Part 8

French names have been Anglicized in strange ways. Isle aux Bois thus becomes Isle of Boys—or, as pronounced on the south coast, Oil of Boys or Oil o’ Boy. Baie de Boules has lost the significance of boulders that bestud its shores in the name Bay Bulls. The famous and dreaded Cape Race, near the spot where the beautiful _Forizel_ was lost, gets its name from the French “razé,” signifying “sheer.” Reucontre is Round Counter; Cinq Isles has become St. Keels, and Peignoir is altered to Pinware or Pinyare. Grand Bruit is Grand Brute; the rocky headland of Blomidon that nobly commands the mouth of the Humber is commonly called Blow-me-down; Roche Blanche is Rose Blanche.

One would scarcely recognize Lance-au-Diable in Nancy Jobble. Bay d’Espoir has been turned into its exact antithesis, in the shape of Bay Despair. L’Argent Bay is now Bay Le John. Out of Point Enrage is evolved Point Rosy, and St. Croix is modified to Sancroze (Sankrose).

Children’s names are likely to be Biblical. They are often called by the middle name as well—William James, Henry George, Albert Edward. Merchants’ ledgers must take account of a vast number of nicknames that are often slight variants on the same name—Yankee Peter, Foxy Peter, Togo Ben, Sailor Ben, Bucky Ben, Big Tom, Deaf Tom, Young Tom, Big Jan, Little Jan, Susy’s Jan, Ripple Jan, Happy Jack. Thomas Cluett comes to be called Tommy Fiddler, whereupon all the children become Fiddlers, and the wife is Mrs. Fiddler. The family of Maynards is known as the Miners.

The little boys have a mischievous way of teasing one another as “bay noddies.” The noddy is a stupid fish that is very good at catching the smaller fry and then easily allows itself to be robbed of its prey. The children cry:

“Bay boy, bay boy, come to your supper, Two cods’ heads and a lump o’ butter.”

We find the children using instead of “Eeny, meeny, miny, mo” this formula:

“Hiram, Jiram, bumbo lock Six knives in a clock; Six pins turning wins. Dibby, dabby, o-u-t spells out.”

Or:

“Little man driving cattle Don’t you hear his money rattle? One, two, sky blue, Out goes y-o-u.”

Or:

“Silver lock, silver key, Touch, go run away!”

Or:

“Eetle, ottle, blue bottle, Eetle, ottle, out!”

Still another is:

“Onery, ury, ickery, Ann, Fillissy, follissy, Nicholas John, Kubee, Kowbee, Irish Mary

They throw marbles against a wall for a sort of carom-shot, and call it “bazzin’ marbles.” “The real precursor of the spring, like the sure mating of the birds,” said an old man of the game.

In some places there is a local celebrity with a real talent for the composition of what are known as “come-all-ye’s,” from the fact that the minstrel is supposed to invite all who will to come and hear him chant his lay. Every big storm or shipwreck is supposed to be commemorated in appropriate verse by the laureate. For instance, one of these ballads begins:

“The Lily Joyce stuck in the ice, So did the Husky too; Captain Bill Ryan left Terry behin’ To paddle his own canoe.”

Another runs thus:

“’Twas on the 29th of June, As all may know the same; The wind did blow most wonderful, All in a flurry came.”

This was written and sung to a hymn tune.

Song is a common accompaniment of a shipboard task:

“Haul on the bow-line, Kitty is me darlin’; Haul on the bow-line, Haul, boys, haul.”

If a boy doesn’t go across the Straits before he is sixteen, he must be “shaved by Neptune.” It is almost a disgrace not to have gone to the Labrador. Neptune is called “Nipkin.” “Nipkin’ll be aboard to shave you tonight.”

When they are cleaning fish, the last man to wash a fish for the season gets ducked in the tub.

Some of the older residents are walking epitomes of the island lore. They know a great deal that never found lodgment in books. Matty Mitchell, the 63-year old Micmac guide, now a prospector for the Reid-Newfoundland Company, was a fellow-passenger on the mail-boat. He was full of tales of the days when the wolf still roamed the island’s inner fastnesses. I asked him when the last of which he knew were at large. He said: “About thirty years ago I saw three on Doctor’s Hill. I have seen none since. There are still lots of bears and many lynxes. Once I was attacked by six wolves. I waited till the nearest was close to me—then I shoved my muzzle-loader into his mouth and shot him and the other five fell away. Another time I was attacked by three bears who drove me into a lake where I had to stay till some men who had been with me came to the rescue.

