Dr. Grenfell's Parish: The Deep Sea Fisherman

I got Bad splotches all over my Body and i dont know what the cause of it is. Please Have you got anything for it. i Have’nt got any money to Pay you now for anything But i wont forget to Pay you when i gets the money.

doctor – i have a compleant i ham weak with wind on the chest, weaknes all all over me up in my harm.

Dear Dr. Grenfell.

I would like for you to Have time to come Down to my House Before you leaves to go to St. Anthony. My little Girl is very Bad. it seems all in Her neck. Cant Ply her Neck forward if do she nearly goes in the fits, i dont know what it is the matter with Her myself. But if you see Her you would know what the matter with Her. Please send a Word By the Bearer what gives you this note and let me know where you will have time to come down to my House. i lives down the Bay a Place called Berry Head.

“What have you been doing since?” Dr. Grenfell has not been idle. There is now a mission hospital at St. Anthony, near the extreme northeast point of the Newfoundland coast. There is another, well-equipped and commodious, at Battle Harbour – a rocky island lying out from the Labrador coast near the Strait of Belle Isle – which is open the year round; when the writer was last on the coast, it was in charge of Dr. Cluny McPherson, a courageous young physician, Newfoundland-born, who went six hundred miles up the coast by dog-team in the dead of winter, finding shelter where he might, curing whom he could – everywhere seeking out those who needed him, caring not a whit, it appears, for the peril and hardship of the long white road. There is a third at Indian Harbour, half-way up the coast, which is open through the fishing season. It is conducted with the care and precision of a London hospital – admirably kept, well-ordered, efficient. The physician in charge is Dr. George H. Simpson – a wiry, keen, brave little Englishman, who goes about in an open boat, whatever the distance, whatever the weather; he is a man of splendid courage and sympathy: the fishing-folk love him for his kind heart and for the courage with which he responds to their every call. There is also the little hospital steamer Strathcona, in which Dr. Grenfell makes the round of all the coast, from the time of the break-up until the fall gales have driven the fishing-schooners home to harbour.

VI – FAITH and DUTY

When Dr. Grenfell first appeared on the coast, I am told, the folk thought him a madman of some benign description. He knew nothing of the reefs, the tides, the currents, cared nothing, apparently, for the winds; he sailed with the confidence and reckless courage of a Labrador skipper. Fearing at times to trust his schooner in unknown waters, he went about in a whale-boat, and so hard did he drive her that he wore her out in a single season. She was capsized with all hands, once driven out to sea, many times nearly swamped, once blown on the rocks; never before was a boat put to such tasks on that coast, and at the end of it she was wrecked beyond repair. Next season he appeared with a little steam-launch, the Princess May– her beam was eight feet! – in which he not only journeyed from St. Johns to Labrador, to the astonishment of the whole colony, but sailed the length of that bitter coast, passing into the gulf and safely out again, and pushing to the very farthest settlements in the north. Late in the fall, upon, the return journey to St. Johns in stormy weather, she was reported lost, and many a skipper, I suppose, wondered that she had lived so long; but she weathered a gale that bothered the mail-boat, and triumphantly made St. Johns, after as adventurous a voyage, no doubt, as ever a boat of her measure survived.

“Sure,” said a skipper, “I don’t know how she done it. The Lord,” he added, piously, “must kape an eye on that man.”

There is a new proverb on the coast. The folk say, when a great wind blows, “This’ll bring Grenfell!” Often it does. He is impatient of delay, fretted by inaction; a gale is the wind for him – a wind to take him swiftly towards the place ahead. Had he been a weakling, he would long ago have died on the coast; had he been a coward, a multitude of terrors would long ago have driven him to a life ashore; had he been anything but a true man and tender, indeed, he would long ago have retreated under the suspicion and laughter of the folk. But he has outsailed the Labrador skippers – out-dared them – done deeds of courage under their very eyes that they would shiver to contemplate, – never in a foolhardy spirit; always with the object of kindly service. So he has the heart and willing hand of every honest man on the Labrador – and of none more than of the men of his crew, who take the chances with him; they are wholly devoted.

One of his engineers, for example, once developed the unhappy habit of knocking the cook down.

“You must keep your temper,” said the doctor. “This won’t do, you know.”

