“THE BULLY-BOAT BECOMES A HOME”
“THE BULLY-BOAT BECOMES A HOME”
His coffin was knocked together on the forward deck next morning—with Carbonear a day’s sail beyond.
The fleet goes home in the early fall. The schooners are loaded—some so low with the catch that the water washes into the scuppers. “You could wash your hands on her deck,” is the skipper’s proudest boast. The feat of seamanship, I do not doubt, is not elsewhere equalled. It is an inspiring sight to see the doughty little craft beating into the wind on a gray day. The harvesting of a field of grain is good to look upon; but I think that there can be no more stirring sight in all the world, no sight more quickly to melt a man’s heart, more deeply to move him to love men and bless God, than the sight of the Labrador fleet beating home loaded—toil done, dangers past; the home port at the end of a run with a fair wind. The home-coming, I fancy, is much like the return of the viking ships to the old Norwegian harbours must have been. The lucky skippers strut the village roads with swelling chests, heroes in the sight of all; the old men, long past their labour, listen to new tales and spin old yarns; the maids and the lads renew their interrupted love-makings. There is great rejoicing—feasting, merrymaking, hearty thanksgiving.
Thanks be to God, the fleet’s home!
[2]A quintal is, roughly, a hundred pounds. One hundred quintals of green fish are equal, roughly, to thirty of dry, which, at $3, would amount to $90.[3]A “clever hand” can split—that is, clean—thirty fish in a minute.
[2]A quintal is, roughly, a hundred pounds. One hundred quintals of green fish are equal, roughly, to thirty of dry, which, at $3, would amount to $90.
[3]A “clever hand” can split—that is, clean—thirty fish in a minute.
Doctor Grenfell appears to have a peculiar affection for the outporters of what is locally known as the “French Shore”—that stretch of coast lying between Cape John and the northernmost point of Newfoundland: it is one section of the shore upon which the French have fishing rights. This is the real Newfoundland; to the writer there is no Newfoundland apart from that long strip of rock against which the sea forever breaks: none that is not of punt, of wave, of fish, of low sky and of a stalwart, briny folk. Indeed, though he has joyously lived weeks of blue weather in the outports, with the sea all a-ripple and flashing and the breeze blowing warm, in retrospect land and people resolve themselves into a rocky harbour and a sturdy little lad with a question—the harbour, gray and dripping wet, a cluster of whitewashed cottages perched on the rocks, towards which a tiny, red-sailed punt is beating from the frothy open, with the white of breakers on either hand, while a raw wind lifts the fog from the black inland hills, upon which ragged patches of snow lie melting; the lad, stout, frank-eyed, tow-headed, browned by the wind, bending over the splitting-table with a knife in his toil-worn young hand and the blood of cod dripping from his fingers, and looking wistfully up, at last, to ask a question or two concerning certain old, disquieting mysteries.
“Where do the tide go, zur, when ’e runs out?” he plainted. “Where do ’e go, zur? Sure, zur,youis able t’ tell me that, isn’t you?”
So, in such a land—where, on some bleak stretches of coast, the potatoes are grown in imported English soil, where most gardens, and some graveyards, are made of earth scraped from the hollows of the hills, where four hundred and nineteen bushels of lean wheat are grown in a single year, and the production of beef-cattle is insignificant as compared with the production of babies—in such a land there is nothing for the young man to do but choose his rock, build his little cottage and his flake and his stage, marry a maid of the harbour when the spring winds stir his blood, gather his potato patch, get a pig and a goat, and go fishing in his punt. And they do fish, have always fished since many generations ago the island was first settled by adventurous Devon men, and must continue to fish to the end of time. Out of a total male population of one hundred thousand, which includes the city-folk of St. Johns and an amazing proportion of babies and tender lads, about fifty-five thousand men and grown boys catch fish for a living.
“Still an’ all, they’s no country in the world like this!” said the old skipper. “Sure, a man’s set up in life when he haves a pig an’ a punt an’ a potato patch.”
“But have you ever seen another?” I asked.
“I’ve been so far as Saint Johns, zur, an’ once t’ the waterside o’ Boston,” was the surprising reply, “an’ I’m thinkin’ I knows what the world’s like.”
So it is with most Newfoundlanders: they love their land with an intolerant prejudice; and most are content with the life they lead. “The Newfoundlander comes back,” is a significant proverb of the outports; and, “White Bay’s good enough for me,” said a fishwife to me once, when I asked her why she still remained in a place so bleak and barren, “for I’ve heered tell ’tis wonderful smoky an’ n’isy ’t Saint Johns.” The life they live, and strangely love, is exceeding toilsome. Toil began for a gray-haired, bony-handed old woman whom I know when she was so young that she had to stand on a tub to reach the splitting-table; when, too, to keep her awake and busy, late o’ nights, her father would make believe to throw a bloody cod’s head at her. It began for that woman’s son when, at five or six years old, he was just able to spread the fish to dry on the flake, and continued in earnest, a year or two later, when first he was strong enough to keep the head of his father’s punt up to the wind. But they seem not to know that fishing is a hard or dangerous employment: for instance, a mild-eyed, crooked old fellow—he was a cheerful Methodist, too, and subject to “glory-fits”—who had fished from one harbour for sixty years, computed for me that he had put out to sea in his punt at least twenty thousand times, that he had been frozen to the seat of his punt many times, that he had been swept to sea with the ice-packs, six times, that he had weathered six hundred gales, great and small, and that he had been wrecked more times than he could “just mind” at the moment; yet he was the only old man ever I met who seemed honestly to wish that he might live his life over again!
