I don’t know of a harder-working lot than the crew and captain of a boat that undertakes to carry freight and passengers between southern ports of Newfoundland and the Labrador.
Take the experience of this vessel, the Ethie, in the summer of 1919 as an example. Under a thoroughly capable and chart-perfect skipper, Captain English, she made several ineffectual attempts to get to Battle Harbour through the dense ice-jam before she finally made that roadstead on June 24. When I met her at Curling to go north, a week late, at the end of August, she had just come out of a viscous fog of four days’ duration in the Strait of Belle Isle and in that fog she had escaped by the closest of shaves a collision with a berg that towered above her till the top of it was lost in the fog. She carried so many passengers, short-haul or long-distance, that every seat in the dining saloon was filled with weary folk at night and some paced the decks or sat on the piles of lathes or the oil-barrels. Lumber and barrels were stored everywhere, the hold was crammed, and cattle in the prow came and went mysteriously as the vessel moved into one cove or bight or tickle after another in the dead of the night or the silver cool of the early morning. The clatter of the steam-winch with the tune of babies strange to the sea-trip, the slap and scuffle of the waves on our sheet-iron sides and the banging of the doors as the vessel writhed in her discomfort made an orchestra of many tongues and percussions. The boat was so heavy with her cargo of machinery, oil, lumber, flour ($24 a barrel at Battle Harbour), cattle and human beings that the deck outside my stateroom was hardly two feet out of water. There were four of us in the stateroom, but the population changed almost hourly from port to port, so that I had barely time to get acquainted with a fellow-passenger ere I lost him to look after his lobster or fish, or his missionary labours. One of the ship’s company was going to teach school at Green Island Cove at the northern tip of Newfoundland. He told me he would get $275 for ten months’ work and out of it would have to pay board. Yet out of that salary he meant to put by money to pay for part of a college education at St. John’s. “How old are you?” I asked. “Not yet eighteen, sir.”
It is easy to see why Dr. Grenfell’s heart and hand go out in a practical and helpful sympathy to those whose battle with grim, unmitigated natural forces and with harsh circumstance is unending. The commonest question asked of anyone who returns from a visit to the Labrador is “Why do people live there?” Despite the fog and the cold, the sea-perils and the stark barrenness of the rocks, the Labrador has an allurement all its own. It has brought a sturdy explorer like William B. Cabot of Boston (“Labrador” Cabot) again and again to the rivers and inlets and the central fastnesses, where he shares the life of the Montagnais and the Nauscapee Indians; and the same magic has endeared the Labrador to those who year upon year continue the quest of the cod and the seal and know no life other than this. Whatever place a man calls his home is likely to become unreasonably dear to him, however bare and poor it looks to visitors; and that is the way with the Labrador. But he who cannot find by sea or land a wild and terrible beauty in the waters and the luminous skies and the long roll and lift of the blue hills must be insensible to some of the fairest vistas that earth has to show. Grenfell and his colleagues do not concede that life on the Labrador is dull or that the environment is sterile and monotonous and cheerless. As one of the brave Labrador missionaries, the Rev. Henry Gordon, has written, “Not only does Labrador rejoice in some of the finest scenery in North America, but she also possesses a people of an exceptionally fine type.” Surely it is not right to think of such a country as a land only of rocks, snows and misery.
XIII
A FEW “PARISHIONERS”
A typical interior gladdened by the Doctor’s presence is this on the Southern Labrador. A drudge from Nancy Jobble (Lance-au-Diable) is scrubbing the floor, for the mother is too ill to look to the ways of her household. The drudge instead of singing is chewing on something that may be tobacco, paper or gum, and as she slings the brush about heartlessly she gives furtive eyes and ears to the visitors. The walls are bestuck with staled and yellowed newspapers. There are no pictures or books. There is a wooden bench before the linoleum-covered table, on which are loaves of bread, ill-baked. There is a stove, of the “Favourite” brand with kettle and teapot simmering. A tarnished alarm-clock from Ansonia, a mirror, a wash-stand, shelves with china, tin cans and shreds of bread, a baby’s crib, a rocking-chair and two more benches forlornly complete the inventory. There is nothing green in sight from the besmirched windows but grass and people.
A telegraph operator was reading a volume of the addresses of Russell Conwell when we entered his not overtasked laboratory. The book bore the title “How to Get Rich Honestly.” “ ’Fraid I’ll never get any further than reading about it!” exclaimed the man of the keys and wires. Dr. Grenfell took the book and presently became engrossed in the famous address called “Acres of Diamonds.” It seemed to him the sort of literature to fire the ambition of his neighbours under the Northern Lights, with its instances of those who made their way defiant of the odds and in spite of all opposition.
A very young minister at another Labrador watering-place said to the Doctor: “You needn’t leave any of your books here. I’m not interested in libraries. I’m only interested in the spiritual welfare of the people.”
A run of six miles by power-boat across Lewis Inlet took us to Fox Harbour and the house of Uncle George Holley. In recent years the power-boat, even with gasoline at the prevailing high prices, has become the fisherman’s taxicab or tin Lizzie, and Oh! the difference to him. He bobs and prances out over the war-dance of the waves with his barrels and boxes easily, where once it was a mighty toiling with the sweeps to make his way. The run across the inlet went swiftly and surely past an iceberg white as an angel’s wing though with the malign suggestion of the devil behind it: and there were plenty of chances to take photographs from every possible angle.
Uncle George had on the stage a skinned seal, some whalemeat, salted cod and a few barrels of salmon. His wife showed us a tiny garden with cabbages, lettuce, rhubarb, radishes and “greens.” One year, she said, she had a barrel of potatoes. Indoors she managed to raise balsam, bachelor’s buttons and nasturtiums. Nowhere in the world do flowers mean more to those that plant them. Constantly there comes to mind H. C. Brunner’s poem about a geranium upon a window-sill: for the flowers which it needs incessant care to keep from the nipping frost come to be regarded as not merely friends but members of the family. Uncle George, a fine, patriarchal type, told vividly how with a dog whip nine fathoms long the expert hand could cut off the neck of a glass bottle without upsetting the bottle, and take the bowl from a man’s pipe or the buttons off his coat. No wonder the huskies slink under the houses when they see a stranger coming.
The winter of 1918-19 was especially terrible—or “wonderful” as would be said here—because of the visitation of the “flu.” Conditions were bad enough in Newfoundland, but in Labrador the “liveyers” (those who remain the year round) fought their battles in a hopeless isolation illumined by heroic self-abnegation on the part of a tiny handful of persons.