It was now the fall of 1908, and the
time had come for me to visit England again and try
and arouse fresh interest in our work; and this motive
was combined with the desire to see my old mother,
who was now nearing her fourscore years. I decided
to leave in November and return via America
in the spring to receive the honorary degree of LL.D.
from Williams College and of M.A. from Harvard, which
I had been generously offered.
My lecture tour this winter was entrusted
to an agency. Propaganda is a recognized necessity
in human life, though it has little attraction for
most men. To me having to ask personally for money
even for other people was always a difficulty.
Scores of times I have been blamed for not even stating
in a lecture that we needed help. The distaste
for beating the big drum, which lecturing for your
own work always appears to be, makes me quite unable
to see any virtue in not doing it, but just asking
the Lord to do it. If I really were convinced
that He would meet the expenses whether I worked or
not, I should believe that neither would He let people
suffer and die untended out here or anywhere else.
Indeed, it would seem a work of supererogation to have
to remind Him of the necessity that existed.
The fact that we have to show pictures
of the work which we are doing is tiresome and takes
time, but it encourages us to have pictures worth
taking and to do deeds which we are not ashamed to
narrate. It also stimulates others to give themselves
as well as their money to similar kinds of work at
their own doorsteps, to see how much like themselves
their almoners are. Only to-day my volunteer secretary
told me that he honestly expected to meet “a
bearded old fogey in spectacles,” not a man
who can shoot his own dinner from the wing or who
enjoys the justifiable pleasures of life.
The religion of Christ never permitted
me to accept the idea that there is “nothing
to do, only believe.” Every man ought to
earn his own bread and the means to support his family.
Why, then, should you have only to ask the Lord to
give unasked the wherewithal to feed other people’s
families?
Lecturing for philanthropies, only
another word for the means to help along the Kingdom
of God on earth, is in England usually carried on
through the ordinary missionary meetings; and in my
previous experience they were not generally much credit
to the splendid objects in view. The lectures
were often patronized by small audiences largely composed
of women and children.
That particular winter in England
I had the privilege of addressing all sorts of workmen’s
clubs and city lecture-course audiences, people who
would have “the shivers” almost if one
had asked them to attend a “missionary”
lecture. The collection, or even the final monetary
outcome, is far from being the test of the value of
the address. To commend Christ’s religion
by minimizing in any way the prerogative He gave men
of carrying on the work of His kingdom in their human
efforts is to sap the very appeal that attracts manhood
to Him. I never wanted to sing, “Oh! to
be nothing, nothing.” I always wished to
sing, “Oh! make me something, something” that
shall leave some footprints on the sands of time,
and have some record of talents gained to offer a
Master whom we believe to be righteous.
When spring came and the lectures
were over, a new idea suddenly dawned upon me.
If I were going to America to festive gatherings and
to have some honours conferred, why leave the mother
behind? Seventy-eight years is not old.
She was born in India, had lived in England, and suppose
anything did happen, why not sleep in America? she
would be just as near God there. The splendid
Mauretania not only took us safely over, but gave
me also that gift which I firmly believe God designed
for me a real partner to share in my joys
and sorrows, to encourage and support in trouble and
failures, to inspire and advise in a thousand ways,
and in addition to bring into my distant field of
work a personal comrade with the culture, wisdom,
and enthusiasm of the American life and the training
of one of the very best of its Universities.
We met on board the second day out.
She was travelling with a Scotch banker of Chicago
and his wife, Mr. W.R. Stirling, whose daughter
was her best friend. They were returning from
a motor tour through Europe and Algeria. The
Mauretania takes only four and a half days in crossing,
and never before did I realize the drawbacks of “hustle,”
and yet the extreme need of it on my part. The
degrees of longitude slipped by so quickly that I
felt personally aggrieved when one day we made over
six hundred miles, and the captain told us in triumph
that it was a new record. The ship seemed to
be paying off some spite against me. My mother
kept mostly to her cabin. Though constantly in
to see her, I am afraid I did not unduly worry her
to join me on the deck. When just on landing
I told her that I had asked a fellow passenger to
become my wife, I am sure had the opportunity arisen
she would have tumbled down the Mauretania’s
staircase. When she had the joy of meeting the
girl, her equanimity was so far upset as to let an
unaccustomed tear roll down her cheek. That, at
least, is one of the tears which I have cost her which
brings no regrets. For she confesses that it
often puzzles her to which of our lives the event has
meant most.
