A Labrador Doctor Part 10

THE SEAL FISHERY

Returning South in the fall of 1895, business necessitated my remaining for some time in St. John's, where as previously the Governor, Sir Terence O'Brien, very kindly entertained me. It proved to be a most exciting time. There were only two banks in the Colony, called respectively the Union and the Commercial. These issued all the notes used in the country and except for the savings bank had all the deposits of the fishermen and people. Suddenly one day I was told, though with extreme secrecy, that the two banks were unsound and would not again open after Monday morning. This was early on Sat.u.r.day.

Business went on as usual, but among the leaders of the country consternation was beginning to spread. The banks closed at their usual hour--three o 'clock on Sat.u.r.day, and so far as I knew no one profited by the secret knowledge, though later accusations were made against some people. The serious nature of the impending disaster never really dawned on me, not being either personally concerned in either bank or having any experience of finance. When the collection came around at the cathedral on Sunday my friend whispered to me, "That silver will be valuable to-morrow." It so happened that on Sunday I was dining with the Prime Minister, who had befriended all our efforts, and his tremendously serious view of the position of the Colony sent me to bed full of alarms for my new friends. We were to have sailed for England next day and I went down after breakfast to buy my ticket. The agent sold it, but remarked, "I am not sure if Newfoundland money is good any longer. It is a speculation selling you this ticket." Before we sailed the vessel was held up by the Government, as only a few of the ships were taking notes at face value. Those of the Commercial Bank were only fetching twenty cents. Besides the banks quite a number of commercial firms also closed. The directors of the banks were all local merchants, and many were heavily indebted to them for supplies given out to their "planters," as they call the fishermen whom they supply with goods in advance to catch fish for them. It was a sorry mix-up, and business was very difficult to carry on because we had no medium of exchange. Even the Governor to pay his gardener had to give I.O.U. orders on shops--there simply being no currency available.

Matters have long since adjusted themselves, though neither bank ever reopened. Larger banks of good standing came in from Canada, and no one can find anything of which to complain in the financial affairs of the "oldest Colony," even in these days of war.

Newfoundland has a large seal as well as cod fishery. The great sealing captains are all aristocrats of the fishermen and certainly are an unusually fine set of men. The work calls for peculiar training in the hardest of schools, for great self-reliance and resource, besides skill in handling men and ships. In those days the doyen of the fleet was Captain Samuel Blandford. He fired me with tales of the hardships to be encountered and the opportunities and needs for a doctor among three hundred men hundreds of miles from anywhere. The result was a decision to return early from my lecture tour and go out with the seal hunters of the good ship Neptune.

I look back on this as one of the great treats of my life; though I believe it to be an industry seriously detrimental to the welfare of the people of the Colony and the outside world. For no mammal bringing forth but one young a year can stand, when their young are just born and are entirely helpless, being attacked by huge steel-protected steamers carrying hundreds of men with modern rifles or even clubs.

Advantage is also taken of the maternal instinct to get the mothers as well as the young "fat," if the latter is not obtainable in sufficient quant.i.ties. Meanwhile the poor scattered people of the northern sh.o.r.es of Newfoundland are being absolutely ruined and driven out. They need the seals for clothing, boots, fresh food, and fats. They use every portion of the few animals which each catches, while the big steamers lose thousands which they have killed, by not carrying them at once to the ship and leaving them in piles to be picked up later. Moreover, in the latter case all the good proteid food of their carca.s.ses is left to the sharks and gulls.

At twelve o'clock of March 10, 1896, the good ship Neptune hauled out into the stream at St. John's Harbour, Newfoundland, preparatory to weighing anchor for the seal fishery. The law allows no vessels to sail before 2 P.M. on that day, under a penalty of four thousand dollars fine--nor may any seals be killed from the steamers until March 14, and at no time on Sundays. The whole city of St. John's seemed to be engrossed in the one absorbing topic of the seal fishery.

It meant if successful some fifty thousand pounds sterling at least to the Colony--it meant bread for thousands of people--it meant for days and even weeks past that men from far-away outports had been slowly collecting at the capital, till the main street was peopled all day with anxious-looking crowds, and all the wharves where there was any chance of a "berth" to the ice were fairly in a state of siege.

Now let us go down to the dock and visit the ship before she starts.