“My grandfather was with Peyton when Mary March and another Indian woman were captured at Indian Lake. Mary March died at St. John’s, and was buried there; the other one was brought back to the shore of the lake.”

“How do you know what minerals you are finding when you are prospecting?” I asked.

“I was three times in the Museum at St. John’s,” he answered. “I see everything in the place. That way I know everything that I look at when I go to hunt for minerals and metals. I hear a thing once—I got it. I see a thing once—I got it. I never found gold—but I got pearls from clams, weighing as much as forty grains. I can’t stay in the house. I must be out in the open. If I stay inside I get sick. I take colds. I’ve been twice to the Grand Falls in Labrador. At the upper falls the river rises seven times so”—he arched the back of his hand—“before the water goes over. The biggest flies I ever saw are there. They bite right through the clothes. You close the tent—sew up the opening. You burn up all the flies inside. Next morning there are just as many.”

Another passenger was the Rev. Thomas Greavett, Church of England “parson,” with a parish 100 miles long on the West Coast between Cow Head and Flower’s Cove. He had to be medicine-man and lawyer too, and in his black satchel he carried a stomach-pump, a syringe, eight match-boxes of medicine and Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall.” He told me how he hated to use the mail-boat for his parish visiting, for it generally meant sleepless nights of pacing the deck or sitting in the lifeboat in default of a berth. He carried a petition, to go before the Legislature, reciting the many reasons why the poor little boat on which we were travelling is inadequate to the heavy freight and passenger traffic in which she is engaged. With accommodations for hardly more than 50 passengers, she has carried 210, 235 and even 300, which meant acute discomfort for everybody and the open deck, night and day, for many passengers. What is wanted is a big, heavy ice-breaker. The _Ethie_ never was meant by her Glasgow builders to fight the Humboldt Glacier bit by bit as it falls into the sea. In December she was wrecked off Cow Head in a gale, fortunately with no loss of life.

I don’t know of a harder-working lot than the crew and captain of a boat that undertakes to carry freight and passengers between southern ports of Newfoundland and the Labrador.

Take the experience of this vessel, the _Ethie_, in the summer of 1919 as an example. Under a thoroughly capable and chart-perfect skipper, Captain English, she made several ineffectual attempts to get to Battle Harbour through the dense ice-jam before she finally made that roadstead on June 24. When I met her at Curling to go north, a week late, at the end of August, she had just come out of a viscous fog of four days’ duration in the Strait of Belle Isle and in that fog she had escaped by the closest of shaves a collision with a berg that towered above her till the top of it was lost in the fog. She carried so many passengers, short-haul or long-distance, that every seat in the dining saloon was filled with weary folk at night and some paced the decks or sat on the piles of lathes or the oil-barrels. Lumber and barrels were stored everywhere, the hold was crammed, and cattle in the prow came and went mysteriously as the vessel moved into one cove or bight or tickle after another in the dead of the night or the silver cool of the early morning. The clatter of the steam-winch with the tune of babies strange to the sea-trip, the slap and scuffle of the waves on our sheet-iron sides and the banging of the doors as the vessel writhed in her discomfort made an orchestra of many tongues and percussions. The boat was so heavy with her cargo of machinery, oil, lumber, flour ($24 a barrel at Battle Harbour), cattle and human beings that the deck outside my stateroom was hardly two feet out of water. There were four of us in the stateroom, but the population changed almost hourly from port to port, so that I had barely time to get acquainted with a fellow-passenger ere I lost him to look after his lobster or fish, or his missionary labours. One of the ship’s company was going to teach school at Green Island Cove at the northern tip of Newfoundland. He told me he would get $275 for ten months’ work and out of it would have to pay board. Yet out of that salary he meant to put by money to pay for part of a college education at St. John’s. “How old are you?” I asked. “Not yet eighteen, sir.”

