Doubtless he enjoyed the experience while it lasted—and promptly forgot it, as being commonplace. I have heard of him, caught in the night in a winter’s gale of wind and snow, threading a tumultuous, reef-strewn sea, his skipper at the wheel, himself on the bowsprit, guiding the ship by the flash and roar of breakers, while the sea tumbled over him. If the chance passenger who told me the story is to be believed, upon that trying occasion the doctor had the “time of his life.”
“All that man wanted,” I told the doctor subsequently, “was, as he says, ‘to bore a hole in the bottom of the ship and crawl out.’”
“Why!” exclaimed the doctor, with a laugh of surprise. “He wasn’t frightened, was he?”
“THE HOSPITAL SHIP, STRATHCONA”
Fear of the sea is quite incomprehensible to this man. The passenger was very much frightened; he vowed never to sail with “that devil” again. But the doctor is very far from being a dare-devil; though he is, to be sure, a man altogether unafraid; it seems to me that his heart can never have known the throb of fear. Perhaps that is in part because he has a blessed lack of imagination, in part, perhaps, because he has a body as sound as ever God gave to a man, and has used it as a man should; but it is chiefly because of his simple and splendid faith that he is an instrument in God’s hands—God’s to do with as He will, as he would say. His faith is exceptional, I am sure—childlike, steady, overmastering, and withal, if I may so characterize it, healthy. It takes something such as the faith he has to move a man to run a little steamer at full speed in the fog when there is ice on every hand. It is hardly credible, but quite true, and short of the truth: neither wind nor ice nor fog, nor all combined, can keep the Strathcona in harbour when there comes a call for help from beyond. The doctor clambers cheerfully out on the bowsprit and keeps both eyes open. “As the Lord wills,” says he, “whether for wreck or service. I am about His business.”
It is a sublime expression of the old faith.
[VII—THE LIVEYERE]
Doctor Grenfell’s patients are of three classes. There is first the “liveyere”—the inhabitant of the Labrador coast—the most ignorant and wretched of them all. There is the Newfoundland “outporter”—the small fisherman of the remoter coast, who must depend wholly upon his hook and line for subsistence. There is the Labradorman—the Newfoundland fisherman of the better class, who fishes the Labrador coast in the summer season and returns to his home port when the snow begins to fly in the fall. Some description of these three classes is here offered, that the reader may understand the character and condition of the folk among whom Dr. Grenfell labours.
“As a permanent abode of civilized man,” it is written in a very learned if somewhat old-fashioned work, “Labrador is, on the whole, one of the most uninviting spots on the face of the earth.” That is putting it altogether too delicately; there should be no qualification; the place is a brutal desolation. The weather has scoured the coast—a thousand miles of it—as clean as an old bone: it is utterly sterile, save for a tuft or two of hardy grass and wide patches of crisp moss; bare gray rocks, low in the south, towering and craggy in the north, everywhere blasted by frost, lie in billowy hills between the froth and clammy mist of the sea and the starved forest at the edge of the inland wilderness. The interior is forbidding; few explorers have essayed adventure there; but the Indians—an expiring tribe—and trappers who have caught sight of the “height of land” say that it is for the most part a vast table-land, barren, strewn with enormous boulders, scarce in game, swarming with flies, with vegetation surviving only in the hollows and ravines—a sullen, forsaken waste.