With Grenfell on the Labrador

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Title: With Grenfell on the Labrador
Author: Waldo, Fullerton Leonard
Language: English
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LABRADOR ***

WITH GRENFELL ON THE
LABRADOR

[Illustration: DR. GRENFELL, A.B.
(Three ratlins were broken on the ascent).]

WITH GRENFELL ON
THE LABRADOR

BY
FULLERTON L. WALDO

_ILLUSTRATED_

[Illustration]

NEW YORK CHICAGO
Fleming H. Revell Company
LONDON AND EDINBURGH

New York: 158 Fifth Avenue
Chicago: 17 North Wabash Ave.
London: 21 Paternoster Square
Edinburgh: 75 Princes Street

DORIS KENYON

COMPANY L., 307th INFANTRY,
77th DIVISION;

HONORARY SERGEANT, U.S.A.

FOREWORD

Aboard the _Strathcona_,
Red Bay, Labrador, Sept. 9, 1919.
DEAR WALDO:

It has been great having you on board for a time. I wish you could stay
and see some other sections of the work. When you joined us I hesitated
at first, thinking perhaps it would be better to show you the poorer
parts of our country, and not the better off—but decided to let you
drop in and drop out again of the ordinary routine, and not bother to
‘show you sights.’ Still I am sorry that you did not see some other
sections of the people. There is to me in life always an infinite
satisfaction in accomplishing anything. I don’t care so much what it is.
But if it has involved real anxiety, especially as to the possibility of
success, it always returns to me a prize worth while.

Well, you have been over some parts, where things have somehow
materialized. The reindeer experiment I also estimate an accomplished
success, as it completely demonstrated our predictions, and as it is now
in good hands and prospering. The Seamen’s Institute, in having become
self-supporting and now demanding more space, has also been a real
encouragement to go ahead in other lines. But there is one thing better
than accomplishment, and that is opportunity; as the problem is better
than the joy of writing Q. E. D.

So I would have liked to show you White Bay as far as La Scie, where our
friends are fighting with few assets, and many discouragements. It
certainly has left them poor, and often hungry and naked, but it has
made men of them, and they have taught me many lessons; and it would do
your viewpoint good to see how many debts these people place me under.

If life is the result of stimuli, believe me we ought to know what life
means in a country where you are called on to create every day
something, big or small. On the other hand, if life consists of the
multitude of things one possesses, then Labrador should be graded far
from where I place it, in its relation to Philadelphia.

A thousand thanks for coming so far to give us your good message of
brotherly sympathy.

Yours sincerely,
WILFRED T. GRENFELL.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

FOREWORD, by Doctor Grenfell 7
I “DOCTOR” 15
II A FISHER OF MEN 27
III AT ST. ANTHONY 39
IV ALL IN THE DAY’S WORK 53
V THE CAPTAIN OF INDUSTRY 78
VI THE SPORTSMAN 97
VII THE MAN OF SCIENCE 106
VIII THE MAN OF LAW 114
IX THE MAN OF GOD 119
X SOME OF HIS HELPERS 130
XI FOUR-FOOTED AIDES: DOGS AND 139
REINDEER
XII A WIDE, WIDE “PARISH” 150
XIII A FEW “PARISHIONERS” 173
XIV NEEDS, BIG AND LITTLE 183

[Illustration: LABRADOR AND NEWFOUNDLAND
PREPARED FOR DR. WILFRED T. GRENFELL, C.M.G.
_From “AMONG THE DEEP SEA FISHERS”_
_By Courtesy of The Grenfell Association of America_]

ILLUSTRATIONS

PAGE
Dr. Grenfell, A.B. Title
Fritz and His Master 38
“Doctor” 38
Battle Harbour, Spreading Fish for 60
Drying
“Please Look at My Tongue, Doctor” 98
“Next” 98
Dr. Grenfell Leading Meeting at 120
Battle Harbour
St. Anthony Hospital in Winter 134
Some of the Helpers 134
Signal Hill, Harbour of St. Johns 150
Happy Days at the Orphanage St. 180
Anthony

I
“DOCTOR”

Grenfell and Labrador are names that must go down in history together.
Of the man and of his sea-beaten, wind-swept “parish” it will be said,
as Kipling wrote of Cecil Rhodes:

“Living he was the land, and dead
His soul shall be her soul.”

Some folk may try to tell us that Wilfred Thomason Grenfell, C.M.G.,
gets more credit than is due him: but while they cavil and insinuate the
Recording Angel smiles and writes down more golden deeds for this
descendant of an Elizabethan sea-dog. Sir Richard Grenville, of the
_Revenge_, as Tennyson tells us—stood off sixty-three ships of Spain’s
Armada, and was mortally wounded in the fight, crying out as he fell
upon the deck: “I have only done my duty, as a man is bound to do.” That
tradition of heroic devotion to duty, and of service to mankind, is
ineradicable from the Grenfell blood.

“We’ve had a hideous winter,” the Doctor said, as I clasped hands with
him in June at the office of the Grenfell Association in New York. His
hair was whiter and his bronzed face more serious than when I last had
seen him; but the unforgettable look in his eyes of resolution and of
self-command was there as of old, intensified by the added years of
warfare with belligerent nature and sometimes recalcitrant mankind. For
a few moments when he talks sentence may link itself to sentence very
gravely, but nobody ever knew the Doctor to go long without that keen,
bright flash of a smile, provoked by a ready and a constant sense of
fun, that illumines his face like a pulsation of the Northern Lights,
and—unless you are hard as steel at heart—must make you love him, and
do what he wants you to do.

The Doctor on this occasion was a month late for his appointment with
the board of directors of the Grenfell Association. His little steamer,
the _Strathcona_, had been frozen in off his base of operations and
inspirations at St. Anthony. So he started afoot for Conch to catch a
launch that would take him to the railroad. He was three days covering a
distance which in summer would have required but a few hours, in the
direction of White Bay on the East Coast. He slept on the beach in wet
clothes. Then he was caught on pans of ice and fired guns to attract the
notice of any chance vessel. Once more ashore, he vainly started five
times more from St. Anthony harbour. Finally he went north and walked
along the coast, cutting across when he could, eighty miles to Flower’s
Cove. In the meantime the _Strathcona_, with Mrs. Grenfell aboard, was
imprisoned in the ice on the way to Seal Harbour; and it was three weeks
before Mrs. Grenfell, with the aid of two motor-boats, reached the
railroad by way of Shoe Cove.

At Flower’s Cove the Doctor rapped at the door of Parson Richards. That
good man fairly broke into an alleluia to behold him. With beaming face
he started to prepare his hero a cup of tea. But there came a cry at the
door: “Abe Gould has shot himself in the leg!”

Out into the cold and the dark again the Doctor stumbled. He put his
hand into the leg and took out the bone and the infected parts with such
instruments as he had. Then he sat up all night, feeding his patient
sleeping potions of opium. With the day came the mail-boat for the
south, the Ethie, beaten back from two desperate attempts to penetrate
the ice of the Strait to Labrador.

Two months later I rejoined the Doctor at Croucher’s wharf, at Battle
Harbour, Labrador.

The little _Strathcona_, snuggling against the piles, was redolent of
whalemeat for the dogs, her decks piled high with spruce and fir, white
birch and juniper, for her insatiable fires. (Coal was then $24 a ton.)

“Where’ve you been all this time?” the Doctor cried, as I flung my
belongings to his deck from the _Ethie’s_ mail-boat, and he held out
both hands with his radiant smile of greeting. “I’m just about to make
the rounds of the hospital. This is a busy day. We pull out for St.
Anthony tonight!” With that he took me straight to the bedside of his
patients in the little Battle Harbour hospital that wears across its
battered face the legend: “Inasmuch as ye did it unto one of the least
of these my brethren ye did it unto me.”

The first man was recovering from typhoid, and the Doctor, with a smile,
was satisfied with his convalescence.

The next man complained of a pain in the abdomen. Dr. Grenfell inquired
about the intensity of the pain, the temperature, the appetite and the
sleep of the patient.

“He has two of the four cardinal symptoms,” said the Doctor, “pain and
temperature. Probably it’s an appendical attack. We had a boy who—like
this man—looked all right outwardly, and yet was found to have a bad
appendix.”

The Doctor has a way of thinking aloud as he goes along, and taking
others into his confidence—frequently by an interrogation which is
flattering in the way in which he imputes superior knowledge to the one
of whom the question is asked. It is a liberal education in the healing
craft to go about with him, for he is never secretive or mysterious—he
is frankly human instead of oracular.

“How about your schooner?” was his next question. “Do you think that
they can get along without you?”

He never forgets that these are fishermen, whose livelihood depends on
getting every hour they can with their cod-traps, and the stages and the
flakes where the fish is salted and spread to dry.

The third patient was a whaler. He had caught his hand in a winch. The
bones of the second and third fingers of the right hand were cracked,
and the tips of those fingers had been cut off. The hand lay in a hot
bath.

“Dirty work, whaling,” was the Doctor’s comment, as he examined the
wound. “Everything is rotten meat and a wound easily becomes infected.”

Number four was a baffling case of multiple gangrene. This Bonne Bay
fisherman had a nose and an ear that looked as if they had turned to
black rubber. His toes were sloughing off. The back of his right hand
was like raw beef. His left leg was bent at an angle of 90 degrees, and
as it could not bear the pressure of the bedclothes a scaffolding had
been built over it. The teeth were gone, and when the dressings were
removed even the plucking of the small hairs on the leg gave the patient
agony.

“What have you been eating?”

“Potatoes, sir.”

“What else?”

“Turnips, sir.”

“You need green food. Fresh vegetable salts.”

The Doctor looked out of the window and saw a dandelion in the rank
green grass. “That’s what he ought to have,” was his comment.

On the verandah were four out-of-door patients to whom fresh air was
essential. One had a tubercular spine. A roll of plaster had been coming
by freight all summer long and was impatiently awaited. But a delay of
months on the Labrador is nothing unusual. Dr. Daly, of Harvard,
presented the _Strathcona_ with a searchlight, and it was two years on
the way—most of that time stored in a warehouse at North Sydney.

Around these fresh-air cases the verandah was netted with rabbit-wire.
That was to keep the dogs from breaking in and possibly eating the
patients, who are in mortal terror of the dogs.

When the Doctor took a probe from the hand of a trusted assistant he was
careful to ask if it was sterile ere he used it. He constantly took his
juniors—in this instance, Johns Hopkins doctors—into consultation.
“What do you think?” was his frequent query.

The use of unhallowed patent medicines gave him distress. “O the stuff
the people put into themselves!” he exclaimed.

“Have we got a Dakin solution?” he asked presently.

“We’ve been trying to get a chloramine solution all summer,” answered
one of the young physicians.

The Doctor made a careful examination of the man with the tubercular
spine, who was encased in plaster from the waist up. “After all,” was
his comment as he rose to his feet, “doctors don’t do anything but keep
things clean.”

In the women’s ward the Harris Cot, the Torquay Cot, the Northfield Cot,
the Victoria Cot, the Kingman Cot, the Exeter Cot were filled with
patient souls whose faces shone as the Doctor passed. “More fresh air!”
he ejaculated, and other windows were opened. Those who came from homes
hermetically sealed have not always understood the Doctor’s passion for
ozone. One man complained that the wind got in his teeth and a girl said
that the singing on Sundays strained her stomach.

He had a remarkable memory for the history of each case. “The day after
you left her heart started into fibrillation,” said an assistant. “It
was there before we left,” answered the Doctor quietly.

At one bedside where an operation of a novel nature had been performed
he remarked, “I simply hate leaving an opening when I don’t know how to
close it.”

He never pretends to know it all: he never sits down with folded hands
in the face of a difficulty or “passes the buck” to another. In his
running commentary while he looks the patient over he confesses his
perplexities. Yet all that he says confirms rather than shakes the
patient’s confidence in him. Those whom he serves almost believe that he
can all but raise the dead.

“Now this rash,” he said, “might mean the New World smallpox—but
probably it doesn’t. We’ve only had two deaths from that malady on the
coast. It ran synchronously with the ‘flu.’ In one household where there
were three children and a man, one child and the man got it and two
children escaped it.

“This woman’s ulcers are the sequel to smallpox. She needs the vegetable
salts of a fresh diet. How to get green things for her is the problem.
And this patient has tubercular caries of the hip. The X-ray apparatus
is across the Straits at St. Anthony, sixty miles away. If we only had a
portable X-ray apparatus of the kind they used in the war! Now you see,
no matter what the weather, this woman must be taken across the Straits
because we are entirely without the proper appliances here.”

Screens were put around the cots as the examination was made, so that
the others wouldn’t be harrowed by the sight of blood or pain.

The sick seemed to find comfort merely in being able to describe their
symptoms to a wise, good man. Much of the trouble seemed actually to
evaporate as they talked to him. Miss Dohme and the other nurses kept
the rooms spotlessly clean, and gay bowls of buttercups were about.

“I don’t feel nice, Doctor,” said the next woman. “Some mornings a kind
of dead, dreary feeling seems to come out of me stummick and go right
down me laigs. Sometimes it flutters; sometimes it lies down. The wind’s
wonderful strong today, and it’s rising.”

Usually the diagnosis is not greatly helped by the patient, who meekly
answers the questions with “Yes, Doctor,” or “No, Doctor,” or describes
the symptoms with such poetic vagueness that a great deal is left to the
imagination. It takes patient cross-questioning—in which the Doctor is
an adept—to elicit the truth.

Here is a dear little baby, warmly muffled, on the piazza with the
elixir of the sun and the pine air. The pustular eczema has been treated
with ammoniate of mercury—but what will happen when the infant goes
home to the old malnutrition and want of sanitation? If only the Doctor
could follow the case!

Bathtubs are a mystery to some of the patients, who after they have been
undressed and led to the water’s edge ask plaintively, “What do you want
me to do now?”

So many times in this little hospital one was smitten by the need of
green vegetables which in so many places are not to be had—“greens”
(like spinach), lettuce, radishes and the rest.

As we came away the Doctor spoke of the feeling that he used to have
that wherever a battle for the right was on anywhere he must take part
in it. “But I have learned that they also serve who simply do their duty
in their places. These dogs hereabouts seem to think they must go to
every fight there is, near or far. But none of us is called upon to do
all there is to do. I often read of happenings in distant parts of the
earth and feel as though I ought to be there in the thick of things.
Then I realize that if we all minded our own business exactly where we
are we’d be doing well. And when such thoughts come to me I just make up
my mind to be contented and to buckle down to my job all the harder.”

II
A FISHER OF MEN

That evening Dr. Grenfell spoke in the little Church of England, taking
as his text the words from the twelfth chapter of John: “The spirit that
is ruling in this world shall be driven out.” Across the tickle the
huskies howled at the moon, and one after another took up the challenge
from either bank. But one was no longer conscious of the wailful
creatures, and heard only the speaker; and the kerosene lamps lighted
one by one in the gloom of the church became blurred stars, and the
woman sitting behind me in a loud whisper said, “Yes! yes!” as Dr.
Grenfell, in the earnest and true words of a man who speaks for the
truth’s sake and not for self’s sake, interpreted the Scriptures that he
has studied with such devotion.

“When I was young,” he said, “I learned that man is descended from a
monkey, and I was told that there is no God.

“When I became older and did my own thinking I refused to believe that
God chose one race of mankind and left the rest to be damned.

“No one has the whole truth, whether he be Church of England, Methodist
or Roman Catholic.

“The simple truth of Christianity is what the world needs. How foolish
seem the tinsel and trumpery distinctions for which men struggle! What
is the use of being able to string the alphabet along after your name?
Character is all that counts.

“Some say that religion is for the saving of your soul. But it is not a
grab for the prizes of this world, and the capital prize of the life
eternal.

“The things the world holds to be large, Christ tells us, are small.
Jesus says the greatest things are truth and love.

“Love is so big a thing that it forgets self utterly.

“How many of us know what it is to love? It is not mere animal desire.

“If we all truly loved, what a world it would be!

“Suppose a doctor loved all his patients. He wouldn’t be satisfied then
to say: ‘Your leg is better,’ or ‘Here is a pill.’

“Suppose a clergyman loved his people. He wouldn’t say: ‘I wonder how
many in this congregation are Church of England.’

“God Himself is love and truth. Jesus lived the beautiful things He
taught. He was them.

“Every man has something in him that forces him to love what is
unselfish and true and altogether lovely and of good report.

“In the war, in the midst of all the horror and the terror and the pity
of it, a noble spirit was made manifest among men—a heroic spirit of
self-control and a sense of true values.

“If I couldn’t have a palace I could have a clean house; if I couldn’t
speak foreign languages I needn’t speak foul language. We may be poor
fishermen or poor London doctors: we can serve in our places, and we can
let our lives shine before men. If I have done my duty where I am, I
don’t care about the rest. I shall not care if they leave my old body on
the Labrador coast or at the bottom of the Atlantic for the fishes, if I
have fought the good fight and finished the course. Having lived well, I
shall die contented.”

As soon as the service in the church was over a meeting was held in the
upper room of the hospital. The room was filled, and Dr. Grenfell spoke
again. Before his address familiar hymns were sung, and—noting that two
of those present had violins and were accompanying the cabinet organ—he
referred to their efforts in his opening words.

“We all have the great duty and privilege of common human friendliness,”
he said. “We may show it in the little things of every day. For
everybody needs help, everywhere. There is no end to the need of human
sympathy. It may be shown with a fiddle—or perhaps I ought to say
‘violin’ (apologizing to a Harvard student who was officiating).

“I have always loved Kim in Kipling’s story of that name. Kim is just a
waif. Nobody knows who his father is; but he is called ‘the little
friend of all the world.’

“There is a book which has found wide acceptance called ‘Mrs. Wiggs of
the Cabbage Patch.’ Mrs. Wiggs lived in a humble cottage with only her
cabbage patch, but everybody came to her for sunshine and healing. She
had plenty of troubles of her own, but just because she had them she
knew how to help others. Whoever we are, whatever we are, we may wear
the shining armour of the knights of God: there is work waiting for our
hands to do, there is good cheer for us to spread.”

Dreamer and doer live side by side in amity in Dr. Grenfell’s make-up.
At the animated dinner-table of the nurses and the doctors in the Battle
Harbour hospital, after asking a blessing, he was talking eagerly about
the League of Nations, the industrial situation in England and America
and the future for Russia while brandishing the knife above the meat pie
and letting no plate but his own go neglected.

Dr. Grenfell is happy and his soul is free at the wheel of the
_Strathcona_. That wheel bears the words, “Jesus saith, Follow me and I
will make you fishers of men.” At the peak of the mainmast is likely to
be the blue pennant bearing the words, “God is Love.” The _Strathcona_
is ketch-rigged. Her mainmast, that is to say, is in the foremast’s
place; and above the mainsail is a new oblong topsail that is the
Doctor’s dear delight. The other sail has above it a topsail of orthodox
pattern, and there are two jibs. So that when she has her full
fuel-saving complement of canvas spread, the _Strathcona_ displays six
sails at work. Could the Doctor always have his way, all the sails would
be up whenever a breeze stirs. With a good wind the ship is capable of
eight knots and even more an hour: five knots or so is her average speed
under steam alone. In the bow, his paws on the rail, or out on the
bowsprit sniffing the air and seeing things that only he can see, is the
incomparable dog Fritz—Fritz of “57 varieties”—brown and black, like
toast that was burned in the making. No one knows the prevailing
ancestry of Fritz, but a strain of Newfoundland is suspected. He will
take a chance on swimming ashore if we cast anchor within half a mile of
it, though the water is near congealment, and he knows that a pack of
his wolfish brethren is ready to dispute the shoreline with him when he
clambers out dripping upon the stony beach with seaweed in his hair.
When he swims back to the ship again his seal-like head is barely above
the waves as he paddles about, a mute appeal in his brown eyes for a
bight of rope to be hitched about his body to help him aboard.

Dr. Grenfell keeps unholy hours, and dawn is one of his favourite
out-door sports. He may nominally have retired at twelve—which is
likely to mean that he began to read a book at that hour. He may have
risen at two, three and four to see how the wind lay and the sea
behaved: and perhaps five o’clock will find him at the wheel,
bareheaded, the wind ruffling the silver locks above his ruddy
countenance, his grey-brown eyes—which are like the stone labradorite
in the varying aspects they take on—watching the horizon, the swaying
bowsprit, the compass, and the goodness of God in the heavens.

The Doctor is a great out-of-doors man. He scorns a hat, and in his own
element abjures it utterly. He wears a brown sweater, high in the neck,
and above it he smokes a briarwood pipe that is usually right side up
but appears to give him just as much satisfaction when the bowl is
inverted. The rest of his costume is a symphony of grey or brown,
patched or threadbare but neat always, ending in boots high or low of
red rubber or of leather.

You may think that the dog Fritz out on the bowsprit is enjoying all the
morning there is, but the Doctor is transformed.