The hook-and-line man has a lonely time of it. From earliest dawn, while the night yet lies thick on the sea, until in storm or calm or favouring breeze he makes harbour in the dusk, he lies off shore, fishing—tossing in the lop of the grounds, with the waves to balk and the wind to watch warily, while he tends his lines. There is no jolly companionship of the forecastle and turf hut for him—no new scene, no hilarious adventure; nor has he the expectation of a proud return to lighten his toil. In the little punt he has made with his own hands he is forever riding an infinite expanse, which, in “fish weather,” is melancholy, or threatening, or deeply solemn, as it may chance—all the while and all alone confronting the mystery and terrible immensity of the sea. It may be that he gives himself over to aimless musing, or, even less happily, to pondering certain dark mysteries of the soul; and so it comes about that the “mad-house ’t Saint Johns” is inadequate to accommodate the poor fellows whom lonely toil has bereft of their senses—melancholiacs, idiots and maniacs “along o’ religion.”
Notwithstanding all, optimism persists everywhere on the coast. One old fisherman counted himself favoured above most men because he had for years been able to afford the luxury of cream of tartar; and another, a brawny giant, confessed to having a disposition so pertinaciously happy that he had come to regard a merry heart as his besetting sin. Sometimes an off-shore gale puts an end to all the fishing; sometimes it is a sudden gust, sometimes a big wave, sometimes a confusing mist, more often long exposure to spray and shipped water and soggy winds. It was a sleety off-shore gale, coming at the end of a sunny, windless day, that froze or drowned thirty men off Trinity Bay in a single night; and it was a mere puff on a “civil” evening—but a swift, wicked little puff, sweeping round Breakheart Head—that made a widow of Elizabeth Rideout o’ Duck Cove and took her young son away. Often, however, the hook-and-line man fishes his eighty years of life, and dies in his bed as cheerfully as he has lived and as poor as he was born.
It had been a race against the peril of fog and the discomfort of a wet night all the way from Hooping Harbour. We escaped the scowl of the northeast, the gray, bitter wind and the sea it was fast fretting to a fury, when the boat rounded Canada Head and ran into the shelter of the bluffs at Englee—into the damp shadows sombrely gathered there. When the punt was moored to the stage-head, the fog had thickened the dusk into deep night, and the rain had soaked us to the skin. There was a light, a warm, yellow light, shining from a window, up along shore and to the west. We stumbled over an erratic footpath, which the folk of the place call “the roaad”—feeling for direction, chancing the steps, splashing through pools of water, tripping over sharp rocks. The whitewashed cottages of the village, set on the hills, were like the ghosts of houses. They started into sight, hung suspended in the night, vanished as we trudged on. The folk were all abed—all save Elisha Duckworthy, that pious giant, who had been late beating in from the fishing grounds off the Head. It was Elisha who opened the door to our knock, and sent a growling, bristling dog back to his place with a gentle word.
“THE WHITEWASHED COTTAGES ON THE HILLS”
“THE WHITEWASHED COTTAGES ON THE HILLS”
“Will you not——”
“Sure, sir,” said Elisha, a smile spreading from his eyes to the very tip of his great beard, “’twould be a hard man an’ a bad Christian that would turn strangers away. Come in, sir! ’Tis a full belly you’ll have when you leaves the table, an’ ’tis a warm bed you’ll sleep in, this night.”
After family prayers, in which we, the strangers he had taken in, were commended to the care and mercy of God in such simple, feeling phrases as proved the fine quality of this man’s hospitality and touched our hearts in their innermost parts, Elisha invited us to sit by the kitchen fire with him “for a spell.” While the dogs snored in chorus with a young kid and a pig by the roaring stove, and the chickens rustled and clucked in their coop under the bare spruce sofa which Elisha had made, and the wind flung the rain against the window-panes, we three talked of weather and fish and toil and peril and death. It may be that a cruel coast and a sea quick to wrath engender a certain dread curiosity concerning the “taking off” in a man who fights day by day to survive the enmity of both. Elisha talked for a long time of death and heaven and hell. Then, solemnly, his voice fallen to a whisper, he told of his father, Skipper George, a man of weakling faith, who had been reduced to idiocy by wondering what came after death—by wondering, wondering, wondering, in sunlight and mist and night, off shore in the punt, labouring at the splitting-table, at work on the flake, everywhere, wondering all the time where souls took their flight.
“’Twere wonderin’ whether hell do be underground or not,” said Elisha, “that turned un over at last. Sure, sir,” with a sigh, “’twere doubt, you sees. ’Tis faith us must have.”