She is a large barque-rigged vessel, with auxiliary steam, or rather one should say a steamer with auxiliary sails. The first point that strikes one is her ma.s.sive build, her veritable bulldog look as she sits on the water. Her sides are some eighteen inches thick, and sheathed and resheathed with "greenheart" to help her in battering the ice. Inside she is ceiled with English oak and beech, so that her portholes look like the arrow slits of the windows of an old feudal castle. Her bow is double-stemmed--shot with a broad band of iron, and the s.p.a.ce of some seventeen feet between the two stems solid with the choicest hardwoods. Below decks every corner is adapted to some use.

There are bags of flour, hard bread, and food for the crew of three hundred and twenty men; five hundred tons of coal for the hungry engine in her battle with the ice-floe. The vessel carries only about eighteen hundred gallons of water and the men use five hundred in a day. This, however, is of little consequence, for a party each day brings back plenty of ice, which is excellent drinking after being boiled. This ice is of very different qualities. Now it is "slob"

mixed with snow born on the Newfoundland coast. This is called "dirty ice" by the sealers. Even it at times packs very thick and is hard to get through. Then there is the clearer, heavy Arctic ice with here and there huge icebergs frozen in; and again the smoother, whiter variety known as "whelping ice"--that is, the Arctic sh.o.r.e ice, born probably in Labrador, on which the seals give birth to their pups.

The masters of watches are also called "scunners"--they go up night and day in the forebarrel to "scun" the ship--that is, to find the way or leads through the ice. This word comes from "con" of the conning tower on a man-of-war.

When the morning of the 10th arrives, all is excitement. Fortunately this year a southwest wind had blown the ice a mile or so offsh.o.r.e.

Now all the men are on board. The vessels are in the stream. The flags are up; the whistles are blowing. The hour of two approaches at last, and a loud cheering, renewed again and again, intimates that the first vessel is off, and the S.S. Aurora comes up the harbour. Cheers from the ships, the wharves, and the town answer her whistle, and closely followed by the S.S. Neptune and S.S. Windsor, she gallantly goes out, the leader of the sealing fleet for the year.

There have been two or three great disasters at the seal fishery, where numbers of men astray from their vessels in heavy snow blizzards on the ice have perished miserably. Sixteen fishermen were once out hunting for seals on the frozen ice of Trinity Bay when the wind changed and drove the ice offsh.o.r.e. When night came on they realized their terrible position and that, with a gale of wind blowing, they could not hope to reach land in their small boats. Nothing but an awful death stared them in the face, for in order to hunt over the ice men must be lightly clad, so as to run and jump from piece to piece.

Without fire, without food, without sufficient clothing, exposed to the pitiless storm on the frozen sea, they endured thirty-six hours without losing a life. Finally, they dragged their boats ten miles over the ice to the land, where they arrived at last more dead than alive.

It is the physical excitement of travelling over broken loose ice on the bosom of the mighty ocean, and the skill and athletic qualities which the work demands, that makes one love the voyage. Jumping from the side of the ship as she goes along, skurrying and leaping from ice-pan to ice-pan, and then having killed, "sculped," and "pelted"

the seal, the exciting return to the vessel! But it has its tragic side, for it takes its regular tribute of fine human life.

A Mr. Thomas Green, of Greenspond, while a boy, with his father and another man and a 'prentice lad, was tending his seal nets when a "dwey" or snowstorm came on, and the boat became unmanageable and drifted off to sea. They struck a small island, but drifted off again.

That night the father and the 'prentice lad died, and next morning the other man also. The son dressed himself in all the clothes of the other three, whose bodies he kept in the boat. He ate the flesh of an old harp seal they had caught in their net. On the third day by wonderful luck he gaffed an old seal in the slob ice. This he hauled in and drank the warm blood. On the fifth day he killed a white-coat, and thinking that he saw a ship he walked five miles over the floe, leaving his boat behind. The phantom ship proved to be an island of ice, and in the night he had to tramp back to his open punt. On the seventh day he was really beginning to give up hope when a vessel, the Flora, suddenly hove in sight. He shouted loudly as it was dark, whereupon she immediately tacked as if to leave him. Again he shouted, "For G.o.d's sake, don't leave me with my dead father here!" The words were plainly heard on board, and the vessel hove to. The watch had thought that his previous shouting was of supernatural origin. He and his boat with its pitiful load were picked up and sent back home by a pa.s.sing vessel.

On this particular voyage we were lucky enough to come early into the seals. From the Conner's barrel, in which I spent a great deal of time, we saw one morning black dots spread away in thousands all over the ice-floes through which we were b.u.t.ting, ramming, and fighting our way. All hands were over the side at once, and very soon patients began needing a doctor. Here a cut, there a wrench or sprain, and later came thirty or forty at a time with snow-blindness or conjunctivitis--very painful and disabling, though not fatal to sight.

