With Grenfell on the Labrador

by Fullerton L. Waldo

Captain Coté is the keeper of the Greenly Island Lighthouse, near Blanc Sablon. It is a very important station.

The Doctor, true to form, at once made up his mind to go. Greenly Island is about 100 miles from St. Anthony, and on the opposite side of the Straits, on the Canadian side of the line that divides Canadian Labrador from Newfoundland Labrador. The short cut took us through Carpoon (Quirpon) Tickle, and there we spent the night, for much as the Doctor wanted to push ahead the wind made the Strait so rough that—having it against us—the Strathcona could not have made headway. “I remember,” said the Doctor with a smile, “that once we steamed all night in Bonavista Bay, full speed ahead, and in the morning found ourselves exactly where we were the night before. Coal is too scarce now.” On one occasion the Strathcona distinguished herself by going ashore with all sails set.

By the earliest light of morning we were under way. The tendency of a land-lubber at the wheel off this cruel coast was naturally to give the jagged and fearsome spines of rock as wide a berth as possible. In the blue distance might be seen a number of bergs, large and small, just as a reminder of what the ice can do to navigation when it chooses; and in the foreground were fishermen’s skiffs bobbing about and taking their chances of crossing the track of our doughty little steamer. But the Doctor called in at the door of the wheelhouse: “Run her so close to those rocks that you almost skin her!” He was thinking not of his ship, not of himself, but of the necessity of getting to the lonely lighthouse-keeper at the earliest possible moment, to perform that operation for a subtonsillar abscess. There was a picture in his mind of the valiant French Canadian engineer gasping for breath as the orifice dwindled, and now he was burning not the firewood but coal—a semi-precious stone in these waters in this year of grace. The Strathcona labours and staggers; Fritz the dog goes to the bowsprit and sniffs the sun by day and the moon by night; the ship is carrying all the bellying sails she has; and the Doctor mounts to the crow’s-nest to make sure that his beloved new topsail is doing its full share. He tools the Strathcona—when he is at the wheel—as if she were a taxicab. So the long diagonal across the Strait is cut down, seething mile by mile, till between Flower’s Cove and Forteau—where the Strait is at the narrowest, and the shores are nine miles and three-quarters apart—it almost seems as if an hour’s swim on either hand would take one to the eternal crags where the iris blows and the buttercup spreads her cloth of gold.

We drew near Blanc Sablon (pronounced Sablow) with Grant’s Wharf by the river. West of that river for several hundred yards it is no man’s land between the two Labradors—that is to say, between Canada and Newfoundland. A man stood up in a jouncing power-boat and waved an oar, and then—his overcoat buttoned up to his ears—our patient, Captain Coté, stood up beside him. They had come out to meet us to save every moment of precious time. It was a weak and pale and shaky man that came aboard—but he was a man every bit of him, and he did not wince when the Doctor, in the crypt-like gloom of the Strathcona’s saloon, while the tin lamp was held in front of the Captain’s mouth, reached into the throat with his attenuated tongs and scissors and made the necessary incision after giving him several doses of the novocaine solution as a local anaesthetic.

“Then the Captain sat back white and gasping on the settle, and—with a strong Canadian French flavour in his speech—told us a little of his lonely vigil of the summer.

“In eighteen days, Doctor, I never saw a ship for the fog: but I kept the light burning—two thousand gallons of kerosene she took.

“All summer long it was fog—fog—fog. I show you by the book I keep. Ever since the ice went out we have the fog. Five days we have in July when it was clear—but never such a clear day as we have now. Come ashore with me on Greenly Island and you shall have the only motor car ride it would be possible for you to have in Labrador.”

We accepted the invitation. At the head of the wharf were men spreading the fish to dry—grey-white acres of them on the flakes like a field of everlastings. In the lee of a hill they had a few potato-plants, fenced away from the dogs. In a dwelling house with “Please wipe your feet” chalked on the door we found a spotless kitchen and two fresh-cheeked, white-aproned women cooking. It was a fine thing to know that they were upholding so high a standard of cleanliness and sanitation in that lonely outpost—as faithful as the keeper of the light in his storm-defying tower.

From the fish-flakes of the ancient “room” over half a mile of cinderpath and planking we rode on the chassis of a Ford car, which the keeper uses to convey supplies.

“The first joy-ride I ever had in Labrador,” said the Doctor, and the Captain grinned and let out another link to the roaring wind that flattened the grass and threatened to lift his cabbage-plants out of their paddock under his white housewalls.