Elisha stroked the nearest dog with a gentle hand—a mighty hand, toil-worn and misshapen, like the man himself.
“Do your besettin’ sin get the best o’ you, sir?” he said, looking up. It may be that he craved to hear a confession of failure that he might afterwards sustain himself with the thought that no man is invulnerable. “Sure, we’ve all besettin’ sins. When we do be snatched from the burnin’ brands, b’y, a little spark burns on, an’ on, an’ on; an’ he do be wonderful hard t’ douse out. ’Tis like the eye us must pluck out by command o’ the Lard. With some men ’tis a taste for baccy. With some ’tis a scarcity o’ salt in the fish. With some ’tis too much water in the lobster cans. With some ’tis a cravin’ for sweetness. With me ’tis worse nor all. Sure, sir,” he went on, “I’ve knowed some men so fond, so wonderful fond, o’ baccy that um smoked the shoes off their children’s feet. ’Tis their besettin’ sin, sir—’tis their besettin’ sin. But ’tis not baccy that worries me. The taste fell away when I were took from sin. ’Tis not that. ’Tis worse. Sure, with me, sir,” he said, brushing his hand over his forehead in a weary, despairing way, “’tis laughin’. ’Tis the sin of jokin’ that puts my soul in danger o’ bein’ hove overboard into the burnin’ lake. I were a wonderful joker when I were a sinful man. ’Twas all I lived for—not t’ praise God an’ prepare my soul for death. When I gets up in the marnin’, now, sir, I feels like jokin’ like what I used t’ do, particular if it do be a fine day. Ah, sir,” with a long sigh, “’tis a great temptation, I tells you—’tis a wonderful temptation. But ’tis not set down in the Book that Jesus Christ smiled an’ laughed, an’ with the Lard’s help I’ll beat the devil yet. I’ll beat un,” he cried, as if inspired to some supreme struggle. “I’ll beat un,” he repeated, clinching his great hands. “I will!”
Elisha bade us good-night with a solemn face. A little smile—a poor, frightened little smile of tender feeling for us—flickered in his eyes for the space of a breath. But he snuffed it out relentlessly, expressed his triumph with a flash of his eye, and went away to bed. In the morning, when the sun called us up, he had come back from the early morning’s fishing, and was singing a most doleful hymn of death and judgment over the splitting-table in the stage. The sunlight was streaming into the room, and the motes were all dancing merrily in the beam. The breeze was rustling the leaves of a sickly bush under the window—coaxing them to hopeful whisperings. I fancied that the sea was all blue and rippling, and that the birds were flitting through the sunlight, chirping their sympathy with the smiling day. But Elisha, his brave heart steeled against the whole earth’s frivolous mood, continued heroically to pour forth his dismal song.
Twilight was filling the kitchen with strange shadows. “We had disposed of Aunt Ruth’s watered fish and soaked hard-bread with hunger for a relish. Uncle Simon’s glance was mournfully intent upon the bare platter.
“But,” said Aunt Ruth, with obstinate emphasis, “I knows they be. ’Tis not what we hears we believe, sir. No, ’tis not what we hears. ’Tis what we sees. An’ I’ve seed un.”
“’Tis true, sir,” said Uncle Simon, looking up. “They be nar a doubt about it.”
“But where,” said I, “did she get her looking-glass?”
“They be many a trader wrecked on this coast, sir,” said Uncle Simon.
“’Twere not a mermaid I seed,” said Aunt Ruth. “’Twere a merman.”
“Sure,” said Uncle Simon, mysteriously, “they do be in the sea the shape o’ all that’s on the land—shape for shape, sir. They be sea-horses an’ sea-cows an’ sea-dogs, Why not the shape o’ humans?”
“Well,” said Aunt Ruth, “’twas when I were a little maid. An’ ’twas in a gale o’ wind. I goes down t’ Billy Cove t’ watch me father bring the punt in, an’ I couldn’t see un anywhere. So I thought he were drownded. ’Twere handy t’ dark when I seed the merman rise from the water. He were big an’ black—so black as the stove. I could see the eyes of un so plain as I can see yours. He were not good lookin’—no, I’ll say that much—he were not good lookin’. He waved his arms, an’ beckoned an’ beckoned an’ beckoned. But, sure, sir, I wouldn’t go, for I were feared. ‘’Tis the soul o’ me father,’ thinks I. ‘Sure, the sea’s cotched un.’ So I runs home an’ tells me mother; an’ she says ’twere a merman. Iknowsthey be mermans an’ mermaids, ’cause I’se seed un. ’Tis what we sees we believes.”
“’Tis said,” said Uncle Simon, “that if you finds un on the rocks an’ puts un in the water they gives you three wishes; an’ all you has t’ do is wish, an’——”
“’Tis said,” said Aunt Ruth, with a prodigious frown across the table, “that the mermaids trick the fishermen t’ the edge o’ the sea an’ steals un away. Uncle Simon Ride,” she went on, severely, “if ever you——”
Uncle Simon looked sheepish. “Sure, woman,” said he, the evidences of guilt plain on his face, “they be no danger t’ me. ’Twould take a clever mermaid t’——”
“Uncle Simon Ride,” said Aunt Ruth, “nar another word. An’ if you don’t put my spinnin’ wheel t’ rights this night I’ll give you your tea in a mug[4]t’-morrow—an’ mind that, sir, mind that!”