One morning we had been kept late relieving these various slight ailments, and the men being mostly out on the ice made me think that they were among the seals; so I started out alone as soon as I could slip over the side to join them. This, however, I failed to do till late in the afternoon, when the strong wind, which had kept the loose ice packed together, dropped, and in less than no time it was all "running abroad." The result naturally is that one cannot get along except by floating on one piece to another, and that is a slow process without oars. It came on dark and a dozen of us who had got together decided to make for a large pan not far distant; but were obliged to give it up, and wait for the ship which had long gone out of sight. To keep warm we played "leap-frog," "caps," and "hop, skip, and jump"--at which some were very proficient. We ate our sugar and oatmeal, mixed with some nice clear snow; and then, shaving our wooden seal bat handles, and dipping them into the fat of the animals which we had killed, we made a big blaze periodically to attract the attention of the ship.

It was well into the night before we were picked up; and no sooner had we climbed over the rail than the skipper came and gave us the best or worst "blowing-up" I ever received since my father spanked me. He told me afterwards that his good heart was really so relieved by our safe return that he was scarcely conscious of what he said. Indeed, any words which might have been considered as unparliamentary he asked me to construe as grat.i.tude to G.o.d.

Our captain was a pa.s.senger on and prospective captain of the S.S.

Tigris when she picked up those members of the ill-fated Polaris expedition who had been five months on the ice-pans. He had gone below from his watch and daylight was just breaking when the next watch came and reported a boat and some people on a large pan, with the American flag flying. A kayak came off and Hans, an Eskimo, came alongside and said, "Ship lost. Captain gone." Boats were immediately lowered and nineteen persons, including two women and one baby, born on the ice-pan, came aboard amidst cheers renewed again and again. They had to be washed and fed, cleaned and clothed. The two officers were invited to live aft and the remainder of the rescued party being pestered to death by the sealing crew in the forecastle, it was decided to abandon the sealing trip, and the brave explorers were carried to St. John's, the American people eventually indemnifying the owners of the Tigris.

In hunting my patients I started round with a book and pencil accompanied by the steward carrying a candle and matches. The invalids were distributed in the four holds--the after, the main, forecastle, and foretop-gallant-forecastle. I never went round without a bottle of cocaine solution in my pocket for the snow-blind men, who suffered the most excruciating pain, often rolling about and moaning as if in a kind of frenzy, and to whom the cocaine gave wonderful relief. Very often I found that I must miss one or even both holds on my first rounds, for the ladders were gone and seals and coals were exchanging places in them during the first part of the day. Once down, however, one shouts out, "Is there any one here?" No answer. Louder still, "Is there any one here?" Perhaps a distant cough answers from some dark recess, and the steward and I begin a search. Then we go round systematically, climbing over on the barrels, searching under sacks, and poking into recesses, and after all occasionally missing one or two in our search. It seems a peculiarity about the men, that though they will lie up, they will not always say anything about it. The holds were very damp and dirty, but the men seemed to improve in health and fattened like the young seals. It must have been the pork, doughs, and excellent fresh meat of the seal. We had boiled or fried seal quite often with onions, and I must say that it was excellent eating--far more palatable than the dried codfish, which, when one has any ice work, creates an intolerable thirst.

The rats were making a huge noise one night and a barrel man gave it as his opinion that we should have a gale before long; but a glorious sunshine came streaming down upon us next morning, and we decided perforce the rats were evidently a little previous.

On Sunday I had a good chance to watch the seals. They came up, simply stared at the ship; now from sheer fat rolling on their backs, and lying for a few seconds tail and flippers beating the air helpless.

These baby seals resemble on the ice nothing so much as the South Sea parrot fish--that is, a complete round head, with somewhere in the sphere two huge black dots for eyes and a similar one for a nose.

These three form the corners of a small triangle, and except for the tail one could not easily tell which was the back and which the belly of a young white-coat--especially in stormy weather. For it is a well-ascertained fact that Nature makes the marvellous provision that in storm and snow they grow fattest and fastest. I have marvelled greatly how it is possible for any hot-blooded creature to enjoy so immensely this terribly cold water as do these old seals. They paddle about, throw themselves on their backs, float and puff out their b.r.e.a.s.t.s, flapping their flippers like paws over their chests.

Sunday morning we were lying off Fogo Island when some men came aboard and reported the wreck of the S.S. Wolf in the ice. She got round the island, a wind offsh.o.r.e having cleared the ice from the land. Three other vessels were behind her. Hardly, however, had she got round when the northerly wind brought the ice back. The doomed ship now lay between the main or fixed frozen sh.o.r.e ice and the immense floe which was impelled by the north wind acting on its whole irregular surface.

