Everything was hustle and bustle on board and all around us, for at that time of the year—it was nearing the middle of March—a score or more of ships steam from St. Johns along the great Labrador Coast to the frozen north where the young harp seals are found by the thousands on the ice floes off the coast.
Of all the ships at St. Johns I saw only one other that was fitted with an aerial and when I got my apparatus in order I made my way over to her to see Mackey, her operator.
In days gone by the sealing ships were all schooners and just as these gave way to wooden steamers so the latter will be supplanted by ships with steel hulls, and the Midnight Sun was the first of these fine new steel craft. For size and power she put it all over the Polar Bear, but she lacked the glamor of romance and for this reason I liked my ship the best.
I had met Mackey, her operator, at Liverpool once and we straightway became better acquainted. He told me that the firm who owned the Polar Bear also owned the Midnight Sun and that the Captains of them were to work together. A new experiment was to be tried, he said, and that was to catch seals by wireless, but what the modus operandi of the scheme was he hadn’t the faintest idea and no more had I. I remember when I was a little boy that folks talked about running street cars by electricity and I wondered how it could be done. I had a kind of a vague notion that a chunk of electricity came along, struck the car and pushed it ahead just as a breeze fills the sails of a ship and carries her for’ard.
In after years I learned that the current of electricity flowed along a wire parallel with the tracks and that it passed from this feeder to the trolley of a car, thence down a conductor to a motor which it energized and finally back to the power house through the rails; further that it was the power of the motor thus developed which drove the wheels of the car; and I was disappointed, for it seemed to me to be altogether too round-about a way—too far-fetched—to justify the statement that the “car runs by electricity.”
The same thing holds good when you see signs which read, “hats cleaned by electricity,” “eggs hatched by electricity,” and “diamonds made by electricity,” for the hat is merely rotated by an electric motor, the eggs are hatched in an incubator which is heated by a current flowing through a wire, and the diamonds are made in an electric furnace.
Now catching seals by wireless was to my mind quite a vague, mysterious and altogether a difficult proposition to see into—even as running a car by electricity was when I was a little shaver. Seals are wonderful creatures, as you will admit if you ever saw them do a balancing act in a show, and I have heard that they have a great liking for music. A seal hunter can take a phonograph, put a band record on it, set it up where there is a patch of seals and start it going. The seals will come out of the water to listen to the sweet strains and every time one puts its nose above the surface the hunter, who is lying a little way off, will shoot it with his rifle. This then is what you might call hunting seals with music.
It looked to me as if we might be told to send out a line of wireless waves to a patch of seals, bend up the ends of a few dashes and when the seals had swallowed them the sailors would heave ho and pull them aboard. But no, catching seals by wireless was not done in quite so direct a fashion, as you will presently see.
We only made one stop after we left St. Johns and that was at Cartwright, near the mouth of the Hamilton River, on the bleak coast of Labrador. And wireless, let me say right here, has been a big factor in changing life, such as it is, in this wild, forbidding country.
Labrador, you know, is a narrow strip of coastland along the edge of the province of Quebec. It is from 10 to 50 miles wide, but a thousand miles long, reaching from Belle Isle Strait which separates the lower end of it from Newfoundland to Hudson Strait which lies within the Arctic Circle.