Down to the sea, yarns from the Labrador

Front matter

mpRED T, GRENFELL

Class __£_lliix

Copyright }^^

Contents

I. UNDER THE NORTHERN LIGHTS

II. 'TIS DOGGED AS DOES IT .

III. DANNY'S DELIVERANCE .

II 36 66

96 112

127 141

153 165

171 183

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

A Distinguished Visitor . . . Opposite Title

The Native Eskimo — Still almost prehistoric in

their customs . . . . . 14

I Have Most Faith in Unwritten Sermons . 34

The Gloomy Faces of Great Beetling Cliffs . 66

Great Masses of Ice Were Day by Day Increasing in Size ..... 70 They Had a Good Six Hundred Pounds to Haul 80 It Was a Veritable Day of Sick Calls . . 114 A Labrador Four-in-Hand . . . .150 The Physician in the Labrador . . .184 A Doctor is Unable to Specialize on this Coast . 192 Trusted Friends of the Labrador . . . 208 "Doesn't Look Exactly Like a Pleasure Yacht" 222

I.

The Northern Lights.

AS a country for summer holidays, Labrador has not yet been taken seriously. Yet it attracts many scientists who visit it for its unique opportunities for special work. In the summer of 1905, Elihu Root, Secretary of State, came in search of that absolute rest which is impossible in any country where telephones and the other appurtenances of civilization have intruded.

From several points of view, also, Labrador affords attractions offered by no other country so near at hand. The scenery of tlie southern coast is modified by the fact that in the glacial period the ice-cap smoothed and rounded the mountain peaks, while the cliffs are seldom five hundred feet in height. In the north, however, the mountain-tops apparently always reared their heads above the ice-stream, and

II for its high cliffs and virgin peaks the coast-line is unrivaled anywhere in the world. The fact that the high land runs right out to the Atlantic seaboard does not prevent its affording most imposing fiords winding away among its fastnesses. For the thundering of the restless Atlantic, the grinding masses of the polar ice, which assail its bulwarks for eight months out of twelve, and the iron frost of its terrible winters, have proved to be workmen that even its adamantine rocks have been unable to withstand.

Thus there have been carved out fiords such as that of Nakvak, which runs inland for thirty miles. The cliffs on each side rise direct from the narrow gorge, which is itself only a mile in width, to an average of about two thousand feet, the deep blue water affording anchorage so close in under the cliffs that one would suppose it bottomless elsewhere. Though these rocks are the basal rocks of the earth's skeleton, and are entirely barren of trees and shrubs — or, indeed, of any fossil either, — their sternness is mitigated by the abundant carpet bedding of brilliant-colored lichens and the numerous small subarctic flora to be found up to their highest peaks. To the north of this inlet are still loftier mountains.

the heights of which have not yet been measured, and the summits of which have never yet yielded to the foot of man. A cluster known as the "Four Peaks" has been variously estimated up to six thousand feet in height.

There is no country in the world where the glories of the aurora borealis can so frequently be enjoyed. The weird "northern lights," called by the Eskimo "the spirits of the dead at play," are seen dancing in the sky on almost every clear night. The glorious red morning light, stealing over these rugged peaks, and steeping, in blood, as it were, the pinnacles of the loftiest icebergs in the world, forms a contrast with the deep blue of the ocean and the glistening white in a way that will hold the dullest spellbound. The endless stream of fantastic icebergs at all times enlivens the monotony of a boundless ocean.

Though cruising in north Labrador is at present made difficult by the poor survey of the coast, it is also made delightful to the amateur sailor by the countless natural harbors, never more than a few miles apart, and by the thousands of outlying islands, which permit almost one-fourth of the coast to be visited in perfectly smooth water, the great swell from the Atlantic being shouldered off by the

14 DOW.KtoTheSEA

long fringe of them that runs seaward for twenty or thirty miles.

Clearly written in water-worn boulders on the mountain-sides of the now slowly rising land, and by the elevated sea-caves, with their wave-washed pillows, is the history of how the Labrador came here. These raise before the dullest mind visions of a paleocrystic sea that lapped these shores in the dim ages of the past. Hanging everywhere on almost imperceptible lodging-places on the crests and ridges of every mountain, the ice-carried erratics forever tempt one to climb up and try to dislodge them. But generally one finds they weigh many tons, and his puny strength cannot stir them the single inch necessary to send them crashing down into the valleys below.

