Farther north, right by our hospital at Indian Harbour, is a narrow tickle known as the "White Cockade." Through this most of the fleet pass, and here also we had planned for a lighthouse. When we were forbidden to put our material at Battle Harbour, we suggested moving to this almost equally important point. But it fell under the same category, and soon after the Government put a good light there also. The fishermen, therefore, suggested that we should offer our peripatetic, would-be lighthouse to the Government for some new place each year.
We have not much now to complain of so far as the needs of our present stage of evolution goes. We have wireless stations, quite a number of lights, not a few landmarks, and a ten times better mail and transport service than the much wealthier and more able Dominion of Canada could and ought to give to her long shore from Quebec to the eastern "Newfoundland" boundary on the Straits Labrador.
He is not a great legislator who only makes provision for certainties. True, the West has shown such riches and capacity that it has paid better to develop it first. But there is no excuse now whatever for neglecting the East. The Dominion would have been well advised, indeed, had she years ago built a railway to the east coast, shortening the steamer communication with England to only two nights at sea, and saving twenty-four hours for the mails between London and Toronto. The war has shown how easily she could have afforded it. Most ardently I had hoped that she might have turned some of her German prisoner labour in so invaluable a direction.
Had the reindeer installation been handled by the Newfoundland Government years ago as it should have been, Labrador would have yielded to our boys in France a very material assistance in meat and furs. Canada now could and should, if only in the interest of her native population, begin on this problem as soon as peace is declared.
The fact that a thing possesses vitality is a guarantee that it will grow if it can. Each new focus will expand, and caterpillar-like cast off its old clothing for better. The first necessity for economy and efficiency in our work has been to get our patients quickly to us or to be able to get to them. Experience has shown us that while boats entirely dependent on motors are cheapest, it is not always safe to do open-sea work in such launches without a secondary and more reliable means of progression. The stories of a doctor's work in these launches would fill a volume by themselves. The first Northern Messenger, a small "hot-head" boat, was replaced and sold to pay part of the cost of Northern Messenger number two. This in its turn was wrecked on an uncharted shoal with Dr. West on board, and her insurance used to help to procure Northern Messenger number three—which is the beautiful boat which now serves Harrington, our most westerly hospital. We are largely indebted for her to Mr. William Bowditch, of Milton, Massachusetts.
Dr. Hare, our first doctor at that station, never wrote his own experiences, but one of the Yale volunteers who worked under him wrote a story founded on fact, from which the following incident is suggestive.
Once, running home before a wind in the Gulf, the doctor suddenly missed his little son Pat, and looking round saw him struggling in the water, already many yards astern. Dr. Hare, who was at the tiller at the time, instantly jumped over after him. The child was finally disappearing when he reached him at last and held his head above water. Meanwhile the engineer, who had been below, jumped on deck to find the sails flapping in the wind and the boat head to sea. With the intuitive quickness of our people in matters pertaining to the sea, he took in the situation in a second, and though entirely alone manœuvred the boat so cleverly as to pick them both up before they perished in these frigid waters. Pat's young life was saved, only to be given a short few years later in France for the same fight for the kingdom of righteousness which his home life had made his familiar ideal.
The forty-five-foot, "hot-head" yawl Daryl, given us by the Dutch Reformed friends in New York, was sold to the Hudson Bay Company. At first she was naturally called the Flying Dutchman, and was most useful; but here we have learned when a better instrument is available that it is the truest economy to scrap-heap the old. We were to give delivery of the boat in Baffin's Land. There were plenty of volunteers for the task, for the tough jobs are the very ones which appeal to real men. It would be well if the churches realized this fact and that therein lies the real secret of Christianity. The impression that being a Christian is a soft job inevitably brings our religion into contempt. I had been in England that spring, and had been able to arrange that the mail steamer bound for Montreal on which I took passage should stop and drop me off Belle Isle if the crusaders who were to take this launch on her long voyage North would stand out across our pathway. Mr. Marconi personally took an interest in the venture. The launch was to wait at our most easterly Labrador station, and we were to keep telling her our position. The boat was in charge of Mr. John Rowland and Mr. Robert English, both of Yale. It created quite a furor among the passengers on our great ship, when she stopped in mid-ocean, as it appeared to them, and lowered an erratic doctor over the side on to a midget, whose mast-tops one looked down upon from the liner's rail. The sensation was all the more marked as we disappeared over the rail clinging to two large pots of geraniums—an importation which we regarded as very much worth while.
With an old Hudson Bay man, Mr. George Ford, to act as interpreter, and a Harvard colleague, who to his infinite chagrin was recalled by a wireless from his parents almost before starting, the little ship and her crew of three disappeared "over the edge" beyond communication. I should mention that the Company had promised an engineer for the launch, but he had begged off when he understood the nature of the projected expedition; so Yale decided that they were men enough to do without any outside help.
September had nearly gone, and no news had come from the boys. I owe some one an infinite debt for a temperament which does not go halfway to meet troubles; but even I was a little worried when unkind rumours that we had sold a boat that was not safe were capped by a father's letter to say that he "had heard the reports"! Fortunately, two days later, as the Strathcona lay taking on whale meat for winter dog food at the northernmost factory, the Northern mail steamer came in. On board were our returned wanderers, and papa, who had gone down as far as the Labrador steamer runs to look for them, as proud and happy as a man has a right to be over sons who do things. The boys had not only reached Baffin's Land, but had explored over a hundred miles of its uncharted coast-line, crossed to Cape Wolstenholme, navigated Stupart's Bay—northeast of Ungava—and finally returned to Baffin's Land, coming back to Cartwright on the Hudson Bay Company's steamer Pelican. It was a splendid record, especially when we remember the fierce currents and tremendous rise and fall of tides in that distant land. This latter was so great that having anchored one night in three fathoms of water in what appeared to be a good harbour, they had awakened in the morning to the fact that they were in a pond a full mile in the country, left stranded by the retiring tide.