My messages were soon sent, and then I sat down to wait for the replies.
The office was in the house of Thomas Moors, and he was good enough to invite me to stop with him while in Red Bay. His daughter was the telegraph operator.
The next day the answers to my telegrams came, and many messages from friends, and one from Bowring & Company stating that no steamer would be sent to Cape Charles. I had been making inquiries here, however, in the meantime, and learned that it was quite possible to secure dogs and continue the journey up the north shore, so I was not greatly disappointed. I dispatched Murphy at once to Battle Harbor to bring on the other men, waiting myself at Red Bay for their coming, and holding teams in readiness for an immediate departure when they should arrive.
They drove in at two o’clock on April fourth, and we left at once. On the morning of the sixth we passed through Blanc Sablon, the boundary line between Newfoundland and Canadian territory, and here I left the Newfoundland letters from my mail bag. From this point the majority of the natives are Acadians, and speak only French.
At Brador Bay I stopped to telegraph. No operator was there, so I sent the message myself, left the money on the desk and proceeded.
Three days more took us to St. Augustine Post of the Hudson’s Bay Company, where we arrived in the morning and accepted the hospitality of Burgess, the Agent.
Our old friends the Indians whom we met on our inland trip at Northwest River were here, and John, who had eaten supper with us at our camp on the hill on the first portage, expressed great pleasure at meeting us, and had many questions to ask about the country. They had failed in their deer hunt, and had come out half starved a week or so before, from the interior.
We did fifty miles on the eleventh, changing dogs at Harrington at noon and running on to Sealnet Cove that night. Here we found more Indians who had just emerged from the interior, driven to the coast for food like those at St. Augustine as the result of their failure to find caribou.