With Grenfell on the Labrador

by Fullerton L. Waldo

Then suddenly spying other vessels with their sails up, Dr. Grenfell proceeds to study them for a lesson as to the way his own ship is to take. He calls out to Albert Ash, his pessimistic mate, “She’s well-ballasted, that two-master. Have those others tacked?” His talk runs on easily as he swings the ship about and the sails are bellying with a favouring breeze. “This wind’ll run out three knots. I’m cheating it up into the wind. We’ll let her go by a bit. This is Chimney Tickle in here. A beautiful harbour. The tide and the polar current meet here. It’s always open water. It’s the place they’re thinking of for a transatlantic harbour. It’s only 1,625 miles from here to Galway. The jib and mainsail aren’t doing the work. That man has no idea of trimming a jib!” He rushes out to the wheelhouse and does most of the work of setting the mainsail himself.

“I’m so fond of those words ‘The sea is His,’ ” he says, coming back to the spokes again. “I think it runs in the blood. I like to think of the old sea-dogs—like Frobisher and Drake and Cabot. Shackleton told Mrs. Grenfell that the first ship that came to Labrador was named the Grenfell.”

“The comings and goings of the Strathcona mean much to these people,” said Dr. McConnell. “At Independence a woman met us on the wharf, the great tears rolling down her cheeks. She lost her husband and her son in the ‘flu’ epidemic. She told me that her son said to her: ‘Mother, if Dr. Grenfell were only here, he could save me.’ At Snack Cove the people went out on the rocks and cried bitterly when the Strathcona passed them by—as we learned when to their great relief we dropped in upon them a fortnight later.”

We cast anchor at Pleasure Harbour because of rough weather and for a few hours had one of the Doctor’s all too infrequent play-times, while waiting for the Strait to abate its fury to permit of a possible crossing.

Here a delicious trout stream tumbled and swirled from sullen, mist-hung uplands into a piratical cove where two small schooners swung at anchor. Like so many of these places the cove was a complete surprise—you came round the rock with no hint that it was there till you found it, placid as a tarn and deep and black, with big blue hills stretching to the northward beyond the fuzzy fringes of the nearer trees and the mottled barrens where the clouds were poised and the ghosts of the mist descended. (A tuneful, sailor-like name it is that the Eskimoes give to a ghost—the “Yo-ho”: and they say that the Northern Lights are the spirits of the dead at play).

An unhandy person with a rod, I was allowed by Dr. Grenfell and Dr. McConnell to go ahead and spoil the nicest trout-pools with my fly. Even though cod fishermen at the mouth of the stream had unlawfully placed a net to keep the trout from ascending, there were plenty of trout in the brook, and in the course of several hours forty-nine were good enough to attach themselves to my line. The banks were soggy under the long green grass: the water was acutely cold: and in two places there were small fields of everlasting snow in angles of the rock. It was an ideal trout-brook, for it was full of swirling black eddies, rippling rapids, and deep, still pools. The brook began at a lake which was roughened by a wind blowing steadily toward us. Dr. Grenfell cast against the wind where the lake discharged its contents into the brook, and the line was swept back to his boots. With unwearying patience he cast again and again, and while I strove in vain to land a single fish from the lake he caught one monster after another, almost at his own feet. All the way up the brook he had successfully fished in the most unpromising places, that we had given over with little effort, and here he was again getting by far the best results in the most difficult places of all. There seemed to be a parallel here with his medical and spiritual enterprise on the Labrador. He has worked for poor and humble people, when others have asked impatiently: “Why do you throw away your life upon a handful of fishermen round about a bleak and uncomfortable island where people have no business to live anyway?” He could not leave the fishermen’s stage at the mouth of the brook this time without being called upon to examine a fisherman troubled by failing eyesight. On the run of a couple of hundred yards in a rowboat to the Strathcona the thunder-clouds rolled up, with lightning, and as we set foot on board the deluge came.

FRITZ AND HIS MASTER.