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.
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.
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.
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.”