The constant little activities of
my life had so filled every hour of time, and so engrossed
my thoughts, that I had never thought to philosophize
on the advisability of marriage, nor stopped to compare
my life with those of my neighbors. There is no
virtue in keeping the Ninth Commandment and not envying
your neighbour’s condition or goods when it
never enters your head or heart to worry about them;
and when you are getting what you care about no halo
is due you for not falling victim to envy or jealousy
of others. I have not been in the habit of praying
for special personal providences like fine weather
in my section of the earth, or for head wind for the
schooners so as to give me a fair wind for my
steamer, except so far as one prays for the recognition
of God’s good hand in everything.
I can honestly protest that nothing
in my life ever came more “out of the blue”
than my marriage; and beyond that I am increasingly
certain each day that it did come out of that blue
where God dwells.
I knew neither whence she came nor
whither she was going. Indeed, I only found out
when the proposition was really put that I did not
even know her name for it was down on the
passenger list as one of the daughters of the friends
with whom she was travelling. Fortunately it
never entered my head that it mattered. For I
doubt if I should have had the courage to question
the chaperon, whose daughter she presumably was.
It certainly was a “poser” to be told,
“But you don’t even know my name.”
Had I not been a bit of a seaman, and often compelled
on the spur of the moment to act first and think afterwards,
what the consequences might have been I cannot say.
Fortunately, I remembered that it was not the matter
at issue, and explained, without admitting the impeachment,
that the only question that interested me in the least
was what I hoped that it might become. Incidentally
she mentioned that she had only once heard of me.
It was the year previous when I had been speaking
at Bryn Mawr and she had refused in no measured terms
an invitation to attend, as sounding entirely too
dull for her predilections. I have wondered whether
this was not another “small providence.”
A pathological condition of one’s
internal workings is not unusual even in Britons who
“go down to the sea in ships,” but such
genius as our family has displayed has, so history
assures us, shone best on a quarter-deck; and on this
occasion it pleased God ultimately to add another
naval victory to our credit. It is generally admitted
that an abnormal mentality accompanies this not uncommon
experience of human life, and I found my lack of appreciation
of the rapid voyage paralleled by a wicked satisfaction
that my mother preferred the brass four-poster, so
thoughtfully provided for her by the Cunard Company,
to the risks of the unsteady promenade deck.
When the girl’s way and mine
parted in that last word in material jostlings, the
custom-house shed in Manhattan, after the liner arrived,
I realized that it was rather an armistice than a permanent
settlement which I had achieved. Though there
was no father in the case, I learned that there was
a mother and a home in Chicago. These were formidable
strongholds for a homeless wanderer to assault, but
rendered doubly so by the fact that there was neither
brother nor sister to leave behind to mitigate the
possible vacancy. The “everlasting yea”
not having been forthcoming, under the circumstances
it was no easy task for me to keep faith with the many
appointments to lecture on Labrador which had been
made for me. The inexorable schedule kept me
week after week in the East. Fortunately the
generous hospitality of many old friends who wanted
the pleasure of meeting my mother kept my mind somewhat
occupied. But I confess at the back of it the
forthcoming venture loomed up more and more momentous
as the fateful day drew near for me to start for Chicago.
This visit to my wife’s beautiful
country home among the trees on the bluff of Lake
Michigan in Lake Forest was one long dream. My
mother and I were now made acquainted with the family
and friends of my fiancee. Her father, Colonel
MacClanahan, a man of six feet five inches in height,
had been Judge Advocate General on the Staff of Braxton
Bragg and had fought under General Robert E. Lee.
He was a Southerner of Scotch extraction, having been
born and brought up in Tennessee. A lawyer by
training, after the war, when everything that belonged
to him was destroyed in the “reconstruction period,”
and being still a very young man, he had gone North
to Chicago and begun life again at his profession.
There he met and married, in 1884, Miss Rosamond Hill,
who was born in Burlington, Vermont, but who, since
childhood and the death of her parents, had lived with
her married sister, Mrs. Charles Durand, of Chicago.
The MacClanahans had two children the boy,
Kinloch, dying at an early age as the result of an
accident. Colonel MacClanahan himself died a few
months later, leaving a widow and one child, Anna
Elizabeth Caldwell MacClanahan. She and her mother
had lived the greater part of the time with Mrs. Durand,
who died something more than a year before our engagement.
The friends with whom my fiancee had
been travelling were almost next-door neighbours in
Lake Forest. They made my short stay doubly happy
by endless kindnesses; and all through the years, till
his death in 1918, Mr. Stirling gave me not only a
friendship which meant more to me than I can express,
but his loving and invaluable aid and counsel in our
work.
In spite of my many years of sailor
life, I found that I was expected among other things
to ride a horse, my fiancee being devoted to that
means of progression. The days when I had ridden
to hounds in England as a boy in Cheshire stood me
in some little stead, for like swimming, tennis, and
other pastimes calling for coordination, riding is
never quite forgotten. But remembering Mr. Winkle’s
experiences, it was not without some misgivings that
I found a shellback like myself galloping behind my
lady’s charger. My last essay at horseback
riding had been just eleven years previously in Iceland.
