Flower’s Cove, and when the enterprise was fairly launched and the
Grenfell Association decided to abstain from lending help to trade he
drew it out, and asked no interest. That store in its last fiscal year
sold goods to the value of more than $200,000, paying fair prices and
selling at a fair profit. It had three ships in the summer of 1919
carrying fish abroad—“foreigners.” The proprietor bought for $50 a
schooner that went ashore at Forteau, dressed it in a new suit of sails
worth $1,250, and now has a craft worth $8,000 to him. Dr. Grenfell has
personally great affection for some of the traders—it is the “truck
system” he hates. “Trading in the old days,” the Doctor observes, “was
like a pond at the top of a hill. It got drained right out. The money
was not set in circulation here on the soil of Newfoundland. The traders
in two months took away the money that should have been on the coast.
1919 was the first year in which the co-operative stores themselves sent
fish to the other side. A vessel from Iceland came here to the Flower’s
Cove store; another was a Norwegian; a third came from Cadiz with salt;
and today a small vessel is preparing to go across.”
At Red Bay is another store to which Dr. Grenfell loaned money, which he
drew out, sans interest, when it was prosperous. It has saved the people
there, as every soul in the harbour will testify.
The fishermen on the West Coast in 1919 enjoyed something like affluence
as compared with their brethren on the East Coast, where the fish were
scarce.
Where there were lobsters, they were getting $35.50 or $35.00 per case
of 48 one-pound cans. For cod, $11.20 a quintal of 112 pounds was paid.
In 1918 over $15 per quintal was paid.
On the other hand, with pork at $100 a barrel, coal at $24 a ton, and
gasoline at 70 cents a gallon, the big prices for fish were matched by
an alarming cost of the necessaries of life.
Some fishermen make but $200 a year; a few make as much as $2,000 and
even more. The merchant princes as a rule are the store-keepers who deal
with the fishermen. There were two big bank failures in St. John’s years
ago, and since that time many persons have hidden their money in the
ground. One fisherman of whose case I heard had but $35 in cash as the
result of his season’s effort, and he had eight to support besides
himself. The small amount of ready money on which people can live with a
house, a vegetable garden, and a supply of firewood at their backs in
the timbered hillsides is unbelievable. If a man was fortunate enough to
possess any grassland, he might get as much as $65 a ton for his hay in
1919, if he could spare it from his own cows and sheep. It is too bad
that for the sake of the sheep the noble Newfoundland dog that chased
them has had to perish. It is almost impossible today to find a
pure-breed example of the dog that spread the name of the island to the
ends of the earth. Such dogs as there are are remarkably intelligent and
make excellent messengers between a man at work and his house.
The “Southerners” go to the Grand Banks for their fishing; the others go
to the Labrador. The three classes of fishermen are the shore fishermen,
the “bankers,” and the “floaters”—those of the Labrador. Ordinarily the
catch is reckoned by quintals (pronounced kentals) of 112 pounds. Those
who live on the Labrador coast the winter through are known as the
“liveyers”—the live-heres—and those who come regularly to the fishing
are “stationers” or “planters.”
During the war big prices have been realized for the fish, and
unprecedented prosperity has come to the fishermen. The growth in the
number of motor-boats is an index of this condition, though with
gasoline at 70 cents a gallon on the Labrador (for the imperial gallon,
slightly larger than ours), the question of fuel has been a disturbing
one to many. Of late much of the fish has been marketed on favourable
terms in the United States and Canada, but before this the preferred
markets in order have been Spain and Portugal, Brazil and the West
Indies. The three grades recognized, from the best to the lowest, are
“merchantable,” “Madeira,” and “West Indies” (“West Injies”), the
last-named for the negroes.
An industry of growing importance to the future of the Grenfell mission
is the manufacture and sale of “hooked” rugs by the women trained at the
industrial school at St. Anthony. Large department stores in the United
States have begun to buy these rugs in considerable quantities, and the
demand is lively and increasing.
