As I have stated in the previous chapter we had raised, largely through the generosity of Lord Strathcona, the money for a suitable little hospital steamer, and she had been built to our design in England. I had steamed her round to our fitting yard at Great Yarmouth, and had her fitted for our work before sailing. While I was in America, my old Newfoundland crew went across and fetched her over, so that June found us once more cruising the Labrador coast.
While working with the large fleet of schooners, which at that time fished in August and September from Cape Mugford to Hudson Bay Straits, I visited as usual the five stations of the Moravian Brethren. They were looking for a new place to put a station, and at their request I took their representative to Cape Chidley in the Strathcona.
This northern end of Labrador is extremely interesting to cruise. The great Appalachian Mountain Range runs out here right to the water edge, and forms a marvellous sea-front of embattled cliffs from two thousand to three thousand feet in height. The narrow passages which here and there run far into the mountains, and represent old valleys scooped out by ice action, are dominated all along by frowning peaks, whose pointed summits betray the fact that they overtopped the ice stream in the glacial age. The sharp precipices and weather-worn sides are picked out by coloured lichens, and tiny cold-proof Arctic plants, and these, with the deep blue water and unknown vistas that keep constantly opening up as one steams along the almost fathomless fjords, afford a fascination beyond measure.
Once before in the Sir Donald we had tried to navigate the narrow run that cuts off the island on which Cape Chidley stands from the mainland of Labrador, but had missed the way among the many openings, and only noted from a hilltop the course we should have taken, by the boiling current which we saw below, whose vicious whirlpools like miniature maelstroms poured like a dashing torrent from Ungava Bay into the Atlantic.
It was, however, with our hearts somewhere near our mouths that we made an attempt to get through this year, for we knew nothing of the depth, except that the Eskimos had told us that large icebergs drove through at times. We could steam nine knots, and we essayed to cover the tide, which we found against us, as we neared the narrowest part, which is scarcely one hundred yards wide. The current carried us bodily astern, however, and glad enough we were to drive stern foremost into a cove on one side and find thirteen fathoms of water to hold on in till the tide should turn. When at last it did turn, and got under way, it fairly took us in its teeth, and we shot through, an impotent plaything on the heaving bosom of the resistless waters. We returned safely, with a site selected and a fair chart of the "Tickle" (Grenfell Tickle).
When winter closed in, I arranged for an old friend, a clerk of the Hudson Bay Company, to stay with me at St. Anthony, and once more we settled down in rooms hired in a cottage. We had a driver, a team of dogs, and an arrangement with a paternal Government to help out by making an allowance of twenty-five cents for medicine for such patients as could not themselves pay that amount, and in those days the number was quite large.
When early spring came the hospital question revived. An expedition into the woods was arranged, and with a hundred men and thrice as many dogs, we camped in the trees, and at the end of the fortnight came home hauling behind us the material for a thirty-six by thirty-six hospital. Being entirely new to us it proved a very happy experience. We were quartermasters and general providers. Our kitchen was dug down in thick woods through six feet of snow, and our main reliance was on boiled "doughboys"—the "sinkers" among which, with a slice of fat pork or a basin of bird soup, were as popular as lobster à la Newburg at Delmonico's or Sherry's.
The next summer we had trouble with a form of selfishness which I have always heartily hated—the liquor traffic. Suppose we do allow that a man has a right to degrade his body with swallowing alcohol, he certainly has no more right to lure others to their destruction for money than a filibuster has a right to spend his money in gunpowder and shoot his fellow countrymen. To our great chagrin we found that an important neighbour near one of our hospitals was selling intoxicants to the people—girls and men. One girl found drunk on the hillside brought home to me the cost of this man's right to "do as he liked." We promptly declared war, and I thanked God who had made "my hands to war, and my fingers to fight"—when that is the only way to resist the Devil successfully and to hasten the kingdom of peace.
This man and I had had several disagreements, and I had been warned not to land on the premises on pain of being "chucked into the sea." But when I tested the matter out by landing quite alone from a row-boat, after a "few wor-r-r-ds" his coast-born hospitality overcame him, and as his bell sounded the dinner call, he promptly invited me to dine with him. I knew that he would not poison the food, and soon we were glowering at one another over his own table—where his painful efforts to convince me that he was right absolutely demonstrated the exact opposite.
My chance came that summer. We were steaming to our Northern hospital from the deep bay which runs in a hundred and fifty miles. About twenty miles from the mouth a boat hailed us out of the darkness, and we stopped and took aboard a wrecked crew of three men. They had struck our friend's well-insured old steam launch on a shoal and she had sunk under them. We took them aboard, boat and all, wrote down carefully their tale of woe, and then put the steamer about, pushed as near the wreck as we dared and anchored. Her skipper came forward and asked me what I intended doing, and I told him I was going to survey the wreck. A little later he again came to ask permission to go aboard the wreck to look for something he had forgotten. I told him certainly not. Just before sunrise the watch called me and said that the wrecked crew had launched their boat, and were rowing toward the steamer. "Launch ours at once, and drive them back" was an order which our boys obeyed with alacrity and zest. It was a very uneasy three men who faced me when they returned. They were full of bluff at what they would do for having their liberties thus interfered with, but obviously uneasy at heart.