XII
A WIDE, WIDE “PARISH”
To take the measure of the man Dr. Grenfell is and the work he does it is necessary to know something of the land and the waters round about, where he puts his life in jeopardy year after year, day unto day, to save the lives of others. There is much more to “Dr. Grenfell’s parish” than the “rock, fog and bog” of the old saying. Such observations as are here assembled are the raw material for the Doctor’s inimitable tales of life on the Labrador.
The great fact of life here is the sea, and much of existence is in giving battle to it. The little boys practice jumping across rain-barrels and mud-puddles, because some day they hope to get a “ticket” (a berth on a sealer) and go to the ice, and when it is “a good big copy from pan to pan”—that is to say, a considerable distance from one floating ice-cake to the next—their ability to jump like their own island sheep may save their lives.
SIGNAL HILL, HARBOUR OF ST. JOHNS.
The word “copy” comes from the childish game of following the leader and doing as he does. A little piece of ice is called a knob, and a larger piece is a pan. A pan is the same thing as a floe, but the latter expression is not in common usage.
Every youth who aspires to qualify as a skipper must go before an examining board of old sea-wise and weather-wise pilots, and prove himself letter-perfect in the text of that big book, “The Newfoundland and Labrador Pilot and Guide.” His examiners scorn the knowledge of the book, very often, for they have the facts at the fingers’ ends from long and harsh experience of the treacherous waters, with the criss-cross currents, the hidden reefs, the sudden fogs, the contrary winds. So they delight to make life miserable for the young mariner by heckling him.
The disasters that now and then overtake the sealing-fleet are ever present in the minds of those who do business in these waters. They know what it means for a ship’s company to be caught out on the ice in a snow-storm, far from the vessel. In early March the wooden ships race for the Straits of Belle Isle, and three days later the faster iron ships follow. When they get to where the seals are sunning themselves around the blow-holes in the ice, the crew go out with their gaffs (staves) and kill the usually unresisting animals by hitting them over the back of the head. It sounds like simple and easy hunting, and in good weather it is. But a long-continued storm changes the complexion of the adventure to that of the gravest peril.
One captain saved his men by making them dance like mad the long night through, while he crooned the music to them. At the end of each five minutes he let them rest on their piles of gaffs, and then they were made to spring to their feet again and resume the frantic gyrations that kept them from freezing to death. In the same storm, the Greenland of Harbour Grace lost 52 of her 100 men.