The argument for cooperation had been
that life on the coast was not worth living under
the credit system. A short feast and a long famine
was the local epigram. If our profits could be
maintained on the coast, and spent on the coast, then
the next-to-nature life had enough to offer in character
as well as in maintenance to attract a permanent population,
especially with the furring in winter. For the
actual figures showed that good hunters made from
a thousand to fifteen hundred dollars in a season,
besides the salmon and cod fishery. There was,
moreover, game for food, free firewood, water, homes,
and no taxation except indirect in duties on their
goods.
These same conditions prevailed on
the long, narrow slice of land known as the “French
shore” in northern Newfoundland. There the
people were more densely settled, the hinterland was
small, and many therefore could not go furring.
Moreover, the polar current, entering the mouth of
the Straits of Belle Isle, makes this section of land
more liable to summer frosts, with a far worse climate
than the Labrador bays, and gardening is less remunerative.
We puzzled our brains for some way to add to our earning
capacities, some cooperative productive as well as
distributive enterprise.
The poverty which I had witnessed
in Canada Bay in North Newfoundland, some sixty miles
south of St. Anthony Hospital, had left me very keen
to do something for that district which might really
offer a solution of the problem. I had been told
that there was plenty of timber to justify running
a mill in the bay; but that no sawmills paid in Newfoundland.
This was emphasized in St. John’s by my friends
who still own the only venture out of the eleven which
have operated in that city that has been able to continue.
They have succeeded by adopting modern methods and
erecting a factory for making furniture, so as to
supply finished articles direct to their customers.
We knew that in our case labour would be cheaper than
ordinarily, for our labour in winter had generally
to go begging. It was mainly this fact which
finally induced us to make the attempt.
Having talked the matter over with
the people we secured from the Government a special
grant, as the venture, if it succeeded, would relieve
them of the necessity of having poor-relief bills.
The whole expense of the enterprise fell upon myself,
for the Mission Board considered it outside their
sphere; and already we had built St. Anthony Hospital
in spite of the fact that they thought that we were
undertaking more than they would be able to handle,
and had discouraged it from the first.
The people had no money to start a
mill, and the circumstances prohibited my asking aid
from outside, so it was with considerable anxiety
that we ordered a mill, as if it were a pound of chocolates,
and arranged with two young friends to come out from
England as volunteers, except for their expenses,
to help us through with the new effort. At the
same time there was three hundred dollars to pay for
the necessary survey and line cutting, and supplies
of food for the loggers for the winter. Houses
must also be erected and furnished.
Ignorance undoubtedly supplied us
with the courage to begin. Personally I knew
nothing whatever of mills, having never even seen
one. Nor had I seen the grant of land, or selected
a site for the building. This was left entirely
to the people themselves; and as none of them had
ever seen a mill either, we all felt a bit uneasy about
our capacities. I had left orders with the captain
of the Cooperator (our schooner) to fetch the mill
and put it where the people told him; but when I heard
that there was one piece which included the boiler
which weighed three tons, it seemed to me that they
could never handle it. We had no wharf ready
to receive it and no boat capable of carrying it.
I woke many times that summer wondering if it had not
gone to the bottom while they were attempting the landing.
There was no communication whatever with them as we
were six hundred miles farther north on our summer
cruise; and we had not the slightest control over
the circumstances in which we might become involved.
It was late in the season and the
snow was already deep on the ground when eventually
we were piloted to the spot selected. It was nine
miles up the bay on a well-wooded promontory of a side
inlet. The water was deep to the shore and the
harbour as safe as a house. The boys from England
had arrived, and a small cottage had been erected,
tucked away in the trees. It was very small, and
very damp, the inside of the walls being white with
frost in the morning until the fire had been under
way for some time. But it was a merry crowd, emerging
from various little hutlets around among the trees,
which greeted the Strathcona.
The big boiler, the “bugaboo”
of my dreams all summer, lay on the bank. “How
did you get it there?” was my first query.
“We warped the vessel close to the land, and
then hove her close ashore and put skids from the
rocks off to her. On these we slid the boiler,
all hands hauling it up with our tackles.”
Having left the few supplies which
we had with us, for the Strathcona has no hold or
carrying space, we returned to the hospital, mighty
grateful for the successful opening of the venture.
The survey had been completed and accepted by the
Government, and though unfortunately it was but very
poorly marked, and we have had lots of trouble since, as
we have never been able to say exactly where our boundaries
lie, nor even to find marks enough to follow over the
original survey again, yet it enabled us
to get to work, which was all that we wanted at the
moment.
