Labrador will never be a “vineland,” a land of corn and wine, or a country where fenced cities will be needed to keep out the milk and honey. But though there may be other sections of the Empire that can produce more dollars, Labrador will, like Norway and Sweden, produce Vikings, and it is said that the man behind the gun is still of some moment.

In past years we have made quite extensive experiments in trying to adapt possible food supplies to this climate. I had seventeen bags of the hardiest cereal seeds known sent me. They consisted of barley from Lapland, from Russia, from Abyssinia, Mansbury barley and Finnish oats. All the seeds came from the experimental station at Rampart, Alaska, and were grown in latitude 63 de’, which is two degrees north of Cape Chidley.

I find in the notes of one of my earliest voyages my satisfaction at the fact that a storm with lightning and thunder had just passed over the boat and freshened up some rhubarb which I was growing in a box. It had been presented to me by the Governor to carry down to Battle Harbour, and I was very eager that it, my first agricultural venture, should not fail.

Everywhere along the coast the inability to get a proper diet, owing to the difficulties of successful farming even on ever so small a scale, had aroused my mind to the necessity of doing something along that line. In one small cottage I saw a poor woman zealously guarding an aged rooster.

“Have you got a hen?” I asked her.

“No, Doctor; I had one, but she died last year.”

“Then why ever do you keep that rooster?”

“Oh! I hopes some day to get a hen. I’ve had him five years. The last manager of the mill gave him to me, but you’se sees he can’t never go out and walk around because of the dogs, so I just keeps he under that settle.”

Pathetic as were her efforts at stock farming, I must admit that my sympathies were all with the incarcerated rooster.

The problem of the dogs seemed an insurmountable one. The Moravians’ records abound in stories of their destructiveness. Mr. Hesketh Pritchard writes: “Dr. Grenfell records two children and one man killed by the dogs. This is fortunately a much less terrible record than that shown farther north by the Moravian Missions. The savage dogs did great harm at those stations one winter.” Among other accidents, a boy of thirteen, strong and well, was coming home from his father’s kayak to his mother. After some time, as he did not arrive, they went to search for him and found that the dogs had already killed and eaten a good part of him. A full-grown man, driving to Battle Harbour Hospital, was killed by his dogs almost at our doors.

The wolves of the country only pack when deer are about. As a contrast to our dogs, wolves have never been known to kill a man in Labrador, so it would be more correct to speak of a doggish wolf than a wolfish dog. It is an odd thing and a fortunate one that in this country, where it is very common to have been bitten by a dog, we never have been able to find any trace of hydrophobia.

A visitor returning to New York after a summer on the coast wrote as follows: “One of my lasting remembrances of Battle Harbour will be the dreadful dogs. The Mission team were on an island far removed, but there were a number of settlers’ dogs which delighted in making the nights hideous. Never before have I seen dogs stand up like men and grapple with each other in a fight, and when made to move on, renew the battle round the corner.”

Our efforts at agriculture had taught us not to expect too much of the country. A New Zealand cousin, Martyn Spencer, a graduate of Macdonald College of Agriculture, gave us two years’ work. His experience showed that while dogs continued to be in common use, cattle-raising was impossible. Of a flock of forty Herdwick sheep given by Dr. Wakefield, the dogs killed twenty-seven at one time. Angora goats, which we had imported, perished in the winter for lack of proper food. Our land cost so much to reclaim for hay, being soaked in humic acid, that we had always to import that commodity at a cost which made more cows than absolutely essential very inadvisable. Weasels, rats, hawks, and vermin needed a man’s whole time if our chickens were to be properly guarded and repay keeping at all. An alfalfa sent us from Washington did well, and potatoes also gave a fair return, though our summer frosts often destroyed whole patches of the latter. Our imported plum and crabapple trees were ringed by mice beneath the snow in winter. At a farm which we cleared nine miles up a bay, so as to have it removed from the polar current, our oats never ripened, and our turnips and cabbage did not flourish in every case. We could not plant early enough, owing to the ground being frozen till July some years.

On the other hand, when we looked at the hundreds of thousands of square miles on which caribou could live and increase without any help from man, and indeed in spite of all his machinations, our attention was naturally turned to reindeer farming, and I went to Washington to consult Dr. Sheldon Jackson, the Presbyterian missionary from Alaska. It was he who had pioneered the introduction by the United States Government of domestic reindeer into Alaska. At Washington we received nothing but encouragement. Reindeer could make our wilderness smile. They would cost only the protection necessary. They multiply steadily, breeding every year for eight or ten years after their second season. A selected herd should double itself every three years.