After we had left the table Uncle Simon took me aside. “She do be a wonderful woman,” said he, meaning Aunt Ruth. Then, earnestly, “She’ve no cause t’ be jealous o’ the mermaids. No, sir—sure, no.”
It is difficult to convey an adequate conception of the barrenness of this coast. If you were to ask a fisherman of some remote outport what his flour was made of he would stare at you and be mute. “Wheat” would be a new, meaningless word to many a man of those places. It may be that the words of the Old Skipper of Black Harbour will help the reader to an understanding of the high value set upon the soil and all it produces.
“Come with me,” said the Old Skipper, “an’ I’ll show you so fine a garden as ever you seed.”
The garden was on an island two miles off the mainland. Like many another patch of ground it had to be cultivated from a distant place. It was an acre, or thereabouts, which had been “won from the wilderness” by the labour of several generations; and it was owned by eleven families. This was not a garden made by gathering soil and dumping it in a hollow, as most gardens are; it was a real “meadow.”
“Look at them potatoes, sir,” said the skipper. He radiated pride in the soil’s achievement as he waited for my outburst of congratulation.
The potatoes, owing to painstaking fertilization with small fish, had attained admirable size—in tops. But the hay!
“’Tis fine grass,” said the skipper. “Fine as ever you seed!”
It was thin, and nearer gray than yellow; and every stalk was weak in the knees. I do it more than justice when I write that it rose above my shoe tops.
“’Tis sizable hay,” said the skipper. “’Tis time I had un cut.”
On the way back the skipper caught sight of a skiff-load of hay, which old John Burns was sculling from Duck Island. He was careful to point it out as good evidence of the fertility of that part of the world. By and by we came to a whisp of hay which had fallen from the skiff. It was a mere handful floating on the quiet water.
“The wastefulness of that dunderhead!” exclaimed the skipper.
He took the boat towards the whisp of hay, puffing his wrath all the while.
“Pass the gaff, b’y,” he said.
With the utmost care he hooked the whisp of hay—to the last straw—and drew it over the side.
“’Tis a sin,” said he, “t’ waste good hay like that.”
Broad fields, hay and wheat and corn, all yellow, waving to the breeze—the sun flooding all—were far, far beyond this man’s imagination. He did not know that in other lands the earth yields generously to the men who sow seed. How little did the harvest mean to him! The world is a world of rock and sea—of sea and naked rock. Soil is gathered in buckets. Gardens are made by hand. The return is precious in the sight of men.
Uncle Zeb Gale—Daddy Gale, who had long ago lost count of his grandchildren, they were so many—Ol’ Zeb tottered up from the sea, gasping and coughing, but broadly smiling in the intervals. He had a great cod in one hand, and his old cloth cap was in the other. His head was bald, and his snowy beard covered his chest. Toil and the weight of years had bowed his back, spun a film over his eyes and cracked his voice. But neither toil nor age nor hunger nor cold had broken his cheery interest in all the things of life. Ol’ Zeb smiled in a sweetly winning way. He stopped to pass a word with the stranger, who was far away from home, and therefore, no doubt, needed a heartening word or two.
“Fine even, zur,” said he.
“Tis that, Uncle Zeb. How have the fish been to-day?”
“Oh, they be a scattered fish off the Mull, zur. But ’tis only a scattered one. They don’t run in, zur, like what they used to when I were young, sure.”
“How many years ago, sir?”
“TOIL”
“TOIL”
“’Tis many year, zur,” said Uncle Zeb, smiling indulgence with my youth. “They was fish a-plenty when—when—when I were young. ’Tis not what it used t’ be—no, no, zur; not at all. Sure, zur, I been goin’ t’ the grounds off the Mull since I were seven years old. Since I were seven! I be eighty-three now, zur. Seventy-six year, zur, I has fished out o’ this here harbour.”
Uncle Zeb stopped to wheeze a bit. He was out of breath with this long speech. And when he had wheezed a bit, a spasm of hard coughing took him. He was on the verge of the last stage of consumption, was Uncle Zeb.
“’Tis a fine harbour t’ fish from, zur,” he gasped. “They be none better. Least-ways, so they tells me—them that’s cruised about a deal. Sure, I’ve never seen another. ’Tis t’ Conch[5]I’ve wanted t’ go since I were a young feller. I’ll see un yet, zur—sure, an’ I will.”
“You are eighty-three?” said I.
“I be the oldest man t’ the harbour, zur. I marries the maids an’ the young fellers when they’s no parson about.”
“You have fished out of this harbour for seventy-six years?” said I, in vain trying to comprehend the deprivation and dull toil of that long life—trying to account for the childlike smile which had continued to the end of it.
“Ay, zur,” said Uncle Zeb. “But, sure, they be plenty o’ time t’ see Conch yet. Me father were ninety when he died. I be only eighty-three.”