It is easy to see why Dr. Grenfell’s heart and hand go out in a practical and helpful sympathy to those whose battle with grim, unmitigated natural forces and with harsh circumstance is unending. The commonest question asked of anyone who returns from a visit to the Labrador is “Why do people live there?” Despite the fog and the cold, the sea-perils and the stark barrenness of the rocks, the Labrador has an allurement all its own. It has brought a sturdy explorer like William B. Cabot of Boston (“Labrador” Cabot) again and again to the rivers and inlets and the central fastnesses, where he shares the life of the Montagnais and the Nauscapee Indians; and the same magic has endeared the Labrador to those who year upon year continue the quest of the cod and the seal and know no life other than this. Whatever place a man calls his home is likely to become unreasonably dear to him, however bare and poor it looks to visitors; and that is the way with the Labrador. But he who cannot find by sea or land a wild and terrible beauty in the waters and the luminous skies and the long roll and lift of the blue hills must be insensible to some of the fairest vistas that earth has to show. Grenfell and his colleagues do not concede that life on the Labrador is dull or that the environment is sterile and monotonous and cheerless. As one of the brave Labrador missionaries, the Rev. Henry Gordon, has written, “Not only does Labrador rejoice in some of the finest scenery in North America, but she also possesses a people of an exceptionally fine type.” Surely it is not right to think of such a country as a land only of rocks, snows and misery.

XIII A FEW “PARISHIONERS”

A typical interior gladdened by the Doctor’s presence is this on the Southern Labrador. A drudge from Nancy Jobble (Lance-au-Diable) is scrubbing the floor, for the mother is too ill to look to the ways of her household. The drudge instead of singing is chewing on something that may be tobacco, paper or gum, and as she slings the brush about heartlessly she gives furtive eyes and ears to the visitors. The walls are bestuck with staled and yellowed newspapers. There are no pictures or books. There is a wooden bench before the linoleum-covered table, on which are loaves of bread, ill-baked. There is a stove, of the “Favourite” brand with kettle and teapot simmering. A tarnished alarm-clock from Ansonia, a mirror, a wash-stand, shelves with china, tin cans and shreds of bread, a baby’s crib, a rocking-chair and two more benches forlornly complete the inventory. There is nothing green in sight from the besmirched windows but grass and people.

A telegraph operator was reading a volume of the addresses of Russell Conwell when we entered his not overtasked laboratory. The book bore the title “How to Get Rich Honestly.” “’Fraid I’ll never get any further than reading about it!” exclaimed the man of the keys and wires. Dr. Grenfell took the book and presently became engrossed in the famous address called “Acres of Diamonds.” It seemed to him the sort of literature to fire the ambition of his neighbours under the Northern Lights, with its instances of those who made their way defiant of the odds and in spite of all opposition.

A very young minister at another Labrador watering-place said to the Doctor: “You needn’t leave any of your books here. I’m not interested in libraries. I’m only interested in the spiritual welfare of the people.”

A run of six miles by power-boat across Lewis Inlet took us to Fox Harbour and the house of Uncle George Holley. In recent years the power-boat, even with gasoline at the prevailing high prices, has become the fisherman’s taxicab or tin Lizzie, and Oh! the difference to him. He bobs and prances out over the war-dance of the waves with his barrels and boxes easily, where once it was a mighty toiling with the sweeps to make his way. The run across the inlet went swiftly and surely past an iceberg white as an angel’s wing though with the malign suggestion of the devil behind it: and there were plenty of chances to take photographs from every possible angle.

Uncle George had on the stage a skinned seal, some whalemeat, salted cod and a few barrels of salmon. His wife showed us a tiny garden with cabbages, lettuce, rhubarb, radishes and “greens.” One year, she said, she had a barrel of potatoes. Indoors she managed to raise balsam, bachelor’s buttons and nasturtiums. Nowhere in the world do flowers mean more to those that plant them. Constantly there comes to mind H. C. Brunner’s poem about a geranium upon a window-sill: for the flowers which it needs incessant care to keep from the nipping frost come to be regarded as not merely friends but members of the family. Uncle George, a fine, patriarchal type, told vividly how with a dog whip nine fathoms long the expert hand could cut off the neck of a glass bottle without upsetting the bottle, and take the bowl from a man’s pipe or the buttons off his coat. No wonder the huskies slink under the houses when they see a stranger coming.