“I love these early mornings,” he says—and he is innocent of pose when
he says it: it is not a mere literary emotion. “It’s a beautiful sight
in autumn with the ice when the banks are red with the little hills
clear-cut against the sky and the sea a deep, deep blue. Isn’t it a
beautiful world to live in? Isn’t it fun to live?”

You have to admit that it is.

“A man can’t think just of stomachs all the time. Sometimes I have to go
away for a day or two. But I can’t say when I’ve ever been tired.

“A great little ship she is. She is very human to me. She has done her
bit—she has carried her load. On that small deck and down below we once
took 56 Finns from the wreck of the _Viking_ off Hamilton Inlet. We had
nothing but biscuit and dry caplin on which to feed them. Once we were
caught in a storm with seven schooners. We had 60 fathoms out on two
chains for our anchors. Six of the other seven ships went ashore. Then
the seventh overturned—ours was the only ship that stood. All of a
sudden our main steampipe burst. We had to use cold sea-water. It was a
hard struggle to bring our ship into shallow water at 1½ fathoms.
Another time we had to tow 19 small boats at once.

“We always have something up our sleeve to get out of trouble.”

Then suddenly spying other vessels with their sails up, Dr. Grenfell
proceeds to study them for a lesson as to the way his own ship is to
take. He calls out to Albert Ash, his pessimistic mate, “She’s
well-ballasted, that two-master. Have those others tacked?” His talk
runs on easily as he swings the ship about and the sails are bellying
with a favouring breeze. “This wind’ll run out three knots. I’m cheating
it up into the wind. We’ll let her go by a bit. This is Chimney Tickle
in here. A beautiful harbour. The tide and the polar current meet here.
It’s always open water. It’s the place they’re thinking of for a
transatlantic harbour. It’s only 1,625 miles from here to Galway. The
jib and mainsail aren’t doing the work. That man has no idea of trimming
a jib!” He rushes out to the wheelhouse and does most of the work of
setting the mainsail himself.

“I’m so fond of those words ‘The sea is His,’” he says, coming back to
the spokes again. “I think it runs in the blood. I like to think of the
old sea-dogs—like Frobisher and Drake and Cabot. Shackleton told Mrs.
Grenfell that the first ship that came to Labrador was named the
_Grenfell_.”

“The comings and goings of the _Strathcona_ mean much to these people,”
said Dr. McConnell. “At Independence a woman met us on the wharf, the
great tears rolling down her cheeks. She lost her husband and her son in
the ‘flu’ epidemic. She told me that her son said to her: ‘Mother, if
Dr. Grenfell were only here, he could save me.’ At Snack Cove the people
went out on the rocks and cried bitterly when the _Strathcona_ passed
them by—as we learned when to their great relief we dropped in upon
them a fortnight later.”

We cast anchor at Pleasure Harbour because of rough weather and for a
few hours had one of the Doctor’s all too infrequent play-times, while
waiting for the Strait to abate its fury to permit of a possible
crossing.

Here a delicious trout stream tumbled and swirled from sullen, mist-hung
uplands into a piratical cove where two small schooners swung at anchor.
Like so many of these places the cove was a complete surprise—you came
round the rock with no hint that it was there till you found it, placid
as a tarn and deep and black, with big blue hills stretching to the
northward beyond the fuzzy fringes of the nearer trees and the mottled
barrens where the clouds were poised and the ghosts of the mist
descended. (A tuneful, sailor-like name it is that the Eskimoes give to
a ghost—the “Yo-ho”: and they say that the Northern Lights are the
spirits of the dead at play).

An unhandy person with a rod, I was allowed by Dr. Grenfell and Dr.
McConnell to go ahead and spoil the nicest trout-pools with my fly. Even
though cod fishermen at the mouth of the stream had unlawfully placed a
net to keep the trout from ascending, there were plenty of trout in the
brook, and in the course of several hours forty-nine were good enough to
attach themselves to my line. The banks were soggy under the long green
grass: the water was acutely cold: and in two places there were small
fields of everlasting snow in angles of the rock. It was an ideal
trout-brook, for it was full of swirling black eddies, rippling rapids,
and deep, still pools. The brook began at a lake which was roughened by
a wind blowing steadily toward us. Dr. Grenfell cast against the wind
where the lake discharged its contents into the brook, and the line was
swept back to his boots. With unwearying patience he cast again and
again, and while I strove in vain to land a single fish from the lake he
caught one monster after another, almost at his own feet. All the way up
the brook he had successfully fished in the most unpromising places,
that we had given over with little effort, and here he was again getting
by far the best results in the most difficult places of all. There
seemed to be a parallel here with his medical and spiritual enterprise
on the Labrador. He has worked for poor and humble people, when others
have asked impatiently: “Why do you throw away your life upon a handful
of fishermen round about a bleak and uncomfortable island where people
have no business to live anyway?” He could not leave the fishermen’s
stage at the mouth of the brook this time without being called upon to
examine a fisherman troubled by failing eyesight. On the run of a couple
of hundred yards in a rowboat to the _Strathcona_ the thunder-clouds
rolled up, with lightning, and as we set foot on board the deluge came.

[Illustration: FRITZ AND HIS MASTER.]

[Illustration: “DOCTOR.”]

III
AT ST. ANTHONY

Next evening found us at St. Anthony. Doctors and nurses were on the
wharf to greet their chief after his absence of several weeks. Dr.
Curtis showed the stranger through the clean and well-appointed
hospital, with its piazza for a sun-bath and the bonny air for the T. B.
patients, its X-ray apparatus and its operating room, its small museum
of souvenirs of remarkable operations. I saw Dr. Andrews of San
Francisco perform with singular deftness an operation for congenital
cataract, with a docile little girl who had been blind a long time, and
whose sight would probably be completely restored by the two thrusts
made with a needle at the sides of the cornea. Her eyes were bandaged
and she was carried away by the nurse, broadly smiling, to await the
outcome. For ten years or so this noted oculist, no longer young except
in the spirit, has crossed the continent to spend the summer in
volunteer service at St. Anthony—a fair type of the men that are
naturally drawn to the work in which the Doctor found his life.

One of the St. Anthony doctors visiting out-patients came upon a woman
who was carefully wrapped in paper. This explanation was offered: “If us
didn’t use he, the bugs would lodge their paws in we.” “Bugs” are flies,
and the use of “he” for “it” is characteristic. A skipper will talk
about a lighthouse as he, just as he feminizes a ship, and the
nominative case serves also as the objective.

Another woman had been wrapped by her neighbours in burnt butter and
oakum. “Now give her a bath,” was Dr. Grenfell’s advice after he had
made his examination. “You can if you like, Doctor,” the volunteer nurse
said. “If you do it and she dies we shan’t be blamed.”

In the hospital the Doctor was concerned with a baby twelve months old
whose feet were twisted over till they were almost upside down. The
mother had massaged the feet with oil for hours at a time. The baby
cried constantly with pain, and neither the child nor the mother had
known a satisfactory night’s rest since it was born. When the Doctor
said the condition was curable, because she had brought her child in
time, the look of relief in the mother’s face defied recording. It is a
look often seen with his patients, and since he scarcely ever asks or
receives a fee worth mentioning, it constitutes a large part of his
reward.

The herd of reindeer that the Doctor imported from Lapland and installed
between St. Anthony and Flower’s Cove with two Lapp herders are now
flourishing under Canadian auspices in (Canadian) Labrador in the
vicinity of the St. Augustine River. The Doctor himself took a hand in
the difficult job of lassoing them and tying their feet, and still there
were about forty of the animals that could not be found. The Doctor says
it was “lots of fun” catching them—but he gives that description to
many transactions that most of us would consider the hardest kind of
hard work.

Next in importance after the hospital, Exhibit A is the spick-and-span
orphanage, with thirty-five of the neatest and sweetest children, polite
and friendly and more than willing to learn. The boys who are not named
Peter, James or John are named Wilfred. “Suffer little children to come
unto me” is in big letters on the front of the building. On the hospital
is the inscription: “Faith, hope and love abide, but the greatest of
these is love.” Over the Industrial School stands written, “Whatsoever
ye do, do it heartily, as unto the Lord.” Here the beautiful rugs are
made—hooked through canvas—according to lively designs of Eskimoes and
seals and polar bears prepared in the main by the Doctor. Even the
bird-house has its legend: “Praise the Lord, ye birds of wing.” There is
a thriving co-operative store, next door to the well-kept little inn. A
sign of the Doctor’s devising and painting swings in front of the store.
On one side is a picture of huskies with a komatik (sled) bringing boxes
to a settler’s door, and the inscription is, “Spot cash is always the
leader.” On the other side of the sign a ship named _Spot Cash_ is seen
bravely ploughing through mountainous waves and towering bergs.
Underneath it reads: “There’s no sinking her.” “That is a reminiscence,”
smiled the Doctor, “of my fights with the traders. Do you think these
signs of mine are cant? I don’t mean them that way. I want every one of
them to count.”

A school, a laundry, a machine-shop and a big store are other features
of the plant at St. Anthony. The dock is a double-decker, and from it a
diminutive tramway with a hand-car sends “feeders” to the various
buildings and even up the walk to the Doctor’s house. All the mail-boats
now turn in at this harbour. The captain of a ship like the
_Prospero_—which in the summer of 1919 brought on four successive trips
70, 70, 60 and 50 patients to overflow the hospital—appreciates the
facilities offered by this modern wharfage.

As the Doctor goes about St. Anthony he does not fail to note anything
that is new, or to bestow on any worthy achievement a word of praise,
for which men and women work the harder.

To “The Master of the Inn” he expressed his satisfaction in the
smooth-running, cleanly hostelry. “He is one of my boys,” he remarked to
me after the conversation. “He was trained here at St. Anthony, and then
at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.”

Then he meets the electrician. “Did you get your ammeter?” he asks. And
then: “How did you make your rheostat?”

He points with satisfaction to a little Jersey bull recently acquired,
and then he critically surveys the woodland paths that lead from his
dooryard to a tea-house on the hill commanding the wide vista of the
harbour and the buildings of the industrial colony. “Nothing of this
when we came here,” he observes. “The people seem possessed to cut down
all their trees: we do our best to save ours, and we dote on these
winding walks, which are an innovation.” Then he laughs. “A good woman
heard me say that lambs were unknown in Labrador, and that we had to
speak of seals instead when we were reading the Scriptures. She sent me
a lamb and some birds, stuffed, so that the people might understand. She
meant well, but in transit the lamb’s head got sadly twisted on one
side, and the birds were decrepit specimens indeed with their bedraggled
plumage.”

The house itself is delightful, and it is only too bad that the Doctor
and his wife see so little of it.

It is a house with a distinct atmosphere. The soul of it is the
living-room with a wide window at the end that opens out upon a prospect
of the wild wooded hillside, with an ivy-vine growing across the middle,
so that it seems as if there were no glass and one could step right out
into the clear, pure air. There is a big, hearty fireplace; there is a
generously receptive sofa; there is an upright Steinway piano, where a
blind piano-tuner was working at the time of my visit.

Lupins, the purple monk’s hood and the pink fireweed grow along the
paths and about the house. A glass-enclosed porch surrounds it on three
sides, and in the porch are antlered heads of reindeer and caribou,
coloured views of scenery in the British Isles and elsewhere, snowshoes
and hunting and fishing paraphernalia, a great hanging pot of lobelias,
and—noteworthily—a brass tablet bearing this inscription:

To the Memory of
Three Noble Dogs
Moody
Watch
Spy
whose lives were given for
mine on the ice
April 21, 1908
Wilfred Grenfell
St. Anthony

It is the kind of house that eloquently speaks of being lived in.

It is comfortable, but the note of idle luxury or useless ostentation is
absent. There is no display for its own sake. The books bear signs of
being fireside companions. Dr. Grenfell is fond of running a pencil down
the margin as he reads. He is very fond of the books of his intimate
friend Sir Frederick Treves, in whose London hospital he was
house-surgeon. “The Land that is Desolate” was aboard the _Strathcona_.
Millais’ book on Newfoundland was on the writing desk at St. Anthony,
and had been much scored, as, indeed, had many of his other books.

I asked him to name to me his favourite books. Offhand he said: “The
Bible first, naturally. And I’m very fond of George Borrow’s ‘The Bible
in Spain.’ I admire Borrow’s persistence until he sold a Testament in
Finisterre. ‘L’Avengro’ and ‘Romany Rye’ are splendid, too. I’m very
fond of Kipling’s ‘Kim.’ Then I greatly care for the lives of men of
action. Autobiography is my favourite form of reading. The ‘Life of
Chinese Gordon’—the ‘Life of Lord Lawrence’—the ‘Life of Havelock.’
You see there is a strong strain of the Anglo-Indian in my make-up. My
family have been much concerned with colonial administration in India.
The story of Outram I delight in. He was everything that is unselfish
and active—and a first-class sportsman. Boswell’s ‘Johnson’ is a great
favourite of mine. I take keen pleasure in Froude’s ‘Seamen of the 16th
Century.’ In the lighter vein I read every one of W. W. Jacob’s stories.
Mark Twain is a great man. What hasn’t he added to the world!

“Then there is ‘Anson’s Voyages.’ It’s a capital book. He describes how
he lugged off two hundred and ten old Greenwich pensioners to sail his
ships, though they frantically fled in every direction to avoid being
impressed into the service. All of them died, and he lost all of his
ships but the one in which he fought and conquered a Spanish galleon
after a most desperate battle.

“I used to have over my desk the words of Chinese Gordon:

‘To love myself last;
To do the will of God,’

and the rest of his creed.

“The only man whose picture is in my Bible is the Rev. Jeremiah Horrox,
a farmer’s son. He was the first to observe the transit of Venus. That
was in 1640. The picture shows him watching the phenomenon through the
telescope. It inspired me to think what a poor lonely clergyman could
accomplish. He and men like him stick to their jobs—that’s what I like.

“I have in my Bible the words of Pershing to the American Expeditionary
Force in France in 1917—the passage beginning ‘Hardship will be your
lot.’”

I was privileged to look into that Bible. It is the Twentieth Century
New Testament This he likes, he says, because the vernacular is clear,
and sheds light on disputed passages which are not clear in other
versions.

“I care more for clearness than anything else,” he declared. “When I
read to the fishermen I want them to understand every word. But I have
often read from this version to sophisticated congregations in the
United States and had persons afterwards ask me what it was. Many
passages are positively incorrect in the King James Version. For
instance, the eighth chapter of Isaiah, which is the first lesson for
Christmas morning, is misleading in the Authorized Version.”

We debated the relative merits of the King James Version and the
Twentieth Century Version for a long time one evening. I was holding out
for the old order, in the feeling that the revised text deliberately
sacrificed much of the majestic beauty and poetry of the style of the
King James Version and that—despite an occasional archaism—the meaning
was clear enough, and the additional accuracy did not justify putting
aside the earlier beloved translation. Dr. Grenfell earnestly insisted
that the most important thing is to make the meaning of the Scriptures
plain to plain people—that the sense is the main consideration, and the
truth is more important than a stately cadence of poetic prose.

“I don’t want the language of three hundred years ago,” he asserted. “I
want the language of today.”

It is his custom to crowd the margins of his Bibles with annotations. He
fills up one copy after another—one of these is in the possession of
Mrs. John Markoe of Philadelphia, who prizes it greatly.

By the name of George Borrow and the picture of Jeremiah Horrox on the
fly-leaf of the copy he now uses, he has written “My inspirers.”

There is much interleaving and all the inserted pages are crowded with
trenchant observations and reflections on the meaning of life.

Adhering to the inner side of the front corner is a poem:

“Is thy cruse of comfort failing?
Rise and share it with another.
. . . . . .
Scanty fare for one will often
Make a royal feast for two.”

There is a clipping from the _Outlook_, of an article by Lyman Abbott
quoting Roosevelt to American troops, June 5, 1917, on the text from
Micah, “What more doth the Lord require of thee than to do justly and to
love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?”

Then there is a quotation from Shakespeare:

“Heaven doth with us, as we with torches do,
Nor light them for ourselves. For if our virtues
Did not go forth of us, ’twere all alike
As if we had them not.”

Pages of meditation are given to dreams—service—conversion—going to
the war in 1915 with the Harvard Medical Unit—the place of religion in
daily life—the will—the religion of duty.

Another clipping—in large print—bears the words: “Not to love, not to
serve, is not to live.”

In the back of the book is pasted an extended description of the death
of Edith Cavell.

In one place he writes: “I don’t want a squashy credulity weakening my
resolution and condoning incompetency—but just a faith of optimism
which is that of youth and makes me do things regardless of the
consequences.”

His marginal annotations disclose the profound and the devoted student
of the Bible—the man who without the slightest shred of mealy-mouthed
sanctimoniousness searches the Scriptures, and lives close to the spirit
of the Master. Anyone who sees even a little of Grenfell in action must
realize how faithful his life is to the pattern of Christ’s life on
earth. There are many passages of Christ’s experience—as when the crowd
pressed in upon Him—or when learned men were supercilious—or when He
perceived that virtue had gone out of Him—or when He was reproached
because He let a man die in His absence—that remind one of Grenfell’s
thronged and hustled life. Many believe that Grenfell can all but work a
miracle of healing; and the lame, the halt and the blind are brought to
him from near and far, at all times of the day or the night, even as
they were brought to the Master. In his love of children, in his
patience with the doer of good and his righteous wrath aflame against
the evil-doer, in his candour and his sunny sweetness and his unfailing
courage Grenfell translates the precepts of the Book into the action and
the speech of the living way. He cannot live by empty professions of
faith; he is happy only when he is putting into vivid practice the creed
which guides his living.

IV
ALL IN THE DAY’S WORK

It was hard to say where the Doctor’s day began or ended. One night he
rose several times to inspect wind and weather ere deciding to make a
start; and at twenty minutes before five he was at the wheel himself.
Mrs. Grenfell clipped from “Life” and pinned upon his tiny stateroom
mirror a picture of a caterpillar showing to a class of worms the early
bird eating the worm. The legend beneath it ran: “Now remember, dear
children, the lesson for today—the disobedient worm that would persist
in getting up too early in the morning.”

His books and articles are usually written between the early hours of
five and seven o’clock in the morning. The log of the _Strathcona_,
religiously kept for the information of the International Grenfell
Association, was likely to be pencilled on his knee while sitting on a
pile of firewood on the reeling deck. Just as Roosevelt wrote his
African game-hunting articles “on safari,” while so wearied with the
chase that he could hardly keep his eyes open, the Doctor has schooled
himself to do his work without considering his pulse-beat or his
temperature or his blood pressure. After a driving day afloat and
ashore, as surgeon, magistrate, minister and skipper, he rarely retires
before midnight, and often he sits up till the wee small hours engrossed
in the perusal of a book he likes.

When the Doctor enters a harbour unannounced and drops anchor, within a
few minutes power-boats and rowboats are flocking about the
_Strathcona_, and the deck fills with fishermen, their wives and their
children, all with their major and minor troubles. Sometimes it requires
the whole family to bring a patient. Often after a diagnosis it seems
advisable to place a patient in the hospital at Battle Harbour or St.
Anthony, and so the “Torquay Cot” or another in the diminutive hospital
on the _Strathcona_ is filled, or perhaps the passenger goes to hob-nob
with the good-natured crew and consume their victuals. Many a crying
baby, in the limited space, makes the narrow quarters below-decks
reverberate with the heraldry of the fact that he is teething or has the
tummyache.

The Doctor operates at the foot of the companion-ladder leading down
into the saloon, which is dining-room, living-room and everything else.
“I always have a basin of blood at the foot of the ladder,” he grimly
remarks.

I told him I thought I would call what I wrote about him “From Topsails
to Tonsils,” since with such versatility he passed from the former to
the latter. “That reminds me,” he said with a laugh, “of the time I went
ashore with Dr. John Adams, and the first thing we did was to lay three
children out on the table and remove their tonsils. That was a mighty
bloody job, I can tell you!”

The hatchway over his head as he operates is always filled with the
heads of so many spectators—including frequently the Doctor’s dog,
Fritz—that the meagre light which comes from above is nearly shut off.
Often a lamp is necessary, and as electric flash-lamps are notoriously
faithless in a crisis, it is usually a kerosene lamp. Often an impatient
patient starts to come down before his time, or an over-eager parent or
husband thinks he must accompany the one that he has brought for the
doctor’s lancet. It is hard to get elbow-room for the necessary surgery,
and every operation is a more or less public clinical demonstration.

Usually the description of the symptoms is of the vaguest.

“I’m chilled to the cinders,” said an anxious Irishman.

“Well, we can put on some fresh coal,” was the Doctor’s answer. “How old
are you?”

“Forty-six, Doctor!”

“A mere child!” the doctor replies, and the merry twinkle in his eyes
brings an answering smile to the face of the sufferer. The Doctor
himself was fifty-five years old in February, 1920.

