Dyer Cape

The waters around Dyer Cape lie at the northern approach to the Labrador Sea, between Baffin Island and Greenland. The Labrador Current carries cold water and icebergs southward, while drift ice covers much of the northern and western sea from December into early summer. Fog and sudden storms make this a difficult coast even in open water.

By about 1200 the Thule ancestors of Inuit peoples had spread across the eastern Arctic. On Baffin Island they built winter houses from stone, sod and whalebone and hunted seals, caribou, whales and narwhals from kayaks and larger skin boats. Dorset remains predate them, and both forms of settlement reveal how deeply human life depended on the ice edge.

Farther south, Basque fleets hunted right and bowhead whales along the Labrador coast from the 1540s into the early seventeenth century. Dutch, Danish and German ships entered Davis Strait in the late 1600s, and British whalers followed during the 1700s. Local Inuktitut knowledge and routes sometimes guided these visitors through a sea that Europeans could not easily chart.

The return of cod and whale ships brought metal, cloth and new diseases into Inuit trade networks. Navigation remained tied to ice, current and weather rather than fixed roads. Around Dyer Cape, the result was a maritime frontier where northern hunters, whalers and seasonal harvests met across open water.