He was crying.
“They need,” thought I, “a mission-doctor in these parts.”
And the next day—in the harbour beyond—I first heard of Grenfell. In that place they said they would send him to the little maid who lay dying; they assured me, indeed, that he would make haste, when he came that way: which would be, perhaps, they thought, in “’long about a month.” Whether or not the doctor succoured the child I do not know; but I have never forgotten this first impression of his work—the conviction that it was a good work for a man to be about.
Subsequently I learned that Dr. Grenfell was the superintendent of the Newfoundland and Labrador activities of the Royal National Mission to Deep Sea Fishermen, an English organization, with a religious and medical work already well-established on the North Sea, and a medical mission then in process of development on the North Atlantic coast. Two years later he discovered himself to be a robust, hearty Saxon, strong, indefatigable, devoted, jolly; a doctor, a parson by times, something of a sportsman when occasion permitted, a master-mariner, a magistrate, the director of certain commercial enterprises designed to “help the folk help themselves”—the prophet and champion, indeed, of a people: and a man very much in love with life.
[II—A ROUND of BLEAK COASTS]
The coast of Labrador, which, in number of miles, forms the larger half of the doctor’s round, is forbidding, indeed—naked, rugged, desolate, lying sombre in a mist. It is of weather-worn gray rock, broken at intervals by long ribs of black. In part it is low and ragged, slowly rising, by way of bare slopes and starved forest, to broken mountain ranges, which lie blue and bold in the inland waste. Elsewhere it rears from the edge of the sea in stupendous cliffs and lofty, rugged hills. There is no inviting stretch of shore the length of it—no sandy beach, no line of shingle, no grassy bank; the sea washes a thousand miles of jagged rock. Were it not for the harbours—innumerable and snugly sheltered from the winds and ground swell of the open—there would be no navigating the waters of that region. The Strait Shore is buoyed, lighted, minutely charted. The reefs and currents and tickles[[1]] and harbours are all known. A northeast gale, to be sure, raises a commotion, and fog and drift-ice add something to the chance of disaster; but, as they say, from one peril there are two ways of escape to three sheltered places. To the north, however, where the doctor makes his way, the coast is best sailed on the plan of the skipper of the old Twelve Brothers.
“You don’t cotch me meddlin’ with no land!” said he.
Past the Dead Islands, Snug Harbour, Domino Run, Devil’s Lookout and the Quaker’s Hat—beyond Johnny Paul’s Rock and the Wolves, Sandwich Bay, Tumbledown Dick, Indian Harbour, and the White Cockade—past Cape Harrigan, the Farmyard Islands and the Hen and Chickens—far north to the great, craggy hills and strange peoples of Kikkertadsoak, Scoralik, Tunnulusoak, Nain, Okak, and, at last, to Cape Chidley itself—northward, every crooked mile of the way, bold headlands, low outlying islands, sunken reefs, tides, fogs, great winds and snow make hard sailing of it. It is an evil coast, ill-charted where charted at all; some part of the present-day map is based upon the guess-work of the eighteenth century navigators. The doctor, like the skippers of the fishing-craft, must sometimes sail by guess and hearsay, by recollection, and old rhymes.
