---
title: "Nine miles from normal: Battle Harbour, the ghost island that still takes guests"
description: "Once the saltfish capital of the world, a half-mile of Labrador rock keeps its dead on the wharf and its doors open to travellers"
author: "Jan Sokol"
published: 2026-10-21T12:00:56.949Z
modified: 2026-10-21T15:31:45Z
url: https://rews.cc/a/nine-miles-from-normal-battle-harbour-the-ghost-island-that--34dcc0
language: en
tags: ["travel", "history", "canada", "tourism", "labrador", "world"]
publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)"
---

# Nine miles from normal: Battle Harbour, the ghost island that still takes guests

*Once the saltfish capital of the world, a half-mile of Labrador rock keeps its dead on the wharf and its doors open to travellers*

By Jan Sokol · October 21, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/nine-miles-from-normal-battle-harbour-the-ghost-island-that--34dcc0

## In brief

- Battle Harbour, a half-mile island off Labrador, once the world’s saltfish capital, now operates as a summer heritage retreat with no mobile service
- At its peak the island had a hospital, school, church, wireless station, about 300 permanent residents and thousands of seasonal fishermen
- A 1930 fire, falling stocks, 1960s resettlement and the 1992 cod moratorium, which cost 30,000 jobs, emptied the island by the 1970s
- Robert Peary announced his claimed 1909 North Pole attainment from the Salt Store loft, transmitting via the island’s Marconi station
- Two-night packages for two start at C$1,570; the trust is raising C$200,000 to restore North America’s last surviving pair of Marconi towers

The fishermen are waiting on the wharf, sleeves rolled, knives over the cod, the merchants behind them in their suits, everyone arranged for the photograph. But nobody moves, and everybody is grey. They have been dead for more than a century. They are cardboard now, life-sized, cut from archival pictures taken around 1900, when this half-mile of rock off the Labrador coast was the saltfish capital of the world. This is how [Jennifer Bain, writing for BBC Travel](https://bbc.com/travel/article/20261015-battle-harbour-canadas-ghost-island-where-guests-still-check-in), finds herself welcomed to Battle Harbour, a place that describes itself, proudly, as “nine miles from normal”.

Welcome, says Peter Bull, executive director of the Battle Harbour Historic Trust, and then the litany of a place where time has been stopped and carefully wound again: lunch at 12:30, a tour at 13:30, an Arctic fox family in the old cemetery, two historic wireless towers in need of saving, no mobile phone service, one communal Wi-Fi spot, sunrise at 06:19. In the hallway hangs a walkie-talkie — the emergency system. “If there’s a problem in the nighttime, if you’re sick or hurt or anything, just press this square button,” Wanda Fifield instructs. “You tell them your problem. You tell them that you’re staying at the Merchant Building because they’ll need to know what cottage to go to.”

![Three men display fish on a wooden dock beside a fishing shack with a glowing doorway, overlooking boats, rocky islands, and a misty coastal village.](https://rews.cc/img/83255068f4b0f9e0c91d5f6bf2262abca49ce202.webp)

## The road to the end of the road

Empires of fish are not reached easily. You fly to Happy Valley-Goose Bay, on mainland Labrador, then drive five hours down the forest-flanked Expedition 51° highway, hoping for a moose, yearning for an outhouse, finding no services of any kind for most of the way. At Mary’s Harbour a small passenger boat — luggage sometimes stacked in the bathroom — makes the 14.5-kilometre crossing, sixty to seventy-five minutes past craggy coastline and near-shore islands, with gulls, kittiwakes and gannets alongside, and sometimes icebergs, humpbacks and minkes. The island that emerges is hard to credit as a former capital of anything. Yet in the 1770s the English merchant John Slade built a trading operation here that opened onto Labrador’s richest fishing grounds, and salt cod went out from this speck to Europe, the Caribbean and beyond. At its peak Battle Harbour held a hospital, a school, a church and a wireless station, a permanent population of around 300, and thousands more seasonal fishermen — floaters who lived on schooners, stationers who threw up temporary shacks ashore.

