At Humbermouth it was my good fortune to encounter Captain Daniel Owen, of Annapolis Royal, Nova Scotia, Captain of the H. V. Greene Labrador Aerial Expedition. The little vessel Miranda had limped in on her way to Halifax, to get her boiler mended.
Captain Owen, himself, deserves more than passing mention. A member of the Royal Flying Corps, he had his left eye shot out in combat with five German planes that brought him to the ground 60 miles within their lines. The observer’s leg was shattered in nine places by their fire. There followed a sojourn of seven months in three German prison-camps. The chivalrous surgeon who was first to operate on Captain Owen’s comrade amused himself and the nurses by twisting bits of bone about in the leg, laughing, while the nurses laughed too, at the patient’s agony.
Flying at a height of 2,000 to 8,700 feet, Captain Owen’s party in Labrador added to the industrial map 1,500,000 acres (about 2,300 square miles) of land timbered with firs and spruces suitable for pulp-wood, the property lying on the Alexis, St. Louis and Gilbert Rivers about 15 miles north of Battle Harbour. This tract will, it is estimated, produce as much as 115 cords to the acre for a maximum, and on the average 40 to 50 cords. 15,000 photographs were taken, and moving pictures also were made. The aerodrome was 28 miles up the Alexis River, and according to Captain Owen it was an extremely serious matter to find the way back to it each time after a flight for there was no other suitable place to land anywhere in the neighbourhood. “I never felt so anxious for the return of an aeroplane in the Western Front as I felt for the safety of ours,” he said.
The flying took place on five different days—and in that time as much was accomplished as might have been done in from six to ten years of the usual land cruising which—in sample areas—was used to check up the results of the airmen.
The propeller of the Curtiss biplane was a mass of blood from the flies it sucked in. Dr. Murdock Graham, second in command, kept some of these flies in a bottle as souvenirs, and they were portentous insects.
“We enjoyed nothing more,” said Dr. Graham, “than an evening spent with Dr. Grenfell at Battle Harbour where, lolling at ease in corduroy and his old Queen’s College blazer with the insignia over the left breast-pocket, pulling a corn-cob pipe, he spun one yarn after another of the life at the Front with the Harvard contingent in 1915-16.
“Murphy, the mail-man from Battle Harbour, friend of the Grenfell mission, friend of everybody, is a man worth knowing. I can hear now his genial ‘Does ye smoke, boy? Has ye any on ye? Does ye mind, boy?’ He said to one of our Greene Expedition doctors, ‘Doctor, are all the Americans like ye? Ye has a kind word for everybody. Has ye any tobacco?’ ‘By gorry, that’s fine,’ he said of the aeroplane. ‘How do it do it?’ He was as modest as he was plucky. ‘I don’t want to go and eat with all those gentlemen, with their fine clothes on,’ he would say. Of one of the young ‘liveyeres’ he remarked: ‘If he had the learn there’d be a fine job for him’—which alas! is true of so many on the Labrador.
“No member of our expedition heard any swearing from the forty men we employed—with the exception of a single Newfoundlander. I asked one of the men how they came to be so clean of profanity, and he answered simply: ‘We doesn’t make a practice of that, we doesn’t.’
“At Williams Harbour on the Alexis River there was three weeks’ schooling by a visiting teacher from the Grenfell mission. In two families with a joint membership of eighteen one person could read and write.
“They have had no minister since the war and in the winter the bottom falls out of everything. The people on the rivers have no doctor for a year and a half and two years at a time. At Williams Harbour they swarmed to Dr. Twiss and Dr. MacDonald. One woman in desperation had been treating pneumonia with salt-water, snow and white moss.