_THE LIVEYERE_
Doctor Grenfell's patients are of three classes. There is first the
"liveyere"--the inhabitant of the Labrador coast--the most ignorant
and wretched of them all. There is the Newfoundland "outporter"--the
small fisherman of the remoter coast, who must depend wholly upon his
hook and line for subsistence. There is the Labradorman--the
Newfoundland fisherman of the better class, who fishes the Labrador
coast in the summer season and returns to his home port when the snow
begins to fly in the fall. Some description of these three classes is
here offered, that the reader may understand the character and
condition of the folk among whom Dr. Grenfell labours.
"As a permanent abode of civilized man," it is written in a very
learned if somewhat old-fashioned work, "Labrador is, on the whole,
one of the most uninviting spots on the face of the earth." That is
putting it altogether too delicately; there should be no
qualification; the place is a brutal desolation. The weather has
scoured the coast--a thousand miles of it--as clean as an old bone: it
is utterly sterile, save for a tuft or two of hardy grass and wide
patches of crisp moss; bare gray rocks, low in the south, towering and
craggy in the north, everywhere blasted by frost, lie in billowy hills
between the froth and clammy mist of the sea and the starved forest at
the edge of the inland wilderness. The interior is forbidding; few
explorers have essayed adventure there; but the Indians--an expiring
tribe--and trappers who have caught sight of the "height of land" say
that it is for the most part a vast table-land, barren, strewn with
enormous boulders, scarce in game, swarming with flies, with
vegetation surviving only in the hollows and ravines--a sullen,
forsaken waste.
Those who dwell on the coast are called "liveyeres" because they say,
"Oh, ay, zur, I lives yere!" in answer to the question. These are not
to be confounded with the Newfoundland fishermen who sail the Labrador
seas in the fishing season--an adventurous, thrifty folk, bright-eyed,
hearty in laughter--twenty-five thousand hale men and boys, with many
a wife and maid, who come and return again. Less than four thousand
poor folk have on the long coast the "permanent abode" of which the
learned work speaks--much less, I should think, from the Strait of
Belle Isle to Cape Chidley. It is an evil fate to be born there: the
Newfoundlanders who went north from their better country, the Hudson
Bay Company's servants who took wives from the natives, all the chance
comers who procrastinated their escape, desperately wronged their
posterity; the saving circumstance is the very isolation of the
dwelling-place--no man knows, no man really _knows_, that elsewhere
the earth is kinder to her children and fairer far than the
wind-swept, barren coast to which he is used. They live content,
bearing many children, in inclemency, in squalor, and, from time to
time, in uttermost poverty--such poverty as clothes a child in a
trouser leg and feeds babies and strong men alike on nothing but flour
and water. They were born there: that is where they came from; that is
why they live there.
"'Tis a short feast and a long famine," said a northern "liveyere,"
quite cheerfully; to him it was just a commonplace fact of life.
* * * * *
There are degrees of wretchedness: a frame cottage is the habitation
of the rich and great where the poor live in turf huts; and the poor
subsist on roots and a paste of flour and water when the rich feast on
salt junk. The folk who live near the Strait of Belle Isle and on the
gulf shore may be in happier circumstances. To be sure, they know the
pinch of famine; but some--the really well-to-do--are clear of the
over-shadowing dread of it. The "liveyeres" of the north dwell in
huts, in lonely coves of the bays, remote even from neighbours as
ill-cased as themselves; there they live and laugh and love and suffer
and die and bury their dead--alone. To the south, however, there are
little settlements in the more sheltered harbours--the largest of not
more than a hundred souls--where there is a degree of prosperity and
of comfort; potatoes are a luxury, but the flour-barrel is always
full, the pork-barrel not always empty, and there are raisins in the
duff on feast-days; moreover, there are stoves in the whitewashed
houses (the northern "liveyere's" stove is more often than not a flat
rock), beds to sleep in, muslin curtains in the little windows, and a
flower, it may be, sprouting desperately in a red pot on the sill.
That is the extreme of luxury--rare to be met with; and it is at all
times open to dissolution by famine.
"Sure, zur, _last_ winter," a stout young fellow boasted, "we had all
the grease us wanted!"