## How an island dies

The death came in instalments, as it usually does. A devastating fire in 1930. Declining fish stocks. A provincial resettlement programme in the 1960s that emptied such places by policy, moving people off the small islands toward larger centres. By the 1970s the last year-round residents had gone. The final blow arrived on 2 July 1992, when the federal government’s cod moratorium closed the northern cod fishery and threw 30,000 people across Newfoundland and Labrador out of work in a single announcement. It has been more than half a century since anyone lived on Battle Harbour all year.

![A woodcut-style coastal scene shows wooden fish-drying racks with hanging nets on rocky shores, dark water, and small fishing huts beneath a cloudy sky.](https://rews.cc/img/fe40cafcc38a0975bba47b2204da084cfb190538.webp)

And yet the island refuses to vanish entirely, because certain men refuse to let it. Bull’s grandfather fished this coast; Bull has worked here since 2013, summering on the island and carrying back to St John’s each September enough cod, squid, mackerel and bakeapple and partridgeberry to last a winter. “When I die, my ashes are going to spread out where I pick partridgeberries,” he confides, “and I’m going to come back as a partridgeberry.” Nelson Smith helped restore the historic buildings and has led tours here for nearly three decades. “Every building is going to smell different because of the different stuff stored in them,” he promises in a thick Labradorian accent. “If you hears me say a word you don’t understand, stop me and I’ll try to explain it to you.”

## The rooms

In Newfoundland English the cluster of musty buildings is called the rooms; each store is named for what it once held. The Pork Store smells faintly of molasses. The Salt Store keeps the mineral that preserved the cod. More cutouts stand along the way — a dapper merchant, a young fisherman in his wooden boat, an older one beside his cod trap. “The best way I likes my saltfish is two years old,” Smith offers, explaining how the catch was cleaned, salted and dried on the raised open-air platforms called flakes. In the Salt Store’s loft, the American explorer Robert E Peary held two press conferences in 1909 to announce he had reached the North Pole, and sent his first account from the nearby Marconi station to the New York Times. Even the pole, it turns out, passed through this island on its way into print.

![A woodcut-style scene shows a dried fish, a crate of salt, and a telegraph key inside a wooden hut overlooking icy water and mountains.](https://rews.cc/img/bf4b7365b0f08acdbd259cf3bf9b28e7268e52f1.webp)

Guests sleep among this. Sixteen private summer residences share the island with five restored cottages and thirteen inn rooms, including the Merchant Building’s Harry Smith Room, named for an employee of the old general store: a quilt on a wooden bed, a space heater against the lingering chill, no television, the only sound the quiet. The guestbook entries read like messages in bottles — “Best view on the island. The iceberg was framed by our window.” “Something you have to experience rather than explain.” “So much serenity.” Dinner is Labrador char, pan-fried cod and moose pot pie at communal tables; the night is spent watching for the Northern Lights; sunrise is spent on the dirt path to the old cemetery, where foxes slip out of their den on the rocky hillside.

## The towers and the memory of wood

The Battle Harbour Footpath runs 1.9 kilometres past a newer cemetery and a memorial to three men killed in a 1976 seaplane crash. Two local boys stumbled on the wreckage, some of which still lies on the ground; one of those boys was Nelson Smith. At the path’s end stand the Marconi towers, built in 1906 and rebuilt in 1931, the last surviving pair of their kind in North America, once guiding mariners and carrying messages by Marconi’s wireless telegraph. “They’re pretty special and they’re an important part of the skyline here,” Bull says. The trust is trying to raise C$200,000 (£106,000/$140,000) to repair them.

When the wind permits, a small boat runs to Cape St Charles, the most easterly point of continental North America, and across the tickle — the channel — to Great Caribou Island, where Tanya Russell, the local postmistress and amateur photographer, can be found in a blueberry patch. The site is open to guests only about three months a year, June into early September; a two-night package for two begins at C$1,570 (£835; $1,106), ferry, meals and a guided tour included. The rest of the year the island belongs to the cutouts on the wharf, forever mid-gesture over the cod, and to whatever memory the wind agrees to keep. A man who wishes to return as a partridgeberry has made his arrangements. The island, it seems, has made its own.