Payne Lake is a
lake
A lake is often a naturally occurring, relatively large and fixed body of water on or near the Earth's surface. It is localized in a basin or interconnected basins surrounded by dry land. Lakes lie completely on land and are separate from ...
on the
Ungava Peninsula of northern
Quebec
Quebec is Canada's List of Canadian provinces and territories by area, largest province by area. Located in Central Canada, the province shares borders with the provinces of Ontario to the west, Newfoundland and Labrador to the northeast, ...
, and the main source of the
Arnaud River
The Arnaud River (formerly known as the Payne River) is a river in Nunavik, Quebec, Canada, flowing from the low plateaux of the Ungava Peninsula through a series of glacial lakes to Ungava Bay. Its mean discharge is approximately per year, but ...
. It lies at an elevation of
[ and is long and wide, covering an area of .][ The lake is named after Frank F. Payne, an English-born meteorologist who explored and operated a weather station in the ]Hudson Strait
Hudson Strait () in Nunavut links the Atlantic Ocean and the Labrador Sea to Hudson Bay in Canada. This strait lies between Baffin Island and Nunavik, with its eastern entrance marked by Cape Chidley in Newfoundland and Labrador and Nunavut ...
area in the 1880s. The Inuit
Inuit (singular: Inuk) are a group of culturally and historically similar Indigenous peoples traditionally inhabiting the Arctic and Subarctic regions of North America and Russia, including Greenland, Labrador, Quebec, Nunavut, the Northwe ...
call the lake ''Tasirruaq'' (also previously transliterated as ''Tasurak''), or the great lake.[
The lake features excellent fishing for ]lake trout
The lake trout (''Salvelinus namaycush'') is a freshwater Salvelinus, char living mainly in lakes in Northern North America. Other names for it include mackinaw, namaycush, lake char (or charr), touladi, togue, laker, and grey trout. In Lake Sup ...
, and also contains brook trout
The brook trout (''Salvelinus fontinalis'') is a species of freshwater fish in the char genus ''Salvelinus'' of the salmon family Salmonidae native to Eastern North America in the United States and Canada. Two ecological forms of brook trout h ...
and landlocked arctic char
The Arctic char or Arctic charr (''Salvelinus alpinus'') is a cold-water fish in the family Salmonidae, native to alpine lakes, as well as Arctic and subarctic coastal waters in the Holarctic realm, Holarctic.
Distribution and habitat
It Spaw ...
. Caribou
The reindeer or caribou (''Rangifer tarandus'') is a species of deer with circumpolar distribution, native to Arctic, subarctic, tundra, boreal, and mountainous regions of Northern Europe, Siberia, and North America. It is the only represe ...
are found in the region.
In 1948, the first European expedition to reach Payne Lake discovered ruins that they attributed to the Dorset culture
The Dorset was a Paleo-Eskimo culture, lasting from to between and , that followed the Pre-Dorset and preceded the Thule people (proto-Inuit) in the North American Arctic. The culture and people are named after Cape Dorset (now Kinngait) in ...
. In 1965, Thomas E. Lee re-investigated the ruins and advanced the theory that they were of Norse pre-Columbian origin. Lee's interpretation of other sites on the Ungava coast as being Norse settlements has been rejected by other archaeologists, who have found that they are more plausibly associated with the Dorset.[
]
References
{{Canada topic, List of lakes of
Nunavik
Lakes of Nord-du-Québec