No human life can be perfect, or even
be lived without troubles. Clams have their troubles,
I dare say. A queer sort of sinking feeling just
like descending in a fast elevator comes over one,
as if trouble and the abdominal viscera had a direct
connection. Some one has said that it must be
because that is where the average mind centres.
Thus, when we lost the little steamer Swallow which
we were towing, and with it the evidence of a crime
and the road to the prevention of its repetition,
it absolutely sickened me for two or three days, or,
to be more exact, during two or three nights.
It was all quite unnecessary, for we can see now that
the matter worked out for the best. The fact
that troubles hurt most when one is at rest and one’s
mind unoccupied, and in the night when one’s
vitality is lowest, is a great comfort, because that
shows how it is something physical that is at fault,
and no physical troubles are of very great importance.
The summer of 1910 brought me a fine
crop of personal worries, and probably deservedly
so, for no one should leave his business affairs too
much to another, without guarantees, occasionally renewed,
that all is well. Few professional men are good
at business, and personally I have no liking for it.
This, combined with an over-readiness to accept as
helpers men whose only qualifications have sometimes
been of their own rating, was really spoiling for
trouble and mine came through the series
of cooperative stores.
To begin with, none of the stores
were incorporated, and their liabilities were therefore
unlimited. Though I had always felt it best not
to accept a penny of interest, I had been obliged to
loan them money, and their agent in St. John’s,
who was also mine, allowed them considerable latitude
in credits. It was, indeed, a bolt from the blue
when I was informed that the merchants in St. John’s
were owed by the stores the sum of twenty-five thousand
dollars, and that I was being held responsible for
every cent of it because on the strength
of their faith in me, and their knowledge that I was
interested in the stores, having brought them into
being, they had been willing to let the credits mount
up. Even then I still had all my work to carry
on and little time to devote to money affairs.
Had I accepted, on first entering the Mission, the
salary offered me, which was that of my predecessor,
I should have been able to meet these liabilities,
and very gladly indeed would I have done so.
As it was I had to find some way out. All the
merchants interested were told of the facts, and asked
to meet me at the office of one of them, go over the
accounts with my agent, and try and find a plan to
settle. One can have little heart in his work
if he feels every one who looks at him really thinks
that he is a defaulter. The outcome of the inquiry
revealed that if the agent could not show which store
owed each debt, neither could the merchants; some
had made out their bills to separate stores, some all
to one store, and some in a general way to myself,
though not one single penny of the debt was a personal
one of my own.
The next discovery was that the manager
of the St. Anthony store, who had been my summer secretary
before, and was an exceedingly pious man whose
great zeal for cottage prayer meetings, and that form
of religious work, had led me to think far too highly
of him had neglected his books. He
had given credit to every one who came along (though
it was a cardinal statute under his rules that no credit
was to be allowed except at his own personal risk).
The St. John’s agent claimed that he had made
a loss of twelve thousand dollars in a little over
a year, in which he professed to have been able to
pay ten per cent to shareholders and put by three
hundred dollars to reserve. Besides this, the
new local store secretary had mixed up affairs by
both ordering supplies direct from Canada and sending
produce there, which the St. John’s agent claimed
were owed to the merchants in that city.
These two men, instead of pulling
together, were, I found, bitter enemies; and it looked
as if the whole pack of cards were tumbling about
my ears. I cashed every available personal asset
which I could. The beautiful schooner, Emma E.
White, also a personal possession, arrived in St.
John’s while we were there with a full load of
lumber, but it and she sailed straight into the melting-pot.
The merchants, with one exception, were all as good
about the matter as men can be. They were perfectly
satisfied when they realized that I meant facing the
debt squarely. One was nasty about it, saying
that he would not wait and oddly enough
in ordinary life he was a man whom one would not expect
to be ungenerous, for he too was a religious man.
Whether he gained by it or not it is hard to say.
He was paid first, anyhow. The standard of what
is really remunerative in life is differently graded.
The stores have dealt with him since, and his prices
are fair and honest; but he was the only one among
some twenty who even appeared to kick a man when he
was down. I have nothing but gratitude to all
the rest.
I should add that the incident was
not the fault of the people of the coast. Often
I had been warned by the merchants that the cooperative
stores would fail and that the people would rob me.
It is true that there was trouble over the badly kept
books, and a number of the fishermen disclaimed their
debts charged against them; but with one exception
no one came and said that he had had things which were
not noted on the bills. I am confident, however,
that they did not go back on me willingly, and when
my merchant friends said, “I told you so,”
I honestly was able to state that it was the management,
not the people or the system, that was at fault.
