Chapter 20

THEY THAT DO BUSINESS IN GREAT WATERS

Contrary to her ungenerous reputation, even if vessels are lost on the Labrador, her almost unequalled series of harbours--so that from the Straits of Belle Isle to those of Hudson Bay there is not ten miles of coast anywhere without one--enables the crew to escape nearly every time.

In 1883, in the North Sea in October, a hurricane destroyed twenty-five of our stout vessels on the Dogger Bank, cost us two hundred and seventy good lives, and left a hundred widows to mourn on the land. In 1889 a storm hit the north coast of Newfoundland, but too late in the season to injure much of the fishing fleet, which had for the most part gone South. But it caused immense damage to property and the loss of a few lives. As one of the testimonials to its fury, I saw the flooring and seats of the church in the mud of the harbour at St. Anthony at low tide even though that church had been founded entirely on a rock. We now concede that it is good economy on our coast to have wire stays to ringbolts leaded into rocky foundations, to anchor small buildings. Our storms are mostly cyclones with wide vortices, and coming largely from the southwest or northwest, are offshore, and therefore less felt.

We were once running along at full speed in a very thick fog, framing a course to just clear some nasty shoals on our port bow. There was nothing outside us and we had seen no ice of late, so I went below for some lunch, telling the mate to report land as soon as he saw any, and instructing the man at the wheel, if he heard a shout, to port his helm hard. The soup was still on the table when a loud shouting made us leap on the deck to see the ship going full tilt into an enormous iceberg, which seemed right at the end of the bowsprit. This unexpected monster was on our starboard bow, and the order to avoid the shoal was putting us headfirst into it. Our only chance was full speed and a starboard helm, and we actually grazed along the side of the berg. It seemed almost ludicrous later to pick up a large island and run into a harbour with grassy, sloping sides, out of which the fog was shut like a wall, and then to go ashore and bargain over buying a couple of cows, which were being sold, as the settler was moving to the mainland.

Among the records of events of importance to us I find in 1908 that of the second real hurricane which I have ever seen. It began on Saturday, July 28, the height of our summer, with flat calm and sunshine alternating with small, fierce squalls. Though we had a falling barometer, this deceived us, and we anchored that evening in a shallow and unsafe open roadstead about twenty miles from Indian Harbour Hospital. Fortunately our suspicions induced us to keep an anchor watch, and his warning made us get steam at midnight, and we brought up at daylight in the excellent narrow harbour in which the hospital stands. The holding ground there is deep mud in four fathoms of water, the best possible for us. Our only trouble was that the heavy tidal current would swing a ship uneasily broadside against an average wind force.

It was blowing so strongly by this time that the hospital yawl Daryl had already been driven ashore from her anchors, but still we were able to keep ours in the water, and getting a line to her, to heave her astern of our vessel with our powerful winch. The fury of the breeze grew worse as the day went on. All the fishing boats in the harbour filled and sank with the driving water. With the increase of violence of the weather we got up steam and steamed to our anchors to ease if possible the strain on our two chains and shore lines--a web which we had been able to weave before it was too late. By Sunday the gale had blown itself entirely away, and Monday morning broke flat calm, with lovely sunshine, and only an enormous sullen ground sea. This is no uncommon game of Dame Nature's; she seemed to be only mocking at the destruction which she had wrought.

Knowing that there must be many comrades in trouble, we were early away, and dancing like a bubble, we ran north, keeping as close inshore as we could, and watching the coast-line with our glasses. The coast was littered with remains. Forty-one vessels had been lost; in one uninhabited roadstead alone, some forty miles away from Indian Harbour, lay sixteen wrecks. The shore here was lined with rude shelters made from the wreckage of spars and sails, and the women were busy cooking meals and "tidying up" the shacks as if they had lived there always.

We soon set to work hauling off such vessels as would float. One, a large hardwood, well-fastened hull, we determined to save. Her name was Pendragon. The owner was aboard--a young man with no experience who had never previously owned a vessel. He was so appalled at the disaster that he decided to have her sold piecemeal and broken up. We attended the auction on the beach and bought each piece as it came to the hammer. Getting her off was the trouble. We adopted tactics of our own invention. Mousing together the two mastheads with a bight of rope, we put on it a large whoop traveller, and to that fastened our stoutest and longest line. Then first backing down to her on the very top of high water, we went "full speed ahead." Over she fell on her side and bumped along on the mud and shingle for a few yards. By repeated jerks she was eventually ours, but leaking so like a basket that we feared we should yet lose her. Pumps inside fortunately kept her free till we passed her topsail under her, and after dropping in sods and peat, we let the pressure from the outside keep them in place. When night fell I was played out, and told the crew they must let her sink. My two volunteer helpers, Albert Gould, of Bowdoin, and Paul Matheson, of Brown, however, volunteered to pump all night.