Having to wait a few days at Reikkavik, I had hired
a whole bevy of ponies with a guide to take myself
and the young skipper of our vessel for a three days’
ride to see the geysers. He had never been on
the back of any animal before, and was nevertheless
not surprised or daunted at falling off frequently,
though an interlude of being dragged along with one
foot in the stirrup over lava beds made no little
impression upon him. Fodder of all kinds is very
scarce in the volcanic tufa of which all that land
consists, and any moment that one stopped was always
devoted by our ponies to grubbing for blades of grass
in the holes. On our return to the ship the crew
could not help noticing that the skipper for many
days ceased to patronize the lockers or any other seat,
and soon they were rejoicing that for some reason
he was unable to sit down at all. He explained
it by saying that his ponies ate so much lava that
it stuck out under their skins, and I myself recall
feeling inclined to agree with him.
The journey from Lake Forest to Labrador
would have been a tedious one, but by good fortune
a friend from New York had arranged to come and visit
the coast in his steam yacht, the Enchantress, and
was good enough to pick me up at Bras d’Or.
Dr. Alexander Graham Bell, who had previously shown
me much kindness, permitted us to rendezvous at his
house, and for a second time I enjoyed seeing some
of the experiments of his most versatile brain.
His aeroplanes, telephones, and other inventions were
all intensely interesting, but among his other lines
of work the effort to develop a race of sheep, which
had litters just as pigs do, interested me most.
Francis Sayre, whom I had heard win
the prize at Williams with his valedictory speech,
was again to be my summer secretary. On our arrival
at St. Anthony we found a great deal going on.
The fame as a surgeon of my colleague, Dr. John Mason
Little, had spread so widely that St. Anthony Hospital
would no longer hold the patients who sought assistance
at it. Fifty would arrive on a single mail boat.
They were dumped down on the little wharf, having
been landed in small punts from the steamer, as in
those days we had no proper dock to which the boats
could come. The little waiting-room in the hospital
at night resembled nothing so much as a newly opened
sardine tin; and to cater for the waiting patients
was a Sisyphean task without the Hercules. Through
the instrumentality of Dr. Little’s sister a
fund of ten thousand dollars was raised to double
the size of the hospital, and the work of building
was begun on my return. Although the capacity
was greatly increased thereby we have really been
unable ever to make our building what it ought to
be to meet the problem. The first part, constructed
of green lumber hauled from the woods, and other wings
added at different periods of growth, the endeavour
to blast out suitable heating-plant accommodations all
this has left the hospital building more or less a
thing of rags and patches, and most uneconomical to
run. We are urgently in need of having it rebuilt
entirely of either brick or stone, in order to resist
the winter cold, to give more efficiency and comfort
to patients and staff and to conserve our fuel, which
is the most serious item of expense we have to meet.
But at that time with all its capacity
for service the new addition was rising, sounding
yet one more note of praise in better ability to meet
the demands upon us.
And pari passu came the beautiful
offer of my friend, Mr. Sayre, to double the size
of our orphanage, putting up the new wing in memory
of his father. This meant that instead of twenty
we might now accommodate forty children at a pinch.
Life is so short that it is the depths of pathos to
be hampered in doing one’s work for the lack
of a few dollars. Of great interest to my fiancee
and myself was the selection of a piece of ground
adjoining the Mission land, and the erection for ourselves
of the home which we had planned and designed together
before I had left Lake Forest. We chose some land
up on the hillside and overlooking the sea and the
harbour, where the view should be as comprehensive
as possible. But we feared that even though our
new house was very literally “founded upon a
rock,” the winds might some day remove it bodily
from its abiding-place, and therefore we riveted the
structure with heavy iron bolts to the solid bedrock.
One excitement of that season was
Admiral Peary’s return from the North Pole.
We were cruising near Indian Harbour when some visitors
came aboard to make use of our wireless telegraph,
which at that time we had installed on board.
It proved to be Mr. Harry Whitney. It was the
first intimation that we had had that Peary was returning
that year. Whitney had met Cook coming back from
the polar sea on the west side of the Gulf, where
he had disappeared about eighteen months previously.
I had met Dr. Cook several times myself, and indeed
I had slept at his house in Brooklyn. He had
visited Battle Harbour Hospital in 1893 when he was
wrecked in the steamer in which he was conducting
a party to visit Greenland. We had again seen
him as he went North with Mr. Bradley in the yacht,
and he had sent us back some Greenland dogs to mix
their blood with our dogs, and so perhaps improve their
breed and endurance. These, however, I had later
felt it necessary to kill, for the Greenland dogs
carry the dangerous tapeworm which is such a menace
to man, and of which our Labrador dogs are entirely
free so far.
