Inco Comes to Labrador
by Raymond Goldie

The Provincial Geologists Medal is awarded to recognize major [scientific] contributions ... [by] Canada’s provincial and territorial Geological Surveys. Each Survey may nominate a candidate each year … the winner of the inaugural Provincial Geologists Medal was A. Bruce Ryan of the Geological Survey of Newfoundland and Labrador. Bruce’s landmark 1990 geological map of the Nain region, together with a remarkably prescient model for the origin of the Voisey’s Bay nickel-copper-cobalt deposit, formed the foundation for the exploration rush that followed the discovery.

—Press Release by the Department of Mines and Energy, Government of Newfoundland and Labrador, from the 56th annual Energy and Mines Ministers Conference, Charlottetown, P.E.I., September 13, 1999

February 3, 1996

“May I speak to David Barr, please?”

“Speaking … is that you, Ray?”

“Greetings, Dave! Is now a good time for that chat?”

“Perfect! As I pointed out in my letter, Ray, I’ve been working on my autobiography. I have a draft in front of me.”

“Glad you don’t mind my tapping your brain, Dave. Your idea that there might be a big copper-nickel deposit in Labrador seems awfully prescient, given what’s been happening there in the past two years.”

“Yes, before our trip there in 1970, I don’t think anyone had thought it worthwhile to prospect for base metals on the coast of Labrador.”

“So, how did you come up with the idea, Dave?”

“Well, like you, the first job I had after graduating with a geology degree was a summer job with Kennco.⁴”

“Uh huh, I’d worked with Kennecott in New Zealand a year or so before you hired me for a summer job with Kennco in Canada.”

Dave continues. “My summer job in 1950 was to supervise a small field party searching for copper-nickel mineralization in northwestern Ontario.⁵ Planning for the project had not been particularly thorough, to say the least. When we assembled in Port Arthur to initiate the program, we found that none of us had a driver’s licence! So we were delayed for two days while I learned to drive. Fortunately, my examiner overlooked a few minor deficiencies in my rather brief experience and passed me. The rest of my recollections of that summer are mostly of days spent trying to push myself through thick groves of alders.”

“I remember when you called me in July 1970, Dave, telling me that you wanted me to work with you in Labrador. I was so relieved because I’d just spent six weeks cursing alders on that project you sent me on in northwestern Ontario! Anyway, we didn’t find any mineralization there …. Did you?”

“Oh, yes, we found three prospects that I thought were worth further exploration by diamond drilling. One of them was eventually picked up by another company, Great Lakes Nickel, which proved up some 100 million tonnes grading 0.4% copper and 0.2% nickel plus precious metals. If it ever does go into production, it will probably be because of those precious metals—platinum, palladium, and gold.

“Anyway,” continues Dave, “by 1969 I had long been working for Kennco full-time. The company sent me to South Africa to see the Bushveld Igneous Complex, which is a vast mafic intrusion that hosts mines that produce platinum, palladium, nickel, chrome, and iron, as well as other metals. I began to wonder: Could there be a Bushveld in Canada that everyone has missed? When I returned home, I began to search the geological literature, and I found that there were three large mafic intrusions in eastern Labrador—Kiglapait, Harp Lake, and Michikamau—all of which seemed to have the same shape and the same kinds of rocks as the Bushveld. I couldn’t find much information on their exploration potential, which was great news—it meant the field was open to us! I decided to start by visiting the Kiglapait intrusion, the smallest and most northerly of the three, with a surface area of about 500 square kilometres. Now, a fellow called Stearns Morse, who was a geologist from Franklin and Marshall College in Pennsylvania, had mapped the area in the ’60s. From his reports, we found that there was a shack that we could probably use in a place called Village Bay, on the east side of the Kiglapait intrusion.”

“As I remember it, Dave, when I got your call, I left my assistant, Max Baker, behind in Thunder Bay and flew to Toronto.”

“Max … ah, yes, Max. He was a Newfoundlander, wasn’t he?”

“Yes, from bonny Botwood, the first Newf I’d met and a true gentleman.”

“Have you kept in touch with him?”

“Sad story. I met his cousin in St. John’s, John Baker, who does some legal work for mining companies. John said that Max went to work for the feds in Ottawa; they moved him out your way, to Vancouver, where he died around 1990. Always a shock to find that someone you think of as a contemporary has not been with us for years.”

“It is. It makes me wonder if I’ll be around by the time you finish your book on Voisey’s!”

“Now, Dave, the party leaving Toronto consisted of you, Dave McAuslan, Tom Webster, and me, right?”

“Right,” says Dave, “we flew from Toronto to Goose Bay on … on August 1, 1970, on Eastern Provincial Airlines. And thank you, Ray, for sending me that stunning photo.”

I chuckle, recalling my photograph of a leggy Eastern Provincial Airlines stewardess at work in a microminiskirt.

“Everyone who sees that picture today, Dave, is astonished that stewardesses dressed like that in 1970!”

“And the next day we chartered a float plane from Eastern Provincial, an Otter, to fly us up to Nain …”

“… and we loaded it with so much stuff, the pilot needed to use several miles of Lake Melville to take off!”

