Floating Poll

The chunky little Marvita was on her strangest assignment. The 122-ton Newfoundland customs cutter, with election officials and ballot boxes aboard, was serving as a floating polling booth for the first election in Labrador's history.

The voting list was the census. That excluded Labrador's several hundred white stationers who go down north from Newfoundland every summer to live in frame and moss tilts and fish inshore, also the 1,200 summer floaters who fish from vessels offshore. Only the 4,000 year-around white livyers (meaning live here) and the 1,500 Eskimos, half-breeds, Nascopie and Montagnais Indians could vote.

Last week the Marvita chugged into tiny Hebron, most northern of bleak Labrador's mission-trading posts. Parka-clad voters padded aboard to mark ballots, picking one of the five candidates--a fisherman, a clergyman, an ex-Ranger, two wireless operators--as Labrador's lone representative at next month's national convention in St. John's.

After eight hours at Hebron, the Marvita moved downshore to Nutak, then on to the Eskimo capital at Nain. Before the final count at Battle Harbour next month, she would stop at 37 Labrador hamlets hugging 800 miles of rugged coastline.

Tundra Trudgers. So sparsely settled is Labrador that at no point would more than 300 trudge over the tundra to vote. At Comfort Bight there were only two: Fisherman Stanley Green and his wife. At Henley Harbour there were 27, all named Stone. Bradley John Point's five were all Pottles, Northwest Island's 14 all Bakers.

Most of the Eskimo voters would be picked up offshore from the missions of the Moravian Brethren who came out from Germany to Christianize the Eskimos in 1764. Like the whites, the Eskimos are content to hug the coast. Their needs are few: cod, salmon, trout and seabirds for food, seal for their blubber lamps. They neither wash nor cook, and they have no need for roads. The sea is their kayak highway in summer; during the long winter, transport by husky-drawn komatik (sled) is fast and cheap.

The Indians would vote at places like Davis Inlet and Northwest River. There, in good seasons, they barter their prized Labrador mink and fox pelts; in bad seasons, pick up their Government dole. Only the Indians wage a battle for existence in the virtually unmapped, unknown interior, and they are losing. Where rigor and hardship have failed to decimate them, intermarriage and the ills brought by the white man have succeeded.

The Marvita has just about time enough to complete her job this season. Soon the Arctic ice would seal in the Labrador coast for the winter.

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