Jack Heaton, wireless operator

by A. Frederick Collins

The inhabitants live only on the coast and these are made up chiefly of Eskimos in the north and Indians in the south, and all along and in between are trappers, fishermen and live yeres. The trappers push into the interior a little way to run their lines of traps and in the spring of the year thousands of fishermen come up from Newfoundland to take the cod-fish, which abound off the coast at this season of the year. If you ask one of the poor, ignorant white inhabitants about himself he will say that he lives yere, hence the nick-name of this fixed part of the population. The condition of all these poor, simple folk has been much improved by wireless.

For many years the mail-boat was the only steamer that made calls at all the ports along the coast and she did this about every six months. If any one wanted to get something from St. Johns he had to know it a long way ahead of time and even when he was thoughtful enough to order it the chances are that by the time it reached him he had forgotten he had ordered it or had gotten over wanting it.

On the mail-boat there was a doctor and the inhabitants had to wait to get sick until he came, or perhaps, it would be stating the case a little more accurately to say that however ill they might be they had to wait until he came before they could be treated. Anything might and often did happen to his patients between calls. But all this has been changed by wireless which now links up the towns along the coast with Battle Harbor where the Royal Deep Sea Mission has its hospital for fishermen, and not only may supplies be ordered but, what is of far greater importance, the sick may have their diseases diagnosed and medicine prescribed though they are as far away as Maine, by the doctor in charge and all in the twinkling of an electric wave.

As we steamed up the coast the ice fields began to loom up and as far as the eye could reach they glittered and sparkled like gigantic jewels under the glare of the Arctic sun. When night came on and the stars came out they shone a hundred fold brighter than in the temperate zone and the pale blue moon illuminated the scene with a kind of a supernatural light that seemed not to belong to earth.

But all the days and nights were by no means fine ones, for howling gales and fierce snow storms continually sprang up and I often wondered how a ship built and sailed by the hands of men, could weather them out. It was a man’s work! On such occasions I stuck to my wireless room which I found mighty comfortable and trusted to the Captain and his mates to see the ship safely through.

As we got farther and farther north the Aurora borealis, or northern lights as it is called, grew brighter and brighter every night until the whole heavens in the region of the North Pole were scintillating with streamers that spread out like a great fan, reaching over our heads and far to the south. The first mate said that it was as brilliant an aurora as he had ever seen and his explanation of it was that the spots on the sun had been unusually large and numerous.

Not only did the sun’s activity show itself in the aurora, but it set up a violent magnetic storm on earth and this made the compass needles oscillate to and fro as much as 1½ degrees on each side of their normal positions. Now magnetic storms always interfere very seriously with the operation of both overland telegraph lines and cable systems where the circuit is completed through the earth.

I had heard some one say, or had read somewhere, that a magnetic storm would interfere in the same way with wireless messages and I was fearful for some time that it would put our signals out of commission. But all through the magnetic storm Mackey and I sent our messages without the slightest trouble—indeed if we had not been told that a magnetic storm was on we should never have guessed it. Evidently wireless had scored another point over the wire systems and another pet theory was put on the ice to cool.

We sailed up the coast keeping pretty close to it while the Midnight Sun steamed up and out from it until we were fifty or more miles apart. Now here is where wireless came in, in catching seals. Over the constantly broadening gap between our ships Mackey and I kept their Captains right in touch with each other.

The Captain of his ship wirelessed that there were any number of old seals about him and this showed, the first mate told me, that there were patches of white coats, as the young harp-seals are called, somewhere in the neighborhood.