The skins are very valuable there is no better nonconductor of heat. The centre of the hair is not a hollow cylinder, but a series of air bubbles which do not soak water, and therefore can be used with advantage for life-saving cushions. The skins are splendid also for motor robes, and now invaluable in the air service. The meat is tender and appetizing, and sold as a game delicacy in New York. The deer fatten well on the abundant mosses of a country such as ours.

Sir William MacGregor, the Governor of Newfoundland at the time, had samples of the mosses collected around the coast and sent to Kew Botanical Gardens for positive identification. The Cladonia Rangiferina, or Iceland moss, proved very abundant. It was claimed, however, that the reindeer would eat any of such plants and shrubs as our coast offers in summer.

As long ago as the year 1903 my interest in the domestication of deer had led me to experiment with a young caribou. We had him on the Strathcona nearly all one summer. He was a great pet on board, and demonstrated how easily trained these animals are. He followed me about like a dog, and called after me as I left the ship’s side in a boat if we did not take him with us. He was as inquisitive as a monkey or as the black bear which we had had two years before. We twice caught him in the chart-room chewing up white paper, for on his first raid there he had found an apple just magnanimously sent us from the shore as a delicacy.

Friends, inspired by Mr. William Howell Reed, of Boston, collected the money for a consignment of reindeer, and we accordingly sent to Lapland to purchase as many of the animals as we could afford. The expense was not so much in the cost of the deer as in the transport. They could not be shipped till they had themselves hauled down to the beach enough moss to feed them on their passage across the Atlantic. Between two hundred and fifty and three hundred were purchased, and three Lapp families hired to teach some of our local people how to herd them. When at last snow enough fell for the sledges to haul the moss down to the landwash, it was dark all day around the North Cape.

Fifty years hence in all probability the Lapps will be an extinct race, as even within the past twelve or fifteen years, districts in which thousands of domesticated reindeer grazed, now possess but a few hundreds.

The good ship Anita, which conveyed the herd to us, steamed in for southern Newfoundland and then worked her way North as far as the ice would permit. At St. Anthony everything was frozen up, and the men walked out of the harbour mouth on the sea ice to meet the steamer bringing the deer. The whole three hundred were landed on the ice in Cremailliere, some three miles to the southward of St. Anthony Hospital, and though many fell through into the sea, they proved hardy and resourceful enough to reach the land, where they gathered around the tinkling bells of the old deer without a single loss from land to land.

One of our workers at St. Anthony that winter wrote that “the most exciting moment was when the woman was lowered in her own sledge over the steamer’s side on to the ice, drawn to the shore, and transferred to one of Dr. Grenfell’s komatiks, as she had hurt her leg on the voyage. The sight of all the strange men surrounding her frightened her, but she was finally reassured, threw aside her coverings, and clutched her frying-pan, which she had hidden under a sheepskin. When she had it safely in her arms she allowed the men to lift her and put her on the komatik.” When the doctor at the hospital advised that her leg would best be treated by operation, the man said, “She is a pretty old woman, and doesn’t need a very good leg much longer.” She was thirty-five!

An Irish friend had volunteered to come out and watch the experiment in our interest and this he did most efficiently. The deer flourished and increased rapidly. Unfortunately the Lapps did not like our country. They complained that North Newfoundland was too cold for them and they wanted to return home. One family left after the first year. A rise in salary kept three of the men, but the following season they wanted more than we had funds to meet, and we were forced to decide, wrongly, I fear, to let them go. The old herder warned me, “No Lapps, no deer”; but I thought too much in terms of Mission finances, the Government having withdrawn their grant toward the herders’ salaries. Trusting to the confidence in their own ability of the locally trained men, I therefore let the Lapp herders go home. The love of the Lapps for their deer is like a fisherman’s for his vessel, and seems a master passion. They appeared even to grudge our having any deer tethered away from their care.

To us it seemed strange that these Lapps always contended that the work was too hard, and that the only reason that they were always gone from camp was that there were no wolves to keep the herd together. They claimed that we must have a big fence or the deer would go off into the country. They, of course, both when with us and in Lapland as well, lived and slept where the herd was. They told us that the deer no longer obeyed the warning summons of the old does’ bells, having no natural enemy to fear; and one told me, “Money no good, Doctor, if herd no increase.” Reindeer seemed to be the complement of their souls.