The winter of 1918-19 was especially terrible—or “wonderful” as would be said here—because of the visitation of the “flu.” Conditions were bad enough in Newfoundland, but in Labrador the “liveyers” (those who remain the year round) fought their battles in a hopeless isolation illumined by heroic self-abnegation on the part of a tiny handful of persons.

When spring released the Labrador Coast from the grip of the ice, and the tragic tale of the winter was told, the Newfoundland Government dispatched the _Terra Nova_ (Scott’s Antarctic vessel) to the aid of the afflicted. Then news filtered out to the world of plague conditions during that terrible winter more dreadful than those which De Foe has chronicled. While reading the gruesome details, one is reminded of the long, lonely and hopeless fight of the early Jamestown colony against sickness and starvation. Throughout the bitter months the Red Death stalked its dread way up and down the Coast, with almost no doctors, nurses or medicines to check the disease. Whole families were stricken, the living were too weak to bury the dead or even to fight off the gaunt dogs that hovered hungrily about the houses; and hamlets were wiped out while neighbouring villages were unable to send aid.

A few sentences from the diary of Henry Gordon, the brave missionary at Cartwright, on Sandwich Bay, will suffice to show what a hideous winter his people passed through. Of this man Dr. Grenfell said to me: “Instead of a stick with a collar on it we have a man with a soul in him.” He is always laughing—incurably an optimist, and a great Boy Scout leader. The following are condensed excerpts.

“Wednesday, Oct. 30, 1918. Reached Cartwright 8 a.m. Mail-boat had brought ‘the great Plague’ and nearly half the population was down with it.

“Thursday, Oct. 31. Nearly everybody down now.

“Nov. 1. Whole households stretched inanimate on floors, unable even to feed themselves or keep fires going.

“Nov. 2. Feeling rotten. Head like a bladderful of wind.

“Nov. 7. Busy all a.m. arranging graves and coffins.

“Nov. 8. Gale N. E. with snow-storms.

“Nov. 17. Two of bodies too much doubled up to put in coffin.

“Nov. 21. Will Leaming in from Indian Harbour with news that ten are dead at North River still unburied and only three coffins. The rest are too sick and dismayed to help.

“Nov. 22. (At North River). Some had lain in their beds three weeks and the stench was appalling. Old Mrs. L. W., aged 71, only survivor of five, lived alone for a fortnight with four dead. No fire, no wood, only ice, which she thawed under her arms.

“Nov. 26. Number burials now totals 26. Population little over 100.

“Dec. 14. Find five little orphans living alone in a deserted house in a deserted cove, bread still frozen.

“Dec. 19. 12 dead in North River out of population of 21.

“Dec. 25. (Christmas Day). Service 10.30. Only six communicants, but considerable ‘Communion of saints.’

“Jan. 1, 1919. (At Cape Porcupine, in Herbert Emb’s one-room house). ‘A sort of damp earthy smell met one on entering, but thanks to frost, body was not so bad as expected. More like mouldering clay than anything. Right on his side was his little girl, actually frozen on to him, so that bodies came off the bunk in one piece.’

“Jan. 3. Grave-blasting.

“Jan. 8. Total deaths: Cartwright, 15; Paradise, 20; Separation Point, 7; North River, 13; Strandshore, 9; Grady, 1; Hare Islands, 4; Sandhills, 4; Boulter’s Rock, 5; North, 12.”

These do not seem large figures, but in settlements of half a dozen houses or less they represent a very large proportion of the inhabitants.

News of the armistice with Germany did not reach Mr. Gordon until January 9, which shows how far from the world was this region within a hundred miles of the summer hospital at Battle Harbour.

It is to be noted that nearly all the children who died perished of starvation, because their elders could no longer feed them and the “loaf” was too frozen to be eaten.

The Eskimo settlements suffered still more grievously. The bodies were buried at sea. Dogs were eating the bodies, and had to be shot. Sometimes the survivors were too weak to drive the dogs from the dead and the dying.

Hebron was wiped out. At Okkak 200 died of 267, and on August 15 there were four widows and two little girls left, who were waiting to be taken away. Nain was not so hard hit, but it is said that forty perished out of several hundred. Zoar and Ramah had already passed out of existence before the “flu” came. It is estimated that the resident Eskimo population on the coast, numbering 600 to 700, was cut nearly in half.