While hunting for a crew to take her South we came upon the wreck of a brand-new boat, only launched two months previously. She had been the pride of the skipper's life. He was an old friend of mine, and we felt so sorry for him that we not only got him to take our vessel, but we handed it over for him to work out at the cost which we had paid for the pieces. He made a good living out of her for several years, but later she was lost with all hands on some dangerous shoals near St. Anthony on a journey North.

With fifty-odd people aboard, and a long trail of nineteen fishing boats we eventually got back to Indian Harbour, where every one joined in helping our friends in misfortune till the steamer came and took them South. They waved us farewell, and, quite undismayed, wished for better luck for themselves another season.

The case of one skipper is well worth relating as showing their admirable optimism. He was sixty-seven years old, and had by hard saving earned his own schooner--a fine large vessel. He had arranged to sell her on his return trip and live quietly on the proceeds on his potato patch in southern Newfoundland. His vessel had driven on a submerged reef and turned turtle. The crew had jumped for their lives, not even saving their personal clothing, watches, or instruments. We photographed the remains of the capsized hull floating on the surf. Yet this man, in the four days during which he was my guest, never once uttered a word of complaint. He had done all he could, and he "'lowed that t' Lord knew better than he what was best."

"But what will you do now, Skipper?" I asked.

"Why, get another," he replied; "I think them'll trust me."

One of our older vessels started a plank in a gale of wind in the Atlantic and went to the bottom without warning. In an open boat for six days with only a little dry bread and no covering of any sort, the crew fought rough seas and heavy breezes. But they handled her with the sea genius of our race; made land safely at last, and never said a word about the incident. On another occasion two men, who had been a fortnight adrift, had rowed one hundred and fifty miles, and had only the smallest modicum of food, came aboard our vessel. When I said, "You are hungry, aren't you?" they merely replied, "Well, not over-much"--and only laughed when I suggested that perhaps a month in the open boat might have given them a real appetite.

One October, south of St. Anthony, we were lying in the arm of a bay with two anchors and two warps out, one to each side of the narrow channel. The wind piled up the waters, much as it did in Pharaoh's day. We were flung astern yard by yard on the top of the seas, and when it was obvious that we must go ashore, we reversed our engines, slipped our line, and drove up high and dry to escape the bumping on the beach which was inevitable. There we lay for days. Meanwhile I had taken our launch into the river-mouth and was marooned there. For the launch blew right up on the bank in among the trees, and strive as we would, for days we could not even move her out again.

Another spring we had a very close squeak of losing the Strathcona. While we were trying one morning to get out of a harbour, a sudden gale of wind came down upon us and pinned us tight, so that we could not move an inch. The pressure of the ice became more severe moment by moment, and meanwhile the ice between us and the shore seemed to be imperceptibly melting away. Naturally we tried every expedient we could think of to keep enough ice between us and the shore rocks to save the vessel being swept over the rocky headland, toward which the irresistible tidal current was steadily forcing us. To make matters worse, we struck our propeller against a pan of ice and broke off one of the flanges close to the shaft. It became breathlessly exciting as the ship drew nearer and nearer to the rocks. We abandoned our boat when we saw that by trying to hold on to it any longer we should be jeopardizing the steamer. Twisting round helplessly as in a giant's arms, we were swept past the dangerous promontory and to our infinite joy carried out into the open Atlantic where there is room for all. Our boat was subsequently rescued from the shore, and we were able to screw on a new blade to the propeller.

Just after the big gale in 1908 His Excellency, Sir William MacGregor, then Governor, was good enough to come and spend a short time surveying on our north coast. He was an expert in this line, as well as being a gold-medallist in medicine. Later he changed over from the Strathcona to the Government steamer Fiona. I acted as pilot among other capacities on that journey, and was unlucky enough to run her full tilt onto one of the only sandbanks on the coast in a narrow passage between some islands and the mainland! The little Strathcona, following behind, was in time to haul us off again, but the incident made the captain naturally distrust my ability, and as a result he would not approach the shore near enough for us to get the observations which we needed. Although we went round Cape Chidley into Ungava Bay I could not regain his confidence sufficiently to go through the straits which I had myself sounded and surveyed. So we accomplished it in a small boat, getting good observations. Our best work, however, was done when His Excellency was content to be our guest. The hospital on board was used for the necessary instruments--four chronometers, two theodolites, guns, telescopes, camp furniture, and piles of books and printed forms. Mr. Albert Gould of Bowdoin was my secretary on board that year, and was of very great value to us.