Meanwhile the Alaskan experiment was realizing all of Dr. Jackson’s happiest hopes; but it had a strong Government grant and backing and plenty of skilled superintendence. The lack of those were our weaknesses. Our deer thrived splendidly and multiplied as we had predicted. We went thirty miles in a day with them with ease. We hauled our firewood out, using half a dozen hauling teams every day. Every fortnight during the rush of patients at the hospital in summer we could afford to kill a deer. The milk was excellent in quality and sweet, and preserved perfectly well in rubber-capped bottles. The cheese was nourishing and a welcome addition to the local diet. At the close of the fourth year we had a thousand deer.

A paper of the serious standing of the “Wall Street Journal,” writing at about that time, under the title “Reindeer Venison from Alaska,” had this to say: “At different times in the past twenty years the Government imported reindeer into Alaska about twelve hundred in all in hopes to provide food for the natives in the future. The plan caused some amusement and some criticism at the time. Subsequent developments, however, have justified the attempt. The herds have now increased to about forty thousand animals, and are rapidly becoming still more numerous. The natives own about two thirds of the number. Shipments of meat have been made to the Pacific Coast cities. Last year the sales of venison and skins amounted to $25,000. It is claimed that the vast tundra, or treeless frozen plains of Alaska, will support at least ten million animals. The federal authorities in charge are so optimistic of the future outlook that the prediction is made that within twenty-five years the United States can draw a considerable part of its meat supply from Alaska.” What can be done in Alaska can be done in Labrador, and with its better facilities for shipping and handling the product, the greater future ought to be the prize of the latter country.

In the spring of 1912 there were five hundred fawns, and at one time we had gathered into our corral for tagging no less than twelve hundred and fifty reindeer. Of these we sold fifty to the Government of Canada for the Peace River District. There they were lost because they were placed in a flat country, densely wooded with alders, and not near the barren lands. We also sold a few to clubs, in order to try and introduce the deer. These sales would have done the experiment no injury, but with the fifty to Canada went my chief herder and two of my other herders from Labrador. This loss, from which we never recovered, coincided with an outbreak of hostility toward the deer among the resident population, who live entirely on the sea edge. Only long afterwards did we find out that it was partly because they feared that we would force deer upon them and do away with their dogs. The local Government official told me only the other day that the second generation from this would have very little good to say of the short-sightedness of these men who let such a valuable industry fail to succeed.

With the increasing cares of the enlarging Mission, with Lieutenant Lindsay gone back to Ireland, and no one to superintend the herding, the successful handling of the deer imperceptibly declined. The tags on the ears were no longer put in; the bells were not replaced in the old localities. The herd was driven, not led as before was paid for, not loved. These differences at the time were marked by increasing poaching on the herd by the people. Here and there at first they had killed a deer unknown to us; and finally we caught one hidden in a man’s woodpile, and several offenders were sent to jail.

We appealed to the Newfoundland Government for protection, as to be policeman and magistrate for the herd which one held in trust was an anomalous position. I was ordered by them to sit on the bench when these cases were up, as I did not own the deer. The section of land on which we had the animals is a peninsula of approximately one hundred and fifty square miles. It is cut off by a narrow, low neck about eight miles long. During all our years of acquaintance with the coast not a dozen caribou had been killed on it, for they do not cross the neck to the northward. But when we applied for a national preserve, that no deer at all might be killed on the peninsula, and so we might run a big fence across the neck with a couple of herders’ houses along the line of it, a petition, signed by part of the “voters,” went up to St. John’s, against such permission being granted us. The petition stated that the deer destroyed the people’s “gardens,” that they were a danger to the lives of the settlers, whose dogs went wild when they crossed their path, and they claimed that the herd “led men into temptation,” because if there were no reindeer to tempt men to kill them, there would be none killed. The deer thus were supposed to be the cause of making cattle-thieves out of honest men! The result was that a law was passed that no domestic reindeer might be shot north of the line of the neck for which we had applied, and which we intended to fence. This only made matters ten times worse, for if the deer either strayed or else were driven across the line, the killing of them was thus legalized.

The deer had cost us, landed, some fifty-one dollars apiece. Three years of herding under the adverse conditions of lack of support from either Government or people had not lessened the per caput expense very materially. If we had shot some one’s fifty-dollar cow, our name would have been anathema but we lost two hundred and fifty deer one winter. In addition to this, when we moved the deer to a spot near another village on a high bluff, over a hundred died in summer, either according to the report of the herders from falling over the cliffs driven by dogs, or of a sickness of which we could not discover the nature, though we thought that it resembled a kind of pneumonia.