Indeed, subsequent events have proved this. For
five of the stores still run, and run splendidly, and
pay handsomer dividends by far than any investment
our people could possibly make elsewhere.
With the sale of a few investments
and some other available property, the liability was
so far reduced that, with what the stores paid, only
one merchant was not fully indemnified, and he generously
told me not to worry about the balance.
This same year, on the other hand,
one of our most forward steps, so far as the Mission
was concerned, was taken, through the generosity of
the late Mr. George B. Cluett, of Troy, New York.
He had built specially for our work a magnificent
three-masted schooner, fitted with the best of gear
including a motor launch. She was constructed
of three-inch oak plank, sheathed with hardwood for
work in the ice-fields. She was also fitted with
an eighty horse-power Wolverine engine. The bronze
tablet in her bore the inscription, “This vessel
with full equipment was presented to Wilfred T. Grenfell
by George B. Cluett.” He had previously
asked me if I would like any words from the Bible
on the plate, and I had suggested, “The sea is
His and He made it.” The designer unfortunately
put the text after the inscription; so that I have
been frequently asked why and how I came to make it,
seeing that it is believed by all good Christians that
in heaven “there shall be no more sea.”
To help out with the expenses of getting
her running, our loved friend from Chicago, Mr. W.R.
Stirling, agreed to come North on the schooner the
first season, bringing his two daughters and three
friends. Even though he was renting her for a
yachting trip, he offered to bring all the cargo free
and make the Mission stations his ports of call.
Mr. Cluett’s idea was that,
as we had big expenses carrying endless freight so
far North, and as it got so broken and often lost in
transit, and greatly damaged in the many changes involved
from rail to steamer, and from steamer to steamer,
if she carried our freight in summer, she could in
winter earn enough to make it all free, and possibly
provide a sinking fund for herself as well. There
was also good accommodation in her for doctors, nurses,
students, etc., who every summer come from the
South to help in various ways in the work of the Mission.
All our freight that year arrived
promptly and in good condition, which had never happened
before. Later the vessel was chartered to go
to Greenland by the Smithsonian. On this occasion
her engine, never satisfactory, gave out entirely,
which so delayed her that she got frozen in near Etah
and was held up a whole twelvemonth. Meanwhile
the war had broken out, and when she at last sailed
into Boston, we were able to sell her, by the generous
permission of Mrs. Cluett, and use the money to purchase
the George B. Cluett II.
Illustrating the advantage of getting
our freight direct, among the many instances which
have occurred, that of the lost searchlight for the
Strathcona comes to my mind. As she had often
on dark nights to come to anchor among vessels, and
to nose her way into unlit harbours, some friends,
through the Professor of Geology at Harvard, who had
himself cruised all along our coast in a schooner,
presented me with a searchlight for the hospital ship
and despatched it via Sydney the
normal freight route. Month after month went by,
and it never appeared. Year followed year, and
still we searched for that searchlight. At length,
after two and a half years, it suddenly arrived, having
been “delayed on the way.” Had it
been provisions or clothing or drugs, or almost anything
else, of course, it would have been useless.
It has proved to us one of the almost de luxe
additions to a Mission steamer.
For a long time I had felt the need
of some place in St. John’s where work for fishermen
could be carried on, and which could be also utilized
as a place of safety for girls coming to that city
from other parts of the island. My attention
was called one day to the fact that liquor was being
sent to people in the outports C.O.D., by a barrel
of flour which was being lowered over the side of
the mail steamer rather too quickly on to the ice.
As the hard bump came, the flour in the barrel jingled
loudly and leaked rum profusely from the compound
fracture. When our sober outport people went to
St. John’s, as they must every year for supplies,
they had only the uncomfortable schooner or the street
in which to pass the time. There is no “Foyer
des Pécheurs”; no one wanted fishermen
straight from a fishing schooner in the home; and
in those days there were no Camp Community Clubs.
As one man said, “It is easy for the parson
to tell us to be good, but it is hard on a wet cold
night to be good in the open street” and nowhere
to go, and harder still if you have to seek shelter
in a brightly lighted room, where music was being
played. The boarding-houses for the fishermen,
where thousands of our young men flocked in the spring
to try for a berth in the seal fishery, were ridiculous,
not to say calamitous. Lastly, unsophisticated
girls coming from the outports ran terrible risks
in the city, having no friends to direct and assist
them; and the Institute which we had in mind was to
comprise also a girls’ lodging department.