So many fishermen get what are called “water-whelps” or
“water-pups,”—pustules on the forearm due to the abrasion of the skin
by more or less infected clothing. Cleaning the cod and cutting up fish
produces many ugly cuts and piercings and consequent sores, and there is
always plenty of putrefying matter about a fishing-stage to infect them.
So that a very common phenomenon is a great swelling on the forearm—and
an agonizing, sleep-destroying one it may be—where pus has collected
and is throbbing for the lance. It is a joy to witness the immediate
relief that comes from the cutting, and as the iodine is applied and
deft fingers bandage the wound the patient tries to find words to tell
of his thankfulness.

One afternoon just as the Doctor thought there was a lull in the
proceedings four women and a man came over the rail at once. The first
woman had a “bad stummick”; the second wanted “turble bad” to have her
tooth “hauled”; the third had “a sore neck, Miss” (thus addressing Mrs.
Grenfell); the fourth woman had something “too turble to tell”; the man
merely wanted to see the Doctor on general principles.

Here is a bit of dialogue with a woman who couldn’t sleep.

“What do you do when you don’t sleep?”

“I bide in the bed.”

“Do you do any work?”

“No, sir.”

“Do you cook?”

“No, sir.”

“Do you wash the children?”

“Scattered times, sir.”

Then the husband put in: “She couldn’t do her work and it overcast her.
She overtopped her mind, sir.”

He was a fine, dignified old fellow, and it was a real pleasure to see
how tender he was toward his poor fidgety, neurasthenic spouse. She
hadn’t any teeth worth mentioning, and her lips were pursed together
with a vise-like grip. I shall not forget how Doctor Grenfell murmured
to me in a humorous aside: “Teeth certainly do add to a lady’s charm!”

When medicine is administered, it is hard to persuade the afflicted one
that the prescription means just what it says.

This lady was told to take three pills, and she took two. But most of
them exceed their instruction. To a woman at Trap Cove Dr. Fox gave
liniment for her knee. It helped her. Then she took it internally for a
stomach-ache, arguing logically enough that a pain is a pain, a medicine
is a medicine, and if this liniment was good for a hurt in the knee it
must be good for any bodily affliction. Luckily she lived to tell the
tale.

“When I was in the North Sea the sailors if they got the chance
ransacked my medicine cupboard and drank up everything they could lay
their hands on.” Such autobiographic confessions are often made while
the Doctor mixes a draught or concocts a lotion. “Here it is the same
way. I have had my customers drain off the whole bottle of medicine at
once, on the theory that if one teaspoonful did you good, a bottle would
be that much better.” His questions, like his lancet, go right to the
root of the trouble. Nothing phases him. He answers every question. He
never tells people they are fools; his inexhaustible forebearance with
the inept and the obtuse is not the least Christlike of his attributes.

It is difficult for these men to come to the hospital in summer, for
their livelihood depends on their catch, and then on their salting and
spreading the fish: and after the cod-fishery has fallen away to zero
the herring come in October, and the cod to some extent return with
them.

“When I tell them they must go to the hospital, they always say ‘I
haven’t time: I want to stay and mind my traps.’”

The Doctor hates above all things—as I have indicated—to leave a wound
open, or a malady half-treated, and hustle on. It is the great drawback
and exasperation in his work that the interval before he sees the
patient again must be so long. He mourns whenever he has to pull a tooth
that might be saved if he could wait to fill it.

He is always working against time, against the sea, against ignorance,
against a want of charity on the part of nominal Christians who ought to
help him instead of carping and denouncing.

But he is working with all honest and sincere men, all who are true to
the high priesthood of science, all who are on the side of the angels.

One man thus describes his affliction, letting the Doctor draw his own
deductions:

“Like a little round ball the pain will start, sir; then it will full me
inside; and the only rest I get is to crumple meself down.”

An unhappy woman reciting the history of her complaint declared: “The
last doctor said I had an impression of the stomach and was full of
glams.”

“Bless God!” exclaimed another, speaking of her children. “There’s
nothing the matter with ’em. They be’s off carrying wood. They just
coughs and heaves, that’s all.”

One mother, asked what treatment she was administering to her infant
replied: “Oh, I give ’er nothing now. Just plenty of cold water and
salts and spruce beer; ne’er drop o’ grease.”

When there is no doctor to be had the services of the seventh son of a
seventh son are in demand.

[Illustration: BATTLE HARBOUR—SPREADING FISH FOR DRYING.]

Elemental human misery made itself heard in the dolorous accents of a
corpulent lady of fifty. “I works in punishment on account of my eyes.
Sometimes I piles two or three fish on top of each other and I has to do
it over. I cries a good deal about it.” Her gratification as she was
fitted to a pair of “plus” glasses that greatly improved her sight was
worth a long journey to witness. Many pairs of glasses were put on her
nose en route to the discovery of the most satisfactory pair, and each
time she would say “Lovely! Beautiful!” with crescendo of fervour.

I heard a fond father tell the Doctor that there was a “rale squick
(real squeak) bawling on the inside of” his offspring.

A man who climbed down the companion way with an aching side, a rupture,
and a hypertrophic growth on his finger, was asked what he did for his
ribs.

“I rinsed them,” was the response.

The Doctor is always on the lookout for the “first flag of warning”—as
he calls it—of the dreaded “T. B.” which is responsible for one death
in every four in Newfoundland. Much of his talk with a patient has to do
with fresh air and fresh vegetables. The Eskimoes may know better than
some native Newfoundlanders. “I like air. I push my whiphandle through
the roof,” said one of the Eskimoes.

Here is a typical excerpt, from a conversation with a young man who to
the layman looked very robust.

“How old are you?”

“Twenty-two, sir.”

“Have any in your family had tuberculosis?”

“Father’s brother Will and Aunt Clarissa died of it, sir.”

“Are you suffering?”

“It shoots up all through my stomach, sir.”

“Do you read and write?”

“No, Doctor.”

“See clearly?”

“Yes, Doctor.”

“Are you able to get any greens?”

“Sometimes, sir.”

“Dock-leaves?”

“No, sir.”

“What greens have you?”

“Alexander greens, sir.”

“Any berries?”

“Yes, Doctor. And bake apples.”

“That’s good. You must eat plenty of them. You must have good food. As
good as you can afford. I’m sorry it’s so hard where you live to get
anything fresh. Do you sleep well?”

“Yes, Doctor.”

“Anybody else sleep in the same bed?”

“No, Doctor.”

“When you go to bed do you keep the windows open?”

“Yes, Doctor.”

“That’s right. That’s very important. Do people spit around you?” (The
Doctor is always on the war-path against this disgusting and dangerous
habit.)

“No, sir.”

“Quite sure?”

“Well, we use spit-boxes.”

“Do you burn the contents?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Do you wear warm things?”

“Yes, Doctor.”

“Sweat a lot?”

“Yes, Doctor.”

“You mustn’t get wet without changing your clothes. Now, when you eat
potatoes I want you to eat them baked, with the skins on. I don’t mean
eat the skins. But the part right under the skins is very important.”

“Yes, Doctor.”

As one listens to such catechizing it becomes clear that the Doctor lays
great stress on fresh air and fresh food as medicines, “Cold is your
friend and heat is your enemy” is his oft-reiterated dictum to
consumptives.

Once he said to me, “I attach great importance to the sun-bath. I
believe in exposing the naked body to all it can get of the air.” In the
nipping cold of the early morning on the _Strathcona_ I emerged from
beneath four double blankets to hear the Doctor joyfully cry: “I’ve just
had my bucket on deck. You could have had one too, but I lost the bucket
overboard.” It has been a pastime of his to row with a boatload of
doctors and nurses to an iceberg and go in swimming from the platform at
the base of the berg.

Sometimes the Macedonian cry comes by letter.

Here is a pencilled missive from an old woman who evidently got a kindly
neighbour to write it for her, for the signature is misspelled:

“Pleas ducker grandlield would you help me with a little clothing I am a
wodow 85 yars of age.”

“Grandlield” is not further from the name than a great many have come.
Here are some other common variants:

Gumpin
Grinpiel
Greenfield
Gramfull
Gremple
Gransfield

From a village in White Bay, where the fishing was woefully poor in
1919, comes this pathetic plea:

“To Dr. and Mrs. Grenfell: Dear Friends: I am writing to see if you will
help me a little.—My husband got about 1 qtl of fish (1
quintal—pronounced kental—of 112 pounds, worth at most $11.20) this
summer, and I have four children, 15, 13, 11, 6 years, and his Father,
and we are all naked as birds with no ways or means to get anything.
What can I do; if you can do anything for me I hope God will bless you.
It is pretty hard to look at a house full of naked children.”

Mrs. Grenfell visited White Bay in July and in two villages found a
number of people all but utterly destitute. They were living on “loaf”
(bread) and tea. They had icefields instead of fish. Six of the
breadwinners got a job at St. Anthony. The villagers had few pairs of
shoes among them, In several instances the foot-gear was fashioned of
the sides of rubber boots tied over the feet with pieces of string. The
people of this neighbourhood are folk of the highest character, and
richly deserving, though poverty-stricken.

Another characteristic letter:

“Dr. dear sir. please send two roals fielt (rolls of felt) one Roal
Ruber Hide (rubberoid) one ten Patent for Paenting Moter Boat some glass
for the bearn (barn) thanks veary mutch for the food you sent me. Glad
two have James Home and his Leg so well you made a splended Cut of it
this time I will all way Pray for you while I Live Potatoes growing well
on the Farm Large Enough two Eaght all redey. But I loast my Cabbages
Plants wit the Big falls rain and snow i the first of the summer, but I
have lotes of turnips Plants I have all the Caplen (a small fish) I
wants two Put on the farm this summer.

“dr—dear sir I want some nails to finesh the farm fance I farn.”

In a fisherman’s house in an interval between examinations of children
for tonsils and adenoids the Doctor related this incident to a
spellbound group. He never has any trouble holding an audience with
stories that grow out of his work, and the fishermen delight as he does
in his informal chats with them and with their families.

“We had a long hunt for a starving family of which we had been told by
the Hudson Bay Company agent, on an island at Hamilton Inlet in
Labrador. The father was half Eskimo. He had a single-barrelled shotgun
with which he had brought down one gull. With his wife and his five
naked children he was living under a sail. The children, though they had
nothing on, were blue in the face with eating the blueberries, and they
were fat as butter. The mate took two of the little ones, as if they
were codfish, one under each arm, and carried them aboard. There were
tears in his eyes, for he had seven little ones of his own, and he was
very fond of children. Both were carefully brought up at our Childrens’
Home and one of them, who can now both read and write, is aboard at
present as a member of the crew of the _Strathcona_.”

After evening prayers on Sunday, at which the Doctor has spoken, he has
treated as many as forty persons.

In one place after removing a man’s tonsils it was a case of eyeglasses
to be fitted, then came one who clamoured to have three teeth extracted.
The teeth were “hauled” and a bad condition of ankylosis at the roots
was revealed. Then a girl had a throat abscess lanced, and she was
followed by a boy with a dubious rash and a tubercular inheritance. The
Doctor is ever on the lookout for the “New World” smallpox: but the
stethoscope detected a pleuritic attack, and strong supporting bandages
were wound about the lower part of his chest.

Another group was this:

1. An operation on a child’s tonsils. A local anaesthetic was given—10
per cent. cocaine. A tooth was also removed. The total charge was $1.00.

2. A fisherman came for ointments—zinc oxide and carbolic.

3. An eight months old infant was brought in, blind in the right eye.
This condition might have been obviated had boric acid been applied at
the time of the baby’s birth. The mother said that only a little warm
water had been used.

So many, though they may not say so, appear to believe with Mary when
she said to Jesus, “Lord, if thou hadst been here my brother had not
died.” They think the Doctor has something like supernatural powers.

With the utmost care he prepared to administer novocaine and treat the
wound of a man who had run a splinter into his left hand between the
first and second fingers, leaving an unhealed sinus. “Wonderful stuff,
this novocaine!” he remarked, as he put on a pair of rubber gloves,
washed them in alcohol, and then gave his knives a bath in a soup-plate
of alcohol.

“In the inflamed parts none of these local anaesthetics work very well,”
was his next comment.

But the patient scarcely felt it when he ran a probe through the hand
till it all but protruded through the skin on the inner side.

The bad blood was spooned out, and then the deep cavity swallowed about
six inches of iodoform gauze. When the wound had been carefully packed
the hand was bandaged. For nearly an hour’s work requiring the exercise
of rare skill and the utmost caution the charge was—a dollar. And that
included a pair of canvas gloves and another pair of rubber mitts, of
the Doctor’s own devising, drawn over the bandages and tied so that the
man might continue at his work without getting salt-water or any
contaminating substance in the wound and so infecting it badly.

These two importunate telegrams arrived while he was paying a flying
visit to headquarters at St. Anthony:

“Do your best to come and operate me I have an abscess under
right tonsil will give you coal for your steamer am getting
pretty weak.

Capt. J. N. Coté, Long Point.”

A second telegram arriving almost simultaneously from the same man read:
“Please come as fast as you can to operate me in the throat and save my
life.”

Captain Coté is the keeper of the Greenly Island Lighthouse, near Blanc
Sablon. It is a very important station.

The Doctor, true to form, at once made up his mind to go. Greenly Island
is about 100 miles from St. Anthony, and on the opposite side of the
Straits, on the Canadian side of the line that divides Canadian Labrador
from Newfoundland Labrador. The short cut took us through Carpoon
(Quirpon) Tickle, and there we spent the night, for much as the Doctor
wanted to push ahead the wind made the Strait so rough that—having it
against us—the _Strathcona_ could not have made headway. “I remember,”
said the Doctor with a smile, “that once we steamed all night in
Bonavista Bay, full speed ahead, and in the morning found ourselves
exactly where we were the night before. Coal is too scarce now.” On one
occasion the _Strathcona_ distinguished herself by going ashore with all
sails set.

By the earliest light of morning we were under way. The tendency of a
land-lubber at the wheel off this cruel coast was naturally to give the
jagged and fearsome spines of rock as wide a berth as possible. In the
blue distance might be seen a number of bergs, large and small, just as
a reminder of what the ice can do to navigation when it chooses; and in
the foreground were fishermen’s skiffs bobbing about and taking their
chances of crossing the track of our doughty little steamer. But the
Doctor called in at the door of the wheelhouse: “Run her so close to
those rocks that you almost skin her!” He was thinking not of his ship,
not of himself, but of the necessity of getting to the lonely
lighthouse-keeper at the earliest possible moment, to perform that
operation for a subtonsillar abscess. There was a picture in his mind of
the valiant French Canadian engineer gasping for breath as the orifice
dwindled, and now he was burning not the firewood but coal—a
semi-precious stone in these waters in this year of grace. The
_Strathcona_ labours and staggers; Fritz the dog goes to the bowsprit
and sniffs the sun by day and the moon by night; the ship is carrying
all the bellying sails she has; and the Doctor mounts to the crow’s-nest
to make sure that his beloved new topsail is doing its full share. He
tools the _Strathcona_—when he is at the wheel—as if she were a
taxicab. So the long diagonal across the Strait is cut down, seething
mile by mile, till between Flower’s Cove and Forteau—where the Strait
is at the narrowest, and the shores are nine miles and three-quarters
apart—it almost seems as if an hour’s swim on either hand would take
one to the eternal crags where the iris blows and the buttercup spreads
her cloth of gold.

We drew near Blanc Sablon (pronounced Sablow) with Grant’s Wharf by the
river. West of that river for several hundred yards it is no man’s land
between the two Labradors—that is to say, between Canada and
Newfoundland. A man stood up in a jouncing power-boat and waved an oar,
and then—his overcoat buttoned up to his ears—our patient, Captain
Coté, stood up beside him. They had come out to meet us to save every
moment of precious time. It was a weak and pale and shaky man that came
aboard—but he was a man every bit of him, and he did not wince when the
Doctor, in the crypt-like gloom of the _Strathcona’s_ saloon, while the
tin lamp was held in front of the Captain’s mouth, reached into the
throat with his attenuated tongs and scissors and made the necessary
incision after giving him several doses of the novocaine solution as a
local anaesthetic.

“Then the Captain sat back white and gasping on the settle, and—with a
strong Canadian French flavour in his speech—told us a little of his
lonely vigil of the summer.

“In eighteen days, Doctor, I never saw a ship for the fog: but I kept
the light burning—two thousand gallons of kerosene she took.

“All summer long it was fog—fog—fog. I show you by the book I keep.
Ever since the ice went out we have the fog. Five days we have in July
when it was clear—but never such a clear day as we have now. Come
ashore with me on Greenly Island and you shall have the only motor car
ride it would be possible for you to have in Labrador.”

We accepted the invitation. At the head of the wharf were men spreading
the fish to dry—grey-white acres of them on the flakes like a field of
everlastings. In the lee of a hill they had a few potato-plants, fenced
away from the dogs. In a dwelling house with “Please wipe your feet”
chalked on the door we found a spotless kitchen and two fresh-cheeked,
white-aproned women cooking. It was a fine thing to know that they were
upholding so high a standard of cleanliness and sanitation in that
lonely outpost—as faithful as the keeper of the light in his
storm-defying tower.

From the fish-flakes of the ancient “room” over half a mile of
cinderpath and planking we rode on the chassis of a Ford car, which the
keeper uses to convey supplies.

“The first joy-ride I ever had in Labrador,” said the Doctor, and the
Captain grinned and let out another link to the roaring wind that
flattened the grass and threatened to lift his cabbage-plants out of
their paddock under his white housewalls.

Safe in his living-room, with wife and children, two violins, a
talking-machine, an ancient Underwood typewriter and even a telephone
that connected him with the wharf, Captain Coté pulled out his wallet,
selected three ten-dollar bills and offered them to the Doctor, saying:
“I will pay you as much more as you like.”

Dr. Grenfell took one of the bills, saying, “That will be enough.”

The Captain, mindful of his promise about the coal, said, “How much coal
do you want?”

“On the understanding that the Canadian Government supplies it,”
answered the Doctor, “I will let you put aboard the _Strathcona_ just
the amount we used in coming here—5½ tons.”

The Captain went to the telephone and talked with a man at the wharf.
Then he turned away from the transmitter and said: “He tells me that he
can’t put the coal on board today, because it would blow away while they
were taking it out to the _Strathcona_ on the skiff. We have no sacks to
put it in.”

“Very well,” returned the Doctor, “when it’s convenient you might store
it at Forteau. They will need it there this winter at Sister Bailey’s
nursing station.” Then he dismissed the subject of the fee and the
fuel-supply to tell us how pleased he was to find that Mackenzie King,
author of “Industry and Humanity,” had become the Liberal leader in
Canada. King is a Harvard Doctor of Philosophy, a man of thought and
action of the type by nature and training in sympathy with Grenfell’s
work. It is a great thing for Canada that a man of his calibre and
scholarly distinction has been raised to the place he holds.

From the site of the lighthouse there are observed most singular wide
shelves of smooth brown rock presenting their edges to the fury of the
surf, and over the broad brown expanse are scattered huge boulders that
look as though the Druids who left the memorials at Stonehenge might
have put them there. Captain Coté said the winter ice-pack tossed these
great stones about as if it were a child’s game with marbles.

A happy man he thought himself to have his children with him. The
lighthouse-keeper at Belle Isle lost six of his family on their way to
join him; another at Flower’s Cove lost five. As a remorseless graveyard
of the deep the region is a rival of the dreaded Sable Island off
Newfoundland’s south shore.

A wire rope indicates the pathway of two hundred yards between the light
and the foghorn: and in winter the way could not be found without it.
The foghorn gave a solo performance for our benefit, at the instigation
of either member of a pair of Fairbanks-Morse 15 horse-power gasoline
engines. We were ten feet from it, but it can be heard ten miles and
more.

A “keeper of the light” like Captain Coté, or Peter Bourque, who tended
the Bird Rock beacon for twenty-eight years, is a man after Grenfell’s
own heart. For Grenfell himself lets his light shine before men, and
knows the need of keeping the flame lambent and bright, through thick
and thin.

V
THE CAPTAIN OF INDUSTRY

Dr. Grenfell in his battles with profiteering traders has incurred their
enmity, of course—but he has been the people’s friend. The favourite
charge of those who fight him is that he is amassing wealth for himself
by barter on the side, and collecting big sums in other lands from which
he diverts a golden stream for his own uses. The infamous accusation is
too pitifully lame and silly to be worth denying. The most unselfish of
men, he has sometimes worked his heart out for an ingrate who bit the
hand that fed him. His enterprise, whose reach always exceeds his grasp,
is money-losing rather than money-making.

The International Grenfell Association has never participated in the
trading business. Dr. Grenfell, however, started several stores with his
own money and took it out after a time with no interest. He delights in
the success of those whose aim is no more than a just profit, who buy
from the fisherman at a fair price and sell to him in equity. There is a
co-operative store of his original inspiration and engineering at
Flower’s Cove, and another is the one at Cape Charles, which in five
years returned 100 per cent. on the investment with 5 per cent.
interest.

