In connection with the scientific work on the coast I well remember the eclipse of October, 1905. All along the land it was perfectly visible. A break in the clouds occurred at exactly the right moment: one fisherman, to console the astronomers, said that he was very sorry, but that he supposed it did not much matter, as there would be another eclipse next week. The scientific explorer, who was devoting his attention to the effect on the earth's magnetism, spent the time of the eclipse in a dark cellar. Most wonderful magnetic disturbances had been occurring almost every night, and the night before the event a far from ordinary storm had upset his instruments, so that the effect of the eclipse on the magnetic indicators was scarcely distinguishable. He had just time after the thing was over to peep out and see the light returning. He had watched his thermometer and found that it fell three degrees during totality.
The year 1908 at the mill we had built a new large schooner in honour of that devoted friend of Labrador, our secretary in Boston, and had named the vessel for her, the Emma E. White. She fetched Lloyd's full bounty for an A 1 ship. This was a feather in our caps, since she was designed and built by one of our own men, who was no "scholard," having never learned to read or write. Will Hopkins can take an axe and a few tools into the green woods in the fall, and sail down the bay in a new schooner in the spring when the ice goes. To see him steaming the planking in the open in his own improvised boxes on the top of six feet of snow made me stand and take off my hat to him. He is no good at speech-making; he does not own a dress-suit, and he cannot dance a tango; but he is quite as useful a citizen as some who can, and his type of education is one which endears him to all. He gave me the great pleasure of having our friend come sailing into St. Anthony in the middle of a fine day, seated on the bow of her namesake, the beautiful and valuable product of his skill, just when we were all ready on the wharf to "sketch them both off," as our people call taking a photograph.
Our increasing buildings being all of wood, and as the two largest were full of either helpless sick people or an ever-increasing batch of children, we wanted something safer than kerosene lamps to illuminate the rooms. The people here had never seen electric light "tamed," as it were, and to us it seemed almost too big a venture to install a plant of our own. Home outfits were not common in those days even in the States, and we feared in any case that we could not run it regularly enough. No one except the head of the machine shop, a Labrador boy and Pratt graduate, knew the first thing about electricity, and he would not always be available.
However, with the help of friends we were able to purchase a hot-head vertical engine to generate our current; for our near-by streams freeze solid in winter. That engine has now been running for over ten years, and has given us electricity in St. Anthony Hospital for operating and X-ray work as well as all our lighting. Until he died, it was run the greater part of the time by an Eskimo boy whom we had brought down from the North Labrador, and who was convalescing from empyema. The installation was efficiently done by a volunteer student from the Pratt Institute, Mr. Hause.
On my lecture trip the previous winter a gentleman at whose house I was a guest told me that when quite a youth he had fought in the Civil War, been invalided home, and advised to take a sea voyage for his health. He therefore took passage with some Gloucester fishermen and set sail for the Labrador. The crew proved to be Southern sympathizers, and one day, while my friend was ashore taking a walk, the skipper slipped out and left him marooned. He had with him neither money, spare clothing, nor anything else; and as British sympathies were also with the South, he had many doubts as to how the settlers would receive a penniless stranger and Northerner. So seeing his schooner bound in an easterly direction, he started literally to run along the shore, hoping that he might find where she went and catch her again. Mile after mile he went, tearing through the "tuckamore" or dense undergrowth of gnarled trees, climbing over high cliffs, swimming or wading the innumerable rivers, skirting bays, and now and again finding a short beach along which he could hurry. At night, wet, dirty, tired, hungry, penniless, he came to a fisherman's cottage and asked shelter and food. He explained that he was an American gentleman taking a holiday, but hadn't a penny of money. It spoke well for the people that they accepted his story. He told me that they both fed and clothed him, and one kind-hearted man actually the next day gave him some oilskin clothing and a sou'wester hat—costly articles "on Labrador" in those days. So on and on and on he went, till at last arriving at Red Bay he found his schooner at anchor calmly fishing. He went aboard at once as if nothing had happened, and stayed there (having enjoyed enough pedestrian exercise for the time being) and no one ever referred to his having been left behind. He was now, however, forty years later, anxious to do something for the people of that section of the shore, and he gave me a thousand dollars toward building a small cottage for a district nurse. Forteau was the village chosen, and Dennison Cottage erected as a nursing station and dispensary. The people at first each gave a week toward its upkeep; and even now every man gives three days annually. The house has a good garden, little wards for in-patients, and is the centre of much useful industrial work, especially the making of artificial flowers. For twelve years now, Miss Florence Bailey, a nurse from the Mildmay Institute in London, has presided over its destinies, endeared herself to the people, and done most unselfish and heroic work in that lonely station, which she has greatly enlarged and improved by her untiring efforts. It forms an admirable halfway house between Battle and Harrington Hospitals, each being about a hundred miles distant. A local trader once wrote me: "Sister Bailey did good work last year. That cottage hospital is a blessing to the people of this part of the shore. Who would think that by a little act of kindness done forty-odd years ago to an old soldier, we would now be reaping the benefit of such an act."