The poaching got so bad that we took every means in our power to catch the guilty parties. But it was a very difficult thing to do. A dead deer lies quiet, keeps for weeks where he falls in our winter climate, and can be surreptitiously removed by day or night. The little Lapp dogs occasionally scented them beneath the snow, and many tell-tale “paunches” showed where deer had been killed and carried off.

I had been treating the hunchback boy and only child of a fisherman for whom I had very great respect. His was the home where the Methodist minister always boarded, and he was looked upon as a pillar of piety. After a straightening by frame treatment, the boy’s spine had been ankylosed by an operation; and as every one felt sorry for the little fellow, we were often able to send him gifts. One day the father came to me, evidently in great trouble, to have what proved to be a most uncommon private talk. To my utter surprise he began: “Doctor, I can no longer live and keep the secret that I shot two of your reindeer. I have brought you ninety dollars, all the cash that I have, and I want to ask your forgiveness, after all you have done for me.” Needless to say, it was freely given, but it made me feel more than ever that the deer must be moved to some other country.

It was about this year that the Government for the first time granted us a resident policeman previously we had had to be our own police. Fortunately the man sent was quite a smart fellow. A dozen or so deer had been killed along the section of our coast, and so skilfully that even though it was done under the noses of the herders no evidence to convict could be obtained. It so happened, however, that while one of the herders was eating a piece of one of the slaughtered animals which he had discovered, and that the thieves had not been able to carry off, his teeth met on a still well-formed rifle bullet of number 22 calibre. This type of rifle we knew was scarcely ever used on our coast, and the policeman at once made a round to take every one. He returned with three, which was really the whole stock.

A piece of meat was now placed at a reasonable distance, also some bags of snow, flour, etc., and a number of bullets fired into them. These bullets were then all privately marked, and shuffled up. Our own deductions were made, and a man from twenty miles away summoned, arrested, and brought up. He brought witnesses and friends, apparently to impress the court one especially, who most vehemently protested that he knew the owner of the rifle, and that he was never out of his house at the time that the deer would have been killed. In court was a man, for twenty-seven years agent in Labrador for the Hudson Bay Company a crack shot and a most expert hunter. He was called up, given the big pile of bullets, and told to try and sort them, by the groove marks, into those fired by the three different rifles. We then handed him the control bullet, and he put it instantly on one of the piles. It was the pile that had been fired from the rifle of the accused. This man, in testifying, in order to clear himself, had let out the fact that his rifle had not been kept in his house, but in the house of the vociferous witness whom we now arrested, convicted, and condemned to jail for six months or two hundred dollars fine the latter alternative being given only because we knew that he had not the necessary sum. Protesting as loudly as he had previously witnessed, he went to jail; but the rest let out threats that they were coming back with others to set him free. We had only a frame wooden jail, and a rheumatic jailer of over seventy years, hired to hobble around by day and see that the prisoners were fed and kept orderly. We announced, therefore, that our Hudson Bay friend, with his rifle loaded, would be night jailer.

A few days passed by. The prisoner did not like improving the public thoroughfare for our benefit, while those “who were just as bad as he” went free. Our old jailer took good care that he should hear what good times they were having and laughing at him for being caught. Indeed, he liked it so little that he gave the whole plot away at least what he called the whole. This landed four more of his friends in the same honest and public-spirited occupation which he was himself pursuing; though all escaped shortly afterwards by paying fines to the Government which aggregated some eight hundred dollars which sum was largely paid by others for them.

There was no way, however, definitely to stop the steady decrease in the numbers of the herd; and though we moved them to new pastures around the coast, and fenced them in such small mobile corrals as we could afford, they were not safe. On several occasions we found dead deer with buckshot in them, which had “fallen over the cliffs.” Twice we discovered that deer had even been killed within our own corral. One had been successfully removed, and the other trussed-up carcass had been hidden until a good opportunity offered for it to follow suit. I do not wish to leave the impression on the minds of my readers that every man on this part of the coast is a poacher. Far from it. But the majority of the best men were against the reindeer experiment from the moment that the first trouble arose. A new obligation of social life was introduced. This implied restraint in such trifling things as their having to fence their tiny gardens, protect small stray hay-pooks, and discriminate into what they discharged their ubiquitous blunderbusses.