The fresh problems at the hospital,
and the constant demands on our energies, made Christmas
and New Year go by with our minds quite alienated
from the cares of the new enterprise. But when
after Christmas the dogs had safely carried us over
many miles of snow-covered wastes, and our immediate
patients gave us a chance to look farther afield,
I began to wonder if we might not pay the mill a visit.
By land it was only fifty miles distant to the southward,
possibly sixty if we had to go round the bays.
The only difficulty about the trip was that there
were no trails, and most of the way led through virgin
forest, where windfalls and stumps and dense undergrowth
mixed with snow made the ordinary obstacle race a sprint
in the open in comparison. We knew what it meant,
because in our eagerness to begin our dog-driving
when the first snow came, we had wandered over small
trees crusted with snow, fallen through, and literally
floundered about under the crust, unable to climb to
the top again. It was the nearest thing to the
sensations of a man who cannot swim struggling under
the surface of the water. Moreover, on a tramp
with the minister, he had gone through his snow racquets
and actually lost the bows later, smashing them all
up as he repeatedly fell through between logs and
tree-trunks and “tuckamore.” His summons
for help and the idea that there were still eight
miles to go still haunted me. On that occasion
we had cut down some spruce boughs and improvised
some huge webbed feet for ourselves, which had saved
the situation; but whether they would have served
for twenty or thirty miles, we could not tell.
Not so long before a man named Casey, bringing his
komatik down the steep hill at Conche, missed his footing
and fell headlong by a bush into the snow. The
heavy, loaded sledge ran over him and pressed him
still farther into the bank. Struggling only
made him sink the deeper, and an hour later the poor
fellow was discovered smothered to death.
No one knew the way. We could
not hear of a single man who had ever gone across
in winter, though some said that an old fellow who
had lived farther south had once carried the mails
that way. At length we could stand it no longer,
and arranging with four men and two extra teams, we
started off. We hoped to reach the mill in two
days, but at the end of that time we were still trying
to push through the tangle of these close-grown forests.
To steer by compass sounded easy, but the wretched
instrument seemed persistently to point to precipitous
cliffs or impenetrable thickets. There were no
barren hilltops after the first twenty miles.
Occasionally we would stop, climb a tree, and try
to get a view. But climbing a conifer whose boughs
are heavily laden with ice and snow is no joke, and
gave very meagre returns. At last, however, we
struck a high divide, and from an island in the centre
of a lake, occupied only by two lone fir trees, we
got a view both ways, showing the Cloudy Hills which
towered over the south side of the bay in which the
mill stood.
A very high, densely wooded hill lay,
however, directly in our path; and which way to get
round it best none of us knew. We “tossed
up” and went to the eastward the
wrong side, of course. We soon struck a river,
and at once surmised that if we followed it, it must
bring us to the head of the bay, which meant only
three miles of salt water ice to cover. Alas,
the stream proved very torrential. It leaped here
and there over so many rapid falls that great canyons
were left in the ice, and instead of being able to
dash along as when first we struck it, we had painfully
to pick our way between heavy ice-blocks, which sorely
tangled up our traces, and our dogs ran great danger
of being injured. Nor could we leave the river,
for the banks were precipitous and utterly impassable
with undergrowth. At length when we came to a
gorge where the boiling torrent was not even frozen,
and as prospects of being washed under the ice became
only too vivid, we were forced to cut our way out
on the sloping sides. The task was great fun,
but an exceedingly slow process.
It was altogether an exciting and
delightful trip. Now we have a good trail cut
and blazed, which after some years of experience we
have gradually straightened out, with two tilts by
the roadside when the weather makes camping imperative,
or when delay is caused by having helpless patients
to haul, till now it is only a “joy-ride”
to go through that beautiful country “on dogs.”
There is always a challenge, however, left in that
trail just enough to lend tang to the toil
of it. Once, having missed the way in a blizzard,
we had to camp on the snow with the thermometer standing
at twenty below zero. The problem was all the
more interesting as we struck only “taunt”
timberwoods with no undergrowth to halt the wind.
On another occasion we attempted to cross Hare Bay,
and one of the dogs fell through the ice. There
was a biting wind blowing, and it was ten degrees
below zero. When we were a mile off the land
I got off the sledge to try the ice edge, when suddenly
it gave way, and in I fell. It did not take me
long to get out the best advice being to
“keep cool.” I had as hard a mile’s
running as ever I experienced, for my clothing was
fast becoming like the armour of an ancient knight;
and though in my youth I had been accustomed to break
the ice in the morning to bathe, I had never run in
a coat of mail.