The Doctor’s delightful sense of humour comes to the fore in his designs
for these rugs, made of rags worked through canvas. The dyes are vivid
green, blue, red, black, brown—the white rivals the driven snow, and
the workmanship is of the best. A favourite pattern shows the dogs
harnessed to the komatik eager to be off, turning in the traces as if to
ask questions of the driver, their attitude alert and alive, while their
two masters standing by the baggage on the komatik, in hoods and heavy
parkas (blouses) rimmed with red and blue, are discussing the route to
take and pointing with their mittened hands. Or the design may show
Eskimoes stealthily stalking polar bears upon an ice-pan of a wondrous
green at the edges. There is a glorious Turnerian sunset in the
background; the sea bristles with bergs arched and pinnacled. The wary
hunters approach their hapless quarry in a kyak. One is paddling and the
other has the rifle across his knees, and the polar bears are nervously
pacing the ice-pan as though conscious of the fate impending. Another
motif in these diverting rugs—which are often used for wall adornments
instead of floor-covering—is a stately procession of three bears uphill
past the solemn green sentinels of pagoda-like fir trees. What an
improvement these designs are over the former rugs which showed
meaningless blotches of pink and green that might have been thrown at
one another, as if a mason’s trowel had splashed them there!
Since the Labrador is innocent in most places of anything like a store
where you can go to the counter, lay down your money and ask for what
you want, the nearest thing the women know to the luxury of a
shopping-expedition or a bargain-sale is a chance to exchange firewood
or fish for the old clothing carried on her missionary journeys by the
_Strathcona_.
“Why isn’t this clothing given away?” someone may query unthinkingly.
The object of the mission is not to pauperize, and the pride of the
people themselves in most cases forbids the acceptance of an outright
gift.
To preserve self-respect by the exchange of a _quid pro quo_, some of
the clothing contributed by friends in the States and elsewhere is
allocated to the fishermen’s families in return for the supplies of
firewood. The value varies according to the place where the wood is cut
and piled. It may be worth $7 a cord on a certain point or $3 at the
bottom of a bay. (Cutting the wood is called “cleaving the splits.”) The
payment must be very carefully apportioned, so that Mrs. B. shall not
have more or better than Mrs. A.—or else there will be wailing and
gnashing and heart-burning after the boat weighs anchor.
Before making the rounds of the Straits or of White Bay, or going on the
long trail down North, or wherever else the _Strathcona_ may be faring
on her mission, the big boxes of wearables are opened on the deck and
stored in a pinched triangular stateroom forward of the saloon. There
are quantities of clothing for men—overcoats, sweaters of priceless
wool, reefers, peajackets, shooting-coats, dressing-gowns,
underwear—some of it brand new and most of it thick and good; there are
woolen socks excellently made by many loving hands, shoes joined by the
laces or buttoned together, trousers, jackets, whole suits more or less
in disrepair but capable of conversion to all sorts of useful ends.
Generally the Doctor and Mrs. Grenfell find a pretext for giving some of
the clothing to a needy family even when the fiction of payment in kind
is not maintained. Rarely does the article offered—let us say a hooked
rug in garish colours—meet the value of the garments that are given.
But the important thing is that the recipient is made to feel that he
pays for what he gets and is not a pauper.
There is ever a want of clothing for the women and children. Few
complete dresses for women find their way to the _Strathcona’s_
storeroom. There are not nearly enough garments for babies or suits for
little boys. Women’s underclothing is badly needed. But most of those
who come aboard in quest of clothing are grateful for whatever is given
them and make no fuss. They will ingeniously adapt a shirt into a dress
for Susy, and cut a big man’s trousers in twain for her two small
brothers. The Northern housewife learns to make much of little in the
way of textile materials. A barrel of magazines and cards and picture
scrap-books shielded with canvas, stands at the head of the companion
way. Bless whoever pasted in the stories and pictures on the strong
sheets of brown cartridge-paper! Those will be pored over by lamp-light
from cottage to cottage till they fall apart, just as the wooden boxes
of books carried aboard for circulating libraries will provide most of
the life intellectual all winter long for many a village. Many of the
fishermen’s families from the father down are unlettered, but those who
can read and write make up for it by their intellectual activity, and
even the little boys sometimes display a nimbleness of wit and fancy
altogether delightful. They will sing you a song or tell you a
fairy-tale with a naïveté foreign to the American small boy.
A woman came aboard with her husband—pale, thin, forlorn she was—and
asked for clothing for him. She held each garment critically to the
light, and somewhat disdainfully rejected any that showed signs of
mending. Finally I said: “You’re not taking anything for yourself. Don’t
you need something?” I knew the pitiful huddle of fishermen’s houses
ashore from which she came—the entire population of the settlement was
141, not counting the vociferous array of Eskimo dogs that greeted us
when we landed.