But there came an unfortunate day when, being out of temper, the engineer again knocked the cook down.

“This is positively disgraceful!” said the doctor. “I can’t keep a quarrelsome fellow aboard the mission-ship. Remember that, if you will, when next you feel tempted to strike the cook.”

The engineer protested that he would never again lay hands on the cook, whatever the provocation. But again he lost his temper, and down went the poor cook, flat on his back.

“I’ll discharge you,” said the doctor, angrily, “at the end of the cruise!”

The engineer pleaded for another chance. He was denied. From day to day he renewed his plea, but to no purpose, and at last the crew came to the conclusion that something really ought to be done for the engineer, who was visibly fretting himself thin.

“Very well,” said the doctor to the engineer; “I’ll make this agreement with you. If ever again you knock down the cook, I’ll put you ashore at the first land we come to, and you may get back to St. Johns as best you can.”

It was a hard alternative. The doctor is not a man to give or take when the bargain has been struck; the engineer knew that he would surely go ashore somewhere on that desolate coast, whether the land was a barren island or a frequented harbour, if ever again the cook tempted him beyond endurance.

“I’ll stand by it, sir,” he said, nevertheless; “for I don’t want to leave you.”

In the course of time the Princess May was wrecked or worn out. Then came the Julia Sheridan, thirty-five feet long, which the mission doctor bought while she yet lay under water from her last wreck; he raised her, refitted her with what money he had, and pursued his venturesome and beneficent career, until she, too, got beyond so hard a service. Many a gale she weathered, off “the worst coast in the world” – often, indeed, in thick, wild weather, the doctor himself thought the little craft would go down; but she is now happily superannuated, carrying the mail in the quieter waters of Hamilton Inlet. Next came the Sir Donald– a stout ship, which in turn disappeared, crushed in the ice. The Strathcona, with a hospital amidships, is now doing duty; and she will continue to go up and down the coast, in and out of the inlets, until she in her turn finds the ice and the wind and the rocks too much for her.

“’Tis bound t’ come, soon or late,” said a cautious friend of the mission. “He drives her too hard. He’ve a right t’ do what he likes with his own life, I s’pose, but he’ve a call t’ remember that the crew has folks t’ home.”

But the mission doctor is not inconsiderate; he is in a hurry – the coast is long, the season short, the need such as to wring a man’s heart. Every new day holds an opportunity for doing a good deed – not if he dawdles in the harbours when a gale is abroad, but only if he passes swiftly from place to place, with a brave heart meeting the dangers as they come. He is the only doctor to visit the Labrador shore of the Gulf, the Strait shore of Newfoundland, the populous east coast of the northern peninsula of Newfoundland, the only doctor known to the Esquimaux and poor “liveyeres” of the northern coast of Labrador, the only doctor most of the “liveyeres” and green-fish catchers of the middle coast can reach, save the hospital physician at Indian Harbour. He has a round of three thousand miles to make. It is no wonder that he “drives” the little steamer – even at full steam, with all sail spread (as I have known him to do), when the fog is thick and the sea is spread with great bergs.

“I’m in a hurry,” he said, with an impatient sigh. “The season’s late. We must get along.”

We fell in with him at Red Ray in the Strait, in the thick of a heavy gale from the northeast. The wind had blown for two days; the sea was running high, and still fast rising; the schooners were huddled in the harbours, with all anchors out, many of them hanging on for dear life, though they lay in shelter. The sturdy little coastal boat, with four times the strength of the Strathcona, had made hard work of it that day – there was a time when she but held her own off a lee shore in the teeth of the big wind.

It was drawing on towards night when the doctor came aboard for a surgeon from Boston, a specialist, for whom he had been waiting.

“I see you’ve steam up,” said the captain of the coastal boat. “I hope you’re not going out in this, doctor!”

“I have some patients at the Battle Harbour Hospital, waiting for our good friend from Boston,” said the doctor, briskly. “I’m in a hurry. Oh, yes, I’m going out!”

“For God’s sake, don’t!” said the captain earnestly.

The doctor’s eye chanced to fall on the gentleman from Boston, who was bending over his bag – a fine, fearless fellow, whom the prospect of putting out in that chip of a steamer would not have perturbed, though the doctor may then not have known it. At any rate, as though bethinking himself of something half forgotten, he changed his mind of a sudden.