No provision was made for the accommodation of crews
wrecked by accident, and our Institute has already
proved invaluable to many in such plights.
Seeing the hundreds of craft and the
thousands of fishermen, and the capital and interest
vested against us as prohibitionists, it would have
been obviously futile to put up a second-rate affair
in a back street. It would only be sneered at
as a proselytizing job. I had almost forgotten
to mention that there was already an Old Seamen’s
Home, but it had gradually become a roost for boozers,
and when with the trustees we made an inspection of
it, it proved to be only worthy of immediate closure.
This was promptly done, and the money realized from
the sale of it, some ten thousand dollars, was kindly
donated to the fund for our new building.
After a few years of my collecting
funds spasmodically, a number of our local friends
got “cold feet.” Reports started,
not circulated by well-wishers, that it was all a
piece of personal vanity, that no such thing was needed,
and if built would prove a white elephant, to support
which I would be going round with my hat in my hand
worrying the merchants. We had at that time some
ninety thousand dollars in hand. I laid the whole
story before the Governor, Sir Ralph Williams, a man
by no means prejudiced in favour of prohibition.
He was, however, one who knew what the city needed,
and realized that it was a big lack and required a
big remedy.
A letter which I published in all
the St. John’s papers, describing my passing
fifteen drunken men on the streets before morning service
on Christmas Day, brought forth angry denials of the
actual facts, and my statement of the number of saloons
in the city was also contradicted. But a saloon
is not necessarily a place licensed by the Government
or city to make men drunk for the majority
are unlicensed, and a couple of experiences which
my men had in looking for sailors who had shipped,
been given advances, and gone off and got drunk in
shebeens, proved the number to be very much higher
than even I had estimated it.
Sir Ralph thought the matter over
and called a public meeting in the ballroom of Government
House. He had a remarkable personality and no
fear of conventions. After thoroughly endorsing
the plan for the Institute, and the need for it, he
asked each of the many citizens who had responded
to his invitation, “Will you personally stand
by the larger scheme of a two hundred thousand dollar
building, or will you stand by the sixty thousand
dollar building with the thirty thousand dollar endowment
fund, or will you do nothing at all?” It was
proven that when it came to the point of going on
record, practically all who really took the slightest
interest in the matter were in favour of the larger
plan if I would undertake to raise the money.
My own view, since more than justified, was that only
so large a building could ever hope to meet the requirements
and only such a comprehensive institution could expect
to carry its own expenses. I preferred refunding
the ninety thousand dollars to the various donors and
dropping the whole business to embarking on the smaller
scheme.
That meeting did a world of good.
It cleared the atmosphere; and it is only fresh air
which most of these things really need just
as does a consumptive patient. The plan was now
on the shoulders of the citizens; it was no longer
one man’s hobby. Enemies, like the Scribes
and Pharisees of old, knew better than to tackle a
crowd, and with the splendid gift of Messrs. Bowring
Brothers of a site on the water-side on the main street,
costing thirteen thousand dollars, and those of Job
Brothers, Harvey and Company, and Macpherson Brothers
of twenty-five hundred dollars each, the fund grew
like Jonah’s gourd; and in the year of 1911,
with approximately one hundred and seventy-five thousand
dollars in hand, we actually came to the time for
laying the foundation stone. The hostility of
enemies was not over. Such an institute is a
fighting force, and involves contest and therefore
enemies. So we decided to make this occasion as
much of an event as we could. Through friends
in England we obtained the promise of King George
V that if we connected the foundation stone with Buckingham
Palace by wire, he would, after the ceremony in Westminster
Abbey on his Coronation Day, press a button at three
in the afternoon and lay the stone across the Atlantic.
The good services of friends in the Anglo-American
Telegraph Company did the rest.
On the fateful day His Excellency
the Governor came down and made an appropriate and
patriotic speech. Owing to the difference in time
of about three hours and twenty minutes, it was shortly
before twelve o’clock with us. The noonday
gun signal from the Narrows was fired during His Excellency’s
address. Then followed a prayer of invocation
by His Lordship the Bishop of Newfoundland and Bermuda and
then, a dead silence and pause. Every one was
waiting for our newly crowned King to put that stone
into place. Only a moment had passed, the Governor
had just said, “We will wait for the King,”
when “Bing, bang, bang,” went the gong
signifying that His Majesty was at the other end of
the wire. Up went the national flag, and slowly
but surely the great stone began to move. A storm
of cheering greeted the successful effort; and all
that was left for our enemies to say was, “It
was a fake.” They claimed that we had laid
the stone ourselves. Nor might they have been
so far off the mark as they supposed, for we had a
man with a knife under that platform to make that
stone come down if anything happened that the wire
device did not work. You cannot go back on your
King whatever else you do, and to permit any grounds
to exist for supposing that he had not been punctual
was unthinkable. But fortunately for all concerned
our subterfuge was unnecessary.