The people seem to think that Dr. Grenfell can accomplish miracles. One is reminded of the words of the sister of Lazarus, “Lord, if thou hadst been here, my brother had not died.”

“Richard Dempster, our mail-carrier,” said good Parson Richards, of Flower’s Cove, “owes his life to the Doctor. Something had infected his knee. The poison spread to his hip. He wouldn’t have lived twelve hours if the Doctor hadn’t made seven incisions in his right leg with his pocket-knife to let out the poisoned blood.

“Once when I was travelling with him, at Pine’s Cove we found a family had left because the woman had seen a ghost. The Doctor prayed with her, and offered to go and live in the house himself to prove that she was the victim of an illusion. At Eddy’s Cove there was hard glitter ice which would have cut the dog’s paws. We thought we couldn’t go on. While we debated what to do there came a snowfall that spread the ice with a glorious soft blanket, ideal for travel. That’s just the way Providence always seems to favour the Doctor when he goes abroad.

“That man never came to the parsonage and went without leaving me with the desire to do better and be better. Every single time it was the same.

“Once we were on the go with the dogs and the komatik four days from St. Anthony to Cricket (Griguet). Much of the time the Doctor had to run beside the komatik. He struck out a new way, deep in snow. ‘Don’t you ever get tired, Doctor?’ I asked. ‘I don’t know that I ever was tired in my life,’ was his answer.

“A day or two after that dreadful experience on the ice-pan which he described in a book, he was at Cricket, and I went to see him. He was still suffering from the effects of the frost-bite. ‘Will you come to the mass meeting of the churches tonight?’ I said. He didn’t hesitate a moment. ‘Yes—send a dog-team and I’ll come.’ He not merely came but delivered an address of an hour’s duration, and I never heard him speak with greater fervour. He seemed spiritualized by the experience through which he had so recently passed.”

XIV NEEDS, BIG AND LITTLE

It is high time to give Dr. Grenfell’s great work the broad, sure underpinning of a liberal endowment. It may be true that “an institution is the lengthened shadow of one man”; but the one-man power of Grenfell’s personality is not immortal, and the work is too important to be allowed to lapse or to languish when he no longer directs, inspires and energizes all. To endow the work now, when many concerns of lesser moment are claiming their millions of dollars and their thousands of devotees is to relieve the Doctor of the ordeal of stumping the United States, Canada and the British Isles to keep his great plant going. Despite the volunteer assistants, despite the aid of good men and women banded in associations or toiling in groups or as individuals at points far from Battle Harbour and St. Anthony, despite the economy practised everywhere and always, there is ever a need, a haunting need, of funds; and a few insular politicians and traders may talk as elaborately as they please about Grenfell as an interloper, with a task that does not belong to him, but as long as Newfoundland does not provide a sufficient subsidy, most of the money must come from somewhere off the island. I have heard some “little-islanders” say that Dr. Grenfell ought to get out, and that Newfoundland should take over his whole business, but as long as Newfoundland does not move to that end, and there is a woeful want of doctoring and nursing at any outport on the map, somebody with the flaming zeal of this crusader has a place. Grenfell is doing the work not of one man but of a hundred. Could his cured patients have their say, there would be no doubt about that endowment. If grateful words were dollars, Grenfell would be a multi-millionaire.

It should not be necessary to explain in circumstantial detail the constant and pressing need of funds to carry on an enterprise that covers so large a territory and involves so many and such various activities. A chain of hospitals and dispensaries, manned in large part by eager and devoted volunteers, an orphanage, an industrial school, a fleet of boats—including the schooner _George B. Cluett_—a Seamen’s Institute, a number of dwellings for the staff personnel, the supplies of food and coal and surgical apparatus and medical equipment—all these items impose a burden on the overtaxed time and strength of the Doctor so considerable that it is not even humane or moral to expect him to speak two or three times a day as he does when he ought to be taking a well-earned vacation. Countless thousands are eager to hear the man himself describe his work, and there is usually a throng whenever and wherever he appears, but to let him wear himself out in appealing for the means to carry on is a waste of the enormous man-power of a great leader of the age. He does not cavil or repine, but he ought to be saved from his own willingness to overdo.