Uncle Zeb tottered up the hill. Soon the dusk swallowed his old hulk. I never saw him again.
We were seated on the Head, high above the sea, watching the fleet of punts come from the Mad Mull grounds and from the nets along shore, for it was evening. Jack had told me much of the lore of lobster-catching and squid-jigging. Of winds and tides and long breakers he had given me solemn warnings—and especially of that little valley down which the gusts came, no man knew from where. He had imparted certain secrets concerning the whereabouts of gulls’ nests and juniper-berry patches, for I had won his confidence. I had been informed that Uncle Tom Bull’s punt was in hourly danger of turning over because her spread of canvas was “scandalous” great, that Bill Bludgell kept the “surliest dog t’ the harbour,” that the “goaats was wonderful hard t’ find” in the fog, that a brass bracelet would cure salt-water sores on the wrists, that—I cannot recall it all. He had “mocked” a goat, a squid, a lamb, old George Walker at prayer, and “Uncle” Ruth berating “Aunt” Simon for leaving the splitting-table unclean.
Then he sang this song, in a thin, sweet treble, which was good to hear:
“‘Way down on Pigeon Pond Island,When daddy comes home from swilin’,[6](Maggoty fish hung up in the air,Fried in maggoty butter)!Cakes and tea for breakfast,Pork and duff for dinner,Cakes and tea for supper,When daddy comes home from swilin’.”
He asked me riddles, thence he passed to other questions, for he was a boy who wondered, and wondered, what lay beyond those places which he could see from the highest hill. I described a street and a pavement, told him that the earth was round, defined a team of horses, corrected his impression that a church organ was played with the mouth, and denied the report that the flakes and stages of New York were the largest in the world. The boys of the outports do not play games—there is no time, and at any rate, the old West Country games have not come down to this generation with the dialect, so I told him how to play tag, hide-and-go-seek and blind man’s buff, and proved to him that they might be interesting, though I had to admit that they might not be profitable in certain cases.
“Some men,” said I, at last, “have never seen the sea.”
He looked at me and laughed his unbelief. “Sure,” said he, “not a hundred haven’t?”
“Many more than that.”
“’Tis hard t’ believe, zur,” he said. “Terrible hard.”
“We were silent while he thought it over.
“What’s the last harbour in the world?” he asked.
I hesitated.
“The very last, zur! They do say ’tis St. Johns. But, sure, zur, they must be something beyond. What do it be?” After a silence, he continued, speaking wistfully, “What’s the last harbour in all the whole world, zur? Doesn’t you know?”
It had been a raw day—gray and gusty, with the wind breaking over the island from a foggy sea: a sullen day. All day long there had been no rest from the deep harsh growl of the breakers. We were at tea in Aunt Amanda’s cottage; the table was spread with dried caplin, bread and butter, and tea, for Aunt Amanda, the Scotsman who was of the harbour, and me. The harbour water was fretting under the windows as the swift gusts whipped over it; and beyond the narrows, where the sea was tumbling, the dusk was closing over the frothy waves. Out there a punt was reeling in from the Mad Mull fishing grounds; its brown sail was like a leaf driven by the wind. I saw the boat dart through the narrows to the sheltered water, and I sighed in sympathy with the man who was then furling his wet and fluttering sail, for I, too, had experienced the relief of sweeping from that waste of grasping waves to the sanctuary of the harbour.
“Do you think of the sea as a friend?” I asked Aunt Amanda.
She was a gray, stern woman, over whose face, however, a tender smile was used to flitting, the light lingered last in her faded eyes—the daughter, wife, and mother of punt fishermen. So she had dealt hand to hand with the sea since that night, long ago, when, as a wee maid, she first could reach the splitting-table by standing on a bucket. As a child she had tripped up the path to Lookout Head, to watch her father beat in from the grounds; as a maiden, she had courted when the moonlight was falling upon the ripples of Lower Harbour, and the punt was heaving to the spent swell of the open; as a woman she had kept watch on the moods of the sea, which had possessed itself of her hours of toil and leisure. In the end—may the day be long in coming—she will be taken to the little graveyard under the Lookout in a skiff. Now, at my suggestion, she dropped her eyes to her apron, which she smoothed in an absent way. She seemed to search her life—all the terror, toil, and glory of it—for the answer. She was not of a kind to make light replies, and I knew that the word to come would be of vast significance.
“It do seem to me,” she said, turning her eyes to the darkening water, “that the say is hungry for the lives o’ men.”
“Tut, woman!” cried the old Scotsman, his eyes all a-sparkle. “’Tis a libel on the sea. Why wull ye speak such trash to a stranger? Have ye never heard, sir, what the poet says?”
“Well,” I began to stammer.
“Aye, man,” said he, “they all babble about it. But have ye never read,
“‘O, who can tell, save he whose heart hath tried,And danced in triumph o’er the waters wide,The exulting sense, the pulse’s maddening play,That thrills the wanderer of that trackless way?’”