Labrador has no towns, no roads, and no policemen. Scattered along its shores one meets, during the months of open water, only the venturous fishing-vessels from the far South, manned by their wholesome crews, the stout-hearted vikings of to-day, and, beside these, the native Eskimo, still almost prehistoric in their customs, and themselves alone of sufficient interest to merit a side-show at all the recent world's exhibitions. But for the fact that trade and the gospel have gone hand

THE NATIVE ESKIMO Still almost prehistoric in their customs in hand, this "flavor of the past" would have been blotted out long ago. Only around the stations of the brethren of the Moravian Church are there left any number of this interesting people. The good Moravian brethren have acted as traders as well as preachers and teachers. By tabooing liquor and cheap gewgaws, by fair dealing, by the inculcation of simple religion, and by a paternal surveillance of morals, they have almost prevented any decrease in the number of their people in the last fifty years, during which only they have kept a census. Meanwhile the Eskimo have everywhere else virtually vanished from the coast.

This is a tribute to the value of their mission especially unimpeachable, in view of the present-day strenuous efforts to prevent loss of life among children in our crowded cities.

It has not been easy to convey to the Eskimo mind the meaning of the Oriental similes of the Bible. Thus, the Lamb of God had to be translated kotik, or "young seal." This animal, with its perfect whiteness as it lies in its cradle of ice, its gentle, helpless nature, and its pathetic, innocent eyes, is probably as apt a substitute, however, as nature offers. Yet not long ago an elderly lady, who at other times had almost a genius for what savored of idolatry, sent me in Labrador a box containing a stuffed lamb, "that the Eskimo," after all these years, "might learn better."

To the Eskimo mind, everything animate or inanimate possesses a soul. Thus, in their graves v^e found they invariably placed every cherished possession, that their spirits might serve the departed spirit in the same capacities in the life to come. There is little room for burial beneath the scanty earth in Labrador, even if the frost v^ould permit it. So the grave consists of upright stones, with long, flat ones laid across. These not only serve to keep the wolves from the body, but wide chinks also afford the spirits free passage in and out.

I have found many graves perched upon some promontory jutting out into the sea, so that the spirit might be near its huntingground and again take toll from the spirits of departed seals. In a little cache at the foot of the grave are generally to be found the remnants of the man's property. Even since Christianity has come among them, I have seen a modern rifle and good steel snow-knives rusting in the grave ; and I have found pipes filled with tobacco, that those who were denied the pleasures of its enjoyment while on earth should at least have a chance given them to learn its use in the regions beyond the grave. No Puritanical forecasts of the joys of heaven trouble the Eskimo mind.

The stone age is only just passing in Labrador. But already the museums of the South are hungering for these witnesses to man's humble origin, and the most easily found graves have been ruthlessly rifled. Indeed, one man came and complained to me that an energetic collector, of unmentionable nationality, had positively carried off the bones of his grandmother! I wished on one occasion to obtain some specimens of stone kettles, axes, knives, and other relics from some ancient graves known to me on a certain island. We had not time, however, to leave our steamer to hunt for them. Out of gratitude for services rendered to them in my capacity as "Aniasuit," or "the man that has to do with pain," some of my little friends readily promised to seek them for me. They explained, however, that they should put something into the grave for each thing they took out. I referred them to the Moravian station, where they could purchase, at my expense, things likely to satisfy the departed spirits, as there was nothing they would have found valuable in my floating drug store.

Now, it so happened that once, when it was the mark of an anarchist in Germany to wear a beard, the German brethren had brought out a job-lot of razors, forgetful that nature had been merciful to the Eskimo in their frigid climes, and spared them superfluous hair about their faces. So the stock was still available, and on returning in the spring I found my friends had solemnly deposited these in the caches they had robbed. The idea of the hoary spirits of their ancestors practising the noble art, in the night watches, on these awful headlands, with inferior razors, appealed to other than the religious sense in us. But the minds of all men are more or less muddled {teste Carlyle), and the Eskimo have a singular lack of humor.

As patients, these little people are most excellent. They have no fear of pain, and heal rapidly, a tribute, possibly, to our almost germless air. On one occasion, seated in a large Eskimo tiihik, or tent, I was seeing the sick of a settlement which I had not visited for eight months. It came the turn of a gifl of about fifteen years, who silently held up a frost-bitten toe that needed removing. As there was a dense crowd in the tent, she insisted it should be done at once. The satisfaction of being for the moment the center of attraction was all the anesthetic she wanted.