Never shall I forget dragging ourselves
in among those big trees with our axes, and tumbling
to sleep in a grave in the snow, in spite of the elements.
In this hole in a sleeping-bag, protected by the light
drift which blew in, one rested as comfortably as in
a more conventional type of feather bed. Nor,
when I think of De Quincey’s idea of supreme
happiness before the glowing logs, can I forget that
gorgeous blaze which the watch kept up by felling trees
full length into the fire, so that our Yule logs were
twenty feet long, and the ruddy glow and crackling
warmth went smashing through the hurtling snowdrift.
True, it was cold taking off our dripping clothing,
which as it froze on us made progress as difficult
as if we were encased in armour. But dancing
up and down before a huge fire in the crisp open air
under God’s blue sky gave as pleasing a reaction
as doing the same thing in the dusty, germ-laden atmosphere
of a ballroom in the small hours of the night, when
one would better be in bed, if the joys of efficiency
and accomplishment are the durable pleasure of life.
It was a real picnic which we had
at the mill. Our visit was as welcome as it was
unexpected, and we celebrated it by the whole day
off, when all hands went “rabbiting.”
When at the end, hot and tired, we gathered round
a huge log fire in the woods and discussed boiling
cocoa and pork buns, we all agreed that it had been
a day worth living for.
Logging had progressed favourably.
Logs were close at hand; and the whole enterprise
spelled cash coming in that the people had never earned
before. The time had also arrived to prepare the
machinery for cutting the timber; boxes were being
unpacked, and weird iron “parts” revealed
to us, that had all the interest of a Chinese puzzle,
with the added pleasure of knowing that they stood
for much if we solved the problems rightly.
When next we saw the mill it was spring,
and the puffing smoke and white heaps of lumber that
graced the point and met our vision as we rounded
Breakheart Point will not soon be forgotten. Only
one trouble had proved insurmountable. The log-hauler
would not deliver the goods to the rotary saw.
Later, with the knowledge that the whole apparatus
was upside down, it did not seem so surprising after
all. One accident also marred the year’s
record. While a party of children had been crossing
the ice in the harbour to school, a treacherous rapid
had caused it to give way and leave a number of them
in the water. One of my English volunteers, being
a first-class athlete, had by swimming saved five
lives, but two had been lost, and the young fellow
himself so badly chilled that it had taken the hot
body of one of the fathers of the rescued children,
wrapped up in bed with him in lieu of a hot-water
bottle, to restore his circulation.
The second fall was our hardest period.
The bills for our lumber sold had not been paid in
time for us to purchase the absolutely essential stock
of food for the winter; and if we could not get a store
of food, we knew that our men could not go logging.
It was food, not cash, which they needed in the months
when their own slender stock of provisions gave out,
and when all communication was cut off by the frozen
sea.
For a venture which seemed to us problematical
in its outcome, we did not dare to borrow money or
to induce friends to invest; and of course Mission
funds were not available. For the day has not
yet arrived when all those who seek by their gifts
to hasten the coming of the Kingdom of God on earth
recognize that to give the opportunity to men to provide
decently for their families and homes is as effective
work for the Master, whose first attribute was love,
as patching up the unfortunate victims of semi-starvation.
The inculcation of the particular intellectual conception
which the donor may hold of religion, or as to how,
after death, the soul can get into heaven, is, as
the result of the Church teaching, still considered
far the most important line of effort. The emphasis
on hospitals is second, partly at least because, so
it has seemed to me as a doctor of medicine, the more
obvious personal benefit thereby conferred renders
the recipients more impressionable to the views considered
desirable to promulgate. Yet only to-day, as
I came home from our busy operating-room, I felt how
little real gain the additional time on earth often
is either to the world outside or even to the poor
sufferers themselves. In order to have one’s
early teachings on these matters profoundly shaken,
one has only to work as a surgeon in a country where
tuberculosis, beri-beri, and other preventable diseases,
and especially the chronic malnutrition of poverty
fills your clinic with suffering children, who at
least are victims and not responsible spiritually for
their “punishment.” Of course, the
magnitude of service to the world of every act of
unselfishness, and much more of whole lives of devotion,
such as that of Miss Sullivan, the teacher of Miss
Helen Keller, can never be rightly estimated by any
purely material conception of human life.