Accusations of graft he is accustomed to face, and a commission
appointed by the Newfoundland Legislature investigated him, travelled
with him on the _Strathcona_, and completely exonerated him. Some
persons had even gone so far as to accuse him of making money out of the
old clothes business aboard what they were pleased to term his “yacht.”
They descended to such petty false witness as to swear that he had taken
a woman’s dress with $12 in it. It is wearisome to have to dignify such
charges by noticing them. They are about on a par with the letter of a
bishop who wrote to him: “I should like to know how you can reconcile
with your conscience reading a prayer in the morning against heresy and
schism, and then preaching at a dissenting meeting-house in the
afternoon.”

A vestryman objected to his preaching in the church at a diminutive and
forlorn settlement because “he talks about trade.”

The Doctor is never embittered by his traducers. He knows the meaning of
J. L. Garvin’s saying, “He who is bitter is beaten.” Nothing beclouds
for long his sunny temperament, but his unfailing good-humour never
dulls the fighting edge of his courage.

“I bought a boat for a worthy soul, to set him on his feet,” the Doctor
told me. “She had been driven ashore in North Labrador. I had to buy
everything separately—and the total came to $500. The boat was to work
out the payment. This she did—Alas! later on she went ashore on Brehat
(‘Braw’) Shoals. Only her lifeboat came ashore, with the
name—_Pendragon_—upon it.”

The Doctor put $1,000 of his money into the co-operative store at
Flower’s Cove, and when the enterprise was fairly launched and the
Grenfell Association decided to abstain from lending help to trade he
drew it out, and asked no interest. That store in its last fiscal year
sold goods to the value of more than $200,000, paying fair prices and
selling at a fair profit. It had three ships in the summer of 1919
carrying fish abroad—“foreigners.” The proprietor bought for $50 a
schooner that went ashore at Forteau, dressed it in a new suit of sails
worth $1,250, and now has a craft worth $8,000 to him. Dr. Grenfell has
personally great affection for some of the traders—it is the “truck
system” he hates. “Trading in the old days,” the Doctor observes, “was
like a pond at the top of a hill. It got drained right out. The money
was not set in circulation here on the soil of Newfoundland. The traders
in two months took away the money that should have been on the coast.
1919 was the first year in which the co-operative stores themselves sent
fish to the other side. A vessel from Iceland came here to the Flower’s
Cove store; another was a Norwegian; a third came from Cadiz with salt;
and today a small vessel is preparing to go across.”

At Red Bay is another store to which Dr. Grenfell loaned money, which he
drew out, sans interest, when it was prosperous. It has saved the people
there, as every soul in the harbour will testify.

The fishermen on the West Coast in 1919 enjoyed something like affluence
as compared with their brethren on the East Coast, where the fish were
scarce.

Where there were lobsters, they were getting $35.50 or $35.00 per case
of 48 one-pound cans. For cod, $11.20 a quintal of 112 pounds was paid.
In 1918 over $15 per quintal was paid.

On the other hand, with pork at $100 a barrel, coal at $24 a ton, and
gasoline at 70 cents a gallon, the big prices for fish were matched by
an alarming cost of the necessaries of life.

Some fishermen make but $200 a year; a few make as much as $2,000 and
even more. The merchant princes as a rule are the store-keepers who deal
with the fishermen. There were two big bank failures in St. John’s years
ago, and since that time many persons have hidden their money in the
ground. One fisherman of whose case I heard had but $35 in cash as the
result of his season’s effort, and he had eight to support besides
himself. The small amount of ready money on which people can live with a
house, a vegetable garden, and a supply of firewood at their backs in
the timbered hillsides is unbelievable. If a man was fortunate enough to
possess any grassland, he might get as much as $65 a ton for his hay in
1919, if he could spare it from his own cows and sheep. It is too bad
that for the sake of the sheep the noble Newfoundland dog that chased
them has had to perish. It is almost impossible today to find a
pure-breed example of the dog that spread the name of the island to the
ends of the earth. Such dogs as there are are remarkably intelligent and
make excellent messengers between a man at work and his house.

The “Southerners” go to the Grand Banks for their fishing; the others go
to the Labrador. The three classes of fishermen are the shore fishermen,
the “bankers,” and the “floaters”—those of the Labrador. Ordinarily the
catch is reckoned by quintals (pronounced kentals) of 112 pounds. Those
who live on the Labrador coast the winter through are known as the
“liveyers”—the live-heres—and those who come regularly to the fishing
are “stationers” or “planters.”

During the war big prices have been realized for the fish, and
unprecedented prosperity has come to the fishermen. The growth in the
number of motor-boats is an index of this condition, though with
gasoline at 70 cents a gallon on the Labrador (for the imperial gallon,
slightly larger than ours), the question of fuel has been a disturbing
one to many. Of late much of the fish has been marketed on favourable
terms in the United States and Canada, but before this the preferred
markets in order have been Spain and Portugal, Brazil and the West
Indies. The three grades recognized, from the best to the lowest, are
“merchantable,” “Madeira,” and “West Indies” (“West Injies”), the
last-named for the negroes.

An industry of growing importance to the future of the Grenfell mission
is the manufacture and sale of “hooked” rugs by the women trained at the
industrial school at St. Anthony. Large department stores in the United
States have begun to buy these rugs in considerable quantities, and the
demand is lively and increasing.

The Doctor’s delightful sense of humour comes to the fore in his designs
for these rugs, made of rags worked through canvas. The dyes are vivid
green, blue, red, black, brown—the white rivals the driven snow, and
the workmanship is of the best. A favourite pattern shows the dogs
harnessed to the komatik eager to be off, turning in the traces as if to
ask questions of the driver, their attitude alert and alive, while their
two masters standing by the baggage on the komatik, in hoods and heavy
parkas (blouses) rimmed with red and blue, are discussing the route to
take and pointing with their mittened hands. Or the design may show
Eskimoes stealthily stalking polar bears upon an ice-pan of a wondrous
green at the edges. There is a glorious Turnerian sunset in the
background; the sea bristles with bergs arched and pinnacled. The wary
hunters approach their hapless quarry in a kyak. One is paddling and the
other has the rifle across his knees, and the polar bears are nervously
pacing the ice-pan as though conscious of the fate impending. Another
motif in these diverting rugs—which are often used for wall adornments
instead of floor-covering—is a stately procession of three bears uphill
past the solemn green sentinels of pagoda-like fir trees. What an
improvement these designs are over the former rugs which showed
meaningless blotches of pink and green that might have been thrown at
one another, as if a mason’s trowel had splashed them there!

Since the Labrador is innocent in most places of anything like a store
where you can go to the counter, lay down your money and ask for what
you want, the nearest thing the women know to the luxury of a
shopping-expedition or a bargain-sale is a chance to exchange firewood
or fish for the old clothing carried on her missionary journeys by the
_Strathcona_.

“Why isn’t this clothing given away?” someone may query unthinkingly.

The object of the mission is not to pauperize, and the pride of the
people themselves in most cases forbids the acceptance of an outright
gift.

To preserve self-respect by the exchange of a _quid pro quo_, some of
the clothing contributed by friends in the States and elsewhere is
allocated to the fishermen’s families in return for the supplies of
firewood. The value varies according to the place where the wood is cut
and piled. It may be worth $7 a cord on a certain point or $3 at the
bottom of a bay. (Cutting the wood is called “cleaving the splits.”) The
payment must be very carefully apportioned, so that Mrs. B. shall not
have more or better than Mrs. A.—or else there will be wailing and
gnashing and heart-burning after the boat weighs anchor.

Before making the rounds of the Straits or of White Bay, or going on the
long trail down North, or wherever else the _Strathcona_ may be faring
on her mission, the big boxes of wearables are opened on the deck and
stored in a pinched triangular stateroom forward of the saloon. There
are quantities of clothing for men—overcoats, sweaters of priceless
wool, reefers, peajackets, shooting-coats, dressing-gowns,
underwear—some of it brand new and most of it thick and good; there are
woolen socks excellently made by many loving hands, shoes joined by the
laces or buttoned together, trousers, jackets, whole suits more or less
in disrepair but capable of conversion to all sorts of useful ends.
Generally the Doctor and Mrs. Grenfell find a pretext for giving some of
the clothing to a needy family even when the fiction of payment in kind
is not maintained. Rarely does the article offered—let us say a hooked
rug in garish colours—meet the value of the garments that are given.
But the important thing is that the recipient is made to feel that he
pays for what he gets and is not a pauper.

There is ever a want of clothing for the women and children. Few
complete dresses for women find their way to the _Strathcona’s_
storeroom. There are not nearly enough garments for babies or suits for
little boys. Women’s underclothing is badly needed. But most of those
who come aboard in quest of clothing are grateful for whatever is given
them and make no fuss. They will ingeniously adapt a shirt into a dress
for Susy, and cut a big man’s trousers in twain for her two small
brothers. The Northern housewife learns to make much of little in the
way of textile materials. A barrel of magazines and cards and picture
scrap-books shielded with canvas, stands at the head of the companion
way. Bless whoever pasted in the stories and pictures on the strong
sheets of brown cartridge-paper! Those will be pored over by lamp-light
from cottage to cottage till they fall apart, just as the wooden boxes
of books carried aboard for circulating libraries will provide most of
the life intellectual all winter long for many a village. Many of the
fishermen’s families from the father down are unlettered, but those who
can read and write make up for it by their intellectual activity, and
even the little boys sometimes display a nimbleness of wit and fancy
altogether delightful. They will sing you a song or tell you a
fairy-tale with a naïveté foreign to the American small boy.

A woman came aboard with her husband—pale, thin, forlorn she was—and
asked for clothing for him. She held each garment critically to the
light, and somewhat disdainfully rejected any that showed signs of
mending. Finally I said: “You’re not taking anything for yourself. Don’t
you need something?” I knew the pitiful huddle of fishermen’s houses
ashore from which she came—the entire population of the settlement was
141, not counting the vociferous array of Eskimo dogs that greeted us
when we landed.

“I’d like a dress,” she admitted—“for street wear.”

I thought of the straggling path amid the rocks where the dogs growled
and bristled, but I did not smile. For I realized what this chance to go
shopping meant to her isolated life. In the city she would have had huge
warerooms and piled counters from which to make a choice. Here two
bunks, a barrel and a canvas bag held the whole stock in trade.

She rejected a sleeveless ball gown of burgundy. “I must have black,”
she said—“we lost a son in the war.”

The husband began to apologize for the trouble they caused. But we were
more than ever bound to please them now. All the new skirts were found
to be too short or too long or too gay or too youthful or something
else, and the upshot of the dickering was that two pairs of golfer’s
breeches were given in lieu of proper habiliments for a poor, lonely
woman in Labrador. They could be cut down, she explained, for her boys.

There isn’t much for a woman, in most of these places, but cooking and
scrubbing the floor and minding the baby—something like the Kaiser’s
ideal of feminine existence. And when the floor is clean, booted
fishermen come in and spit upon it even though the white plague is
plainly written in the children’s faces.

A new chapter in the industrial history of the Labrador will be written
when it becomes possible to utilize the vast supply of news-print
available from the pulp-wood of the Labrador “hinterland,” even as
Northcliffe is getting paper for his many publications from the plant at
Grand Falls in Northern Newfoundland. The difficulty, of course, will be
to get the timber away from the coast in the short season when the land
is released from the grip of the ice-pack. But the great demand for
news-print which leads to anxious examination and utilization of the
supplies of Alaska and Finland cannot much longer neglect the available
resources so near at hand on the coast of the North Atlantic.

At Humbermouth it was my good fortune to encounter Captain Daniel Owen,
of Annapolis Royal, Nova Scotia, Captain of the H. V. Greene Labrador
Aerial Expedition. The little vessel _Miranda_ had limped in on her way
to Halifax, to get her boiler mended.

Captain Owen, himself, deserves more than passing mention. A member of
the Royal Flying Corps, he had his left eye shot out in combat with five
German planes that brought him to the ground 60 miles within their
lines. The observer’s leg was shattered in nine places by their fire.
There followed a sojourn of seven months in three German prison-camps.
The chivalrous surgeon who was first to operate on Captain Owen’s
comrade amused himself and the nurses by twisting bits of bone about in
the leg, laughing, while the nurses laughed too, at the patient’s agony.

Flying at a height of 2,000 to 8,700 feet, Captain Owen’s party in
Labrador added to the industrial map 1,500,000 acres (about 2,300 square
miles) of land timbered with firs and spruces suitable for pulp-wood,
the property lying on the Alexis, St. Louis and Gilbert Rivers about 15
miles north of Battle Harbour. This tract will, it is estimated, produce
as much as 115 cords to the acre for a maximum, and on the average 40 to
50 cords. 15,000 photographs were taken, and moving pictures also were
made. The aerodrome was 28 miles up the Alexis River, and according to
Captain Owen it was an extremely serious matter to find the way back to
it each time after a flight for there was no other suitable place to
land anywhere in the neighbourhood. “I never felt so anxious for the
return of an aeroplane in the Western Front as I felt for the safety of
ours,” he said.

The flying took place on five different days—and in that time as much
was accomplished as might have been done in from six to ten years of the
usual land cruising which—in sample areas—was used to check up the
results of the airmen.

The propeller of the Curtiss biplane was a mass of blood from the flies
it sucked in. Dr. Murdock Graham, second in command, kept some of these
flies in a bottle as souvenirs, and they were portentous insects.

“We enjoyed nothing more,” said Dr. Graham, “than an evening spent with
Dr. Grenfell at Battle Harbour where, lolling at ease in corduroy and
his old Queen’s College blazer with the insignia over the left
breast-pocket, pulling a corn-cob pipe, he spun one yarn after another
of the life at the Front with the Harvard contingent in 1915-16.

“Murphy, the mail-man from Battle Harbour, friend of the Grenfell
mission, friend of everybody, is a man worth knowing. I can hear now his
genial ‘Does ye smoke, boy? Has ye any on ye? Does ye mind, boy?’ He
said to one of our Greene Expedition doctors, ‘Doctor, are all the
Americans like ye? Ye has a kind word for everybody. Has ye any
tobacco?’ ‘By gorry, that’s fine,’ he said of the aeroplane. ‘How do it
do it?’ He was as modest as he was plucky. ‘I don’t want to go and eat
with all those gentlemen, with their fine clothes on,’ he would say. Of
one of the young ‘liveyeres’ he remarked: ‘If he had the learn there’d
be a fine job for him’—which alas! is true of so many on the Labrador.

“No member of our expedition heard any swearing from the forty men we
employed—with the exception of a single Newfoundlander. I asked one of
the men how they came to be so clean of profanity, and he answered
simply: ‘We doesn’t make a practice of that, we doesn’t.’

“At Williams Harbour on the Alexis River there was three weeks’
schooling by a visiting teacher from the Grenfell mission. In two
families with a joint membership of eighteen one person could read and
write.

“They have had no minister since the war and in the winter the bottom
falls out of everything. The people on the rivers have no doctor for a
year and a half and two years at a time. At Williams Harbour they
swarmed to Dr. Twiss and Dr. MacDonald. One woman in desperation had
been treating pneumonia with salt-water, snow and white moss.

“Dr. Grenfell and his people have more than they can do. We all of us
realize today as we never understood before the meaning to the people of
the North of the presence of Grenfell and his people among them. We
caught the spirit of the work inevitably, and tried to do what good we
could while we were there.

“The folk of the Alexis and the St. Louis River districts, as a rule,
can’t afford the price of gas to go to Battle Harbour. It’s a day’s run,
and there’s nobody to mind their cod-traps when they’re away. So one can
imagine how completely they’d be shut out of the world but for the
contacts which the mission provides even at such long intervals.

“William Russell is the grand old man of Williams Harbour. He is the
most-travelled and the best-educated man of those parts, and he
represents the finest type of patriarch. He never saw a horse or a cow
or an automobile; he has never been south of Battle Harbour, though he
has visited that diminutive settlement four times. He was dumfounded at
our aeroplane.

“In his family the father’s word was law to the twelve children. They
never thought of questioning his authority. They were the best behaved
and most dutiful children I have ever seen. Their obedience was
absolute, and their manner to strangers was deferential. They always
said ‘Yes, sir,’ and ‘No, sir,’ most politely.

“At his house thirty-one gathered to hear the gramophone—for the first
time. They were packed in as tight as could be, choking the room with
their tobacco-smoke. The first night they were silent. The next night
they were excited, and on the third they became hilarious.

“As I said, following the Grenfell example, we did what doctoring we
could on the side. The constant diet of bread and tea, tea and bread is
hard on the teeth. There is much pyorrhea due to this diet, to limestone
in the water, and to failure to clean the teeth. At Blanc Sablon we
treated a little boy who had suffered for three weeks with the
toothache. It was a simple case of congested pulp. The relief was
immediate. It is a joy and a reward to behold the gratitude of those who
are helped.

“I tell you if these people who question the value of Grenfell’s work,
or wonder why he chooses to spend his life in bleak and barren places,
could just see his ‘parishioners’ and know their gratitude toward their
benefactors, they would understand.

“There was a picturesque soul at Blanc Sablon who asked for tobacco,
which we gave him. He was never off the coast. I don’t know where he had
heard a violin. But to make some return to us for the smoke, he gave us
an imitation of a man first tuning and then playing a violin, which was
perfect in its way.”

VI
THE SPORTSMAN

As we were coming off to the _Strathcona_ one evening, the Doctor,
bareheaded, pulling at the oars with the zest of a schoolboy on a
holiday, and every oar-dip making a running flame of phosphorescence,
said: “At college we worshipped at the shrine of athletics. Of course
that wasn’t right, but it did establish a standard—it did teach a man
that he must keep his body under if he would be physically fit. I
realized that if I wanted to win I couldn’t afford to lose an ounce, and
so I was a rigid Spartan with myself. The others sometimes laughed at me
as a goody-goody, but they saw that I could do things that couldn’t be
done by those who indulged in wild flings of dissipation.

“My schooling before Oxford I now feel was wretched. They didn’t teach
me how to learn. The teachers themselves were mediocre. They may have
had a smattering of the classics—but that doesn’t constitute fitness to
teach. Have you read the chapter on education in H. G. Well’s ‘Joan and
Peter’? That strikes me as true.

“I’m glad my orphan children at St. Anthony are getting the right kind
of training from those who understand their business.”

The Doctor still cherishes the insignia of rowing and athletic clubs to
which he was attached while at Oxford. One of his pet coats wears the
initials “O. U. R. F. C.” for the Oxford University Rugby Football Club.
He also stroked the _Torpid_ crew, and the crew of the London Hospital.

He hates—in fact, he refuses, like Peter Pan—to grow up or to grow
old. “Isn’t it too bad that just when our minds have struck their stride
and are doing their best work we should have to end it all?” Not that he
has the least fear of Death. In the country of his loving labour, the
fisher-folk face Death so often in their lawful occasions, for the sake
of you and me who enjoy the savour of the codfish and the lobster, that
when Death finally comes he comes not as a dark and awful figure but as
a familiar and a friend.

[Illustration: “PLEASE LOOK AT MY TONGUE, DOCTOR!”]

[Illustration: “NEXT!”]

The conflict of elemental forces in nature finds at once an echo in the
breast of him who has met “with a frolic heart” every mood and tense of
sky and sea “down north.” At Pleasure Harbour the sunset amid dark
purple clouds edged with a rosy fleece brought “vital feelings of
delight”: and when we came nearest the Dominion’s northern tip the
Doctor said: “I wish you could see the strait ice and the Atlantic ice
fight at Cape Bauld. They go at each other hammer and tongs, with a
roaring and rending like huge wild animals, rampant and foaming and
clashing their tusks.”

On a foggy, super-saturated day, the sails and the deck beaded and
dripping, he will fairly rub his hands in ecstasy and exclaim: “Oh, what
a fine day!” Or he will thrust his ruddy countenance out of his
chart-room door to call: “Isn’t it great to be alive?”

Off Cape Norman, when the foghorn was blaspheming and the sea ran high,
I tried to get the Doctor to concede that it was half a gale, but he
would only admit that it was a “nice breeze.” The new topsail stubbornly
declined to blossom out as it should, though the five other sails were
in full bloom. “We’ll burst it out,” said the Doctor. The offending sail
was forthwith hauled down and stretched like a sick man on the deck;
then it was tied in three places with tarry cords, the Doctor scurried
up the mast, the sail was raised into place by means of the clanking
winch, and then, with violent tugs of the fierce wind like a fish
plucking at a tempting bait the three confining strings snapped in
explosive succession and like a flag unfurling the sail sprang out to
the breeze. We raised a cheer as the perceptible lift of the additional
sail-cloth thrilled the timbers underfoot.