With that, the sentimental old fellow struck an attitude. His head was thrown back; his eyes were flashing; his arm was rigid, and pointing straight through the window to that patch of white, far off in the gathering dark, where the sea lay raging. It ever took a poet to carry that old Scotsman off his feet—to sweep him to some high, cloudy place, where the things of life rearranged and decked themselves out to please his fancy. I confess, too, that his enthusiasm rekindled, for a moment, my third-reader interest in “a wet sheet and a flowing sea” and “a wind that follows fast.” We have all loved well the sea of our fancy.
“Grand, woman!” he exclaimed, turning to Aunt Amanda, and still a-tremble. “Splendid!”
Aunt Amanda fixed him with her gray eye. “I don’t know,” she said, softly. “But I know that the say took me father from me when I was a wee maid.”
The Scotsman bent his head over his plate, lower and lower still. His fervour departed, and his face, when he looked up, was full of sympathy. Of a sudden my ears hearkened again to the growling breakers, and to the wind, as it ran past, leaping from sea to wilderness; and my spirit felt the coming of the dark.
[4]A scolding.[5]Some miles distant.[6]Sealing.
[4]A scolding.
[5]Some miles distant.
[6]Sealing.
It is, then, to the outporter, to the men of the fleet and to the Labrador liveyere that Doctor Grenfell devotes himself. The hospital at Indian Harbour is the centre of the Labrador activity; the hospital at St. Anthony is designed to care for the needs of the French shore folk; the hospital at Battle Harbour—the first established, and, possibly, the best equipped of all—receives patients from all directions, but especially from the harbours of the Strait and the Gulf. In the little hospital-ship,Strathcona, the doctor himself darts here and there and everywhere, all summer long, responding to calls, searching out the sick, gathering patients for the various hospitals. She is known to every harbour of the coast; and she is often overcrowded with sick bound to the hospitals for treatment or operation. Often, indeed, in cases of emergency, operations are performed aboard, while she tosses in the rough seas. She is never a moment idle while the waters are open. But in the fall, when navigation closes, she must go into winter quarters; and then the sick and starving are sought out by dog-team and komatik. There is no cessation of beneficent activity; there is merely a change in the manner of getting about. Summer journeys are hard enough, God knows! But winter travel is a matter of much greater difficulty and hardship. Not that the difficulty and hardship seem ever to be perceived by the mission-doctor; quite the contrary: there is if anything greater delight to be found in a wild, swift race over rotten or heaving ice, or in a night in the driving snow, than in running theStrathconathrough a nor’east gale. The Indian Harbour hospital is closed in the fall; so intense is the cold, so exposed the situation, so scarce the wood, so few the liveyeres, that it has been found unprofitable to keep it open. There is another way of meeting the needs of the situation; and that is by despatching the Battle Harbour doctor northward in midwinter. The folk know that he is bound towards them—know the points of call—can determine within a month the time of his arrival. So they bring the sick to these places—and patiently wait. This is a hard journey—made alone with the dogs. Many a night the doctor must get into his sleeping bag and make himself as comfortable as possible in the snow, snuggled close to his dogs, for the sake of the warmth of their bodies. Six hundred miles north in the dead of winter, six hundred miles back again; it takes a man of unchangeable devotion to undertake it!
“THE HOSPITAL AT BATTLE HARBOR”
“THE HOSPITAL AT BATTLE HARBOR”
The Labrador dogs—pure and half-breed “huskies,” with so much of the wolf yet in them that they never bark—are for the most part used by the doctor on his journeys. There would be no getting anywhere without them; and it must be said that they are magnificent animals, capable of heroic deeds. Every prosperous householder has at least six or eight full-grown sled-dogs and more puppies than he can keep track of. In summer they lie everywhere under foot by day, and by night howl in a demoniacal fashion far and near; but they fish for themselves in shallow water, and are fat, and may safely be stepped over. In winter they are lean, desperately hungry, savage, and treacherous—in particular, a menace to the lives of children, whom they have been known to devour. There was once a father, just returned from a day’s hunt on the ice, who sent his son to fetch a seal from the waterside; the man had forgotten for the moment that the dogs were roaming the night and very hungry—and so he lost both his seal and his son. The four-year-old son of the Hudson Bay Company’s agent at Cartwright chanced last winter to fall down in the snow. He was at once set upon by the pack; and when he was rescued (his mother told me the story) he had forty-two ugly wounds on his little body. For many nights afterwards the dogs howled under the window where he lay moaning. Eventually those concerned in the attack were hanged by the neck, which is the custom in such cases.
Once, when Dr. Grenfell was wintering at St. Anthony, on the French shore, there came in great haste from Conch, a point sixty miles distant, a komatik with an urgent summons to the bedside of a man who lay dying of hemorrhage. And while the doctor was preparing for this journey, a second komatik, despatched from another place, arrived with a similar message.
“Come at once,” it was. “My little boy has broken his thigh.”
The doctor chose first to visit the lad. At ten o’clock that night he was at the bedside. It had been a dark night—black dark: with the road precipitous, the dogs uncontrollable, the physician in great haste. The doctor thought, many a time, that there would be “more than one broken limb” by the time of his arrival. But there was no misadventure; and he found the lad lying on a settle, in great pain, wondering why he must suffer so.