Love is dangerously near to sentimentality
when we actually prefer remedial to prophylactic charity and
I personally feel that it is false economy even from
the point of view of mission funds. The industrial
mission, the educational mission, and the orphanage
work at least rank with and should go hand in hand
with hospitals in any true interpretation of a gospel
of love.
In subsequent years the nearest attempt
to finance such commonly called “side issues
of the work” has been with us through the medium
of a discretionary fund. Into this are put sums
of money specially given by personal friends, who
are content to leave the allocation of their expenditure
in the hands of the worker on the actual field.
This fund is, of course, paid out in the same way
as other mission funds, and is as strictly supervised
by the auditors. While it leaves possibly more
responsibility than some of us are worthy of, it enables
individuality to play that part in mission business
which every one recognizes to be all-important in
the ordinary business of the world. No money,
however, from this fund has ever gone into the mill
or in assisting the cooperative stores.
Sorry as one feels to confess it,
I have seen money wasted and lost through red tape
in the mission business. And after all is not
mission business part of the world’s business,
and must not the measure of success depend largely
on the same factors in the one case as in the other?
Has one man more than another the right to be called
“missionary,” for of what use is any man
in the world if he has no mission in it? Christ’s
life is one long emphasis on the point that in the
last analysis, when something has to be done, it is
the individual who has to do it. It is, we believe,
a fact of paramount importance for efficiency and
economy; and the loyalty of God in committing such
trust to us, when He presumably knows exactly how unworthy
we are of it, is the explanation of life’s enigma.
When at last our food and freight
were purchased for the loggers for the winter and
landed by the mail steamer nine miles from the mill,
the whole bay was frozen and five miles of ice already
over six inches thick. The hull of the Strathcona
was three eighths of an inch soft steel; but there
was no other way to transport the goods but on her,
excepting by sledges a very painful and
impracticable method.
It was decided that as we could not
possibly butt through the ice, we must butt over it.
The whole company of some thirty men helped us to
move everything, including chains and anchors, to the
after end of the ship, and to pile up the barrels
of pork, flour, sugar, molasses, etc., together
with boats and all heavy weights, so that her fore
foot came above the water level and she looked as
if she were sinking by the stern. We then proceeded
to crash into the ice. Up onto it we ran, and
then broke through, doing no damage whatever to her
hull. The only trouble was that sometimes she
would get caught fast in the trough, and it was exceedingly
hard to back her astern for a second drive. To
counteract this all hands stood on one rail, each carrying
a weight, and then rushed over to the other side,
backward and forward at the word of command, thus
causing the steamer to roll. It was a very slow
process, but we got there, though in true Biblical
fashion, literally “reeling to and fro like
drunken men.”
While the mill was in its cradle,
we in the Strathcona were cruising the northern Labrador
waters. We witnessed that year, off the mighty
Kaumajets, the most remarkable storm of lightning that
I have ever seen in those parts. Inky masses
hid the hoary heads of those tremendous cliffs.
Away to the northwest, over the high land called Saeglek,
a lurid light just marked the sharp outline of the
mills. Ahead, where we were trying to make the
entrance to Hebron Bay, an apparently impenetrable
wall persisted. Seaward night had already obscured
the horizon; but the moon, hidden behind the curtain
of the storm, now and again fitfully illuminated some
icebergs lazily heaving on the ocean swell. Almost
every second a vivid flash, now on one side, now on
the other, would show us a glimpse of the land looming
darkly ahead. The powers of darkness seemed at
play; while the sea, the ice, the craggy cliffs, and
the flashing heavens were advertising man’s
puny power.
An amusing incident took place in
one isolated harbour. A patient came on board
for medicine, and after examining him I went below
to make it up. When I came on deck again I gave
the medicine to one I took to be my man, and then
sent him ashore to get the twenty-five cent fee for
the Mission which he had forgotten. No sooner
had he gone than another man came and asked if his
medicine was ready. I had to explain to him that
the man just climbing over the rail had it. The
odd thing was that the latter, having paid for it,
positively refused to give it up. True, he had
not said that he was ill, but the medicine looked good
(Heaven save the mark!) and he “guessed that
it would suit his complaint all right.”
At the mill we found that quite a
large part of the timberland was over limestone, while
near our first dam there was some very white marble.