You’d hear him trotting about the deck in the cool dawn inquiring about
steam or tide and humming softly (or lifting with the fervour of a
sailor’s chantey), that favourite Newfoundland hymn, written by a
Newfoundlander, “We love the place, O God, wherein thine honour dwells.”

In the wheelhouse as he looks out over the sea and guides the prow, as
if it were a sculptor’s chisel, through calm or storm, there comes into
his eyes a look as of communing with a far country: his soul has gone to
a secret, distant coast where no man and but one woman can follow.

Sometimes of an evening the Doctor brought out the chessboard and I saw
another phase of his versatile entity—his fondness for an indoor game
that is of science and not blind chance. The red and white ivory
chessmen, in deference to the staggering ship, had sea-legs in the shape
of pegs attaching them to the board. Two missing pawns—“prawns,” the
Doctor humorously styled them—had as substitutes bits of a red birthday
candle, and two of the rooks were made of green modelling-wax
(plasticine).

“I love to attack,” said the Doctor, and his tactics proved that he
meant what he said. He has what Lord Northcliffe once named to me as the
capital secret of success—concentration.

When he has once moved a piece forward he almost never moves it back
again. He likes to go ahead. He seeks to get his pieces out and into
action, and a defensive, waiting game—the strategy of Fabius the
Cunctator—is not for him.

Once in a while he defers sufficiently to the conventions to move out
the King’s pawn at the start, but often his initial move is that of a
pawn at the side of the board. He works the pawns hard and gives them a
new significance. His delight is to march a little platoon of them
against the enemy—preferably against the bishops. Somehow the bishops
seem to lose their heads when confronted by these minor adversaries.

If you get him into a tight corner, the opposition stiffens—the greater
the odds the more vertebral his attitude.

“I make it a rule to go ahead if I possibly can, and not to be driven
back.” This remark of his over the board of the mimic fray applies just
as well to his constant strife with the sea to get where he is
wanted—as on the present occasion when we were threading the needle’s
eye of the rocky outlet at Carpoon.

The Doctor has the real chess mind—the mind that surveys and weighs and
analyzes—with the uncanny faculty of looking many moves ahead, of
balancing all the alternatives, of remembering the disposal of the
forces at a previous stage of the game. He becomes so completely
immersed in the playing—though he rarely finds an antagonist—that it
is a real rest to him after the teeming day, where many a man would only
find it a culminant exhaustion. “Isn’t it queer,” he observed, “that
most men who are good at this game aren’t good for much else?”

His use of the pawns in chess is like his use of the weaker reeds among
men in his day’s work. Since he cannot always get the best (though his
hand-picked helpers at St. Anthony, Battle Harbour and elsewhere are as
a rule exceptionally able), he learns to use the inferior and the
lesser, and with exemplary gentleness and patience he keeps his temper
and lets them think they are assisting though they may be all but
hindering. He gives you to feel that if you hold a basin or sharpen a
knife or fetch a bottle or bring him a chair you are of real value in
the performance of an operation—even if the basin was upset and the
knife was dull and the bottle wasn’t the one and the chair had a broken
leg.

“Christ used ordinary men,” he remarked. “He was a carpenter, and I try
to teach people that he was a good sportsman.”

All through his chess games, too, runs the Oxford principle of sport for
its own sake: he wins, but the strife is more than the victory. He is
never vainglorious when the checkmate comes; he is neither unduly elated
by success nor depressed by adversity—indeed, his enjoyment is keenest
when he is beset. He shows then the same strain that comes out when the
ship is anchored and Mate Albert Ash pokes his head in and says: “If she
drags, we’ve got but one chain out!” Then he will say nothing, or with a
humorous twinkle he will cry in mock despair: “All is lost!” or “if you
knew how little water there was under her you would be scared!”—and
then he will go on with what he is doing. Whether it is the chessboard
or life’s battlefield, he plays the game.

On the end of a hackmatack (juniper) log lying on the deck for firewood
I pencilled for fun: “The Log of the _Strathcona_.” The Doctor saw it,
laughed, and got a buck-saw. Two fishermen clambered over the rail
between him and the woodpile, to get zinc ointment and advice. When he
had “fixed them up” he sawed off the log-end, and drew a picture of the
_Strathcona_—an entirely correct picture, of course, as far as it
went—and then put his signature (à la Whistler butterfly) in the form
of a roly-poly elf, as rotund as a dollar. “I like to draw myself stout
and round,” he laughed. The strange gnome he drew was the very
antithesis of his own lithe, spare, close-knit figure.

So good a playmate and so firm a master—so rare a combination of
gentleness and strength, of self-respect and rollicking fun is difficult
to match in real life or in biographic literature.

Were one to seek a historic parallel for Grenfell one might not go far
wrong in picking Xenophon. Xenophon was a leader who pointed the way not
from the rear but from the head of the column, and asked of his men
nothing that he would not do himself. The reader of the “Anabasis” will
remember that Xenophon awoke in the night and asked himself “Why do I
lie here? For the night goes forward. And with the morn it is probable
that the enemy will come.” Even so, Grenfell feels that he must do the
works of the Master while it is yet day, for all too soon the night
cometh when no man can work.

Xenophon had sedition on his hands, and his men would not go out into
the snows of the mountains of Armenia and cut the wood. So he left his
tent and seized an ax and hewed so valorously that they were shamed into
following suit. That is just what Wilfred Grenfell would have done: it
is what his forbear Sir Richard Grenville would have done. In such ways
as this when the hour strikes the born leader of men asserts himself and
takes command.

VII
THE MAN OF SCIENCE

The Doctor admires certain of his scientific colleagues greatly: he is
candidly a hero-worshipper. “I love Cushing and Finney,” he says
outspokenly of the noted Harvard and Johns Hopkins surgeons. A clinic by
Dr. George de Schweinitz or an operation by Dr. John B. Deaver is a rare
treat to him. Sir Frederick Treves, the great English surgeon, has been
among his closest friends since Grenfell served under him in a London
hospital: he has leaned on him always for perceptive advice and sympathy
unfailing. It is one of the paramount satisfactions of his life to meet
other minds in his profession that stimulate his own. In the ceaseless
round of his activities little time is left him to read books: but if he
could he would enjoy no pastime more than to browse in a well-chosen
library. The victories of science hold for him the fascination of
romance.

The discovery of the electron, in his opinion, might make it possible to
have an entire city in which every material substance should be
invisible. “There is no reason why the forces in action should make a
visible city. We believe today in the unity of matter. It has almost
been demonstrated that we can turn soda into copper. Uranium passes into
radium. Carrel is growing living protoplasm outside the body. Adami has
shown how an electric stimulus applied to the ovum of frogs produces
twins. The electron is the manifestation of force.

“It is almost certain that there is no such thing as physical life. No
matter could exist without movement—the sort of movement you behold
when the spinthariscope throws the radiations from bromide of radium on
a fluorescent screen. If there is no physical life, there is no death.
So many things exist that we do not see. We cannot see ether or weigh
it, but we know that it exists. There is a physical explanation of the
resurrection. The whole universe is incessant motion, just as sound is
vibration—the ordinary C with 256 vibrations, the octave with 512, the
next octave with 1,024 vibrations to the second.

“Tin is a mass of whirling electrons. Gold is composed of a different
number of electrons. That’s why we can’t cross from one to the other.”

It is not quite fair to put down these random remarks, on an extremely
abstruse matter—thrown over the Doctor’s shoulder as he flits about a
village, the dogs at his heels—without quoting his more deliberate
formulation of his ideas in an article in “Toilers of the Deep.” In that
article he writes:

“If chemistry of today has made it certain that there is no such thing
in the human body as a transcendental entity called ‘life,’ and every
function and every organ of the body can be chemically or physically
accounted for, then it is obvious that we have no reason to weep for it.
More infinitely marvellous the more we learn of it, so marvellous that
no one can begin to appreciate it but the man of science, it helps us to
realize how easily He who clothed us with it can provide another equally
well adapted to the needs of that which awaits us when we go ‘home.’ We
have learned to enlarge our physical capacities, our ‘selves,’ the
microscope, the ultramicroscope, the spectroscope, the electroscope, the
spinthariscope, the ophthalmoscope, the fluoroscope, the telescope, and
other man-made machines have made the natural range of the eye of man a
mere bagatelle compared with what it now commands and reveals. The
microphone, the megaphone, the audophone, the wireless and other
machinery have as greatly enlarged our command of the field of sound.
Space has been largely conquered by electric devices for telephoning,
telegraphing, and motor power. On the land, under the sea, in the air,
man is rapidly acquiring a mastery that is miraculous.

“The marvels of manufacture are miracles. Machinery can now do anything,
even talk and sing far beyond the powers of normal human capacities. The
plants and animals of normal nature can be improved beyond recognition.
The old deserts are being forced to blossom like roses; the most potent
governing agencies of the life of the body, like adrenalin, can be made
from coal tar. Seas are linked by broad water pathways, countries are
united by passages through mountains and under the water. We can see
through solid bodies, we can weigh the stars in balances, we can tell
their composition without seeing them. We can describe the nature and
place of unseen heavenly bodies, and know the existence and properties
of elements never seen or heard of. We know that movement is not a
characteristic of life, unless we are to believe that the very rocks are
alive, for we can see that it is movement alone that holds their
ultimate atoms together.

“The mere ‘Me,’ the resultant of all past and present influences on the
‘I,’ is so marvellous, that we must find it ever increasingly impossible
to conceive that we are the products of blind chance, or the sport of a
cruelty so horrible as to make the end one inconceivable tragedy.

“No, if science teaches that there is no entity called ‘life,’ and it
seems to do so, I for my part gladly accept it as yet another tribute at
the feet of the Master Builder who made and gave my spirit—mine, if you
please—a spirit so insignificant, so unworthy, such an unspeakable gift
as that of a body with capacities such as this one, to be the mechanical
temple and temporary garment of my spirit, and to offer me a chance to
do my share to help this wonderful world. ‘No life,’ says science,
‘there is no life.’ But a knowledge more reliable than current
knowledge, that entered the world with the advent of man, and that has
everywhere in every race of mankind been in the past his actually most
valued possession, replies ‘Yes, and there is no death either.’”

One day his morning greeting was: “Nitrogen is gone!” “Too bad!” I said.
“You can search me. I haven’t got it.” “I mean,” he explained, “that
here in this copy of the ‘Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society of
Canada’ Sir Ernest Rutherford sets forth the theory that the molecule of
nitrogen is a helium universe with hydrogen for its satellites and
helium as the sun.” He was almost as much interested in the discovery as
if it were a hole in the bottom of his boat.

“I’ve just been reading a magazine article on the subject of psychic
research by Booth Tarkington,” he added presently. “It’s well written
and exceedingly interesting. Most men of science have been convinced of
the reality of the spiritual body.”

He is an artist of no slight attainment and in his home at St. Anthony
specimens of his handicraft abound, but not obtrusively. Dr. Grenfell
never puts anything that he is or has done on view to be admired.

He is a keen ornithologist, and even when he is at top speed to get back
to his boat and weigh anchor he will pause to note the friendly grackles
hopping about a wharf or the unfettered grace of the gyrations of the
creaking gulls. He is a collector of butterflies. “I was out driving
with a man who didn’t see the butterflies and had no interest in them.
Just think what such a man misses in his life!”

He also collects birds’ eggs, flowering plants (many of which have been
named at Cambridge), seaweed and shells. The great book he wrote and
edited on Labrador gives a clear idea of his interest in the geology as
well as the fauna and flora of the region.

I found him the last thing at night at St. Anthony trying to discover
why one of a pair of box kites he had made wouldn’t remain aloft as it
should.

He is perpetually acquisitive and inquisitive: the diversity of his
interests rivals the appetite of Roosevelt for every sort of
information. Sir Frederick Treves mourned that a great surgeon was lost
to London when Grenfell embarked on the North Sea to the healing and
helping of fishermen. But Grenfell has become much more than a great
surgeon. With all that he is and does, he gives to every part of his
almost boundless field of interests a careful, methodical, analytic
intellect. Haste and the constant pressure of his over-driven life have
not made him superficial. He sets a sail with the same care he gives to
the setting of a compound fracture: he is of the number of those who
believe that there is but one right way to do everything. Of such is the
kingdom of science and of inestimable service.

VIII
THE MAN OF LAW

In his capacity as magistrate, the Doctor never sidesteps trouble. Law
in his part of the world is a matter not merely of the letter but of the
spirit—not of the statute alone but of shrewd common sense. His
decisions are luminous with a Lincolnian light of acumen and sympathy at
once. He lets the jot and tittle—the mint, anise-seed and cummin—take
care of themselves, and considers the real significance of the situation
and the essential nature of the offence. Red tape is not the important
thing, and the imaginary dignity of an invisible judicial ermine is not
besmirched because Magistrate Grenfell discusses the case with a culprit
as a father might talk things over with a son, and makes it plain why
wrong was done—if it was done—and why there must henceforth be a
different course on the part of the offender. He “lays down the law” not
as if it were a Mosaic dispensation from a beclouded mountain top, but
as if it were the simple and discreet way to walk for God-fearing and
reasonable mankind. To him, forever, a man’s own soul is a matter more
important than an ordinance, and he spares no pains to make his meaning
so plain that the dullest apprehension cannot fail to grasp it. You will
see Grenfell at his best when—in a whipping wind, bareheaded,
sweatered, rubber-booted—he stands in the clear glitter of a bracing
sunny day on the beach with the dogs aprowl around him, painstakingly
explaining to a fisherman why it is right to do thus and reprehensible
to do otherwise. And now and then a hearty laugh or a timely
anecdote—Lincoln’s trait again—clears the atmosphere. Sometimes there
are more formidable leets and law courts held among the whalemeat
barrels and the firewood on the _Strathcona_: but more often it is a
plain matter of a tête-à-tête while Grenfell is on his rambling rounds
of a hamlet with his dilapidated leather bag of instruments and
medicines.

Forteau offered its own problems to Dr. Grenfell, the Magistrate. There
is an isle not far away where that sometimes toothsome bird the puffin
makes his home. Fishermen from Forteau, hard put to it to secure
anti-scorbutic fresh meat, might now and then shoot one of the birds,
and the duty of the faithful lighthouse-keeper, Captain Coté, an
appointed game-warden, was to see that the law’s majesty made itself
respected. One day Coté caught a hunter red-handed. “By what warrant do
you arrest me?” said the man behind the gun. “By this!” said Coté,
flourishing a revolver. Is a magistrate to blame if he believes that
common sense should differentiate between a poor fisherman desperate
with hunger, and a pot-hunter who commits wholesale murder among the
eider-ducks sitting on their nests? Usually it is the poor fisherman who
is fined and made to give up his gun, because he pleads “guilty,” while
the pot-hunter who unblushingly pleads “not guilty” goes scot-free. A
fisherman at Flower’s Cove told me that a late lamented coast
magistrate—who got half of the fines he imposed—was making “big money”
from his calling. He fined one man $100 for importing a second-hand
stove without paying customs duties. When the _Strathcona_ hove in
sight, bearing Dr. Grenfell, this profiteering magistrate weighed anchor
in haste, and in a heavy beam sea and shallow water made his “get-away.”

There are always disputes between traders and fishermen to be
adjudicated. Two men within an hour of each other clambered over the
rail of the _Strathcona_ to display dire written threats of wrath to
come from the same West Coast merchant, in a court summons served by a
constable. This document, accompanying a bill of particulars, says that
if they don’t pay at once the balance due they’ll have to go to St.
John’s at a cost of fifty dollars in addition to whatever the amount may
be which the law assesses against them. It isn’t just the amount of the
ticket to St. John’s, or the board while they are there: it’s the loss
of time from the traps that is exacerbating.

The trader isn’t in the wrong just because he is a trader. The fisherman
hasn’t all the right on his side by the fact of being a fisherman, but
the bookkeeping of these traders seemed to be at very loose ends indeed.
Long after the debtor thought he had paid all his debt, in cash or in
kind, the trader unearthed on the books items of 1915, 1916 or 1917
which he forgot to charge for. Here they bob up like a bay seal, to the
consternation of the man who thought the slate had been sponged off
clean “far away and long ago.”

One of the two who brought their present perplexity to the Doctor had
had the misfortune to lose his house by fire, and all the trader’s
receipts therein, so that he had no written line to show against the
trader’s bill.

I found out later that the trader’s daughters kept the books—in fact, I
saw them behind the counter at their father’s store—and they were said
to be indifferent and slovenly misses indeed, who used their thumbs for
erasures and made as many mistakes in a day’s work as there are
blueberries on Blomidon. Perhaps they were in love—but their
hit-or-miss accountancy meant a terrible worriment for sea-faring men
two hundred miles distant, and a pother of trouble for Dr. Grenfell and
a St. John’s lawyer—a friend of the Doctor’s who befriends those who
cannot afford or do not know how to obtain legal advice.

IX
THE MAN OF GOD

In his formal addresses Dr. Grenfell exemplifies the homely, pithy
eloquence that comes from speaking directly “to men’s business and
bosoms” out of the fulness of the heart: but those who have heard him in
the little, informal, offhand talks he gives among his own people in his
own bailiwick appreciate them even more than what he has to say to a
congregation of strangers in a great city far from the Labrador.

It must be understood that the quotations that follow are merely
extemporaneous, unrevised sentences taken down without the Doctor’s
knowledge, and of a nature wholly casual and unpremeditated.

At a service held in the tiny saloon of the _Strathcona_ for the crew
and the patients who happened to be with us, the Doctor said:

“We so often think that religion is bound to be dull and solemn and
monotonous: we don’t follow the example of Christ who spread light and
joy wherever he went. None of us is perfect, but God doesn’t denounce
Dr. Grenfell and Will Sims and Albert Ash (naming members of the crew)
for their shortcomings. That isn’t his way. He knows us as we are, with
all our weaknesses. He loved David—he said that David was a man after
his own heart. Yet David was a bad man—he was an adulterer and
incidentally a murderer, and he got his people into trouble that lost
thousands of their lives. But God loved him in spite of his human
frailties, because he did such a lot of good in the world.

“It doesn’t do to take a single text. For instance—we read ‘The world
is established so that it cannot be moved,’ but we know that it is all
movement: we know that it moves at a pace six times as fast as the
fastest aeroplane. But the Church looked at that verse and said that he
who denied it was denying the truth. I was reading this morning about
Copernicus, who insisted that this world is round. Up to his time men
had insisted that it was flat and that you might fall off the edge. Then
there was Galileo, who said that it moved: and they put him under the
thumbscrews, and when he came out he said, ‘and still it does move.’

[Illustration: DR. GRENFELL LEADING MEETING AT BATTLE HARBOUR.]

“So often Christian people think it’s their duty to forbid and to
repress and to bring gloom with a long face where they go. But that
wasn’t Christ’s way and it isn’t God’s way. If religious people do these
things people begin to suppose that religion is something to destroy the
joy of living. But that isn’t what it’s for. It’s to make us kinder to
fathers and mothers and sisters and friends, and true to the duty
nearest our hand.

“I love to think of David as the master musician who went about
scattering good and dispelling the clouds of heaviness. We ought to
follow his example. Sometimes we say ‘Oh, they’ve all been so mean to me
I’ll take it out on them by being sour and dull and jealous and bitter!’
Here in this crew we get to know one another almost as well as God knows
us, and we see one another’s faults. It’s so easy to spy out faults when
we’re so close together, day after day. But we should be blind to some
things—like Nelson at Copenhagen. You remember when they gave the
signal to retreat he put his blind eye to the telescope.

“If God looked for the faults in us, who could stand before Him? None of
us is perfect. Let us judge not that we be not judged, and mercifully
learn to make allowances. I knew a man who had been the cause of a loss
of $20,000 to his employer, through costly litigation that was the
result of his mistakes. His master, nevertheless, gave him a second
chance, with an even better job. Later I asked him if the man was making
good. He replied, ‘He is the best servant I have.’ Even so we ought to
learn to be long-suffering with others, as God is lenient until seventy
times seven with us.”

In the little church at Flower’s Cove the Doctor spoke on the meaning of
the words of Christ in Mark 8, 34, as given in the vernacular version:
“If any man wishes to walk in my steps, let him renounce self, take up
his cross, and follow me.”

“What is there that a man values more than his life?

“When I was here early in the spring there was a man who was in a
serious way. I told him he should come to the hospital at St. Anthony
for an operation. He said he must get his traps and his twine ready.
Then when I came again in June I saw that he was worse, and I again gave
him warning that in six months at most the results might be fatal. Still
he said that he could not go. When I came ashore today I learned that he
was dead. The twine was ready—but he was gone. That is the way with so
many of us. We say we are too busy—we can always give that excuse—and
then death finds us, grasping our material possessions, perhaps, but
with the great ends of life unwon. Its only a stage that we cross for a
brief transit, coming in at this door and going out at that. It won’t do
to play our part just as we are making our exit—we must play it while
we are in the middle of the stage.