“I’d like a dress,” she admitted—“for street wear.”
I thought of the straggling path amid the rocks where the dogs growled
and bristled, but I did not smile. For I realized what this chance to go
shopping meant to her isolated life. In the city she would have had huge
warerooms and piled counters from which to make a choice. Here two
bunks, a barrel and a canvas bag held the whole stock in trade.
She rejected a sleeveless ball gown of burgundy. “I must have black,”
she said—“we lost a son in the war.”
The husband began to apologize for the trouble they caused. But we were
more than ever bound to please them now. All the new skirts were found
to be too short or too long or too gay or too youthful or something
else, and the upshot of the dickering was that two pairs of golfer’s
breeches were given in lieu of proper habiliments for a poor, lonely
woman in Labrador. They could be cut down, she explained, for her boys.
There isn’t much for a woman, in most of these places, but cooking and
scrubbing the floor and minding the baby—something like the Kaiser’s
ideal of feminine existence. And when the floor is clean, booted
fishermen come in and spit upon it even though the white plague is
plainly written in the children’s faces.
A new chapter in the industrial history of the Labrador will be written
when it becomes possible to utilize the vast supply of news-print
available from the pulp-wood of the Labrador “hinterland,” even as
Northcliffe is getting paper for his many publications from the plant at
Grand Falls in Northern Newfoundland. The difficulty, of course, will be
to get the timber away from the coast in the short season when the land
is released from the grip of the ice-pack. But the great demand for
news-print which leads to anxious examination and utilization of the
supplies of Alaska and Finland cannot much longer neglect the available
resources so near at hand on the coast of the North Atlantic.
At Humbermouth it was my good fortune to encounter Captain Daniel Owen,
of Annapolis Royal, Nova Scotia, Captain of the H. V. Greene Labrador
Aerial Expedition. The little vessel _Miranda_ had limped in on her way
to Halifax, to get her boiler mended.
Captain Owen, himself, deserves more than passing mention. A member of
the Royal Flying Corps, he had his left eye shot out in combat with five
German planes that brought him to the ground 60 miles within their
lines. The observer’s leg was shattered in nine places by their fire.
There followed a sojourn of seven months in three German prison-camps.
The chivalrous surgeon who was first to operate on Captain Owen’s
comrade amused himself and the nurses by twisting bits of bone about in
the leg, laughing, while the nurses laughed too, at the patient’s agony.
Flying at a height of 2,000 to 8,700 feet, Captain Owen’s party in
Labrador added to the industrial map 1,500,000 acres (about 2,300 square
miles) of land timbered with firs and spruces suitable for pulp-wood,
the property lying on the Alexis, St. Louis and Gilbert Rivers about 15
miles north of Battle Harbour. This tract will, it is estimated, produce
as much as 115 cords to the acre for a maximum, and on the average 40 to
50 cords. 15,000 photographs were taken, and moving pictures also were
made. The aerodrome was 28 miles up the Alexis River, and according to
Captain Owen it was an extremely serious matter to find the way back to
it each time after a flight for there was no other suitable place to
land anywhere in the neighbourhood. “I never felt so anxious for the
return of an aeroplane in the Western Front as I felt for the safety of
ours,” he said.
The flying took place on five different days—and in that time as much
was accomplished as might have been done in from six to ten years of the
usual land cruising which—in sample areas—was used to check up the
results of the airmen.
The propeller of the Curtiss biplane was a mass of blood from the flies
it sucked in. Dr. Murdock Graham, second in command, kept some of these
flies in a bottle as souvenirs, and they were portentous insects.
“We enjoyed nothing more,” said Dr. Graham, “than an evening spent with
Dr. Grenfell at Battle Harbour where, lolling at ease in corduroy and
his old Queen’s College blazer with the insignia over the left
breast-pocket, pulling a corn-cob pipe, he spun one yarn after another
of the life at the Front with the Harvard contingent in 1915-16.
“Murphy, the mail-man from Battle Harbour, friend of the Grenfell
mission, friend of everybody, is a man worth knowing. I can hear now his
genial ‘Does ye smoke, boy? Has ye any on ye? Does ye mind, boy?’ He
said to one of our Greene Expedition doctors, ‘Doctor, are all the
Americans like ye? Ye has a kind word for everybody. Has ye any
tobacco?’ ‘By gorry, that’s fine,’ he said of the aeroplane. ‘How do it
do it?’ He was as modest as he was plucky. ‘I don’t want to go and eat
with all those gentlemen, with their fine clothes on,’ he would say. Of
one of the young ‘liveyeres’ he remarked: ‘If he had the learn there’d
be a fine job for him’—which alas! is true of so many on the Labrador.
