Rensselaer Republican, Volume 18, Number 48, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 5 August 1886 — STARVED TO DEATH. [ARTICLE]

STARVED TO DEATH.

■ - Two Thousand Five Hundred People Perish on the Labrador Coast. [St. John’s (N. F.) dispatch-1 The schooner Nancy Barrett, which has just arrived here, brings the latest reports from the Labrador coast. She came around byway of the Gulf from the Straits of Belle Isle, as the ice outside made navigation dangerous. For nearly two weeks she was blockaded in York harbor by field ice. Her captain brought with him five families who had made their way to that point from Sandwich Bay, more than one hundred miles overland. They came on sledges drawn by ponies, the last of their live stock, and these they were forced to subsist on after striving at the harbor. They burned their sledges for fuel. York harbor is covered with fugitives from (be southern coast who know nothing of their northern neighbors. Eastern Labrador was buried under three feet of suow July 19 and all communications are cutoff. The population, Indians and all, of the region north of Sandwich Bay is estimated at between 10,000 and 15,000. The snow has cemented the ice together and closed all the trails. The relief vessels will be sent direct to York Bay to relieve those who reached that point first. A dispatch from White Bay says that whalers report Hudson Bay Strait has either been frozen over again or nas become choked with floating ice and is solid. About a thousand arctic bears, driven south by starvation, have crossed over from Pennyland, and are devastating the country. What little is left of the stores at Cape Mugford has been seized by these voracious animals. The Indians in that locality are eajing their dead companions, and the white settlers are burying their dead secretly to keep the Esquimaux from getting them.