“At Sandwich Bay we followed a stream and the two men on the other side
called my attention to the tracks of a bear: and when we came back to
the boat the men aboard said they had seen two bears wandering about.
The bears were unable to hide their tracks, and even so you and I cannot
conceal the traces of our footsteps where we went. Captain Coté at the
Greenly Island Light showed us the model of a steamship—made with a
motor costing a dollar and a half that ran it in a straight line for an
hour. It had no volition of its own. Man is not like that soulless boat:
he has a mind of his own. We are surrounded by amazing discoveries:
great scientists are ever toiling on the problem of communication with
the dead. Men laughed at the alchemists of old: we laugh no longer at
the idea of changing one substance into another. We can change water
with electricity and change one frog’s egg into twins. We can fly from
St. John’s to England in a day. We can see through solid
substances—come to St Anthony and I will show it to you with the X-ray
apparatus. What fools we are to deny immortality and the resurrection!
What are realized values as compared with the spiritual? There was the
ship _Royal Charter_ for Australia that went ashore at Moidra in Wales.
A sailor wrapped himself in gold and it drowned him. Would you say that
he had the gold or that the gold had him?

“The carol of good King Wenceslaus tells us of the blessings that came
to the little lad who followed in the footsteps of the king. Even so,
better things than any temporal benefits come to us if we walk in the
steps of Christ.

“Some of the soldiers of the war returning to this country are not
acting as soldiers should. They are importing foreign vices. I have seen
lately horrible examples of the suffering of the innocents as a result
of their misdeeds. There are more communicable diseases in the present
year than we have ever had before on this coast. A man has no right to
the title of a soldier who does not walk in Christ’s steps—he has no
right to the name, when he pleases self and damns his country and his
fellow-men and fellow-women.

“We have among us the deplorable spectacle of many weak sectarian
schools—and it is a wicked thing that we do not combine them in strong
undenominational ones. So many things cry out for changing. Today I
visited a family and found the father had tuberculosis. The
mother?—tuberculosis. The children?—tuberculosis. Then I saw a baby
whose head was not filled up, whose arms were puny, whose shoulders were
constricted. From what? From rickets. The rickets came from bad feeding
due to ignorance. I saw another child with the same complaint from the
same cause.

“American bank-notes are made of paper that comes from Dalton,
Massachusetts. The finest quality of paper is made of rags. They can use
old rags and dirty rags—but they cannot use red ones. In explaining the
manufacture to children I heard the manager speak of the rags as being
‘willing’ or ‘unwilling.’ The red ones were the ‘unwilling’ ones, and
one of the children afterward said she’d rather be a willing rag. We may
be poor and sorry objects—we may be rags—but there is something to be
made of us if only we are willing rags.

“I came to a paralyzed boy. He said, ‘What can I do, Dr. Grenfell?’ I
said, ‘You can smile upon all those who minister to you or come where
you are. You can spread the spirit of good cheer even from your
bedside.’”

“I was present at Pilley’s Island when a soldier came home who had won
the V. C. What a welcome he received! There was a triumphal arch and the
town turned out to do honour to its hero. He was the right sort of
soldier.”

Norman Duncan wrote a delightful book called “Doctor Luke of the
Labrador” which very faithfully mirrors the atmosphere of Dr. Grenfell’s
days and doings. But the book is not to be taken as faithful biography
_verbatim et literatim_, in the passages relating to the titular hero.

The Doctor has nothing in the open book of his past life for which he
needs to make amends; but the hero of “Doctor Luke” has something
mysterious to live down, the precise nature of which is not divulged. In
many admirable qualities the portrait of “Doctor Luke” is a faithful
likeness of Dr. Grenfell, and that is why there is a danger that the
reader will think that in all particulars the book man and the real man
correspond. “Doctor Luke” goes to the Labrador to flee from his own
shadow—a man pursued by bitter memories of what he has done, and by
mocking wraiths of sin, their fingers pointed at him. Dr. Grenfell went
to the Labrador because the spirit moved him to go to the help of men
whose lives were as cold as the ice and as hard as the rock that hemmed
them in. He went not as one who sorrows over misspent years but as one
who rejoices in the belief that his work has the smile of God upon it.
Dr. Grenfell has the spirit of any first-rate missionary—he will not
admit that he has elected a life of brain-fag, bodily travail and
spiritual torment. His joy in doing and giving is unaffected. When he
invites the rest of us to find life beautiful and bountiful he does not
pose nor prate. He walks in the steps and in the name of Christ with a
child’s humility, a man’s strength, an almost feminine tenderness and
never a breath of that maudlin, unctuous sanctimoniousness which always
must repel the virile and vertebrate fibre of the Thomas Hughes brand of
“muscular Christianity.” Dr. Grenfell likes gospel hymns where some
prefer sonatas and concertos, but he likes them when they carry a plain
and pointed message from the heart to the heart, and build up a
consciousness of our human interdependence: he would not care for them
if they merely blew into flame the emotional fire-in-straw that burns
itself out uselessly because of the want of substantial fuel.

To the humble millionaire or the haughty workingman his manner is the
same. He knows what it means “to walk with kings nor lose the common
touch.” Nor is he easily fooled. “Though I give my body to be burned,
and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing.”

“I talked with Mr. A.,” he told me, referring to his visit with a
Croesus of New York who to certain ends has given largely, “and I felt
somehow that, with all his giving, he had not given himself!”

That is the secret, it seems to me, of Dr. Grenfell’s own cogent power
upon other lives—that he goes and does in his own energetic person. He
does not stand at a distance issuing commands. He is entirely willing to
help anybody, anywhere. He holds back nothing that he can bestow, and he
never despairs. His ruddy optimism is a matter of actual daily practice
and not of a cloistered philosophy. You never could persuade him that
with all the heavy burden that he bears, the myriad interruptions and
vexations that occur, he is not having a grand good time. He would be
entirely ready to say with Stevenson:

“Glad did I live and gladly die
And I laid me down with a will!”

X
SOME OF HIS HELPERS

I should like to write a whole book about his helpers. He is not a man
who seeks to shine by surrounding himself with mediocrities. He would be
ready to say with Charles M. Schwab: “I want you to work not for me but
with me.” His presence is quickening and engenders loyalty. It is fun to
be wherever Dr. Grenfell is because something is always going on.

His helpers never are given to feel that they are ciphers while he is
the integer. Some of the ablest surgeons of America and of Europe have
ministered to the patients at Battle Harbour, Indian Harbour and St.
Anthony and on the _Strathcona_. There is an utter absence of “side” and
“swank” in this the good physician, and he never decks himself out in
the borrowed plumage of another’s virtue. He delights to see a thing
well done, and is the first to bestow the word of earned praise on the
doer. Conversely, he is not happy if a job is put through in a bungling,
half-hearted, messy fashion; but he keeps his breath to cool his
porridge, and never wastes it by mere “blowing off” when the mischief is
done and palaver will not mend matters.

Human beings are not angels, and even those who are upheld by a sense of
righteous endeavour may get tired and short-tempered and disheartened
and lonely. Those who attach themselves to this enterprise for the weeks
of summer sunlight only do not have much time to develop nostalgia. But
“there ain’t no busses runnin’ from the bank to Mandalay,” and the
Labrador has no theatres, no picnics, no ball games and few dances.
Think of the large-hearted Moravian Brethren of the Labrador whose
missions are linked with London by one visit a year from their mission
ship the _Harmony_. Think of the man (Mr. Stewart) who sticks it out by
himself at Ungava round the chill promontory of Cape Chidley in Ungava
Bay. Think of the agents of the Hudson Bay and other companies dealing
with the “silent, smoky Indian” in the vast reaches of the North.
Whoever essays to serve God and man in this country must haul his own
weight and bear others’ burdens too. He must lay aside hindrances—he
must forfeit love of home and kindred—he must learn to keep normal and
cheerful in the aching solitudes.

Many are with the Doctor for a season or so. Some like Dr. Little, Dr.
Paddon and Dr. Andrews and certain others who deserve to be named
_honoris causa_—have stood by him year after year. But by this time
there is a small army of short-term or long-term Grenfell graduates—men
and women—who had “their souls in the work of their hands” and whose
precious memories are of the days they spent in assuaging the torment,
physical or spiritual, of plain fisher-folk. It is not possible to
separate in this case the care of bodies from the cure of souls. The
“wops” who brought the schooner _George B. Cluett_ from Boston year
after year, laden with lumber and supplies, and then went ashore to be
plumbers and carpenters and jacks-of-all-trades for love and not for
hire have their own stories to tell of “simple service simply given to
their own kind in their human need.” Most of them knew just what they
would be up against; they knew it would not be a glorified house-party;
but they accepted the isolation and the crudeness and the cold and the
unremitting toil, and in the spirit of good sportsmanship which is the
ruling spirit of the Grenfell undertaking they played the game, and what
they did is graven deep in the Doctor’s grateful memory.

The Doctor wins and keeps the enthusiastic loyalty of his colleagues
because he is so ready with the word of emphatic praise for what they do
when it is the right thing to do. He is fearless to condemn, but he
would rather commend, and the flush of pleasure in the face of the one
praised tells how much his approval has meant to the recipient. He knows
how many persons in this human, fallible world of ours travel faster for
a pat than for a kick or a blow.

A halt was called at Forteau for a few hours’ conference with one of the
remarkable women who have put their shoulders under the load of the
Labrador—Sister Bailey, once a co-worker with Edith Cavell. At Forteau
she has a house that holds an immaculate hospital-ward and an up-to-date
dispensary. For twelve years—except for two visits in England—she has
held the fort here without the company of her peers, except at long
intervals. She has kept herself surrounded with books and flowers, and
her geraniums are exquisite. Sister Bailey’s cow, bought for $40 in a
bargain at Bonne Esperance (“Bony,”) is a wonder, and I took pains to
stroke the nose of this “friendly cow” and praise her life-giving
endeavours. For each day at the crack of dawn there is a line-up of
people with all sorts of containers to get the milk. The dogs, of
course, would cheerfully kill the animal if they could pull her down,
but she fights them off with her horns, and they have learned a
wholesome fear. She is not like the cow at Bonne Esperance today, which
has suffered the loss of part of its hind quarters because it was too
gentle.

Under Sister Bailey’s roof three maids, aged 12, 13 and 22, are being
educated in household management. She has a garden with the dogs fenced
out, and there is a skirmish with the weeds all through the summer into
which winter breaks so suddenly. There is no spring; there is no fall;
flowers, vegetables and weeds appear almost explosively together.

Artificial flowers are beautifully made—with dyes from Paris—by the
girls of Forteau Cove, under Sister Bailey’s supervision. The hues are
remarkably close to the original and the imitation of petal and leaf is
so close as to be startling.

[Illustration: ST. ANTHONY HOSPITAL IN WINTER.]

[Illustration: SOME OF THE HELPERS.]

No description of Dr. Grenfell’s “parish,” as Norman Duncan aptly styled
it, could be complete without mention—that would be much more extended
did she permit—of the part Mrs. Grenfell fills in all that the Doctor
does. Mrs. Grenfell was Miss Anna MacClanahan, of Chicago, and she is a
graduate of Bryn Mawr. The Doctor went to the Labrador years before his
marriage, but since she took her place at his side with her tact, her
humour, her common sense, her sound judgment and her broad sympathies,
she has been a tower of strength, a well-spring of solace and of
healing, and altogether an indispensable factor in her husband’s
enterprise.

She is his secretary, and the number of letters to be written, of
patients’ records to be kept, of manuscripts to be prepared for the
press is enormous. The Doctor pencils a memorandum when and where he
can—perhaps sitting atop of a woodpile on the reeling deck of the
_Strathcona_; and then Mrs. Grenfell tames the rebellious punctuation or
supplies the missing links of predicates or prepositions and evolves a
manuscript that need not fear to face the printer.

The letters of appeal are almost innumerable, of protest occasional, of
sympathy and friendship—with or without subscriptions—very numerous,
and Mrs. Grenfell has the happy gift of saying “thank you” in such warm
and gracious, individualizing terms that the donor is enlisted in a
lifelong friendship for the Grenfell idea.

Mrs. Grenfell is “the life of the party” wherever she goes. Like the
Doctor, she refuses to grow tired of the great game of living, and it is
a game they play together in a completely understanding and sympathetic
copartnership.

General “Chinese” Gordon once gave as the reason for not marrying the
fact that he had never found the woman who would follow him anywhere.
Dr. Grenfell has been more fortunate. A friend of theirs tells me that
Dr. Grenfell proposed on shipboard, almost the minute he met his wife.
Astounded by his precipitancy, she said: “But, Doctor, you don’t even
know my name!” “That doesn’t make any difference; I know what it’s going
to be,” is said to have been his characteristic answer.

Mrs. Grenfell was translated from a life that might have been one of
ease and pleasure and social preoccupation into a life of unremitting
toil and no small measure of actual hardship, and she meets the day and
whatever it brings in the same high-hearted mood that her husband
carries to the various phases of his crowded existence. She is his
mentor—without being a tormentor; she is his business memory and a deal
of his common sense and social conscience: but she never lets her fine,
keen mind, her quick wit and her readily divining intuition become
absorbed in the mechanic phases of the regulation of household or
boatload business. She has the happy faculty of instant transplantation
from the practical task to the ideal atmosphere. She is the Doctor’s
workmate, playmate and helpmate: the complete and inspiring counterpart.
She knows better than anybody else that she has a great man for a
husband, but she never lets that consciousness become oppressive, and
she knows that it is good for them both to yield to the playful spirit
of rollicking nonsense and absurd horseplay now and then. So you needn’t
be surprised if you should find the pair chasing each other about the
deck pretending a mortal combat with billets of birch-wood, while the
distracted Fritz the dog cannot make up his mind whether he is in duty
bound to bite his mistress or his master. You needn’t be surprised if
the Doctor goes through a mighty pantomime of barricading his chart-room
as though his better half had no business in it, or hides some one of
her cherished Lares and Penates and assumes an innocent ignorance of its
whereabouts. When he is at play Dr. Grenfell is not a bit older than the
youngest of his three delightful children whose combined ages cannot be
much more than fifteen years. He is the same sort of amusing and devoted
father as the mourned and beloved head of the household at Sagamore
Hill, who to Dr. Grenfell—of course—is the pattern of all that the
head of a family and the soul of a nation should be.

The family life of the Grenfells and the perfect mutuality of thought
and feeling between Dr. Grenfell and his wife stand out in clear-cut
lines as an example to those who never have known the meaning of the
complete community of ideals in the family life and in the relationship
of wife and husband. It stands in rebuke to the sorrowful travesty the
modern marriage so often exhibits. It shows how the strength of either
partner in the marriage of true minds is multiplied tenfold and how the
yoke is easy and the burden is light when love has entered in—

“The love you long to give to one
Made great enough to hold the world.”

XI
FOUR-FOOTED AIDES: DOGS AND REINDEER

In few places are the dogs so numerous and so noisy as at Forteau, and
Sister Bailey’s team held the primacy for speed and condition and
obedience to command—yet she ruled them by moral suasion and not by
kicks and curses. That does not mean they were dog angels. Every “husky”
is in part a wolf, and the gentlest and most amiable that fawns upon you
will in a twinkling go from the Dr. Jekyll to the Mr. Hyde in his
make-up when the breaking-point is passed. The leaders of the pack were
two monsters named Scotty and Carlo, and they were rivals to the end of
the tether. Carlo was a sentimentalist of a hue between fawn and grey:
his greatest pleasaunce was to put his forepaws on your shoulders and
lick your nose ere you could stave him off. Scotty’s nose—he was black
and white—was embossed with the marks of many bitter duels. Probably
the other dogs could read those marks, as a Bret Harte cowboy could read
the notches on a gun, and he won respect commensurate with the length
and breadth of the scratches. Scotty came with us on the _Strathcona_,
as his mistress was leaving for a rest in England shortly. It was a job
to persuade him aboard the boat, but once there he entered into a tacit
agreement, as between gentlemen, that he should have the after deck
while Fritz, our official dog, monopolized the prow. Scotty had the
better of the bargain, for his bailiwick included the cook’s galley. But
Fritz could sleep on the floor of my cabin, though whenever I looked for
him on the floor he was snugly ensconced in a forbidden lower bunk,
curled up like a jelly roll. He learned to vacate without even a word
when I gazed at him reproachfully.

All Sister Bailey’s dogs, and a great many more, converged upon the
beach when Fritz swam ashore and shook himself free from such marine
algae as he might have collected on his course. We kept Fritz close at
heel, but there were constant alarums and incursions. As we sauntered
along the shore path by the fish-flakes where the women were turning
over the fish under the threat of rain, Fritz was in a measure taken
into the loosely cohesive _plunderbund_ of Sister Bailey’s pack. They
seemed to be saying to him after their fashion: “Oh, well, you are a
foreigner from that ship out yonder in the cove, to be sure, but here we
are passing one hostile tribe after another, and we may need you any
time to help us out in a scrap, so you may as well travel along with our
bushy tails—though yours points toward the ground, and you can’t be
very much of a dog, after all.”

For dogs appeared in squads, platoons, companies, battalions, even as
iron-filings cluster to a magnet. There was a most outrageous and unholy
pow-wow when we had gone about five houses from the beach. All the dogs
from near and far piled into it like hornets from a broken nest. There
was no speech nor language known to dogdom in which their voices were
not heard with howls and imprecations. Alas! even the gentle Sister
Bailey had to abandon for the nonce her policy of moral suasion and get
in among her protégés with thwackings of a bit of driftwood and a few
well-directed pushes (not to say kicks) of the foot. Any moderate
impact, when a scrap is in full swing, rebounds from the tough
integuments like hailstones landing on a tin roof. Even an every-day
argument of these beasts sounds like wholesale murder. It is a pathetic
fact that with all the affectionate responsiveness of some of the
animals to human notice there always lurks a danger. If you are a
stranger, meeting a strange pack, it is well to keep your eyes upon
them, and if you have not a stick in your hand, or a stone ready to
throw, it is wholesome to stoop groundward and pretend you have a
missile. Then, nine times out of ten, they will scatter. So often one
would like to believe they are all dog, with all of the dog’s graces and
goodnesses—but there reigns in the breast of each a vulpine jealousy
that easily and instantly mounts to a blood-heat of maddened fury. Dogs
of the same litter will fight as furiously and savagely as born enemies,
though they may recognize in the traces intuitively the leadership of
their mother at an age far beyond that at which civilized puppies become
as contemptuous of their mother as she is of them.

Unhappily, there are many cases on authentic record when young children
and old people, unable to defend themselves, have been devoured by
dogs—not necessarily when the dogs were starving. A grewsome climax was
reached when in the “flu” epidemic of 1918-19 on the Labrador the dogs
fell on the dead and the dying and the enfeebled survivors could not
stem the onslaught. No wonder, then, that Dr. Grenfell, with all his
manifest affection for dogs that he has known, insists that the
importation of reindeer is the salvation and the solution. Stubbornly
the folk of the northern tip of the peninsula and the Labrador coast
cling to the huskies that were banished, in favour of cows, horses, pigs
and chickens, by their more sophisticated southern neighbours. Uncle
Philip Coates at Eddy’s Cove is the only man on that shore, as far as is
known, who keeps pigs.

A fisherman landing on an island off Cape Charles, on the side away from
his home, found himself the object of the unwelcome attentions of a pack
of dogs who were acting on the principle of the uncouth villager of the
old story who cried: “’Ere’s a stranger, Bill—let’s ’eave ’arf a brick
at him.” He is sure they would have pounced on him and polished off his
bones, had he not seen one dog he knew—the leader. He called the dog’s
name; the wolfish creature halted instantly. When the name was repeated,
the dog slunk off, his ragged retinue at his heels.

It is sad to think that the dogs that will perform so nobly in the
traces are such bad actors when they have nothing to do but to pick a
quarrel in places where perhaps there is no foliage but the proud curled
plumage of their tails. They are beside themselves with excitement when
after the summer siesta they are harnessed to the komatik again. When
the driver smartly rubs his hands and cries, “See the deer!”—or
anything he pleases—it augments the fever. In Labrador “ouk, ouk!”
turns the team to the right—perchance with a disconcerting
promptness—and “urrah, urrah!” swerves it to the left. The
corresponding directions in Newfoundland are “keep off!” and “hold in.”
No reins are used—some drivers use no whip. The books of Dr. Grenfell
abound in affectionate reference to the better nature of these animals
and their extraordinary fidelity to duty. Like most of the people of the
land, they do not fear to die. Their life is largely of neglect and
pain: they spend much of their time crawling under the houses to get out
of the way. Their pleasure is the greater when they find a human
playmate ready to throw a stick into the water for them. Grand swimmers
are they, and they will plunge into the coldest sea; and if they are
hungry they dive in for a small fish without concern. It is hard to find
a time when they are not ready to set their fangs to food—“full-fed” is
an ideal condition to which most of them seldom attain. A square meal of
whalemeat is their millennium. “I don’t see what satisfaction they get
out of it,” said “Bill” Norwood—one of the volunteer “wops” building
the Battle Harbour reservoir. “The meat in winter comes to them in
frozen hunks, and they slide it down at one gulp, to melt in their
stomach. That’s not quite my idea of enjoying a meal.”

