Judging from all I’ve been able to glean from the history of retrievers and Newfoundland dogs, I think that the ancestor of them all looked much like this:
This image comes from the 1879 edition of The Dog in Health and Disease by John Henry Walsh (“Stonhenge”).
The dogs were then either crossed with setters, spaniels, and even collies and foxhounds to make the various British retriever breeds or then crossed with giant mastiff-type- like the proto-Great Pyrenees– to found the giant Newfoundland dog. Chesapeake bay retriever is derived from exactly the same stock, but there was a selection for the liver and brown-skinned red colors over the black, which was the preferred color for a British retriever.
These dogs came in both smooth and feathered coats, but the fishermen of Newfoundland and Labrador were eager to get rid of the feathered ones, as Lambert De Boilieu pointed out:
The dogs sent to England, with rough shaggy coats, are useless on the coast; the true-bred and serviceable dog having smooth, short hair, very close and compact to the body. I sent to England a fine specimen of these, but unfortunately the vessel which bore it had the misfortune to be wrecked on the north coast of Ireland, and all hands were lost.
The modern Labrador wasn’t really created until the 1880’s. However, there were records of “Labradors” well before that. The term was virtually interchangeable with the word “retriever” or “wavy-coated retriever.” It was also used to describe certain strains of the large Newfoundland, especially those with what we would call a Landseer phenotype, black and white and less heavily boned than the typical show Newfoundland. All of these dogs were also called Newfoundlands, which makes things even more confusing!.
There are mentions of “smooth” retrievers, which were almost always crossed with wavy-coated retrievers. The old wavy-coat is the progenitor of the flat-coated and golden retrievers, and at one time, you could get smooth and feathered pups in the same litter.The Rev. Thomas Pearce (“Idstone”) wrote about smooth retrievers and feathered ones in The Dog (1872):
There is the swooth-coated dog of the same family, and as useful an adept. The flat and shaggy, and the smooth-coated—I mean as short in the hair as a Mastiff—are sometimes found in one litter, and one of the best I ever saw was thus bred from Mr. Drax’s keeper’s old “Dinah” (imported), the father being also from Labrador [or Newfoundland]. “Jack” acknowledged no owner but Mr. Drax, and died in his service at Charborough Park. During the time he was in the squire’s service he must have carried more game than any team, or half-a-dozen teams, could draw, since every year he went the circuit of Mr. Drax’s manors and estates, and the two were as much heralds of each other in Kent, Dorset, or Yorkshire, as Wells and “Fisherman” when a Queen’s Plate was to be run for….
But the smooth-coated dog has a lighter eye—a pale hazel with an intensely black pupil, occasionally very like what is known as a “china” or “wall-eye.” Be that how it may, they are the best of all breeds for boating; they can stand all weathers, and though men unused to them call them butchers’ dogs, I think them handsome, and I know that they are sensible, and that the punt and shore men, living by adroit use of the long stauncheon gun and “flat,” look upon them as a part of their household, and in some cases—to quote the words of one old sporting farmer, to a duke who wanted to buy his horse— “no man has money enough to buy them” (pg. 128-129.).
We call this ancestral dog the St. John’s water dog, even though they were found throughout both Newfoundland and Labrador. They were usually imported from St. John’s, and they usually arrived in England through the port of Poole, which was a major base for the English cod fishery that frequented the Grand Banks every year.
These dogs became the breed for every family have, both in Britain and in North America. Their popularity spread also spread through Europe, where they were used to found the Leonberger and the Landseer breed that is recognized by the FCI.
With the heightened popularity of retrievers in the past 30 years, we’re essentially repeating that history. This time we’re going for different descendants of the old Newfoundland water dog.
But we going with them nonetheless.
See related post:
You taught me somethings we didn’t know about our Hurley!