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Title: With Grenfell on the Labrador

Author: Fullerton L. Waldo

Author of introduction, etc.: Sir Wilfred Thomason Grenfell

Release date: March 3, 2022 [eBook #67551]
Most recently updated: October 18, 2024

Language: English

Original publication: United States: Fleming H. Revell Company, 1920

Credits: Mardi Desjardins & the online Distributed Proofreaders Canada team at https://www.pgdpcanada.net from page images generously made available by the Internet Archive

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WITH GRENFELL ON THE LABRADOR ***

WITH GRENFELL ON THE

LABRADOR

DR. GRENFELL, A.B.
(Three ratlins were broken on the ascent).

WITH GRENFELL ON

THE LABRADOR

BY

FULLERTON L. WALDO

ILLUSTRATED

New York Chicago

Fleming H. Revell Company

London and Edinburgh

Copyright, 1920, by

FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY

New York: 158 Fifth Avenue

Chicago: 17 North Wabash Ave.

London: 21 Paternoster Square

Edinburgh: 75 Princes Street

To

DORIS KENYON

OF

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 Reindeer | 139 |
XII | A Wide, Wide “Parish” | 150 |
XIII | A Few “Parishioners” | 173 |
XIV | Needs, Big and Little | 183 |

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 Drying | 60 |
“Please Look at My Tongue, Doctor” | 98 |
“Next” | 98 |
Dr. Grenfell Leading Meeting at Battle Harbour | 120 |
St. Anthony Hospital in Winter | 134 |
Some of the Helpers | 134 |
Signal Hill, Harbour of St. Johns | 150 |
Happy Days at the Orphanage St. Anthony | 180 |

# 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.

FRITZ AND HIS MASTER.

“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.

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.

“PLEASE LOOK AT MY TONGUE, DOCTOR!”

“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.’

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.

ST. ANTHONY HOSPITAL IN WINTER.

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.

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.

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]

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