The argument for coöperation had been that life on the coast was not worth living under the credit system. A short feast and a long famine was the local epigram. If our profits could be maintained on the coast, and spent on the coast, then the next-to-nature life had enough to offer in character as well as in maintenance to attract a permanent population, especially with the furring in winter. For the actual figures showed that good hunters made from a thousand to fifteen hundred dollars in a season, besides the salmon and cod fishery. There was, moreover, game for food, free firewood, water, homes, and no taxation except indirect in duties on their goods.
These same conditions prevailed on the long, narrow slice of land known as the "French shore" in northern Newfoundland. There the people were more densely settled, the hinterland was small, and many therefore could not go furring. Moreover, the polar current, entering the mouth of the Straits of Belle Isle, makes this section of land more liable to summer frosts, with a far worse climate than the Labrador bays, and gardening is less remunerative. We puzzled our brains for some way to add to our earning capacities, some coöperative productive as well as distributive enterprise.
The poverty which I had witnessed in Canada Bay in North Newfoundland, some sixty miles south of St. Anthony Hospital, had left me very keen to do something for that district which might really offer a solution of the problem. I had been told that there was plenty of timber to justify running a mill in the bay; but that no sawmills paid in Newfoundland. This was emphasized in St. John's by my friends who still own the only venture out of the eleven which have operated in that city that has been able to continue. They have succeeded by adopting modern methods and erecting a factory for making furniture, so as to supply finished articles direct to their customers. We knew that in our case labour would be cheaper than ordinarily, for our labour in winter had generally to go begging. It was mainly this fact which finally induced us to make the attempt.
ST. ANTHONY[ToList]
Having talked the matter over with the people we secured from the Government a special grant, as the venture, if it succeeded, would relieve them of the necessity of having poor-relief bills. The whole expense of the enterprise fell upon myself, for the Mission Board considered it outside their sphere; and already we had built St. Anthony Hospital in spite of the fact that they thought that we were undertaking more than they would be able to handle, and had discouraged it from the first.
The people had no money to start a mill, and the circumstances prohibited my asking aid from outside, so it was with considerable anxiety that we ordered a mill, as if it were a pound of chocolates, and arranged with two young friends to come out from England as volunteers, except for their expenses, to help us through with the new effort. At the same time there was three hundred dollars to pay for the necessary survey and line cutting, and supplies of food for the loggers for the winter. Houses must also be erected and furnished.
Ignorance undoubtedly supplied us with the courage to begin. Personally I knew nothing whatever of mills, having never even seen one. Nor had I seen the grant of land, or selected a site for the building. This was left entirely to the people themselves; and as none of them had ever seen a mill either, we all felt a bit uneasy about our capacities. I had left orders with the captain of the Coöperator (our schooner) to fetch the mill and put it where the people told him; but when I heard that there was one piece which included the boiler which weighed three tons, it seemed to me that they could never handle it. We had no wharf ready to receive it and no boat capable of carrying it. I woke many times that summer wondering if it had not gone to the bottom while they were attempting the landing. There was no communication whatever with them as we were six hundred miles farther north on our summer cruise; and we had not the slightest control over the circumstances in which we might become involved.
It was late in the season and the snow was already deep on the ground when eventually we were piloted to the spot selected. It was nine miles up the bay on a well-wooded promontory of a side inlet. The water was deep to the shore and the harbour as safe as a house. The boys from England had arrived, and a small cottage had been erected, tucked away in the trees. It was very small, and very damp, the inside of the walls being white with frost in the morning until the fire had been under way for some time. But it was a merry crowd, emerging from various little hutlets around among the trees, which greeted the Strathcona.