I have omitted so far to state one
of the main reasons why the Institute to our mind
was so desirable. That was because no undenominational
work is carried on practically in the whole country.
Religion is tied up in bundles and its energies used
to divide rather than to unite men. No Y.M.C.A.
or Y.W.C.A. could exist in the Colony for that reason.
The Boys’ Brigade which we had originally started
could not continue, any more than the Boy Scouts can
now. Catholic Cadets, Church Lads Brigade, Methodist
Guards, Presbyterian Highland Brigade are
all names symbolic of the dividing influences of “religion.”
In no place of which I know would a Y.M.C.A. be more
desirable; and a large meeting held in the Institute
this present spring decided that in no town anywhere
was a Y.W.C.A. more needed.
In another place in this book I have
spoken of the problem of alcohol and fishermen.
A man does not need alcohol and is far better without
it. A man who sees two lights when there is only
one is not wanted at the wheel. The people who
sell alcohol know that just as well as we do, but
for paltry gain they are unpatriotic enough to barter
their earthly country as well as their heavenly one,
and to be branded with the knowledge that they are
cursing men and ruining families. The filibuster
deserves the name no less because he does his destructive
work secretly and slowly, and wears the emblems of
respectability instead of operating in the open with
“Long Toms” under the shadow of the “Jolly
Roger.”
As a magistrate on this coast I have
been obliged more than once to act as a policeman,
and though one hated the ill-feeling which it stored
up, and did not enjoy the evil-speaking to which it
gave rise, I considered that it was really only like
lancing a concealed infection the ill-feeling
and evil-speaking were better tapped and let out.
On one occasion at one of our Labrador
hospitals a beardless youth, one of the Methodist
candidates for college who every year are sent down
to look after the interests of that denomination on
our North coast, came to inform me that the only other
magistrate on the coast, the pillar of the Church
of England, and shortly to be our stipendiary, who
had many political friends of great influence in St.
John’s, was keeping a “blind tiger,”
while many even of his own people were being ruined
body and soul by this temptation under their noses.
“Well,” I replied, “if
you will come and give the evidence which will lead
to conviction, I will do the rest.”
“I certainly will,” he
answered. And he did. So we got the little
Strathcona under way, and after steaming some fifteen
miles dropped into a small cove a mile or two from
the place where our friend lived. In the King’s
name we constrained a couple of men to come along as
special constables. Our visit was an unusual one.
To divert suspicion we dressed our ship in bunting
as if we were coming for a marriage license.
When we anchored as near his stage as possible, we
dropped our jolly-boat and made for the store.
The door was, however, locked and our friend nowhere
to be seen. “He is in the store” was
the reply of his wife to our query. We knew then
that there was no time to be lost, and even while
we battered at the door, we could hear a suspicious
gurgle and smell a curious odour. Rum was trickling
down through the cracks of the store floor on to the
astonished winkles below. But the door quickly
gave way before our overtures, and we caught the magistrate
flagrante delicto. We were threatened with
all sorts of big folk in St. John’s; but we
held the trial on board straightaway just the same.
When court was called, the defendant demanded the
name of the prosecutor and to his infinite
surprise out popped the youthful aspirant to the Methodist
ministry. When he learned that half of his fine
of seventy dollars had to be paid to the prosecutor
and would be applied toward the building of a Methodist
school, his temper completely ran away with him; and
we had to threaten auction on the spot of the goods
in the store before we could collect the money.
We left him breathing out threatenings and slaughter.
Only once was I really caught.
Two mothers in a little village had appealed to me
because liquor was being sold to their boys who had
no money, while people were complaining simultaneously
that fish was being stolen from their stages.
No one would tell who was selling it, so we had a
systematic search made of all the houses, and the guilty
man was convicted on evidence discovered under the
floor of his sitting-room. The fine of fifty
dollars he paid without a murmur and it was promptly
divided between the Government and the prosecutor.
It so happened, however, that he had obtained from
us for a close relative a new artificial leg, and
there was fifty dollars owing to us on it. Unknown
to us at the time, he had collected that fifty dollars
from the said relative and with it paid his fine.
To this day we never got a cent for our leg, and so
really fined ourselves. Nor could we with any
propriety distrain on one of a poor woman’s legs!