[Illustration: "THE LABRADOR 'LIVEYERE'"]
It is related of a thrifty settler named Olliver, however, who lived
with his wife and five children at Big Bight,--he was a man of
superior qualities, as the event makes manifest,--that, having come
close to the pass of starvation at the end of a long winter, he set
out afoot over the hills to seek relief from his nearest neighbour,
forty miles away. But there was no relief to be had; the good
neighbour had already given away all that he dared spare, and
something more. Twelve miles farther on he was again denied; it is
said that the second neighbour mutely pointed to his flour-barrel and
his family--which was quite sufficient for Olliver, who thereupon
departed to a third house, where his fortune was no better. Perceiving
then that he must depend upon the store of food in his own house,
which was insufficient to support the lives of all, he returned home,
sent his wife and eldest son and eldest daughter away on a pretext,
despatched his three youngest children with an axe, and shot himself.
As he had foreseen, wife, daughter, and son survived until the
"break-up" brought food within their reach; and the son was a
well-grown boy, and made a capable head of the house thereafter.
* * * * *
The "liveyere" is a fisherman and trapper. In the summer he catches
cod; in the winter he traps the fox, otter, mink, lynx, and marten,
and sometimes he shoots a bear, white or black, and kills a wolf. The
"planter," who advances the salt to cure the fish, takes the catch at
the end of the season, giving in exchange provisions at an incredible
profit; the Hudson Bay Company takes the fur, giving in exchange
provisions at an even larger profit; for obvious reasons, both aim
(there are exceptions, of course) to keep the "liveyere" in
debt--which is not by any means a difficult matter, for the "liveyere"
is both shiftless and (what is more to the point) illiterate. So it
comes about that what he may have to eat and wear depends upon the
will of the "planter" and of the company; and when for his ill-luck or
his ill-will both cast him off--which sometimes happens--he looks
starvation in the very face. A silver fox, of good fur and acceptable
colour, is the "liveyere's" great catch; no doubt his most ecstatic
nightmare has to do with finding one fast in his trap; but when, "more
by chance than good conduct," as they say, he has that heavenly
fortune (the event is of the rarest), the company pays sixty or eighty
dollars for that which it sells abroad for $600. Of late, however, the
free-traders seem to have established a footing on the coast; their
stay may not be long, but for the moment, at any rate, the "liveyere"
may dispose of his fur to greater advantage--if he dare.
The earth yields the "liveyere" nothing but berries, which are
abundant, and, in midsummer, "turnip tops"; and as numerous dogs are
needed for winter travelling--wolfish creatures, savage, big,
famished--no domestic animals can be kept. There was once a man who
somehow managed for a season to possess a pig and a sheep; he marooned
his dogs on an island half a mile off the coast; unhappily, however,
there blew an off-shore wind in the night, and next morning neither
the pig nor the sheep was to be found; the dogs were engaged in
innocent diversions on the island, but there was evidence sufficient
on their persons, so to speak, to convict them of the depredation in
any court of justice. There are no cows on the coast, no
goats,--consequently no additional milk-supply for babies,--who manage
from the beginning, however, to thrive on bread and salt beef, if put
to the necessity. There are no pigs--there is one pig, I believe,--no
sheep, no chickens; and the first horses to be taken to the sawmill on
Hamilton Inlet so frightened the natives that they scampered in every
direction for their lives whenever the team came near, crying: "Look
out! The harses is comin'!" The caribou are too far inland for most of
the settlers; but at various seasons (excluding such times as there is
no game at all) there are to be had grouse, partridge, geese,
eider-duck, puffin, gulls, loon and petrel, bear, arctic hare, and bay
seal, which are shot with marvellously long and old guns--some of them
ancient flintlocks.
Notwithstanding all, the folk are large and hardy--capable of
withstanding cruel hardship and deprivation.