“No member of our expedition heard any swearing from the forty men we
employed—with the exception of a single Newfoundlander. I asked one of
the men how they came to be so clean of profanity, and he answered
simply: ‘We doesn’t make a practice of that, we doesn’t.’
“At Williams Harbour on the Alexis River there was three weeks’
schooling by a visiting teacher from the Grenfell mission. In two
families with a joint membership of eighteen one person could read and
write.
“They have had no minister since the war and in the winter the bottom
falls out of everything. The people on the rivers have no doctor for a
year and a half and two years at a time. At Williams Harbour they
swarmed to Dr. Twiss and Dr. MacDonald. One woman in desperation had
been treating pneumonia with salt-water, snow and white moss.
“Dr. Grenfell and his people have more than they can do. We all of us
realize today as we never understood before the meaning to the people of
the North of the presence of Grenfell and his people among them. We
caught the spirit of the work inevitably, and tried to do what good we
could while we were there.
“The folk of the Alexis and the St. Louis River districts, as a rule,
can’t afford the price of gas to go to Battle Harbour. It’s a day’s run,
and there’s nobody to mind their cod-traps when they’re away. So one can
imagine how completely they’d be shut out of the world but for the
contacts which the mission provides even at such long intervals.
“William Russell is the grand old man of Williams Harbour. He is the
most-travelled and the best-educated man of those parts, and he
represents the finest type of patriarch. He never saw a horse or a cow
or an automobile; he has never been south of Battle Harbour, though he
has visited that diminutive settlement four times. He was dumfounded at
our aeroplane.
“In his family the father’s word was law to the twelve children. They
never thought of questioning his authority. They were the best behaved
and most dutiful children I have ever seen. Their obedience was
absolute, and their manner to strangers was deferential. They always
said ‘Yes, sir,’ and ‘No, sir,’ most politely.
“At his house thirty-one gathered to hear the gramophone—for the first
time. They were packed in as tight as could be, choking the room with
their tobacco-smoke. The first night they were silent. The next night
they were excited, and on the third they became hilarious.
“As I said, following the Grenfell example, we did what doctoring we
could on the side. The constant diet of bread and tea, tea and bread is
hard on the teeth. There is much pyorrhea due to this diet, to limestone
in the water, and to failure to clean the teeth. At Blanc Sablon we
treated a little boy who had suffered for three weeks with the
toothache. It was a simple case of congested pulp. The relief was
immediate. It is a joy and a reward to behold the gratitude of those who
are helped.
“I tell you if these people who question the value of Grenfell’s work,
or wonder why he chooses to spend his life in bleak and barren places,
could just see his ‘parishioners’ and know their gratitude toward their
benefactors, they would understand.
“There was a picturesque soul at Blanc Sablon who asked for tobacco,
which we gave him. He was never off the coast. I don’t know where he had
heard a violin. But to make some return to us for the smoke, he gave us
an imitation of a man first tuning and then playing a violin, which was
perfect in its way.”
VI
THE SPORTSMAN
As we were coming off to the _Strathcona_ one evening, the Doctor,
bareheaded, pulling at the oars with the zest of a schoolboy on a
holiday, and every oar-dip making a running flame of phosphorescence,
said: “At college we worshipped at the shrine of athletics. Of course
that wasn’t right, but it did establish a standard—it did teach a man
that he must keep his body under if he would be physically fit. I
realized that if I wanted to win I couldn’t afford to lose an ounce, and
so I was a rigid Spartan with myself. The others sometimes laughed at me
as a goody-goody, but they saw that I could do things that couldn’t be
done by those who indulged in wild flings of dissipation.
“My schooling before Oxford I now feel was wretched. They didn’t teach
me how to learn. The teachers themselves were mediocre. They may have
had a smattering of the classics—but that doesn’t constitute fitness to
teach. Have you read the chapter on education in H. G. Well’s ‘Joan and
Peter’? That strikes me as true.
“I’m glad my orphan children at St. Anthony are getting the right kind
of training from those who understand their business.”