Only one longer journey on foot on the Labrador coast is on record. The traveller started from Quebec and walked to Battle Harbour. There he turned north and walked to Nakvak Bay. The distance as the crow flies is about fourteen hundred miles. But the man had no boat of his own and only in one or two places accepted a passage. One bay on the east coast runs in for some hundred and fifty miles. Over this he got a boat fifty miles from the mouth. Round Kipokak and Makkovik, and the bays south of Hopedale, he walked most of the way, and these run in for forty miles. He carried practically nothing with him, and depended on what boots and clothing the people gave him, eating berries and whatever else he could find while he was in the country. Those who housed him told me that they did not see any signs of madness about him, except his avoidance of men and refusal to go in boats or mix with others if he could in any way avoid it. He carried no gun. No one knew who he was nor why he went on such a "cruise." Long before he reached the North the theory that he was a murderer fleeing from justice got started, and at some places a very careful watch was kept over him. Arrived at Nakvak, he went to the house of everyone's friend, George Ford. That is one of the most inaccessible places in the world. No mail steamer ever goes there, and no schooner ever anchors nearer than a few miles. It is at the bottom of a fjord twenty-five miles long, with very precipitous cliffs two thousand feet high on each side and bottomless water below. It was then thirty miles from the nearest house, with ranges of mountains between, and was the most northerly house on the Labrador. Here this phenomenon celebrated his arrival by climbing up onto the ridge of the house, when lo! most prosaic of accidents, he fell off and broke his neck. The puzzle has always been why he elected to carry an unbroken neck at such cost all that long distance.
Many inexplicable things happen "on Labrador." Thus, one year while visiting at the head of Hamilton Inlet, a Scotch settler came aboard to ask my advice about a large animal that had appeared round his house. Though he had sat up night after night with his gun, he had never seen it. His children had seen it several times disappearing into the trees. The French agent of Révillon Frères, twenty miles away, had come over, and together they had tracked it, measured the footmarks in the mud, and even fenced some of them round. The stride was about eight feet, the marks as of the cloven hoofs of an ox. The children described the creature as looking like a huge hairy man; and several nights the dogs had been driven growling from the house into the water. Twice the whole family had heard the creature prowling around the cottage, and tapping at the doors and windows. The now grown-up children persist in saying that they saw this wild thing. Their house is twenty miles up the large Grand River, and a hundred and fifty miles from the coast.
An old fellow called Harry Howell was one winter night missing from his home. He had been hunting, and only too late, after a blizzard set in, was it discovered that he was absent. In the morning the men gathered to make a search, but at that moment in walked "old Harry"! He told me later that he was coming home in the afternoon when the blizzard began. It was dirty, thick of snow, and cold. Suddenly he heard bells ringing, and knew that it was fairies bidding him follow them—because he had followed them before. So off he went, pushing his way through the driving snow. When at last he reached the foot of a gnarled old tree in the forest, the bells stopped, and he knew that was the place where he must stay for the night. So he laid some of the partridges which he had killed into a hole in the snow close to the trunk, crawled down and used them for a seat, and placed the rest of the frozen birds at his feet. Then he pulled up his dickey, or kossak, over his head, and with his back to the tree, went to sleep while the snow was still driving. There was no persuading that man that the ringing bells were in his own imagination.
Many years ago a Norwegian captain on the Labrador told me the following story. One day the carpenter of his schooner, a man whom he had known for three voyages, and trusted thoroughly, was steering on the course which the mate had given him. All at once the mate came and found the man steering four points out. When he upbraided him, he answered, "He came and told me to." "Nobody did," replied the mate. "Go northwest."
Three times the experience was repeated, and at last the mate reported the matter to the skipper. He immediately suggested, "Well, let us go on running in the direction he insists on taking for a while and see if anything happens." At the end of two hours they came upon a square-rigger with her decks just awash, and six men clinging to her rigging. As they came alongside the sinking vessel the carpenter pointed aghast to one of the rescued crew and cried out, "There's the man who came and told me the skipper said to change the course."