The picture of this meeting on the
ice between Cook and Whitney gave us the impression
of another Nansen and Jackson at Spitzbergen.
Whitney had welcomed Cook warmly, had witnessed his
troubles at Etah, and his departure by komatik, and
had taken charge of his instruments and records to
carry South with him when he came home. But his
ship was delayed and delayed, and when Peary in the
Roosevelt passed on his way South, fearing to be left
another winter Whitney had accepted a passage on her
at the cost of leaving Cook’s material behind.
He had met his own boat farther south and had transferred
to her. He left the impression very firmly on
all our minds that both he and Dr. Cook really believed
that the latter had found the long-sought Pole.
A little later, while cruising in
thick weather in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, my wireless
operator came in and said: “There can be
no harm telling you, Doctor, that Peary is at Battle
Harbour. He is wiring to Washington that he has
found the Pole, and also he is asking his committee
if he may present the Mission with his superfluous
supplies, or whether he is to sell them to you.”
Seeing that it is not easy to know whence wireless
messages come if the sender does not own up to his
whereabouts, I at once ordered him to wireless to Peary
at Battle the simple words: “Give it to
them, of course,” and sign it “Washington.”
I knew that the Commander would see the joke, and if
the decision turned out later to be incorrect, it
could easily be rectified by purchasing the goods.
A tin of his brown bread now lies among my curios
and one of his sledges is in my barn.
On our arrival at Battle Harbour we
found the Roosevelt lying at the wharf repainting
and refitting. A whole host of newspaper men and
other friends had come North to welcome the explorer
home. Battle was quite a gay place; but it was
living up to its name, for Peary not only claimed
that he had found the Pole, but also that Cook had
not; and he was realizing what a hard thing it is
to prove a negative. We had a very delightful
time with the party, and greatly enjoyed meeting all
the members of the expedition. Among them was
the ill-fated Borup, destined shortly to be drowned
on a simple canoe trip, and the indomitable and athletic
Macmillan who subsequently led the Crocker Land expedition,
our own schooner George B. Cluett carrying them to
Etah.
My secretary, Mr. Sayre, was just
about to leave for America, and at Peary’s request
he transferred to the Roosevelt with his typewriter,
to help the Commander with a few of his many notes
and records. I dare say that he got an inside
view of the question then agitating the world from
Washington to Copenhagen; but if so, he has remained
forever silent about it. For our part we were
glad that some one had found the Pole, for it has
been a costly quest in both fine men and valuable
time, energy, and money. It has caused lots of
trouble and sorrow, and so far at least its practical
issues have been few.
Our wedding had been scheduled for
November, and for the first time I had found a Labrador
summer long. In the late fall I left for Chicago
on a mission that had no flavour of the North Pole
about it. We were married in Grace Episcopal
Church, Chicago, on November 18, 1909. Our wedding
was followed by a visit to the Hot Springs of Virginia;
and then “heigho,” and a flight for the
North. We sailed from St. John’s, Newfoundland,
in January. I had assured my wife, who is an excellent
sailor, that she would scarcely notice the motion of
the ship on the coastal trip of three hundred miles.
Instead of five days, it took nine; and we steamed
straight out of the Narrows at St. John’s into
a head gale and a blizzard of snow. The driving
spray froze onto every thing till the ship was sugared
like a vast Christmas cake. It made the home
which we had built at St. Anthony appear perfectly
delightful. My wife had had her furniture sent
North during the summer, so that now the “Lares
and Penates” with which she had been familiar
from childhood seemed to extend a mute but hearty welcome
to us from their new setting.
We have three children, all born at
St. Anthony. Our elder son, Wilfred Thomason,
was born in the fall of 1910; Kinloch Pascoe in the
fall of 1912, two years almost to a day behind his
brother; and lastly a daughter, Rosamond Loveday,
who followed her brothers in 1917. In the case
of the two latter children the honours of the name
were divided between both sides of the family, Kinloch
and Rosamond being old family names on my wife’s
side, while, on the other hand, there have been Pascoe
and Loveday Grenfells from time immemorial.
Nearly ten years have now rolled away
since our marriage. The puzzle to me is how I
ever got along before; and these last nine years have
been so crowded with the activities and worries of
the increasing cares of a growing work, that without
the love and inspiration and intellectual help of
a true comrade, I could never have stood up under
them. Every side of life is developed and broadened
by companionship. I admit of no separation of
life into “secular” and “religious.”
Religion, if it means anything, means the life and
activities of our divine spirit on earth in relation
to our Father in heaven. I am convinced from
experience of the supreme value to that of a happy
marriage, and that “team work” is God’s
plan for us on this earth.