Though the work of an amateur, Sir William's surveying was accepted by the Admiralty and the Royal Geographical Society--his survey in Nigeria having proved to have not one single location a mile out of place when an official survey was run later.

Many a time in the middle of a meal, some desired but unlucky star would cross the prime vertical, and all hands had to go up on deck and shiver while rows of figures were accumulated. Sir William told us that he would rather shoot a star any time than all the game ever hunted. One night my secretary, after sitting on a rock at a movable table from 5 P.M. till midnight, came in, his joints almost creaking with cold, and loaded with a pile of figures which he assured us would crush the life out of most men. My mate that year was a stout and very short, plethoric person. When he stated that he preferred surveying to fishing, as it was going to benefit others so much, and that he was familiar with the joys of service, he was taken promptly at his word. It was a hot summer. The theodolite was a nine-inch one and weighed many pounds. We had climbed the face of a very steep mountain called Cape Mugford, some three thousand feet high--every inch of which distance we had to mount from dead sea-level. When at last Israel arrived on the summit, he looked worried. He said that he had always thought surveying meant letting things drop down over the ship's side, and not carrying ballast up precipices. For his part he could now see that providing food for the world was good enough for him. He distinctly failed to grasp where the joy of this kind of service came in--and noting his condition as he lay on the ground and panted I decided to let it go at that.

The Governor was a real MacGregor and a Presbyterian, and was therefore quite a believer in keeping Sunday as a day of rest. But after morning prayers on the first fine day, after nearly a week of fog, he decided that he had had physical rest enough, and to get good observations would bring him the recreation of spirit which he most needed. So he packed up for work, and happened to light on the unhappy Israel to row him a mile or so to the land. "Iz" was taken "all aback." He believed that you should not strain yourself ever--much less on Sundays. So from religious scruples he asked to be excused, though he offered to row any one ashore if he was only going to idle the hours away. After all, however, our Governor represented our King, and I was personally horrified, intending to correct Israel's position with a round turn, and show him that we are especially enjoined to obey "Governors and Rulers"--as better also than the sacrifice of loafing. But the Governor forbade it, quietly unpacked, put his things away, and stayed aboard. Israel subsequently cultivated the habit of remaining in bed on Sundays--thereby escaping being led into temptation, as even Governors would not be likely to go and tempt him in his bunk.

I have had others refuse to help in really necessary work on Sunday. One skipper would not get the Strathcona under way in answer to a wireless appeal to come to a woman in danger of dying from hemorrhage forty miles distant. When we prepared to start without him, he told me that he would go, but that it would be at the price of his soul and we would have to be responsible for that loss. We went all the same.

Our charts, such as they were, were subsequently accepted by the Royal Geographical Society of England, who generously invited me to lecture before them. They were later good enough to award me the Murchison Prize in 1911. Much of the work was really due to Sir William, and as much of it as I could put on him to the Sabbatarian "Iz."

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."

In medicine, too, things happen which we professional men are just as unable to explain. A big-bodied, successful fisherman came aboard my steamer one day, saying that he had toothache. This was probable, for his jaw was swollen, his mouth hard to open, and the offending molar easily visible within. When I produced the forceps he protested most loudly that he would not have it touched for worlds.

"Why, then, did you come to me?" I asked. "You are wasting my time."

"I wanted you to charm her, Doctor," he answered, quite naturally.

"But, my dear friend, I do not know how to charm, and don't think it would do the slightest good. Doctors are not allowed to do such things."

He was evidently very much put out, and turning round to go, said, "I knows why you'se won't charm her. It's because I'm a Roman Catholic."

"Nonsense. If you really think that it would do any good, come along. You'll have to pay twenty-five cents exactly as if you had it pulled out."

"Gladly enough, Doctor. Please go ahead."

He sat on the rail, a burly carcass, the incarnation of materialism, while the doctor, feeling the size of a sandflea, put one finger into his mouth and touched the molar, while he repeated the most mystic nonsense he could think of, "Abracadabra Tiddlywinkum Umslopoga"--and then jumped the finger out lest the patient might close his ponderous jaw. The fisherman took a turn around the deck, pulled out the quarter, and solemnly handed it to me, saying, "All the pain has gone. Many thanks, Doctor." I found myself standing alone in amazement, twiddling a miserable shilling, and wondering how I came to make such a fool of myself.

A month later the patient again came to see me when we happened to be in his harbour. The swelling had gone, the molar was there. "Ne'er an ache out of her since," the patient laughed. I have not reported this end result to the committee of the American College of Surgeons, though much attention is now devoted to the follow-up and end-result department of surgery and medicine.