“Oh, very well,” he said. “I’ll wait until the gale blows out.”

He managed to wait a day – no longer; and the wind was still wild, the sea higher than ever; there was ice in the road, and the fog was dense. Then out he went into the thick of it. He bumped an iceberg, scraped a rock, fairly smothered the steamer with broken water; and at midnight – the most marvellous feat of all – he crept into Battle Harbour through a narrow, difficult passage, and dropped anchor off the mission wharf.

Doubtless he enjoyed the experience while it lasted – and promptly forgot it, as being commonplace. I have heard of him, caught in the night in a winter’s gale of wind and snow, threading a tumultuous, reef-strewn sea, his skipper at the wheel, himself on the bowsprit, guiding the ship by the flash and roar of breakers, while the sea tumbled over him. If the chance passenger who told me the story is to be believed, upon that trying occasion the doctor had the “time of his life.”

“All that man wanted,” I told the doctor subsequently, “was, as he says, ‘to bore a hole in the bottom of the ship and crawl out.’”

“Why!” exclaimed the doctor, with a laugh of surprise. “He wasn’t frightened, was he?”

Fear of the sea is quite incomprehensible to this man. The passenger was very much frightened; he vowed never to sail with “that devil” again. But the doctor is very far from being a dare-devil; though he is, to be sure, a man altogether unafraid; it seems to me that his heart can never have known the throb of fear. Perhaps that is in part because he has a blessed lack of imagination, in part, perhaps, because he has a body as sound as ever God gave to a man, and has used it as a man should; but it is chiefly because of his simple and splendid faith that he is an instrument in God’s hands – God’s to do with as He will, as he would say. His faith is exceptional, I am sure – childlike, steady, overmastering, and withal, if I may so characterize it, healthy. It takes something such as the faith he has to move a man to run a little steamer at full speed in the fog when there is ice on every hand. It is hardly credible, but quite true, and short of the truth: neither wind nor ice nor fog, nor all combined, can keep the Strathcona in harbour when there comes a call for help from beyond. The doctor clambers cheerfully out on the bowsprit and keeps both eyes open. “As the Lord wills,” says he, “whether for wreck or service. I am about His business.”

It is a sublime expression of the old faith.

VII – THE LIVEYERE

Doctor Grenfell’s patients are of three classes. There is first the “liveyere” – the inhabitant of the Labrador coast – the most ignorant and wretched of them all. There is the Newfoundland “outporter” – the small fisherman of the remoter coast, who must depend wholly upon his hook and line for subsistence. There is the Labradorman – the Newfoundland fisherman of the better class, who fishes the Labrador coast in the summer season and returns to his home port when the snow begins to fly in the fall. Some description of these three classes is here offered, that the reader may understand the character and condition of the folk among whom Dr. Grenfell labours.

“As a permanent abode of civilized man,” it is written in a very learned if somewhat old-fashioned work, “Labrador is, on the whole, one of the most uninviting spots on the face of the earth.” That is putting it altogether too delicately; there should be no qualification; the place is a brutal desolation. The weather has scoured the coast – a thousand miles of it – as clean as an old bone: it is utterly sterile, save for a tuft or two of hardy grass and wide patches of crisp moss; bare gray rocks, low in the south, towering and craggy in the north, everywhere blasted by frost, lie in billowy hills between the froth and clammy mist of the sea and the starved forest at the edge of the inland wilderness. The interior is forbidding; few explorers have essayed adventure there; but the Indians – an expiring tribe – and trappers who have caught sight of the “height of land” say that it is for the most part a vast table-land, barren, strewn with enormous boulders, scarce in game, swarming with flies, with vegetation surviving only in the hollows and ravines – a sullen, forsaken waste.

