With Grenfell on the Labrador

by Fullerton L. Waldo

They still talk of the fate of the Queen on Gull Island off Cape St. John, though the wreck took place nigh unto forty years ago. There was no lighthouse then. The island lifts its head hundreds of feet above the mean of the tides, and only the long rank grass and the buttercups live there in summer. But this was in a December night, and the wind blew a gale. There were six passengers—a woman among them. When the passengers had battled their way ashore through the leaping surf, the crew went back on the doomed ship to salvage some of the provisions. For they knew that at this forsaken angle of the island no help from any passing ship was likely till the spring.

The passengers toiled to the top of the bleak islet, lugging with them a fragment of a sail. The crew, aboard the vessel, were carried by the furious winds and waters out to the Old Harry Shoals, where they lost their lives when the sea beat the vessel to pieces.

The sequel is known by a little diary in which a doctor—one of the hapless half-dozen—made notes with his own blood till his stiffening fingers refused to scrawl another entry.

It seems from this pathetic note-book that the six at the end of a few days, tortured with thirst and starvation, drew lots to see who should die.

The lot fell to the woman. Her brother offered himself in her place.

Then the entries in the book cease; and the curtain that fell was not lifted till spring brought a solitary hunter to the island. He shot a duck from his boat, and it fell in the breakers. Afterwards he said it was a phantom fowl, sent from heaven to guide him. For he did not see it again, though he landed and searched the beach.

But he saw splinters flung high by the surf that seemed to him a clear indication of a wreck.

He clambered to the top of the islet. There he found, under the rotted sail, the six bodies, and in the hand of one, was a piece of flesh torn from one of the bodies.

Even when their lives are endangered the fishermen preserve their keen mindfulness of the religious proprieties. Caught on an ice-pan together, Protestants and Catholics prayed, their backs to one another, on opposite sides of the pan—and the same thing has happened in ships’ cabins. The sailors are not above a round oath now and then, but there are many God-fearing, prayerful men among them. “These are my sailing orders, sir,” said an old retired sea-dog to me as he patted the cheek of his Bible.

Phrases of the sea enter into every phase of daily human intercourse. “You should have given yourself more room to veer and haul,” said the same old sailor to me when I was in a hurry. Fish when half-cured are said to be “half-saved,” and a man who is “not all there” is likely to be styled “half-saved.”