“Every minute or two,” says the doctor, “there would be a jerk, a flash of pain, and a cry to his father, who was holding him all the time.”
The doctor was glad “to get the chloroform mask over the boy’s face”—he is a sympathetic man, the doctor; glad, always, to ease pain. And at one o’clock in the morning the broken bone was set and the doctor had had a cup of tea; whereupon, he retired to a bed on the floor and a few hours’ “watch below.” At daylight, when he was up and about to depart, the little patient had awakened and was merrily calling to the doctor’s little retriever.
“He was as merry as a cricket,” says the doctor, “when I bade him good-bye.”
About twelve hours on the way to Conch, where the man lay dying of hemorrhage—a two days’ journey—the doctor fell in with a dog-train bearing the mail. And the mail-man had a letter—a hasty summons to a man in great pain some sixty miles in another direction. It was impossible to respond. “That call,” says the doctor, sadly, “owing to sheer impossibility, was not answered.” It was haste away to Conch, over the ice and snow—for the most of the time on the ice of the sea—in order that the man who lay dying there might be succoured. But there was another interruption. When the dog-train reached the coast, there was a man waiting to intercept it: the news of the doctor’s probable coming had spread.
“I’ve a fresh team o’ dogs,” sir, said he, “t’ take you t’ the island. There’s a man there, an’ he’s wonderful sick.”
Would the doctor go? Yes—he would go! But he had no sooner reached that point of the mainland whence he was bound across a fine stretch of ice to the island than he was again intercepted. It was a young man, this time, whose mother lay ill, with no other Protestant family living within fifty miles. Would the doctor help her? Yes—the doctor would; and did. And when he was about to be on his way again——
“Could you bear word,” said the woman, “t’ Mister Elliot t’ come bury my boy? He said he’d come, sir; but now my little lad has been lying dead, here, since January.”
It was then early in March. Mr. Elliot was a Protestant fisherman who was accustomed to bury the Protestant dead of that district. Yes—the doctor would bear word to him. Having promised this, he set out to visit the sick man on the island; for whom, also, he did what he could.
Off again towards Conch—now with fresh teams, which had been provided by the friends of the man who lay there dying. And by the way a man brought his little son for examination and treatment—“a lad of three years,” says the doctor; “a bright, healthy, embryo fisherman, light-haired and blue-eyed, a veritable celt.”
“And what’s the matter with him?” was the physician’s question.
“He’ve a club foot, sir,” was the answer.
And so it turned out: the lad had a club foot. He was fond of telling his mother that he had a right foot and a wrong one. “The wrong one, mama,” said he, “is no good.” He was to be a cripple for life—utterly incapacitated: the fishing does not admit of club feet. But the doctor made arrangements for the child’s transportation to the St. Anthony hospital, where he could, without doubt be cured; and then hurried on.
The way now led through a district desperately impoverished—as much by ignorance and indolence as by anything else. At one settlement of tilts there were forty souls, “without a scrap of food or money,” who depended upon their neighbours—and the opening of navigation was still three months distant! In one tilt there lay what seemed to be a bundle of rags.
“And who is this?” the doctor asked.
It was a child. “The fair hair of a blue-eyed boy of about ten years disclosed itself,” says the doctor. “Stooping over him I attempted to turn his face towards me. It was drawn, with pain, and a moan escaped the poor little fellow’s lips. He had disease of the spine, with open sores in three places. He was stark naked, and he was starved to a skeleton. He gave me a bright smile before I left, but I confess to a shudder of horror at the thought that his lot might have been mine. Of course the ‘fear of pauperizing’ had to disappear before the claims of humanity. Yet, there, in the depth of winter,” the doctor asks, with infinite compassion, “would not a lethal draught be the kindest friend of that little one of Him that loved the children?”
For five days the doctor laboured in Conch, healing many of the folk, helping more; and at the end of that period the man who has suffered the hemorrhage was so far restored that with new dogs the doctor set out for Canada Bay, still travelling southward. There, as he says, “we had many interesting cases.” One of these involved an operation: that of “opening a knee-joint and removing a loose body,” with the result that a fisherman who had long been crippled was made quite well again. Then there came a second call from Conch. Seventeen men had come for the physician, willing to haul the komatik themselves, if no dogs were to be had. To this call the doctor immediately responded; and having treated patients at Conch and by the way, he set out upon the return journey to St. Anthony, fearing that his absence had already been unduly prolonged. And he had not gone far on the way before he fell in with another komatik, provided with a box, in which lay an old woman bound to St. Anthony hospital, in the care of her sons, to have her foot amputated.
Crossing Hare Bay, the doctor had a slight mishap—rather amusing, too, he thinks.
“One of my dogs fell through the ice,” says he. “There was a biting nor’west wind blowing, and the temperature was ten degrees below zero. When we were one mile from the land, I got off to run and try the ice. It suddenly gave way, and in I fell. It did not take me long to get out, for I have had some little experience, and the best advice sounds odd: it is ‘keep cool.’ But the nearest house being at least ten miles, it meant, then, almost one’s life to have no dry clothing. Fortunately, I had. The driver at once galloped the dogs back to the woods we had left, and I had as hard a mile’s running as ever I had; for my clothing was growing to resemble the armour of an ancient knight more and more, every yard, and though in my youth I was accustomed to break the ice to bathe if necessary, I never tried running a race in a coat of mail. By the time I arrived at the trees and got out of the wind, my driver had a rubber poncho spread on the snow under a snug spruce thicket; and I was soon as dry and a great deal warmer than before.”
