With Grenfell on the Labrador

by Fullerton L. Waldo

To preserve self-respect by the exchange of a quid pro quo, some of the clothing contributed by friends in the States and elsewhere is allocated to the fishermen’s families in return for the supplies of firewood. The value varies according to the place where the wood is cut and piled. It may be worth $7 a cord on a certain point or $3 at the bottom of a bay. (Cutting the wood is called “cleaving the splits.”) The payment must be very carefully apportioned, so that Mrs. B. shall not have more or better than Mrs. A.—or else there will be wailing and gnashing and heart-burning after the boat weighs anchor.

Before making the rounds of the Straits or of White Bay, or going on the long trail down North, or wherever else the Strathcona may be faring on her mission, the big boxes of wearables are opened on the deck and stored in a pinched triangular stateroom forward of the saloon. There are quantities of clothing for men—overcoats, sweaters of priceless wool, reefers, peajackets, shooting-coats, dressing-gowns, underwear—some of it brand new and most of it thick and good; there are woolen socks excellently made by many loving hands, shoes joined by the laces or buttoned together, trousers, jackets, whole suits more or less in disrepair but capable of conversion to all sorts of useful ends. Generally the Doctor and Mrs. Grenfell find a pretext for giving some of the clothing to a needy family even when the fiction of payment in kind is not maintained. Rarely does the article offered—let us say a hooked rug in garish colours—meet the value of the garments that are given. But the important thing is that the recipient is made to feel that he pays for what he gets and is not a pauper.

There is ever a want of clothing for the women and children. Few complete dresses for women find their way to the Strathcona’s storeroom. There are not nearly enough garments for babies or suits for little boys. Women’s underclothing is badly needed. But most of those who come aboard in quest of clothing are grateful for whatever is given them and make no fuss. They will ingeniously adapt a shirt into a dress for Susy, and cut a big man’s trousers in twain for her two small brothers. The Northern housewife learns to make much of little in the way of textile materials. A barrel of magazines and cards and picture scrap-books shielded with canvas, stands at the head of the companion way. Bless whoever pasted in the stories and pictures on the strong sheets of brown cartridge-paper! Those will be pored over by lamp-light from cottage to cottage till they fall apart, just as the wooden boxes of books carried aboard for circulating libraries will provide most of the life intellectual all winter long for many a village. Many of the fishermen’s families from the father down are unlettered, but those who can read and write make up for it by their intellectual activity, and even the little boys sometimes display a nimbleness of wit and fancy altogether delightful. They will sing you a song or tell you a fairy-tale with a naïveté foreign to the American small boy.

A woman came aboard with her husband—pale, thin, forlorn she was—and asked for clothing for him. She held each garment critically to the light, and somewhat disdainfully rejected any that showed signs of mending. Finally I said: “You’re not taking anything for yourself. Don’t you need something?” I knew the pitiful huddle of fishermen’s houses ashore from which she came—the entire population of the settlement was 141, not counting the vociferous array of Eskimo dogs that greeted us when we landed.

“I’d like a dress,” she admitted—“for street wear.”

I thought of the straggling path amid the rocks where the dogs growled and bristled, but I did not smile. For I realized what this chance to go shopping meant to her isolated life. In the city she would have had huge warerooms and piled counters from which to make a choice. Here two bunks, a barrel and a canvas bag held the whole stock in trade.

She rejected a sleeveless ball gown of burgundy. “I must have black,” she said—“we lost a son in the war.”

The husband began to apologize for the trouble they caused. But we were more than ever bound to please them now. All the new skirts were found to be too short or too long or too gay or too youthful or something else, and the upshot of the dickering was that two pairs of golfer’s breeches were given in lieu of proper habiliments for a poor, lonely woman in Labrador. They could be cut down, she explained, for her boys.

There isn’t much for a woman, in most of these places, but cooking and scrubbing the floor and minding the baby—something like the Kaiser’s ideal of feminine existence. And when the floor is clean, booted fishermen come in and spit upon it even though the white plague is plainly written in the children’s faces.

A new chapter in the industrial history of the Labrador will be written when it becomes possible to utilize the vast supply of news-print available from the pulp-wood of the Labrador “hinterland,” even as Northcliffe is getting paper for his many publications from the plant at Grand Falls in Northern Newfoundland. The difficulty, of course, will be to get the timber away from the coast in the short season when the land is released from the grip of the ice-pack. But the great demand for news-print which leads to anxious examination and utilization of the supplies of Alaska and Finland cannot much longer neglect the available resources so near at hand on the coast of the North Atlantic.