all the interesting archeology is,” says Norm Catto, the head of the geography department at Memorial University, about the soil.
Regional climate projections show that the intensity and frequency of coastal erosion is expected to “increase with extreme weather conditions,” a spokesperson for province’s Natural Resources Department confirms. Newfoundland and Labrador is expected to become warmer, w especially in w the winter, and wetter, with potential increases in “ex- treme precipitation.” Hurricanes and storm surges are forecasted to become more intense and frequent while the shoreline’s natural winter barrier is expected to weaken. Warmer ocean temperatures will mean a decrease in the “extent and duration of sea ice,” protecting the coast ( and its archeology) “from erosion from waves during the winter months,” a spokesperson noted. Catto says in general, the ice season is getting shorter “all along the Labrador coastline.”
Longtime Red Bay residents Eric Bridle (Blanche’s brother- in- law), 74, and Cliff Moores ( Blanche’s son- in- law), 70, say the winters are generally warmer than when they were boys. Sitting in Eric’s shed on a sunny May day, they say that the outer harbour ice used to freeze solid for about four or five months, but now it seems to be two months. Between 1948 and 2016, the lowest daily minimum temperature increased in Newfoundland and southern Labrador ( as it did for almost all of Canada). Blair Greenan, a research scientist at the Bedford Institute of Oceanography, explains there t are fewer “cold extreme tempera- tures t at night” — the kind of tempera- tures t needed to form harbour ice — than there t were 50 years ago. As the atmo- sphere continues to heat up due to human emissions of greenhouse gases, the trend of fewer cold extremes will persist, he says. In the shed, Bridle and Moores don’t know if it’s warmer temperatures, or the wind blowing the ice around, preventing it from holding fast to land. That godforsaken wind.
“We said maybe this is the last storm, maybe this is the last amount of wind, maybe this is the last house that is going to blow away,” Moores says of this past winter, w when he and w his wife almost left town. “It takes a special breed of people to live here … I mean you gotta accept it because you can’t defeat it.” Nelson, the Parks Canada climate change adviser, knows that people want timelines and certainty. We know the earth is warming, and the water is rising, she says, but we don’t know how successful we will be at reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Speaking generally, she says that in the next 25 years, the t main threats to Parks Canada sites will come from coastal erosion, storm surge, flooding and a loss of ice protection. In 50 years, coastal erosion and sea- level rise will be the major issues. At her workshops, cost doesn’t come up. “Rather than can we afford it,” she says, it’s more — is this possible?
A spokesperson says data is too limited to assess the cost of climate change, but a 2017 review of Parks Canada properties by an outside firm estimated it could cost $ 1.6 billion ( or potentially as much as $ 3.3 billion) to “mitigate climate change issues” across their diverse portfolio of 16,000 built assets which include bridges, parks and historic sites. Most issues were that outside analysts and Parks Canada staff had “trouble differentiating climate change issues from background natural weather w events,” and the risks are only “just starting to be understood.” Christina Cameron has a Google alert for “world heritage,” and typically receives 10 to 20 emails a day. On a recent morning, glacial extinction lurked in her inbox, with a new study projecting that 21 of the 46 world heritage sites with glaciers will lose them by 2100 t under a “business as usual” high emission t scenario.
Cameron, who lives in Ottawa, w spent 36 w years at Parks Canada, where she was director general of National a Historic a Sites. For the last 14 years she was the chair of built heritage at the t Université de Montréal. She thinks that 2005 was the turning point. That year, y several NGOs brought petitions to the United Nations World Heritage Committee to add four sites, including the Great Barrier Reef, to the list of “World Heritage in Danger” because of climate change and its associated risks.
Cameron invited Ewan Hyslop, of Historic Environment Scotland, to speak at her 2015 roundtable conference. Hyslop is a materials scientist who studies how and why buildings weather and decay. He was recruited to Historic Environment Scotland in 2010, and soon after, he and his team gathered historic weather information that made it clear that “real things were already happening,” he says. Since 1960, Scotland is 21 per cent rainier, has 27 fewer days of frost, and 32 fewer days of snow cover each year. The sea level is rising, and erosion, dampness and flooding are becoming major problems for their collection of castles and historic sites.
Hyslop and his team reduced carbon emissions at their historic sites, published a visual risk assessment online, and they are defending where possible, extending seawalls as the adjacent coast recedes, improving drainage to deal with the rainfall, and engineering solutions to bolster cliffs. They also have a citizen science project, encouraging visitors and locals to report changes to nearby sites on a mobile app. “We’re getting to the stage that we’re going to have to accept some loss,” he says.
“His analogy is, it’s like having to choose children,” Christina Cameron says. “Which ones do you keep? Because you can’t keep them all.”
Hyslop says it’s important to have conversations v to “maximize the opportuni- ty,” t of loss. It is better to benefit — for instance, through an educational community excavation project — than to wake w up and find your history w washed a away.
Red Bay’s erosion problem is not an existential e threat to the e site itself, but it could be a bellwether of future worries. Trudy Taylor- Walsh says they might bring in armour stone to guard the affected shoreline; another option is to “let nature f do its course,” she says, knowing the archeology is recorded and there w are other ovens nearby ( 15 ovens have been recorded on the Red Bay site). “Or we dismantle it and use it to do a replica somewhere on the island, so that people can understand how the rendering ovens worked more easily,” she says. They are waiting on expert advice. A conservation landscape architect with Public Services and Procurement Canada is due in Red Bay later this year to assess the problem and figure out a low- impact design that will conserve the “heritage value of the historic place ,” a PSP C spokesperson confirmed. Not everything can be saved. They know this in the arctic. In northern Canada, the mean winter temperature increased by 4.3 degrees from 1948 to 2016, according to the “Canada’s Changing Climate” report. (Atlantic Canada’s mean win- ter temperature increased by 0.5 degrees in the same period.)
“We’re on ground zero and we’re seeing drastic changes … much quicker than people are predicting,” says Duane Smith, chair of the Inuvialuit Regional Corp., from his office in Inuvik.
Along the Beaufort coast, the ice- rich unconsolidated permafrost coast is thawing and collapsing into the sea at a rate of 1.1 metres a year and up to 30 metres a year in some sections, says Dustin Whalen, a physical scientist with Natural Resources Canada.
The Inuvialuit Regional Corp. partners with government and university arche- ologists to excavate historic sites along the coast when funding allows, but Smith says there is no long- term plan. The erosion in Alaska, the western Canadian Arctic, and Siberia is “already so frequent and destructive that immediate action is needed,” 10 scholars wrote in a 2018 paper. “Excavations in both Alaska and Siberia demonstrate that anything not excavated will be lost within a few years of exposure.”
At one whaling site near Kitigaaryuk, estimated to be 900 years old, remnants of the Inuvialuit hunting culture are sliding into the water. “It’s like watching your history disappear in front of you,” Smith says.