At St. Anthony, the woman’s foot was amputated; and in two days the patient was talking of “getting up.” Meantime, a komatik had arrived in haste from a point on the northwest coast—a settlement one hundred and twenty miles distant. The doctor was needed there—and the doctor went!
“THE DOCTOR ON A WINTER’S JOURNEY”
“THE DOCTOR ON A WINTER’S JOURNEY”
This brief and inadequate description of a winter’s journey may not serve to indicate the hardship of the life the doctor leads: he has small regard for that; but it may faintly apprise the reader of the character of the work done, and of the will with which the doctor does it. One brief journey! The visitation of but sixty miles of coast! Add to this the numerous journeys of that winter, the various summer voyages of theStrathcona; conceive that the folk of two thousand miles are visited every year, often twice a year: then multiply by ten—for the mission has been in efficient existence for ten years—and the reader may reach some faint conception of the sum of good wrought by this man. But without knowing the desolate land—without observing the emaciated bodies of the children—without hearing the cries of distress—it is impossible adequately to realize the blessing his devotion has brought to the coast.
The Deep-sea Mission is not concerned chiefly with the souls of the folk, nor yet exclusively with their bodies: it endeavours to provide them with religious instruction, to heal their ailments; but it is quite as much interested, apparently, in improving their material condition. To the starving it gives food, to the naked clothing; but it must not be supposed that charity is indiscriminately distributed. That is not the case. Far from it. When a man can cut wood for the steamer or hospitals in return for the food he is given, for example, he is required to do so; but the unhappy truth is that a man can cut very little wood “on a winter’s diet” exclusively of flour. “You gets weak all of a suddent, zur,” one expressed it to me. In his effort to “help the people help themselves” the doctor has established cooperative stores and various small industries. The result has been twofold: the regeneration of several communities, and an outbreak of hatred and dishonest abuse on the part of the traders, who have too long fattened on the isolation and miseries of the people. The cooperative stores, I believe, are thriving, and the small industries promise well. Thus the mission is at once the hope and comfort of the coast. The man on theStrathconais the only man, in all the long history of that wretched land, to offer a helping hand to the whole people from year to year without ill temper and without hope of gain.
“But I can’t do everything,” says he.
And that is true. There is much that the mission-doctor cannot do—delicate operations, for which the more skilled hand of a specialist is needed. For a time, one season, an eminent surgeon, of Boston, the first of many, it is hoped, cruised on theStrathcona, and most generously operated at Battle Harbour. The mission gathered the patients to the hospital from far and near before the surgeon arrived. Folk who had looked forward in dread to a painful death, fast approaching, were of a sudden promised life. There was a man coming, they were told, above the skill of the mission surgeons, who could surely cure them. The deed was as good as the promise: many operations were performed; all the sick who came for healing were healed; the hope of not one was disappointed. Folk who had suffered years of pain were restored. Never had such a thing been known on the Labrador. Men marvelled. The surgeon was like a man raising the dead. But there was a woman who is now, perhaps, dead; she lacked the courage. Day after day for two weeks she waited for the Boston surgeon; but when he came she fled in terror of the knife. Her ailment was mortal in that land; but she might easily have been cured; and she fled home when she knew that the healer had come. No doubt her children now know what it is to want a mother.
Dr. Grenfell will let no man oppress his people when his arm is strong enough to champion them. There was once a rich man (so I was told before I met the doctor)—a man of influence and wide acquaintance—whose business was in a remote harbour of Newfoundland. He did a great wrong; and when the news of it came to the ears of the mission-doctor, the anchor of theStrathconacame up in a hurry, and off she steamed to that place.
“Now,” said the doctor to this man, “you must make what amends you can, and you must confess your sin.”
The man laughed aloud. It seemed to him, no doubt, a joke that the mission-doctor should interfere in the affairs of one so rich who knew the politicians at St. Johns. But the mission-doctor was also a magistrate.
“I say,” said he, deliberately, “that you must pay one thousand dollars and confess your sin.”
The man cursed the doctor with great laughter, and dared him to do his worst. The joke still had point.
“I warn you,” said the doctor, “that I will arrest you if you do not do precisely as I say.”
The man pointed out to the doctor that his magisterial district lay elsewhere, and again defied him.
“Very true,” said the doctor; “but I warn you that I have a crew quite capable of taking you into it.”
The joke was losing its point. But the man blustered that he, too, had a crew.
“You must make sure,” said the doctor, “that they love you well enough to fight for you. On Sunday evening,” he continued, “you will appear at the church at seven o’clock and confess your sin before the congregation; and next week you will pay the money as I have said.”
“I’ll see you in h—ll first!” replied the man, defiantly.