In a yawl that the _Strathcona_ dragged astern three plaintive huskies,
to be committed to the pack at St. Anthony, hungrily sniffed the
meat-laden breeze that blew from our deck. They were perturbed at
finding themselves going to sea. I may add that when they got ashore the
youngest of the three—a mere baby—jumped on a rock and bit the nose of
the leader of the St. Anthony pack, Eric by name, thereby winning
respect for himself and his two comrades among the aborigines who might
otherwise have fallen upon them and rent them limb from limb.

The dogs at Battle Harbour live up to the name of the settlement. Like
all other “huskies,” they are ready to fight on slight provocation, and
the night is made vocal with their long-drawn ululations. Their appetite
is insatiable—they devour with enthusiasm whatsoever things are thrown
out at the kitchen door—they even ate a towel that went astray—and
when nothing better offers they will wade into the water in quest of
caplin, or cods’ heads. In their enthusiasm for food the dogs will dig
through boards to get at cattle and pigs, and cows and chickens seldom
live where the dogs are numerous.

The murderous proclivities of the dogs of the Labrador furnished one of
the chief reasons, as has been said before, why the Doctor went to such
great pains and to such a relatively large expense to import and
domicile the reindeer.

“It was wildly exciting work, I can tell you, lassoing those reindeer
and tying their legs in that country over yonder,” he said, as the
_Strathcona_ rounded the rugged bread-loaf island of Cape Onion. He
pointed to the settlement of Island Bay behind it. “There we were blown
across the bay on the ice—dogs, komatik and all—roaring with laughter
at our own predicament, helpless before the great gale of wind.” Thus he
recalls without bitterness the costly undertaking whose fruition has
been—and still is—one of his dearest dreams. Conveying the captured
reindeer across the Strait in a schooner to Canada with almost nobody to
help him was a Herculean task. Some day the Legislature at St. John’s
may see fit to divert a little money to establishing the docile and
reliable reindeer in place of treacherous and predatory dogs. It is a
greater loss to the island than to Grenfell that the scheme must wait.

With a mob of dogs in every village, a mob actuated most of the time by
an insatiable hunger driving it forth in quest of any sort of food, it
has been impossible in most places to keep a cow or a goat, and hay is
prohibitively costly to import. Dr. Grenfell has described with pathos
how Labrador mothers, in default even of canned milk for the baby, are
in the habit of chewing hard bread into a pulpy mass to fill the
infant’s mouth and thus produce the illusion of nutriment until it is
able to masticate and assimilate “loaf” for itself. In few countries is
milk so scarce.

The reindeer might be the cow of the Labrador. The reindeer is able to
find a square meal amid the moss and lichens, and it yields milk so rich
as to require dilution to bring it down to the standard of cow’s milk,
while it is free from the peculiar flavour of the milk of the goat. The
Lapps make the milk into a “cream cheese” which Dr. Grenfell has tried
out on his sledge journeys and heartily endorses.

Nearly three hundred reindeer were obtained by Dr. Grenfell in Lapland
in 1907, with three Lapland families to herd them and teach herding.
They were landed at Cremailliere, (locally called “Camelias”), three
miles south of St. Anthony. At the end of four years the herd numbered a
thousand. In 1912, twelve hundred and fifty at once were corraled.
Poaching and want of police protection made it desirable to transfer the
animals across the Straits to Canada. Some of them, by virtue of
strenuous effort, were collected in 1918 and transported to the St.
Augustine River district where now they flourish and increase in number.
Some day, it would seem from the great success of the reindeer-herds of
Alaska—introduced by Dr. Sheldon Jackson and fostered by the United
States Government—these fine animals will surely replace the dogs on
the Labrador, when local prejudice against them has been overcome or has
evaporated. They are useful not merely for the milk but for the meat and
the skins, as well as for transportation. They live at peace instead of
on the precarious verge of battle. The “experiment” has not collapsed in
dismal failure. It is only in abeyance to the ultimate assured success,
and it is not too much to predict that another generation or two will
see the reindeer numerous and useful throughout the Labrador.

XII
A WIDE, WIDE “PARISH”

To take the measure of the man Dr. Grenfell is and the work he does it
is necessary to know something of the land and the waters round about,
where he puts his life in jeopardy year after year, day unto day, to
save the lives of others. There is much more to “Dr. Grenfell’s parish”
than the “rock, fog and bog” of the old saying. Such observations as are
here assembled are the raw material for the Doctor’s inimitable tales of
life on the Labrador.

The great fact of life here is the sea, and much of existence is in
giving battle to it. The little boys practice jumping across
rain-barrels and mud-puddles, because some day they hope to get a
“ticket” (a berth on a sealer) and go to the ice, and when it is “a good
big copy from pan to pan”—that is to say, a considerable distance from
one floating ice-cake to the next—their ability to jump like their own
island sheep may save their lives.

[Illustration: SIGNAL HILL, HARBOUR OF ST. JOHNS.]

The word “copy” comes from the childish game of following the leader and
doing as he does. A little piece of ice is called a knob, and a larger
piece is a pan. A pan is the same thing as a floe, but the latter
expression is not in common usage.

Every youth who aspires to qualify as a skipper must go before an
examining board of old sea-wise and weather-wise pilots, and prove
himself letter-perfect in the text of that big book, “The Newfoundland
and Labrador Pilot and Guide.” His examiners scorn the knowledge of the
book, very often, for they have the facts at the fingers’ ends from long
and harsh experience of the treacherous waters, with the criss-cross
currents, the hidden reefs, the sudden fogs, the contrary winds. So they
delight to make life miserable for the young mariner by heckling him.

The disasters that now and then overtake the sealing-fleet are ever
present in the minds of those who do business in these waters. They know
what it means for a ship’s company to be caught out on the ice in a
snow-storm, far from the vessel. In early March the wooden ships race
for the Straits of Belle Isle, and three days later the faster iron
ships follow. When they get to where the seals are sunning themselves
around the blow-holes in the ice, the crew go out with their gaffs
(staves) and kill the usually unresisting animals by hitting them over
the back of the head. It sounds like simple and easy hunting, and in
good weather it is. But a long-continued storm changes the complexion of
the adventure to that of the gravest peril.

One captain saved his men by making them dance like mad the long night
through, while he crooned the music to them. At the end of each five
minutes he let them rest on their piles of gaffs, and then they were
made to spring to their feet again and resume the frantic gyrations that
kept them from freezing to death. In the same storm, the _Greenland_ of
Harbour Grace lost 52 of her 100 men.

They still talk of the fate of the _Queen_ on Gull Island off Cape St.
John, though the wreck took place nigh unto forty years ago. There was
no lighthouse then. The island lifts its head hundreds of feet above the
mean of the tides, and only the long rank grass and the buttercups live
there in summer. But this was in a December night, and the wind blew a
gale. There were six passengers—a woman among them. When the passengers
had battled their way ashore through the leaping surf, the crew went
back on the doomed ship to salvage some of the provisions. For they knew
that at this forsaken angle of the island no help from any passing ship
was likely till the spring.

The passengers toiled to the top of the bleak islet, lugging with them a
fragment of a sail. The crew, aboard the vessel, were carried by the
furious winds and waters out to the Old Harry Shoals, where they lost
their lives when the sea beat the vessel to pieces.

The sequel is known by a little diary in which a doctor—one of the
hapless half-dozen—made notes with his own blood till his stiffening
fingers refused to scrawl another entry.

It seems from this pathetic note-book that the six at the end of a few
days, tortured with thirst and starvation, drew lots to see who should
die.

The lot fell to the woman. Her brother offered himself in her place.

Then the entries in the book cease; and the curtain that fell was not
lifted till spring brought a solitary hunter to the island. He shot a
duck from his boat, and it fell in the breakers. Afterwards he said it
was a phantom fowl, sent from heaven to guide him. For he did not see it
again, though he landed and searched the beach.

But he saw splinters flung high by the surf that seemed to him a clear
indication of a wreck.

He clambered to the top of the islet. There he found, under the rotted
sail, the six bodies, and in the hand of one, was a piece of flesh torn
from one of the bodies.

Even when their lives are endangered the fishermen preserve their keen
mindfulness of the religious proprieties. Caught on an ice-pan together,
Protestants and Catholics prayed, their backs to one another, on
opposite sides of the pan—and the same thing has happened in ships’
cabins. The sailors are not above a round oath now and then, but there
are many God-fearing, prayerful men among them. “These are my sailing
orders, sir,” said an old retired sea-dog to me as he patted the cheek
of his Bible.

Phrases of the sea enter into every phase of daily human intercourse.
“You should have given yourself more room to veer and haul,” said the
same old sailor to me when I was in a hurry. Fish when half-cured are
said to be “half-saved,” and a man who is “not all there” is likely to
be styled “half-saved.”

“Down killik” is used impartially on arrival at the fishing grounds or
at home after a voyage—the “killik” being a stone anchor for small
craft or for nets. (A “killy-claw” is of wood with the stone in the
middle.) You may hear an old fisherman say of his retirement from the
long warfare with the sea for a living: “My killiks are down; my boat is
moored.” One of them who was blind in his left eye, said as he lay
dying, referring to his own soul: “She’s on her last tack, heading for I
don’t know where: the port light is out, and the starboard is getting
very dim.” A few minutes later he passed away.

The ordinary talk is full of poetry. “If I could only rig up a derrick,
now, to hoist me over the fore part of the winter,” an old salt will
say, “wi’ the help o’ God and a sou’westerly wind and a few swyles I
could last till the spring.” By “swyles,” of course, he means “seals.” A
man’s a man when he has killed his seal. Seal-meat is an anti-scorbutic,
and the sealers present the “paws,” or flippers, as great delicacies to
their friends. A “big feed” is a “scoff.” Sealing brings men together in
conviviality and comaraderie, and it is the great ambition of most of
the youth of Newfoundland to “go to the ice.” Many are the stowaways
aboard the sealing craft. If a man goes “half his hand” it means he gets
half his catch for his labour.

“Seal” is pronounced “swyle,” “syle,” or “swoyle” and Swale Island also
takes its name from this most important mammal. Seals wandering in
search of their blow-holes have been found as far as six or seven miles
inland.

As might be expected, there survives in the vernacular—especially of
the older people—many words and phrases that smack of their English
dialect origin, and words that were the English undefiled of Chaucer’s
or Shakespeare’s day. Certain proper names represent a curious
conversion of a French name no longer understood.

In Dorsetshire dialect v is used for f, and in Newfoundland one hears
“fir” pronounced “vir” or “var.” Firewood is “vir-wood.” Women who are
“vuzzing up their vires” are fussing (making ready) their fires. We have
“it wouldn’t be vitty” in place of “it wouldn’t be fitting.” A pig
“veers”; it does not farrow. The use of “thiccy” for “this” is familiar
to readers of “Lorna Doone.” “The big spuds are not very jonnick yet”
means that the potatoes are not well done. If something “hatches” in
your “glutch,” it catches in your throat. Blizzard is a word not used,
and a lass at school, confusing it with gizzard, said it meant the
insides of a hen. The remains of birds or of animals are the “rames.” “O
yes you, I ’low” is a common form of agreement. To be photographed is to
be “skitched off,” and of snapshots it is sometimes said by an old
fisherman to a “kodak fiend”: “I heard ye firin’ of ’em.”

“Cass ’n goo,” for “can’t you go” may be heard at Notre Dame Bay, as
well as “biss ’n gwine” for “aren’t you going?” and “thees cass’n do it”
for “thee can’t do it.” The berries called “harts” (whorts) are, I
presume, the “hurts” of Surrey.

A vivid toast for a sealer going to the icefields was “Bloody decks to
’im!”

When bad weather is brewing, “We’re going to have dirt” is a common
expression.

A fisherman who had hooked a queer creature that must have been first
cousin to the sea-serpent said, “It had a head like a hulf, a neck like
a harse; I cut the line and let it go to hell.”

Here is a puzzler: “Did ye come on skits or on cart and dogs?” That
means, “Did you come on skates or on a dog-sledge?” Dog-cat is a
dog-sledge. Cat is short for catamaran, which is not a sea-boat but a
land-sledge, so that when you hear it said: “He’s taken his dog and his
cat and gone to the woods” you may know that it means “He’s taken his
dog and his sledge.”

Just as we change the position of the _r_ in going from _three_ to
_third_, we find the letters transposed in “aps” for aspen, “haps” for
hasp, “waps” for “wasp” and “wordle” for world. Labrador is Larbador,
and “down to the Larbador” or “down on the Larbador” are common
expressions.

Instead of “the hatch” the telescoped form “th’ ’atch” is used. We have
“turr” for “tern” and “loo” for “loon,” and “yammit” (emmet) for “ant.”

The tendency to combine syllables is illustrated in the pronunciation of
Twillingate as Twulngate.

A scaffolding for fish is known as a “flake.” Here the split cod are
outspread to dry and, by the way, a decision of the Newfoundland Supreme
Court declares “cod” and “fish” synonymous. The scaffolding is made of
poles called longers, and it is suggested that these “longers” are the
“longiores” which Caesar used to build bridges, according to his
Commentaries. A silk hat is known as a beaver, or behaviour, and so when
you hear it said, “I saw Tom Murphy; he must have been at a funeral; he
had his behaviour on,” it means not that he was circumspect in his
conduct, but that he wore the formal headgear. “Sammy must ’a’ been
writin’ some poetry. I saw him just now a-humourin’ of it with his
foot.” Cannot you see the bard beating out the rhythm with his foot, as
a musician sometimes does when he is sure that he is in time and the
rest are mistaken?

“South’ard,” “north’ard,” “east’ard,” “west’ard” are current maritime
usage, and the adjective “wester” is heard.

Legal Latin is drawn upon for “tal qual”—_talis qualis_—applied in a
bargain for fish “just as they come.”

Here is a quaint one. The end of a pile, above the surface of a wharf,
is a gump-head. Gump and block are one and the same thing. We of the
United States use the word “gump” or “chump” figuratively for a
“blockhead.”

“The curse o’ Crummle on ye” is a rural expression still heard, and
refers to Cromwell’s bloody descent on Ireland.

“I find my kinkhorn and I can’t glutch” means “I have a pain in my
throat and I can’t swallow.” The kinkhorn is the Adam’s apple. A man at
Chimney Cove remarked: “I have a pain in my kinkhorn and it has gone to
my wizen (chest).”

A dog is often called a “crackie.” Caribou is shortened to “boo.” A door
that has stuck is said to be “plimmed up.” A man who ate hard bread and
drank water said “It plimmed up inside and nearly killed me.”

To say of a girl that she “blushed up like a bluerag” refers to the
custom of enclosing a lump of blueing in a cloth when laundering
clothes. “The wind baffles round the house” is a beautiful way of saying
that it was blustering.

“Bruise” is a very popular dish of hard bread boiled with fish, and with
“scrunchins” (pork) fried and put over it. It is the equivalent of
Philadelphia’s famous “scrapple.” A guide, admitting that bread and tea
are the staple articles of diet in many an outpost, said reflectively:
“Yes, that’s all those people live on. Now there’s other things. There’s
beans.”

When a man says that his hands are “hard afrore” (hard frozen) we
remember Milton in “Paradise Lost,” “the air burns frore.” Frozen
potatoes are “frosty tiddies.” Head is often called “heed.” “Tigyer,”
said by an old man to a mischievous lad, means “Take yerself off.” “Is
en?” is a way of saying “Is he?” An old man cut his finger and said that
he had a “risen” on it, which is certainly more of a finality than a
“rising.” “I’m going chock to Gargamelle” means “I’m going all the way
to Gargamelle,” the latter name from “garçon gamelle,” said to signify
“the boy who looks after the soup.”

Instead of “squashed,” “squatted” is a common word, as in the expression
“I squatted my finger.” And there are many other provincialisms not in
the dictionaries.

The fathom is a land-measure of length, as well as a sea-measure of
depth. The leading dog of a team is six or seven “fathoms” ahead of the
komatik.

“Start calm” means perfectly calm, and then they may say expressively
“The wind’s up and down the mast.”

“Puddick” is a common name for the stomach.

“Take it abroad” is “take it apart”; “do you relish enough,” is “have
you eaten plenty?” “Poor sign fish” means that fish are scarce. Woods
that are tall are said to be “taunt.”

These few examples of distinctive phraseology might be multiplied a
thousand-fold.

As for the proper names, a fascinating field of research lies before a
patient investigator who commands the leisure. Here are but a few of
countless examples that might be cited.

French names have been Anglicized in strange ways. Isle aux Bois thus
becomes Isle of Boys—or, as pronounced on the south coast, Oil of Boys
or Oil o’ Boy. Baie de Boules has lost the significance of boulders that
bestud its shores in the name Bay Bulls. The famous and dreaded Cape
Race, near the spot where the beautiful _Forizel_ was lost, gets its
name from the French “razé,” signifying “sheer.” Reucontre is Round
Counter; Cinq Isles has become St. Keels, and Peignoir is altered to
Pinware or Pinyare. Grand Bruit is Grand Brute; the rocky headland of
Blomidon that nobly commands the mouth of the Humber is commonly called
Blow-me-down; Roche Blanche is Rose Blanche.

One would scarcely recognize Lance-au-Diable in Nancy Jobble. Bay
d’Espoir has been turned into its exact antithesis, in the shape of Bay
Despair. L’Argent Bay is now Bay Le John. Out of Point Enrage is evolved
Point Rosy, and St. Croix is modified to Sancroze (Sankrose).

Children’s names are likely to be Biblical. They are often called by the
middle name as well—William James, Henry George, Albert Edward.
Merchants’ ledgers must take account of a vast number of nicknames that
are often slight variants on the same name—Yankee Peter, Foxy Peter,
Togo Ben, Sailor Ben, Bucky Ben, Big Tom, Deaf Tom, Young Tom, Big Jan,
Little Jan, Susy’s Jan, Ripple Jan, Happy Jack. Thomas Cluett comes to
be called Tommy Fiddler, whereupon all the children become Fiddlers, and
the wife is Mrs. Fiddler. The family of Maynards is known as the Miners.

The little boys have a mischievous way of teasing one another as “bay
noddies.” The noddy is a stupid fish that is very good at catching the
smaller fry and then easily allows itself to be robbed of its prey. The
children cry:

“Bay boy, bay boy, come to your supper,
Two cods’ heads and a lump o’ butter.”

We find the children using instead of “Eeny, meeny, miny, mo” this
formula:

“Hiram, Jiram, bumbo lock
Six knives in a clock;
Six pins turning wins.
Dibby, dabby, o-u-t spells out.”

Or:

“Little man driving cattle
Don’t you hear his money rattle?
One, two, sky blue,
Out goes y-o-u.”

Or:

“Silver lock, silver key,
Touch, go run away!”

Or:

“Eetle, ottle, blue bottle,
Eetle, ottle, out!”

Still another is:

“Onery, ury, ickery, Ann,
Fillissy, follissy, Nicholas John,
Kubee, Kowbee, Irish Mary

They throw marbles against a wall for a sort of carom-shot, and call it
“bazzin’ marbles.” “The real precursor of the spring, like the sure
mating of the birds,” said an old man of the game.

In some places there is a local celebrity with a real talent for the
composition of what are known as “come-all-ye’s,” from the fact that the
minstrel is supposed to invite all who will to come and hear him chant
his lay. Every big storm or shipwreck is supposed to be commemorated in
appropriate verse by the laureate. For instance, one of these ballads
begins:

“The Lily Joyce stuck in the ice,
So did the Husky too;
Captain Bill Ryan left Terry behin’
To paddle his own canoe.”

Another runs thus:

“’Twas on the 29th of June,
As all may know the same;
The wind did blow most wonderful,
All in a flurry came.”

This was written and sung to a hymn tune.

Song is a common accompaniment of a shipboard task:

“Haul on the bow-line,
Kitty is me darlin’;
Haul on the bow-line,
Haul, boys, haul.”

If a boy doesn’t go across the Straits before he is sixteen, he must be
“shaved by Neptune.” It is almost a disgrace not to have gone to the
Labrador. Neptune is called “Nipkin.” “Nipkin’ll be aboard to shave you
tonight.”

When they are cleaning fish, the last man to wash a fish for the season
gets ducked in the tub.