Those who dwell on the coast are called “liveyeres” because they say, “Oh, ay, zur, I lives yere!” in answer to the question. These are not to be confounded with the Newfoundland fishermen who sail the Labrador seas in the fishing season – an adventurous, thrifty folk, bright-eyed, hearty in laughter – twenty-five thousand hale men and boys, with many a wife and maid, who come and return again. Less than four thousand poor folk have on the long coast the “permanent abode” of which the learned work speaks – much less, I should think, from the Strait of Belle Isle to Cape Chidley. It is an evil fate to be born there: the Newfoundlanders who went north from their better country, the Hudson Bay Company’s servants who took wives from the natives, all the chance comers who procrastinated their escape, desperately wronged their posterity; the saving circumstance is the very isolation of the dwelling-place – no man knows, no man really knows, that elsewhere the earth is kinder to her children and fairer far than the wind-swept, barren coast to which he is used. They live content, bearing many children, in inclemency, in squalor, and, from time to time, in uttermost poverty – such poverty as clothes a child in a trouser leg and feeds babies and strong men alike on nothing but flour and water. They were born there: that is where they came from; that is why they live there.

“’Tis a short feast and a long famine,” said a northern “liveyere,” quite cheerfully; to him it was just a commonplace fact of life.

There are degrees of wretchedness: a frame cottage is the habitation of the rich and great where the poor live in turf huts; and the poor subsist on roots and a paste of flour and water when the rich feast on salt junk. The folk who live near the Strait of Belle Isle and on the gulf shore may be in happier circumstances. To be sure, they know the pinch of famine; but some – the really well-to-do – are clear of the over-shadowing dread of it. The “liveyeres” of the north dwell in huts, in lonely coves of the bays, remote even from neighbours as ill-cased as themselves; there they live and laugh and love and suffer and die and bury their dead – alone. To the south, however, there are little settlements in the more sheltered harbours – the largest of not more than a hundred souls – where there is a degree of prosperity and of comfort; potatoes are a luxury, but the flour-barrel is always full, the pork-barrel not always empty, and there are raisins in the duff on feast-days; moreover, there are stoves in the whitewashed houses (the northern “liveyere’s” stove is more often than not a flat rock), beds to sleep in, muslin curtains in the little windows, and a flower, it may be, sprouting desperately in a red pot on the sill. That is the extreme of luxury – rare to be met with; and it is at all times open to dissolution by famine.

“Sure, zur, last winter,” a stout young fellow boasted, “we had all the grease us wanted!”

It is related of a thrifty settler named Olliver, however, who lived with his wife and five children at Big Bight, – he was a man of superior qualities, as the event makes manifest, – that, having come close to the pass of starvation at the end of a long winter, he set out afoot over the hills to seek relief from his nearest neighbour, forty miles away. But there was no relief to be had; the good neighbour had already given away all that he dared spare, and something more. Twelve miles farther on he was again denied; it is said that the second neighbour mutely pointed to his flour-barrel and his family – which was quite sufficient for Olliver, who thereupon departed to a third house, where his fortune was no better. Perceiving then that he must depend upon the store of food in his own house, which was insufficient to support the lives of all, he returned home, sent his wife and eldest son and eldest daughter away on a pretext, despatched his three youngest children with an axe, and shot himself. As he had foreseen, wife, daughter, and son survived until the “break-up” brought food within their reach; and the son was a well-grown boy, and made a capable head of the house thereafter.

The “liveyere” is a fisherman and trapper. In the summer he catches cod; in the winter he traps the fox, otter, mink, lynx, and marten, and sometimes he shoots a bear, white or black, and kills a wolf. The “planter,” who advances the salt to cure the fish, takes the catch at the end of the season, giving in exchange provisions at an incredible profit; the Hudson Bay Company takes the fur, giving in exchange provisions at an even larger profit; for obvious reasons, both aim (there are exceptions, of course) to keep the “liveyere” in debt – which is not by any means a difficult matter, for the “liveyere” is both shiftless and (what is more to the point) illiterate. So it comes about that what he may have to eat and wear depends upon the will of the “planter” and of the company; and when for his ill-luck or his ill-will both cast him off – which sometimes happens – he looks starvation in the very face. A silver fox, of good fur and acceptable colour, is the “liveyere’s” great catch; no doubt his most ecstatic nightmare has to do with finding one fast in his trap; but when, “more by chance than good conduct,” as they say, he has that heavenly fortune (the event is of the rarest), the company pays sixty or eighty dollars for that which it sells abroad for $600. Of late, however, the free-traders seem to have established a footing on the coast; their stay may not be long, but for the moment, at any rate, the “liveyere” may dispose of his fur to greater advantage – if he dare.