We fully intended to erect a kiln, using our refuse
for fuel, for the land is loaded with humic acid,
and only plants like blueberries, conifers, and a
very limited flora flourish on it. Some friends
in England, however, hearing of marble in the bay,
which it was later discovered formed an entire mountain,
commenced a marble mine near the entrance. The
material there is said to be excellent for statuary.
Even this small discovery of natural resources encouraged
us. For having neither road, telegraph, nor mail
service to the mill, we hoped that the development
of these things might help in our own enterprise.
For ten years the little mill has
run, giving work to the locality, better houses, a
new church and school, and indeed created a new village.
The only trouble with this North country’s
own peculiar winter work, fur-hunting, is that its
very nature limits its supply. In my early days
in the country, fur in Labrador was very cheap.
Seldom did even a silver fox fetch a hundred dollars.
Beaver, lynx, wolverine, wolves, bears, and other
skins were priced proportionately. Still, some
men lived very well out of furring. We came to
the conclusion that the only way to improve conditions
in this line was to breed some of the animals in captivity.
We did not then know of any enterprise of that kind,
but I remembered in the zoological gardens at Washington
seeing a healthy batch of young fox pups born in captivity.
Life is short. Things have to
be crowded into it. So we started that year an
experimental fox farm at St. Anthony. A few uprights
from the woods and some rolls of wire are a fox farm.
We put it close by the hospital, thinking that it
would be less trouble. The idea, we rejoice to
know, was perfectly right; but we had neither time,
study, nor experience to teach us how to manage the
animals. Very soon we had a dozen couples, red,
white, patch, and one silver pair. Some of the
young fox pups were very tame, for I find an old record
written by a professor of Harvard University, while
he was on board the Strathcona on one trip when we
were bringing some of the little creatures to St.
Anthony. He describes the state of affairs as
follows: “Dr. Grenfell at one time had
fifteen little foxes aboard which he was carrying to
St. Anthony to start a fox farm there. Some of
these little animals had been brought aboard in blubber
casks, and their coats were very sticky. After
a few days they were very tame and played with the
dogs; were all over the deck, fell down the companionway,
were always having their tails and feet stepped on,
and yelping for pain, when not yelling for food.
The long-suffering seaman who took care of them said,
‘I been cleaned out that fox box. It do
be shockin’. I been in a courageous turmoil
my time, but dis be the head smell ever I witnessed.’”
When the farm was erected, every schooner
entering the harbour was interested in it, and a deep-cut
pathway soon developed as the crews went up to see
the animals. The reds and one patch were very
tame, and always came out to greet us. One of
the reds loved nothing better than to be caught and
hugged, and squealed with delight like a child when
you took notice of it. The whites, and still more
the silvers, were always very shy; and though we never
reared a single pup, there were some born and destroyed
by the old ones.
As the years passed we decided to
close up the little farm, particularly after a certain
kind of sickness which resembled strychnine poisoning
had attacked and destroyed three of the animals which
were especial pets. We then converted the farm
into a garden with a glass house for our seedling
vegetables.
Meanwhile the industry had been developed
by a Mr. Beetz in Quebec Labrador with very marked
economic success; and in Prince Edward Island with
such tremendous profit that it soon became the most
important industry in the Province. Enormous prices
were paid for stock. I remembered a schooner
in the days of our farm (1907) bringing me in four
live young silvers, and asking two hundred dollars
for the lot. We had enough animals and refused
to buy them. In 1914 one of our distant neighbours,
who had caught a live slut in pup, sold her with her
little brood for ten thousand dollars. We at once
started an agitation to encourage the industry locally,
and the Government passed regulations that only foxes
bred in the Colony could be exported alive. The
last wild one sold was for twenty-five dollars to a
buyer, and resold for something like a thousand dollars
by him. A large number of farms grew up and met
with more or less success, one big one especially
in Labrador, which is still running. We saw there
this present year some delightful little broods, also
some mink and marten (sables), the prettiest little
animals to watch possible. For some reason the
success of this farm so far has not been what was hoped
for it. Indeed, even in Prince Edward Island
the furor has somewhat died down owing to the war;
though at the close of the war it is anticipated that
the industry will go on steadily and profitably.
Are not sheep, angora goats, oxen, and other animals
just the result of similar efforts? If fox-farming
some day should actually supersede the use of the
present sharp-toothed leg trap, no small gain would
have been effected. A fox now trapped in those
horrible teeth remains imprisoned generally till he
perishes of cold, exhaustion, or fear. Though
the fur trapper as a rule is a most gentle creature,
the “quality of mercy is not strained”
in furring.