Some of the older residents are walking epitomes of the island lore.
They know a great deal that never found lodgment in books. Matty
Mitchell, the 63-year old Micmac guide, now a prospector for the
Reid-Newfoundland Company, was a fellow-passenger on the mail-boat. He
was full of tales of the days when the wolf still roamed the island’s
inner fastnesses. I asked him when the last of which he knew were at
large. He said: “About thirty years ago I saw three on Doctor’s Hill. I
have seen none since. There are still lots of bears and many lynxes.
Once I was attacked by six wolves. I waited till the nearest was close
to me—then I shoved my muzzle-loader into his mouth and shot him and
the other five fell away. Another time I was attacked by three bears who
drove me into a lake where I had to stay till some men who had been with
me came to the rescue.

“My grandfather was with Peyton when Mary March and another Indian woman
were captured at Indian Lake. Mary March died at St. John’s, and was
buried there; the other one was brought back to the shore of the lake.”

“How do you know what minerals you are finding when you are
prospecting?” I asked.

“I was three times in the Museum at St. John’s,” he answered. “I see
everything in the place. That way I know everything that I look at when
I go to hunt for minerals and metals. I hear a thing once—I got it. I
see a thing once—I got it. I never found gold—but I got pearls from
clams, weighing as much as forty grains. I can’t stay in the house. I
must be out in the open. If I stay inside I get sick. I take colds. I’ve
been twice to the Grand Falls in Labrador. At the upper falls the river
rises seven times so”—he arched the back of his hand—“before the water
goes over. The biggest flies I ever saw are there. They bite right
through the clothes. You close the tent—sew up the opening. You burn up
all the flies inside. Next morning there are just as many.”

Another passenger was the Rev. Thomas Greavett, Church of England
“parson,” with a parish 100 miles long on the West Coast between Cow
Head and Flower’s Cove. He had to be medicine-man and lawyer too, and in
his black satchel he carried a stomach-pump, a syringe, eight
match-boxes of medicine and Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall.” He told me how
he hated to use the mail-boat for his parish visiting, for it generally
meant sleepless nights of pacing the deck or sitting in the lifeboat in
default of a berth. He carried a petition, to go before the Legislature,
reciting the many reasons why the poor little boat on which we were
travelling is inadequate to the heavy freight and passenger traffic in
which she is engaged. With accommodations for hardly more than 50
passengers, she has carried 210, 235 and even 300, which meant acute
discomfort for everybody and the open deck, night and day, for many
passengers. What is wanted is a big, heavy ice-breaker. The _Ethie_
never was meant by her Glasgow builders to fight the Humboldt Glacier
bit by bit as it falls into the sea. In December she was wrecked off Cow
Head in a gale, fortunately with no loss of life.

I don’t know of a harder-working lot than the crew and captain of a boat
that undertakes to carry freight and passengers between southern ports
of Newfoundland and the Labrador.

Take the experience of this vessel, the _Ethie_, in the summer of 1919
as an example. Under a thoroughly capable and chart-perfect skipper,
Captain English, she made several ineffectual attempts to get to Battle
Harbour through the dense ice-jam before she finally made that roadstead
on June 24. When I met her at Curling to go north, a week late, at the
end of August, she had just come out of a viscous fog of four days’
duration in the Strait of Belle Isle and in that fog she had escaped by
the closest of shaves a collision with a berg that towered above her
till the top of it was lost in the fog. She carried so many passengers,
short-haul or long-distance, that every seat in the dining saloon was
filled with weary folk at night and some paced the decks or sat on the
piles of lathes or the oil-barrels. Lumber and barrels were stored
everywhere, the hold was crammed, and cattle in the prow came and went
mysteriously as the vessel moved into one cove or bight or tickle after
another in the dead of the night or the silver cool of the early
morning. The clatter of the steam-winch with the tune of babies strange
to the sea-trip, the slap and scuffle of the waves on our sheet-iron
sides and the banging of the doors as the vessel writhed in her
discomfort made an orchestra of many tongues and percussions. The boat
was so heavy with her cargo of machinery, oil, lumber, flour ($24 a
barrel at Battle Harbour), cattle and human beings that the deck outside
my stateroom was hardly two feet out of water. There were four of us in
the stateroom, but the population changed almost hourly from port to
port, so that I had barely time to get acquainted with a
fellow-passenger ere I lost him to look after his lobster or fish, or
his missionary labours. One of the ship’s company was going to teach
school at Green Island Cove at the northern tip of Newfoundland. He told
me he would get $275 for ten months’ work and out of it would have to
pay board. Yet out of that salary he meant to put by money to pay for
part of a college education at St. John’s. “How old are you?” I asked.
“Not yet eighteen, sir.”

It is easy to see why Dr. Grenfell’s heart and hand go out in a
practical and helpful sympathy to those whose battle with grim,
unmitigated natural forces and with harsh circumstance is unending. The
commonest question asked of anyone who returns from a visit to the
Labrador is “Why do people live there?” Despite the fog and the cold,
the sea-perils and the stark barrenness of the rocks, the Labrador has
an allurement all its own. It has brought a sturdy explorer like William
B. Cabot of Boston (“Labrador” Cabot) again and again to the rivers and
inlets and the central fastnesses, where he shares the life of the
Montagnais and the Nauscapee Indians; and the same magic has endeared
the Labrador to those who year upon year continue the quest of the cod
and the seal and know no life other than this. Whatever place a man
calls his home is likely to become unreasonably dear to him, however
bare and poor it looks to visitors; and that is the way with the
Labrador. But he who cannot find by sea or land a wild and terrible
beauty in the waters and the luminous skies and the long roll and lift
of the blue hills must be insensible to some of the fairest vistas that
earth has to show. Grenfell and his colleagues do not concede that life
on the Labrador is dull or that the environment is sterile and
monotonous and cheerless. As one of the brave Labrador missionaries, the
Rev. Henry Gordon, has written, “Not only does Labrador rejoice in some
of the finest scenery in North America, but she also possesses a people
of an exceptionally fine type.” Surely it is not right to think of such
a country as a land only of rocks, snows and misery.

XIII
A FEW “PARISHIONERS”

A typical interior gladdened by the Doctor’s presence is this on the
Southern Labrador. A drudge from Nancy Jobble (Lance-au-Diable) is
scrubbing the floor, for the mother is too ill to look to the ways of
her household. The drudge instead of singing is chewing on something
that may be tobacco, paper or gum, and as she slings the brush about
heartlessly she gives furtive eyes and ears to the visitors. The walls
are bestuck with staled and yellowed newspapers. There are no pictures
or books. There is a wooden bench before the linoleum-covered table, on
which are loaves of bread, ill-baked. There is a stove, of the
“Favourite” brand with kettle and teapot simmering. A tarnished
alarm-clock from Ansonia, a mirror, a wash-stand, shelves with china,
tin cans and shreds of bread, a baby’s crib, a rocking-chair and two
more benches forlornly complete the inventory. There is nothing green in
sight from the besmirched windows but grass and people.

A telegraph operator was reading a volume of the addresses of Russell
Conwell when we entered his not overtasked laboratory. The book bore the
title “How to Get Rich Honestly.” “’Fraid I’ll never get any further
than reading about it!” exclaimed the man of the keys and wires. Dr.
Grenfell took the book and presently became engrossed in the famous
address called “Acres of Diamonds.” It seemed to him the sort of
literature to fire the ambition of his neighbours under the Northern
Lights, with its instances of those who made their way defiant of the
odds and in spite of all opposition.

A very young minister at another Labrador watering-place said to the
Doctor: “You needn’t leave any of your books here. I’m not interested in
libraries. I’m only interested in the spiritual welfare of the people.”

A run of six miles by power-boat across Lewis Inlet took us to Fox
Harbour and the house of Uncle George Holley. In recent years the
power-boat, even with gasoline at the prevailing high prices, has become
the fisherman’s taxicab or tin Lizzie, and Oh! the difference to him. He
bobs and prances out over the war-dance of the waves with his barrels
and boxes easily, where once it was a mighty toiling with the sweeps to
make his way. The run across the inlet went swiftly and surely past an
iceberg white as an angel’s wing though with the malign suggestion of
the devil behind it: and there were plenty of chances to take
photographs from every possible angle.

Uncle George had on the stage a skinned seal, some whalemeat, salted cod
and a few barrels of salmon. His wife showed us a tiny garden with
cabbages, lettuce, rhubarb, radishes and “greens.” One year, she said,
she had a barrel of potatoes. Indoors she managed to raise balsam,
bachelor’s buttons and nasturtiums. Nowhere in the world do flowers mean
more to those that plant them. Constantly there comes to mind H. C.
Brunner’s poem about a geranium upon a window-sill: for the flowers
which it needs incessant care to keep from the nipping frost come to be
regarded as not merely friends but members of the family. Uncle George,
a fine, patriarchal type, told vividly how with a dog whip nine fathoms
long the expert hand could cut off the neck of a glass bottle without
upsetting the bottle, and take the bowl from a man’s pipe or the buttons
off his coat. No wonder the huskies slink under the houses when they see
a stranger coming.

The winter of 1918-19 was especially terrible—or “wonderful” as would
be said here—because of the visitation of the “flu.” Conditions were
bad enough in Newfoundland, but in Labrador the “liveyers” (those who
remain the year round) fought their battles in a hopeless isolation
illumined by heroic self-abnegation on the part of a tiny handful of
persons.

When spring released the Labrador Coast from the grip of the ice, and
the tragic tale of the winter was told, the Newfoundland Government
dispatched the _Terra Nova_ (Scott’s Antarctic vessel) to the aid of the
afflicted. Then news filtered out to the world of plague conditions
during that terrible winter more dreadful than those which De Foe has
chronicled. While reading the gruesome details, one is reminded of the
long, lonely and hopeless fight of the early Jamestown colony against
sickness and starvation. Throughout the bitter months the Red Death
stalked its dread way up and down the Coast, with almost no doctors,
nurses or medicines to check the disease. Whole families were stricken,
the living were too weak to bury the dead or even to fight off the gaunt
dogs that hovered hungrily about the houses; and hamlets were wiped out
while neighbouring villages were unable to send aid.

A few sentences from the diary of Henry Gordon, the brave missionary at
Cartwright, on Sandwich Bay, will suffice to show what a hideous winter
his people passed through. Of this man Dr. Grenfell said to me: “Instead
of a stick with a collar on it we have a man with a soul in him.” He is
always laughing—incurably an optimist, and a great Boy Scout leader.
The following are condensed excerpts.

“Wednesday, Oct. 30, 1918. Reached Cartwright 8 a.m. Mail-boat had
brought ‘the great Plague’ and nearly half the population was down with
it.

“Thursday, Oct. 31. Nearly everybody down now.

“Nov. 1. Whole households stretched inanimate on floors, unable even to
feed themselves or keep fires going.

“Nov. 2. Feeling rotten. Head like a bladderful of wind.

“Nov. 7. Busy all a.m. arranging graves and coffins.

“Nov. 8. Gale N. E. with snow-storms.

“Nov. 17. Two of bodies too much doubled up to put in coffin.

“Nov. 21. Will Leaming in from Indian Harbour with news that ten are
dead at North River still unburied and only three coffins. The rest are
too sick and dismayed to help.

“Nov. 22. (At North River). Some had lain in their beds three weeks and
the stench was appalling. Old Mrs. L. W., aged 71, only survivor of
five, lived alone for a fortnight with four dead. No fire, no wood, only
ice, which she thawed under her arms.

“Nov. 26. Number burials now totals 26. Population little over 100.

“Dec. 14. Find five little orphans living alone in a deserted house in a
deserted cove, bread still frozen.

“Dec. 19. 12 dead in North River out of population of 21.

“Dec. 25. (Christmas Day). Service 10.30. Only six communicants, but
considerable ‘Communion of saints.’

“Jan. 1, 1919. (At Cape Porcupine, in Herbert Emb’s one-room house). ‘A
sort of damp earthy smell met one on entering, but thanks to frost, body
was not so bad as expected. More like mouldering clay than anything.
Right on his side was his little girl, actually frozen on to him, so
that bodies came off the bunk in one piece.’

“Jan. 3. Grave-blasting.

“Jan. 8. Total deaths: Cartwright, 15; Paradise, 20; Separation Point,
7; North River, 13; Strandshore, 9; Grady, 1; Hare Islands, 4;
Sandhills, 4; Boulter’s Rock, 5; North, 12.”

These do not seem large figures, but in settlements of half a dozen
houses or less they represent a very large proportion of the
inhabitants.

News of the armistice with Germany did not reach Mr. Gordon until
January 9, which shows how far from the world was this region within a
hundred miles of the summer hospital at Battle Harbour.

It is to be noted that nearly all the children who died perished of
starvation, because their elders could no longer feed them and the
“loaf” was too frozen to be eaten.

The Eskimo settlements suffered still more grievously. The bodies were
buried at sea. Dogs were eating the bodies, and had to be shot.
Sometimes the survivors were too weak to drive the dogs from the dead
and the dying.

Hebron was wiped out. At Okkak 200 died of 267, and on August 15 there
were four widows and two little girls left, who were waiting to be taken
away. Nain was not so hard hit, but it is said that forty perished out
of several hundred. Zoar and Ramah had already passed out of existence
before the “flu” came. It is estimated that the resident Eskimo
population on the coast, numbering 600 to 700, was cut nearly in half.

The people seem to think that Dr. Grenfell can accomplish miracles. One
is reminded of the words of the sister of Lazarus, “Lord, if thou hadst
been here, my brother had not died.”

“Richard Dempster, our mail-carrier,” said good Parson Richards, of
Flower’s Cove, “owes his life to the Doctor. Something had infected his
knee. The poison spread to his hip. He wouldn’t have lived twelve hours
if the Doctor hadn’t made seven incisions in his right leg with his
pocket-knife to let out the poisoned blood.

[Illustration: HAPPY DAYS AT THE ORPHANAGE, ST. ANTHONY.]

“Once when I was travelling with him, at Pine’s Cove we found a family
had left because the woman had seen a ghost. The Doctor prayed with her,
and offered to go and live in the house himself to prove that she was
the victim of an illusion. At Eddy’s Cove there was hard glitter ice
which would have cut the dog’s paws. We thought we couldn’t go on. While
we debated what to do there came a snowfall that spread the ice with a
glorious soft blanket, ideal for travel. That’s just the way Providence
always seems to favour the Doctor when he goes abroad.

“That man never came to the parsonage and went without leaving me with
the desire to do better and be better. Every single time it was the
same.

“Once we were on the go with the dogs and the komatik four days from St.
Anthony to Cricket (Griguet). Much of the time the Doctor had to run
beside the komatik. He struck out a new way, deep in snow. ‘Don’t you
ever get tired, Doctor?’ I asked. ‘I don’t know that I ever was tired in
my life,’ was his answer.

“A day or two after that dreadful experience on the ice-pan which he
described in a book, he was at Cricket, and I went to see him. He was
still suffering from the effects of the frost-bite. ‘Will you come to
the mass meeting of the churches tonight?’ I said. He didn’t hesitate a
moment. ‘Yes—send a dog-team and I’ll come.’ He not merely came but
delivered an address of an hour’s duration, and I never heard him speak
with greater fervour. He seemed spiritualized by the experience through
which he had so recently passed.”

XIV
NEEDS, BIG AND LITTLE

It is high time to give Dr. Grenfell’s great work the broad, sure
underpinning of a liberal endowment. It may be true that “an institution
is the lengthened shadow of one man”; but the one-man power of
Grenfell’s personality is not immortal, and the work is too important to
be allowed to lapse or to languish when he no longer directs, inspires
and energizes all. To endow the work now, when many concerns of lesser
moment are claiming their millions of dollars and their thousands of
devotees is to relieve the Doctor of the ordeal of stumping the United
States, Canada and the British Isles to keep his great plant going.
Despite the volunteer assistants, despite the aid of good men and women
banded in associations or toiling in groups or as individuals at points
far from Battle Harbour and St. Anthony, despite the economy practised
everywhere and always, there is ever a need, a haunting need, of funds;
and a few insular politicians and traders may talk as elaborately as
they please about Grenfell as an interloper, with a task that does not
belong to him, but as long as Newfoundland does not provide a sufficient
subsidy, most of the money must come from somewhere off the island. I
have heard some “little-islanders” say that Dr. Grenfell ought to get
out, and that Newfoundland should take over his whole business, but as
long as Newfoundland does not move to that end, and there is a woeful
want of doctoring and nursing at any outport on the map, somebody with
the flaming zeal of this crusader has a place. Grenfell is doing the
work not of one man but of a hundred. Could his cured patients have
their say, there would be no doubt about that endowment. If grateful
words were dollars, Grenfell would be a multi-millionaire.

It should not be necessary to explain in circumstantial detail the
constant and pressing need of funds to carry on an enterprise that
covers so large a territory and involves so many and such various
activities. A chain of hospitals and dispensaries, manned in large part
by eager and devoted volunteers, an orphanage, an industrial school, a
fleet of boats—including the schooner _George B. Cluett_—a Seamen’s
Institute, a number of dwellings for the staff personnel, the supplies
of food and coal and surgical apparatus and medical equipment—all these
items impose a burden on the overtaxed time and strength of the Doctor
so considerable that it is not even humane or moral to expect him to
speak two or three times a day as he does when he ought to be taking a
well-earned vacation. Countless thousands are eager to hear the man
himself describe his work, and there is usually a throng whenever and
wherever he appears, but to let him wear himself out in appealing for
the means to carry on is a waste of the enormous man-power of a great
leader of the age. He does not cavil or repine, but he ought to be saved
from his own willingness to overdo.

“I never put up a building without having the funds in hand,” he
declared. “But when it comes to work—I believe in beginning first and
asking afterwards. The support will somehow come, if there is faith, but
faint-heartedness means paralysis of effort.”

One of the most important producers and consumers of all Dr. Grenfell’s
institutions is the King George V. Seamen’s Institute at St. John’s. The
cornerstone of the four-story brick building was laid in 1911. Sir Ralph
Williams (the Governor), Bowring Brothers, Job Brothers, Harvey and
Company, MacPherson Brothers and other loyal and forward-looking
citizens got behind the plan: and when the stone was swung into place by
wire from Buckingham Palace as King George V. pressed the button, the
sum of $175,000 was in hand. The site contributed by Bowring Brothers
was valued at $13,000.

The enumeration of beds occupied, meals served, baths taken, games
played, books loaned, films shown and lectures heard does not begin to
tell the story. Fishermen and sailormen ashore are traditionally
forlorn. Men from the outports who drift into St. John’s are like
country lads who come wide-eyed to a great city. It is not morally so
bad for them as it was ere prohibition came and clamped the lid upon the
gin-mills. But still, these are lonely men, friendless men, with very
little money: and the Institute has a helping hand out for them, to
befriend them from the moment they set foot on shore. Moreover, there is
a dormitory given over to the use of outport girls: since it is seen
that hard as things may be for Jack ashore they are harder yet for
sister Jill, who knows even less of the great round world outside the
bay and needs even more protection than her brother.

The Institute at last is able to show a small balance on the right side
of the ledger. Since the first thought of those who ran it has been
service, they are satisfied to come out only a little better than even.
No charge of graft or profiteering lies here: and those who are fed and
housed and warmed find it “a little bit of heaven” to be made so
comfortable at an expense so small.

At the start, less than a decade ago, there were croakers who said there
would be but a slim and scattering patronage: but now nearly all the
beds are in use every night. In the dread influenza year, 1918, the
Institute was invaluable as an Emergency Hospital, which treated 267
patients. The city hospital at St. John’s is small and always
overcrowded. If the Institute had not been available the results of the
epidemic would have been still more terrible. When in February, 1918,
the _Florizel_ was wrecked on the coast between St. John’s and Cape Race
the survivors were brought here, and the Institute also prepared the
bodies of the dead for burial. And on other occasions it has done good
service.

Demobilized men of the Army and Navy coming into town from the outports
use the building as a clubhouse.

Since the high cost of living has not spared Newfoundland, the rate for
the young women who are permanent boarders has had to be raised to $4.00
a week. In parts of Newfoundland that is a good deal of money, but it is
not much compared with what these girls would have to pay in the absence
of the Institute.

The successful operation of the Institute is an outstanding
object-lesson, and a source of particular satisfaction to its founder
and chief promoter. It has triumphantly answered and silenced the
objections of those who at the start declared that the only possible
result would be calamitous failure. It has survived the shock of the
discovery that some of its earlier administrators were unworthy of their
charge; it has outlived the era of struggle and set-back; it has so
clearly proved its place and its meaning in the community where it is
established that if it were destroyed the merchants themselves would be
prompt to undertake its replacement. It is as impressive a monument as
any to the enduring worth of the devoted labours of Wilfred Thomason
Grenfell, and as conspicuous a proof as could be offered that his great
work by land and sea deserves an Endowment Fund.

* * * * *

Transcriber’s Notes:

Obvious punctuation and typesetting errors have been corrected without
note. Some illustrations have been moved slightly to keep paragraphs
intact.

[End of _With Grenfell on the Labrador_ by Fullerton Waldo]

*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "With Grenfell on the Labrador" ***

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