The Doctor still cherishes the insignia of rowing and athletic clubs to
which he was attached while at Oxford. One of his pet coats wears the
initials “O. U. R. F. C.” for the Oxford University Rugby Football Club.
He also stroked the _Torpid_ crew, and the crew of the London Hospital.
He hates—in fact, he refuses, like Peter Pan—to grow up or to grow
old. “Isn’t it too bad that just when our minds have struck their stride
and are doing their best work we should have to end it all?” Not that he
has the least fear of Death. In the country of his loving labour, the
fisher-folk face Death so often in their lawful occasions, for the sake
of you and me who enjoy the savour of the codfish and the lobster, that
when Death finally comes he comes not as a dark and awful figure but as
a familiar and a friend.
[Illustration: “PLEASE LOOK AT MY TONGUE, DOCTOR!”]
[Illustration: “NEXT!”]
The conflict of elemental forces in nature finds at once an echo in the
breast of him who has met “with a frolic heart” every mood and tense of
sky and sea “down north.” At Pleasure Harbour the sunset amid dark
purple clouds edged with a rosy fleece brought “vital feelings of
delight”: and when we came nearest the Dominion’s northern tip the
Doctor said: “I wish you could see the strait ice and the Atlantic ice
fight at Cape Bauld. They go at each other hammer and tongs, with a
roaring and rending like huge wild animals, rampant and foaming and
clashing their tusks.”
On a foggy, super-saturated day, the sails and the deck beaded and
dripping, he will fairly rub his hands in ecstasy and exclaim: “Oh, what
a fine day!” Or he will thrust his ruddy countenance out of his
chart-room door to call: “Isn’t it great to be alive?”
Off Cape Norman, when the foghorn was blaspheming and the sea ran high,
I tried to get the Doctor to concede that it was half a gale, but he
would only admit that it was a “nice breeze.” The new topsail stubbornly
declined to blossom out as it should, though the five other sails were
in full bloom. “We’ll burst it out,” said the Doctor. The offending sail
was forthwith hauled down and stretched like a sick man on the deck;
then it was tied in three places with tarry cords, the Doctor scurried
up the mast, the sail was raised into place by means of the clanking
winch, and then, with violent tugs of the fierce wind like a fish
plucking at a tempting bait the three confining strings snapped in
explosive succession and like a flag unfurling the sail sprang out to
the breeze. We raised a cheer as the perceptible lift of the additional
sail-cloth thrilled the timbers underfoot.
You’d hear him trotting about the deck in the cool dawn inquiring about
steam or tide and humming softly (or lifting with the fervour of a
sailor’s chantey), that favourite Newfoundland hymn, written by a
Newfoundlander, “We love the place, O God, wherein thine honour dwells.”
In the wheelhouse as he looks out over the sea and guides the prow, as
if it were a sculptor’s chisel, through calm or storm, there comes into
his eyes a look as of communing with a far country: his soul has gone to
a secret, distant coast where no man and but one woman can follow.
Sometimes of an evening the Doctor brought out the chessboard and I saw
another phase of his versatile entity—his fondness for an indoor game
that is of science and not blind chance. The red and white ivory
chessmen, in deference to the staggering ship, had sea-legs in the shape
of pegs attaching them to the board. Two missing pawns—“prawns,” the
Doctor humorously styled them—had as substitutes bits of a red birthday
candle, and two of the rooks were made of green modelling-wax
(plasticine).
“I love to attack,” said the Doctor, and his tactics proved that he
meant what he said. He has what Lord Northcliffe once named to me as the
capital secret of success—concentration.
When he has once moved a piece forward he almost never moves it back
again. He likes to go ahead. He seeks to get his pieces out and into
action, and a defensive, waiting game—the strategy of Fabius the
Cunctator—is not for him.
Once in a while he defers sufficiently to the conventions to move out
the King’s pawn at the start, but often his initial move is that of a
pawn at the side of the board. He works the pawns hard and gives them a
new significance. His delight is to march a little platoon of them
against the enemy—preferably against the bishops. Somehow the bishops
seem to lose their heads when confronted by these minor adversaries.
If you get him into a tight corner, the opposition stiffens—the greater
the odds the more vertebral his attitude.
“I make it a rule to go ahead if I possibly can, and not to be driven
back.” This remark of his over the board of the mimic fray applies just
as well to his constant strife with the sea to get where he is
wanted—as on the present occasion when we were threading the needle’s
eye of the rocky outlet at Carpoon.