Gratitude, also, is not so uncommon in Labrador as it was in Judea. I had operated one year, in the North, on a young man with a dislocated shoulder, and had long since forgotten all about him. Some two years later a beaming Eskimo met me at the head of the companion-ladder, and produced from beneath his voluminous kossack a finely ornamented pair of boots. He soon made clear to me that he had been pursuing me all this time with this token of his gratitude, and kept pointing to the shoulder, which he could now freely use. I have known it otherwise at home with doctors and their fees, where the patient took no unlawful trouble to see his benefactor rewarded.

There are in Labrador settlers and halfbreeds who are ever increasing in number, while their pure-blooded brethren are vanishing away. These, too, are an interesting people, retaining many bygone superstitions and customs, some of which they have in common with all fisherfolk. Among these a large part of my practice lies. I append a sample invitation to pay a visit to one of them who was sick. It is an exact copy.

Please Docker i sen

you this to see if

you call in Sea

bight when you gose

down to see Mr. archbell

Chubbs he in nead

of you.

A letter like this, however, is a compromise with their own ideas, and to me is the emblem of a better era. For among my first patients, thirteen years ago, on a lonely island, was the father of a budding family. When I called, he was sitting up on his bed, perspiration from pain pouring down his face, and the red lines of a spreading infection running up his arm from a deep poisoned wound in the hand. I showed him that his life was at stake, and that I could painlessly open the deep wound. He absolutely refused, as he had already sent a messenger to an old lady up the bay who was given to "charming." Passing the island again before I left next morning, I found he had not slept since I went away, and the old lady had not yet arrived. He again refused the knife. I did not call again at the island till the following spring, when I was not surprised to find his "tilt" deserted and the roof fallen in. The old lady had not arrived in time, and the neighbors, in their generous way, had shared his children among them.

Having no doctors of their own, they display no small ingenuity in devising remedies from the few resources they possess. Naturally, certain persons are looked upon as specially gifted. The claims of wise women vie with those of seventh sons, but no reasonable person would dispute the priority of the seventh son of a seventh son. "Why, bless yer, worms '11 perish in their open hands." Once, in stripping a fisherman to examine his chest, I perceived that he had a string, as of a scapular, around his neck. Knowing that he was not a Catholic, I asked him the meaning of it. "Sure, 't is a toothache-string, sir," he rephed. "Sure, I never had the toothache sunce I worn un." So another, who on one occasion I found to be wearing a green ribbon round his left wrist, told me, "'T is against the bleedin', sir, if ever I be took."

There are more feet than shoes in many families in Labrador, and we are frequently called upon to amputate legs which have been frozen. Not only do the children suffer from this cause, but men and women as well. I recall a case which proves the unimportance of creed in religion. The wife of a Roman Catholic had a leg amputated, and I was called upon to supply an artificial leg. I had one in stock, and after I had given it to her I learned its history. The leg had been made for a Baptist soldier who lost a limb in the Civil War. When he died, his wife, who was a Presbyterian, kept it for a while and then gave it to an Episcopal cripple. It worked around to my mission in a devious way, and I gave it to the wife of the Roman Catholic.

On one occasion, the burly skipper of a fishing crew boarded the mission ship, his head swathed in red flannel, his cheek blistered with liniment, and his face puffed out like a blue-bag.

"Toothache, Skipper Joe?" I said; "you '11 soon be all right," and I pulled down a snaky instrument from the row in the chart-house.

"No, no, Doctor; I wants un charmed."

"But, you know, I don't charm people, Skipper. Nonsense, I tell you! Get out of the deck-house!"

But he only stood vociferating on the deck, "No, no, Doctor; 't is only charmin' her wants."

Time is precious when steam is in the boiler, so I merely replied, "Sit on that coaming, and open your mouth."

He waited to see that I had dropped the forceps, and then followed my directions. Waving my hands over his head, I touched the offending molar. His mind seemed greatly relieved, and he at once proffered twenty-five cents for the benefit of the mission. Three months later, on my way south, I saw this man again. Beaming with smiles, he volunteered, "Ne'er an ache nor a pain in 'er since you charmed her, Doctor." While he was showing me the molar, still in its place, to confirm his theory, I was wondering what faith-healing really meant.

On one of my winter journeys with dog team and komatik, we made a long detour to see a sick man. A snow-storm overtook us, and we arrived late at night, thoroughly tired out, at the rude tilt where our patient lay. After doing our best for the poor fellow, we stretched out our sleeping-bags on the floor preparatory to turning in, as we are in the habit of doing whenever it is desirable to have a private apartment. It was customary for our host's dogs to burrow down through the snow and sleep under the house. For there they got shelter and warmth beneath that part of the floor where the stove stood. Our dogs, having discovered their burrows, desired to share their comforts, but they could not get down to give battle except by crawling down one at a time. The result was a constant growling and barking only a few inches from our heads. Sleep seemed impossible, yet no one wished the task of digging the dogs out.