In summer-time the weather is blistering hot inland; and on the coast
it is more often than not wet, foggy, blustering--bitter enough for
the man from the south, who shivers as he goes about. Innumerable
icebergs drift southward, scraping the coast as they go, and patches
of snow lie in the hollows of the coast hills--midway between Battle
Harbour and Cape Chidley there is a low headland called Snowy Point
because the snow forever lies upon it. But warm, sunny days are to be
counted upon in August--days when the sea is quiet, the sky deep
blue, the rocks bathed in yellow sunlight, the air clear and bracing;
at such times it is good to lie on the high heads and look away out to
sea, dreaming the while. In winter, storm and intense cold make most
of the coast uninhabitable; the "liveyeres" retire up the bays and
rivers, bag and baggage, not only to escape the winds and bitter cold,
but to be nearer the supply of game and fire-wood. They live in little
"tilts"--log huts of one large square room, with "bunks" at each end
for the women-folk, and a "cockloft" above for the men and lads. It is
very cold; frost forms on the walls, icicles under the "bunks"; the
thermometer frequently falls to fifty degrees below zero, which, as
you may be sure, is exceedingly cold near the sea. Nor can a man do
much heavy work in the woods, for the perspiration freezes under his
clothing. Impoverished families have no stoves--merely an arrangement
of flat stones, with an opening in the roof for the escape of the
smoke, with which they are quite content if only they have enough
flour to make hard bread for all.
It goes without saying that there is neither butcher, baker, nor
candlestick-maker on the coast. Every man is his own bootmaker,
tailor, and what not; there is not a trade or profession practiced
anywhere. There is no resident doctor, save the mission doctors, one
of whom is established at Battle Harbour, and with a dog-team makes a
toilsome journey up the coast in the dead of winter, relieving whom he
can. There is no public building, no municipal government, no road.
There is no lawyer, no constable; and I very much doubt that there is
a parson regularly stationed among the whites beyond Battle Harbour,
with the exception of the Moravian missionaries. They are scarce
enough, at any rate, for the folk in a certain practical way to feel
the hardship of their absence. Dr. Grenfell tells of landing late one
night in a lonely harbour where three "couples wanted marrying." They
had waited many years for the opportunity. It chanced that the doctor
was entertaining a minister on the cruise; so one couple determined at
once to return to the ship with him. "The minister," says the doctor,
"decided that pronouncing the banns might be dispensed with in this
case. He went ahead with the ceremony, for the couple had three
children already!"
* * * * *
The "liveyere" is of a sombrely religious turn of mind--his creed as
harsh and gloomy as the land he lives in; he is superstitious as a
savage as well, and an incorrigible fatalist, all of which is not hard
to account for: he is forever in the midst of vast space and silence,
face to face with dread and mysterious forces, and in conflict with
wind and sea and the changing season, which are irresistible and
indifferent.
Jared was young, lusty, light-hearted; but he lived in the fear and
dread of hell. I had known that for two days.
"The flies, zur," said he to the sportsman, whose hospitality I was
enjoying, "was wonderful bad the day."
We were twelve miles inland, fishing a small stream; and we were now
in the "tilt," at the end of the day, safe from the swarming, vicious
black-flies.
"Yes," the sportsman replied, emphatically. "I've suffered the
tortures of the damned this day!"
Jared burst into a roar of laughter--as sudden and violent as a
thunderclap.
"What you laughing at?" the sportsman demanded, as he tenderly stroked
his swollen neck.
"Tartures o' the damned!" Jared gasped. "Sure, if _that's_ all 'tis,
I'll jack 'asy about it!"
He laughed louder--reckless levity; but I knew that deep in his heart
he would be infinitely relieved could he believe--could he only make
sure--that the punishment of the wicked was no worse than an eternity
of fighting with poisonous insects.
"Ay," he repeated, ruefully, "if that's all 'twas, 'twould not trouble
me much."
The graveyard at Battle Harbour is in a sheltered hollow near the sea.
It is a green spot--the one, perhaps, on the island--and they have
enclosed it with a high board fence. Men have fished from that harbour
for a hundred years and more--but there are not many graves; why, I do
not know. The crumbling stones, the weather-beaten boards, the
sprawling ill-worded inscriptions, are all, in their way, eloquent:
[Illustration: "Sarah Combe died the fourth of August, 1881,
aged 31 years."]
There is another, better carved, somewhat better spelled, but quite as
interesting and luminous:
In
Memory of John
Hill who Died
December 30 1890
Aged 34
Weep not dear Parents
For your lost tis my
Etarnel gain May
May Crist you all take up
The crost that we
Shuld meat again
These things are, indeed, eloquent--of ignorance, of poverty; but no
less eloquent of sorrow and of love. The Labrador "liveyere" is kin
with the whole wide world.