The earth yields the “liveyere” nothing but berries, which are abundant, and, in midsummer, “turnip tops”; and as numerous dogs are needed for winter travelling – wolfish creatures, savage, big, famished – no domestic animals can be kept. There was once a man who somehow managed for a season to possess a pig and a sheep; he marooned his dogs on an island half a mile off the coast; unhappily, however, there blew an off-shore wind in the night, and next morning neither the pig nor the sheep was to be found; the dogs were engaged in innocent diversions on the island, but there was evidence sufficient on their persons, so to speak, to convict them of the depredation in any court of justice. There are no cows on the coast, no goats, – consequently no additional milk-supply for babies, – who manage from the beginning, however, to thrive on bread and salt beef, if put to the necessity. There are no pigs – there is one pig, I believe, – no sheep, no chickens; and the first horses to be taken to the sawmill on Hamilton Inlet so frightened the natives that they scampered in every direction for their lives whenever the team came near, crying: “Look out! The harses is comin’!” The caribou are too far inland for most of the settlers; but at various seasons (excluding such times as there is no game at all) there are to be had grouse, partridge, geese, eider-duck, puffin, gulls, loon and petrel, bear, arctic hare, and bay seal, which are shot with marvellously long and old guns – some of them ancient flintlocks.

Notwithstanding all, the folk are large and hardy – capable of withstanding cruel hardship and deprivation.

In summer-time the weather is blistering hot inland; and on the coast it is more often than not wet, foggy, blustering – bitter enough for the man from the south, who shivers as he goes about. Innumerable icebergs drift southward, scraping the coast as they go, and patches of snow lie in the hollows of the coast hills – midway between Battle Harbour and Cape Chidley there is a low headland called Snowy Point because the snow forever lies upon it. But warm, sunny days are to be counted upon in August – days when the sea is quiet, the sky deep blue, the rocks bathed in yellow sunlight, the air clear and bracing; at such times it is good to lie on the high heads and look away out to sea, dreaming the while. In winter, storm and intense cold make most of the coast uninhabitable; the “liveyeres” retire up the bays and rivers, bag and baggage, not only to escape the winds and bitter cold, but to be nearer the supply of game and fire-wood. They live in little “tilts” – log huts of one large square room, with “bunks” at each end for the women-folk, and a “cockloft” above for the men and lads. It is very cold; frost forms on the walls, icicles under the “bunks”; the thermometer frequently falls to fifty degrees below zero, which, as you may be sure, is exceedingly cold near the sea. Nor can a man do much heavy work in the woods, for the perspiration freezes under his clothing. Impoverished families have no stoves – merely an arrangement of flat stones, with an opening in the roof for the escape of the smoke, with which they are quite content if only they have enough flour to make hard bread for all.

It goes without saying that there is neither butcher, baker, nor candlestick-maker on the coast. Every man is his own bootmaker, tailor, and what not; there is not a trade or profession practiced anywhere. There is no resident doctor, save the mission doctors, one of whom is established at Battle Harbour, and with a dog-team makes a toilsome journey up the coast in the dead of winter, relieving whom he can. There is no public building, no municipal government, no road. There is no lawyer, no constable; and I very much doubt that there is a parson regularly stationed among the whites beyond Battle Harbour, with the exception of the Moravian missionaries. They are scarce enough, at any rate, for the folk in a certain practical way to feel the hardship of their absence. Dr. Grenfell tells of landing late one night in a lonely harbour where three “couples wanted marrying.” They had waited many years for the opportunity. It chanced that the doctor was entertaining a minister on the cruise; so one couple determined at once to return to the ship with him. “The minister,” says the doctor, “decided that pronouncing the banns might be dispensed with in this case. He went ahead with the ceremony, for the couple had three children already!”

The “liveyere” is of a sombrely religious turn of mind – his creed as harsh and gloomy as the land he lives in; he is superstitious as a savage as well, and an incorrigible fatalist, all of which is not hard to account for: he is forever in the midst of vast space and silence, face to face with dread and mysterious forces, and in conflict with wind and sea and the changing season, which are irresistible and indifferent.