It so happened that my host's seventh son was at home, and he promptly offered to charm the dogs into quietude. This he did by standing with his back to the wall and apparently twiddling the thumbs of his clasped hands in some peculiar way. He also muttered a few words which he would not tell me. For my part, I was so tired that I went to sleep watching him, and for me, at least, the charm worked. My driver also confessed he thought that it was we who were charmed; for the seventh son had faded from sight and memory while still twiddling his thumbs.

Much more rational than these efforts are some of those in use at sea. The astringent liquor from the boiled scrapings of the hardwood sheave of an old block is no mean remedy when swallowed in quantity; and the boiled gelatinous skin of a flatfish, covered with a piece of an oilskin coat, forms a really rational poultice. "Why, 't will draw yous head to yous heels, if you puts her in the right place."

A salt herring, bandaged against the delicate skin of the throat, has much virtue as a countter-irritant ; but, like most of these humble remedies, fails in diphtheria, nor saves in the hour of peril some loved child that skilled aid might have rescued.

It is often said that there is no law in Labrador, and I have heard men profane enough! to add, "Thank God!" I do not know that the facilities for obtaining satisfactory settlements have evolved in proportion to our sense of justice and the intricacies of our methods of obtaining it. In the capacity of magistrate, I was called on once to settle the division of a property which should have left a small sum to a needy family. I found the cost of division by the usual channels would have left only a zero to divide. So we appealed to equity, and forced one another to abide by it. Only last week a dispute arose about the ownership of a certain plot of land. It had beai argued unsuccessfully with high words and with pike-handles. The weaker party applied for a summons. So, appointing the plot of land as the court, and daybreak as the hour, we settled the question between three disputants in exactly fifteen minutes. This included the making of landmarks, which I erected myself. Moreover, the court was able to be back over the hills in time for breakfast, with an excellent appetite and a satisfied mind as his only judicial fees.

There has been no law promulgated as yet in Labrador dealing with the infant mortality and cruelty to children. My first case of this kind involved insistence on a stepfather's assuming the responsibility for a little girl belonging to his new wife. Returning three months later to the same place, I found the man obdurate and the little girl living in a house by hersdf, where he merely allowed food to be sent to her. There could be no gain to the community by our deporting the man to a prison five hundred miles away in Newfoundland, nor gain to the child by forcing so unnatural a person to allow her to live with him. So the court decided to add the httle g-irl to the crew of his steamer, and steamed away with a new kind of fee. Good, however, came out of evil, for we have since ventured on a small orphanage near one of our hospitals, and I have had the supreme pleasure of taking to its shelter more than one delightful little derelict.

We cannot, however, always be Solomons, and the best-intentioned of decisions may sometimes be at fault. Thus, on one occasion a man's cow, feeding on the hillside, was found dead in the morning. It had obviously been killed by some one's dogs. As the owner went up to find the body, he saw two dogs coming away suspiciously licking their chops. These belonged to a poor neighbor of his, the guilt of whose team, I fear, was at no time in doubt. He expressed the greatest sorrow, and offered to shoot his dogs. But that would not bring the cow to life again. So, though he had no money, we decided that the cow should be cut in two, each man taking half, the offender to pay half the value of the cow to the owner, in money, as soon as he could. By the valuation of the coast, the cow was worth only twenty dollars. I was alarmed next day to hear that my steward had bought from the aggressor six dollars' worth of meat, and that two other men had bought four dollars' worth, so that the offender was in pocket and distinctly encouraged to kill his neighbor's cow again, especially as his disposition of his half had left him with a fine meal of fresh beef into the bargain.

The uncertainty of a fisherman's calling, and the long winter of forced inaction, when Jack Frost has our hunting-grounds in his grip, made the need of some remunerative winter work as necessary to us as a safetyvalve is to a boiler. We had an excellent belt of spruce and fir trees at the bottom of our long bays, and a number of us agreed to co-operate in a lumber-mill, that thus men might be helped to help themselves, rather than be forced to accept doles of free flour and molasses, and at the same time be robbed of their self-respect. So we purchased a boiler, engine, and saw-table, and the skipper of our cooperative vessel volunteered to bring these weighty impedimenta on his deck from St. John's. I myself was away in the North, beyond the reach of mails, when it suddenly occurred to me that the boiler weighed over three tons, and we had not chosen a spot or built a wharf on which to land it. We had merely applied for an area on which to conduct operations.