Meanwhile the steadily increasing demand for meat, especially since the war began, caused outside interest in the experiment; and both the owners of Anticosti Island, and a firm in the West who were commencing reindeer farming on a commercial basis, opened negotiations with us for the purchase of our herd. In the original outlay, however, the Canadian Dominion Government had taken an interest to the amount of five thousand dollars, so it was necessary to get their opinion on the subject. Their Department of Indian Affairs happened to be looking for some satisfactory way of helping out their Labrador Indian population. They sent down and made inquiries, and came to the conclusion that they would themselves take the matter up, as they had done with buffalo, elk, and other animals in the West.

In 1917 all preparations for transferring the deer were made, but war conditions called their steamer away and transport was delayed until 1918. Again their steamer was called off, so we decided to take the deer across ourselves in our splendid three-masted schooner, the George B. Cluett. She, alas, was delayed in America by the submarine scare, and it was the end of September instead of June when she finally arrived. It was a poor season for our dangerous North coast and a very bad time for moving the deer, whose rutting season was just beginning. My herders, too, were now much reduced in numbers. Most of them had gone to the war, and as one had been sick all summer, practically only two were available. To add to the difficulty, many small herds of reindeer were loose in the country outside the corral.

However, we felt that the venture must be attempted at all hazards, even if it delayed our beautiful ship taking a cargo of food to the Allies as she was scheduled to do as soon as possible and though it was a serious risk to remain anchored in the shallow open roadstead off the spot where the deer had to be taken aboard. The work was all new to us. The deer, instead of being tame as they had previously been, were wild at best, and wilder still from their breeding season. The days went by, and we succeeded in getting only a few aboard. We were all greenhorns with the lassoes and lariats which we improvised. A gale of wind came on and nothing could be done but lie up.

Then followed a fine Sunday morning. It was intensely interesting to note the attitude which my crew could take toward my decision to work all day after morning prayers. We talked briefly over the emphasis laid by the four Evangelists on Christ’s attitude toward the day of rest, and what it might mean, if we allowed a rare fine day to go by, to that long section of coast which we had not yet this year visited, and which might thus miss the opportunity of seeing a doctor before Christmas. As since this war has begun I have felt that the Christ whom I wanted to follow would be in France, so now I felt that the Christ of my ideal would go ashore and get those deer in spite of the great breach of convention which it would mean for a “Mission” doctor to work in any way, except in the many ways he has to work every Sunday of his life. The whole crew followed me when I went ashore, saying that they shared my view all except the mate, who spent his Sunday in bed. Idleness is not rest to some natures, either to body or mind, and when at night we all turned in at ten o’clock, wet through for it had rained in the evening and tired out, we were able to say our prayers with just as light hearts, feeling that we had put sixty-eight deer aboard, as if we had enjoyed that foretaste of what some still believe to be the rest of heaven. Rest for our souls we certainly had, and to some of us that is the rest which God calls His own and intends shall be ours also. When later I spoke to some young men about this, it seemed to them a Chestertonian paradox, that we should actually hold a Sunday service and then go forth to render it. They thought that Sunday prayers had to do only with the escaping the consequences of one’s sins.

I still believe that we were absolutely right in our theory of the introduction of the deer into this North country, and that we shall be justified in it by posterity. That these thousands of miles, now useless to men, will be grazed over one day by countless herds of deer affording milk, meat, clothing, transport, and pleasure to the human race, is certain. They do not by any means destroy the land over which they rove. On the contrary, the deep ruts made by their feet, like the ponies’ feet in Iceland, serve to drain the surface water and dry the land. The kicking and pawing of the moss-covered ground with their spade-like feet tear it up, level it, and cut off the dense moss and creeping plants, bring the sub-soil to the top, and over the whole the big herd spreads a good covering of manure.

Reindeer-trodden barrens, after a short rest, yield more grass and cattle food than ever before. No domesticated animal can tolerate the cold of this country and find sustenance for itself as can the deer. It can live as far north as the musk-ox. Peary found reindeer in plenty on the shores of the polar sea. The great barren lands of Canada, from Hudson Bay north of Chesterfield Inlet away to the west, carry tens of thousands of wild caribou. Mr. J.B. Tyrrell’s photographs show armies of them advancing; the stags with their lordly horns are seen passing close to the camera in serried ranks that seem to have no end.

Our own experiment is far from being a failure. It has been a success, even if only the corpse is left in Newfoundland. We have proved conclusively that the deer can live, thrive, and multiply on the otherwise perfectly valueless areas of this North country, and furnish a rapidly increasing domesticated “raw material” for a food and clothing supply to its people.