Most people think the initial activity in Canada's oil industry occurred in Oil Springs, Ontario, or Turner Valley, Alberta, where oil was discovered in 1857 and 1904, respectively. If you are talking about a petroleum oil boom, you are right.

A boom involving another kind of oil, however, took place in the Labrador fisheries off Canada's east coast, hundreds of years earlier. In the sixteenth century, a full-blown whale-oil industry existed on the coast of Labrador for about five generations, between the first voyages of Jacques Cartier in 1534 and those of Samuel de Champlain in 1603.

The 1970s scholar Selma Barkham found the remains of the fisheries and primitive refineries established by the Spanish Basques in Red Bay, Labrador. Nine whaling stations employed about two thousand whalers, who for six months of the year, hunted about twenty thousand bowhead and right whales, refined their oil, and supplied the product to the ports of Bristol, Southampton, London and Flanders.