I recall that flight, beginning over flat, timbered land just like the country west of Thunder Bay where Max and I had been working. As the Otter ground its way north, steep-sided, flat-topped hills began to appear and, on the flat-tops, the trees began to shrink and disappear.

Then a maze of steep cliffs, fjords, and forested valley bottoms, splashes as the plane’s floats hit the sea, and we’d reached Nain.

“When we were in Nain, Ray, it had a population of 800 people, mostly English and Inuit. It seemed that most of them came down to the dock to look us over!”

“There seemed to be almost as many sled dogs as people—the poor dogs were sweltering in the 10°C heat when we were there.”

“We docked at a long pier extending into the bay,” says Dave. “At the foot of the pier was a church—though probably not the original building.⁶ In my later research, I found that the original church would’ve been built in 1771 by the Moravian missionaries—Protestants. My dominant impression of Nain was a huddle of white buildings with red, blue, and occasional green roofs, all within a few hundred metres of the shore, surrounded by spruce trees, then scrub and bare rock on the higher ground.

“We found a local fellow,” he continues, “Henry Webb, who agreed to transport our barrels of aviation gas in his dory, ‘down the shore,’⁷ as he put it, to Village Bay.”

“He and his wife had just got back from their first week ‘outside,’” I add. “It was supposed to have been three weeks in Florida, but they came back after two because they missed Nain so much!”

“And then we continued flying north in the Otter without the av. gas. We landed and beached the Otter at Village Bay. Village Bay was uninhabited, but the shack was still there. Tom Webster immediately began to set up a kitchen and bedroom in the shack; the rest of us slept in a couple of tents.”

“Marvellous setting, wasn’t it?”

“Oh, yes, spectacular!” replies Dave. “There was a little iceberg floating in the bay and, immediately to the west, the central part of the Kiglapait intrusion rising to an elevation of about 1,000 metres. The campsite itself was a broad, grass-covered area, partly surrounded by boulders and sandhills, with a profusion of wildflowers, cotton grass, and Labrador tea. There were still broad patches of snow scattered throughout the mountains to the west, and on the ancient, raised beaches, which ran along the coast like flights of stairs.

“The next morning Henry Webb arrived with our load of av. gas—probably before you’d got up!”

“Well, there is a two-hour time difference between Labrador and the part of northwestern Ontario I was in, Dave.”

“And our helicopter hadn’t arrived, so I decided to make use of Henry Webb and his dory on his return journey to Nain.”

“You’d been in the exploration business long enough, Dave, to know that late helicopters get later!”

“True. Henry agreed to take me back along the shoreline to the south to a point about 10 kilometres south of our camp, near the southern end of the Kiglapait intrusion. We stayed close to shore, as I wanted to be sure that, if I had to follow parts of it back to Village Bay, I would recognize where I was. Henry was somewhat apprehensive about dropping me off. ‘Are you sure you’ll be all right?’ he asked. I assured him, appreciating his concern, but assumed that it was a natural reaction for a seafaring man considering a landlubber contending with the vagaries of terra infirma. I set off, equipped with my usual field gear, which included aerial photos.

“By the end of the day, I was within a kilometre of camp and looking forward to dinner. With a steep mountain rising above me, I was eventually forced to traverse immediately above the shoreline until I reached a cliff face dropping into the sea. Checking the air photo, I realized that there was a 50- to 100-metre-wide cliff spur separating me from what I recalled to be accessible ground beyond.

“I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Finally it dawned on me that I was looking at high tide, compared to low tide earlier. I considered my options. I could wait for low tide when it would be dark. And I had no flashlight. I could walk back to the south, climb the mountain above me, then descend to camp, without any guidance as to the distances and time involved. I finally gambled on what I could see on the aerial photos and recollection of what I saw from the dory.

“So I put my camera, aerial photos, and compass in my pack and I lowered myself into the sea, which was fortunately quite tranquil, and set off holding my packsack above my head and paddling vigorously with my other arm. At what I believed to be the halfway point, I thought ‘I’m not going to make it.’ It was so cold. The alternative must have seemed worse, because I kept going and, by good fortune, reached a spot where I could wade ashore.

“Again I was most fortunate, for it was still sunny. I stripped quickly and was still wringing out clothing when I heard a whissh! to seaward. I turned and saw the spray from the blowhole of a whale not more than 70 metres away. I put my clothes back on and continued back to camp. I remember you were all very concerned.”

“Yeah, we were wondering who would sign our paycheques.”

“I think that the helicopter, a G-2 with floats, arrived the next day. We’d chartered it from Universal Helicopters out of Gander, Newfoundland.”

“Just looking at the picture you took of me in front of that machine makes me shudder. I flew around in that?”

“Yes, you did, Ray! I remember the pilot, Fred Wagner, kept making reference to the ‘Jesus nut’ at the top of the rotor, which allegedly kept the whole thing from falling apart. He mentioned it whenever the wind was blowing hard. There must have been a mechanic with Fred, but I don’t recall his name.”

“There was a mechanic—he’s in a group photo I took—but I don’t remember his name either. Universal Helicopters is still in business, and I sent them a copy of my picture, but they weren’t able to help. So we know the names of only five of the six people in the first exploration party to look for the Voisey’s Bay deposit.”