When spring released the Labrador Coast from the grip of the ice, and the tragic tale of the winter was told, the Newfoundland Government dispatched the Terra Nova (Scott’s Antarctic vessel) to the aid of the afflicted. Then news filtered out to the world of plague conditions during that terrible winter more dreadful than those which De Foe has chronicled. While reading the gruesome details, one is reminded of the long, lonely and hopeless fight of the early Jamestown colony against sickness and starvation. Throughout the bitter months the Red Death stalked its dread way up and down the Coast, with almost no doctors, nurses or medicines to check the disease. Whole families were stricken, the living were too weak to bury the dead or even to fight off the gaunt dogs that hovered hungrily about the houses; and hamlets were wiped out while neighbouring villages were unable to send aid.
A few sentences from the diary of Henry Gordon, the brave missionary at Cartwright, on Sandwich Bay, will suffice to show what a hideous winter his people passed through. Of this man Dr. Grenfell said to me: “Instead of a stick with a collar on it we have a man with a soul in him.” He is always laughing—incurably an optimist, and a great Boy Scout leader. The following are condensed excerpts.
“Wednesday, Oct. 30, 1918. Reached Cartwright 8 a.m. Mail-boat had brought ‘the great Plague’ and nearly half the population was down with it.
“Thursday, Oct. 31. Nearly everybody down now.
“Nov. 1. Whole households stretched inanimate on floors, unable even to feed themselves or keep fires going.
“Nov. 2. Feeling rotten. Head like a bladderful of wind.
“Nov. 7. Busy all a.m. arranging graves and coffins.
“Nov. 8. Gale N. E. with snow-storms.
“Nov. 17. Two of bodies too much doubled up to put in coffin.
“Nov. 21. Will Leaming in from Indian Harbour with news that ten are dead at North River still unburied and only three coffins. The rest are too sick and dismayed to help.