But the genius of the sailor saved the situation. For the skipper had found a spot where he could warp his vessel alongside the rocks. He had then cut down some trees, which he had used as skids, and improvising a derrick out of his main and mizzen halyards, he had safely slipped the boiler to the beach. Others had dragged it up on another set of skids, and had built over it a massive mill-house, kneed like a capsized schooner, and calculated at a pinch to resist a bombardment. True, we had to bring fresh water a mile and a quarter without pipes, but they had sawed wood enough for this, dammed the river, and carried the troughs on eighteen- foot stakes; and now for several years the mill has been running successfully. We had to learn our trade, and it has cost us much unevenly sawed boarding and at least four fingers, but, beyond that, no serious accidents ; and a httle winter village has sprung up about this source of work, with a school and a mission room, and we can afford to pay for logs enough to give a winter's diet to one hundred separate families. We have built schooners at the mill, besides other boats, and a lot of building. I am not sure in my own mind which does more to mitigate the many evils that follow in the wake of semi-starvation, our pills or our mill.

The economic conditions of all places largely cut off from communication are, I presume, hampered by the fact that the supplying of the necessaries of life falls into the hands of a monopoly; so that it often happens that the poorer the people are, the higher the prices they have to pay. It is the more galling to those who wish to preach a gospel of help when they discover that these same poor people find it difficult to get market value for their produce.

Here is an illustration of the cash value of independence which I took the other day from the lips of as fine a toiler of the sea as ever trod a quarter-deck. The man has three sons grown up enough to help him in the fishery. After long years as a poor hook-and-line fisherman, living from hand to mouth, the boys made enough money to induce a kindly merchant to build them a schooner on credit. The schooner, named the Olinda^ cost, ready for sea, with "the bit of food aboard," as she left the narrows of their harbor for the fishery, exactly eighteen hundred dollars. "And us didn't know where us was ever goin' to see it from; and us had three sharemen with us. But us come back, sir, in three months, and sold our catch for twenty-three hundred dollars; so that us had enough to pay our three sharemen, and pay for the schooner, and have one hundred dollars coming to us. Us still had time to go down North again and fetch the freighters us had carried down, and to catch another hundred quintals of fish. The second trip brought us in seven hundred and forty dollars. And now," he said triumphantly, "us is independent, and can buy our bit anywhere us likes ; so it will come cheaper, you see, Doctor," It stands to reason every man cannot shake off quite so easily the shackles which bind him to a particular trader.

It was to help others to do what this man was able to do for himself that thirteen years ago we started a series of small cooperative stores. In many cases these have had the effect that we desired.

The reality of a spiritual world is no stumbling-block to our people, and indeed all are more or less superstitious as to its relations to the world we now inhabit. Four winters ago an excellent trapper, Joe Michelin, living about twenty-five miles up the magnificent river on which the Grand Falls of Labrador are situated, was in much trouble. His children informed him that they had seen a weird, large, hairy man crossing the little bit of open country between the alders on the river-bank and a drogite of woods on the other side of his house. A practical-minded man, he put no credence in the story until one day they ran in and told him it had just crossed the open, and they had seen it waving its hands at them from the willows. Rifle in hand, he went out, and to his intense surprise found fresh, strange tracks in the direction in which the children had told him the creature had gone. These marks sank into the ground at least six inches, where the horses that work at the mill would only have sunk two inches. The mark of the hoof was distinctly cloven, and the strides were at times no less than eight feet apart.

Knowing that he would not be credited if he told this story even to his nearest neighbor, who lived some miles away, he boarded over some of the tracks to preserve them from the weather. At night-time his dogs would often be growling and uneasy, and several times he found they had all been driven into the river during the night. He himself heard the monster walking around the house in the dark, and twice distinctly heard it tapping on the down-stairs shutter. He and his familywere so thoroughly frightened that they always slept in the top loft of their house, with loaded revolvers and rifles beside them.

The tracks became more numerous as the spring opened, and one day his boy of fourteen told him that he, too, had seen the creature vanishing into the trees. A French- Canadian trapper, hearing of his trouble, came over to see the tracks, and was so impressed that he hauled over four bear-traps and set them in the paths. Michelin himself would sit day after day at the window, his repeatingrifle in his hand, and not leaving his position even for meals, on the off chance of a shot at his unearthly visitor. The chief wood-ranger from the big mill told me he had seen the tracks but what to say of them he did not know. No new tracks appeared for some weeks, however, and Michelin quite recovered his equanimity.