The force was irresistible. The Wolf backed and b.u.t.ted and got twenty yards into a nook in the main ice, and lay there helpless as an infant. On then swept the floe, crashed into the fixed ice, shattered its edge, rose up out of water over it, which is called "rafting,"

forced itself on the unfortunate ship, rose over her bulwarks, crushed in her sides, and only by nipping her tightly avoided sinking her immediately. Seeing that all was lost, Captain Kean got the men and boats onto the pans, took all they could save of food and clothes, but before he had saved his own clothing, the ice parted enough to let her through and she sank like a stone, her masts catching and breaking in pieces as she went. A sorrowful march for the sh.o.r.e now began over the ice, as the three hundred men started for home, carrying as much as they could on their backs. Many would have to face empty cupboards and hard times; all would have days of walking and rowing and camping before they could get home. One hundred miles would be the least, two and even three hundred for some, before they could reach their own villages. Some of these poor fellows had walked nearly two hundred miles to get a chance of going on the lost ship, impelled by hunger and necessity. Alas, we felt very sad for them and for Captain Kean, who had to face almost absolute ruin on account of this great loss.

The heaving of the great pans, like battering-rams against the sides of the Neptune, made a woesome noise below decks. I was often glad of her thirty-six inches of hardwood covering. Every now and then she steamed ahead a little and pressed into the ice to prevent this. I tried to climb on one of the many icebergs, but the heavy swell made it dangerous. At every swell it rolled over and back some eight feet, and as I watched it I understood how an iceberg goes to wind. For it acted exactly like a steam plough, crashing down onto one large pan as it rolled, and then, as it rolled back, lifting up another and smashing it from beneath. A regular battle seemed to be going on, with weird sounds of blows and groanings of the large ma.s.ses of ice.

Sometimes as pieces fell off the water would rush up high on the side of the berg. For some reason or other the berg had red-and-white streaks, and looked much like an ornamental pudding.

At lat.i.tude 50.18, about Funk Island, is one of the last refuges of the great auk. A few years ago, the earth, such as there is on these lonely rocks, was sifted for the bones of that extinct bird, and I think three perfect skeletons, worth a hundred pounds sterling each, were put together from the remnants discovered. One day the captain told me that he held on there in a furious gale for some time. Ma.s.ses of ice, weighing thirty or forty tons, were hurled high up and lodged on the top of the island. Some men went out to "pan" seals on a large pan. Seven hundred of the animals had been placed on one of them, and the men had just left it, when a furious breaking sea took hold of the pan and threw it completely upside down.

I am never likely to forget the last lovely Sunday. We had nearly "got our voyage"; at least no one was anxious now for the credit of the ship. The sunshine was blazing hot as it came from above and below at the same time, and the blue sky over the apparently boundless field of heaving "floe" on which we lay made a contrast which must be seen to be appreciated. I had brought along a number of pocket hymn-books and in the afternoon we lay out on the high fore-deck and sang and talked, unworried by callers and the thousand interruptions of the land. Then we had evening prayers together, Catholic and Protestant alike; and for my part I felt the nearness of G.o.d's presence as really as I have felt it in the mysterious environment of the most magnificent cathedral. Eternal life seemed so close, as if it lay just over that horizon of ice, in the eternal blue beyond.

CHAPTER X

THREE YEARS' WORK IN THE BRITISH ISLES

In the spring of 1897 I was asked by the Council to sail to Iceland with a view to opening work there, in response to a pet.i.tion sent in to the Board by the Hearn longliners and trawlers, who were just beginning their vast fishery in those waters from Hull and Grimsby.

Having chosen a smaller vessel, so as to leave the hospital ship free for work among the fleets, we set sail for Iceland in June. The fight with the liquor traffic which the Mission had been waging had now been successful in driving the sale of intoxicants from the North Sea by international agreement; but the proverbial whiskey still continued its filibustering work in the Scotch seaports. As our men at times had to frequent these ports we were anxious to make it easier for them to walk straight while they were ash.o.r.e.

We therefore called at Aberdeen on the way and anch.o.r.ed off the first dock. The beautiful Seaman's Home there was on the wrong side of the harbour for the vessels, and was not offering exactly what was needed.

So we obtained leave to put a hull in the basin, with a first-aid equipment, refreshments, lounge and writing-rooms, and with simple services on Sunday. This boat commenced then and there, and was run for some years under Captain Skiff; till she made way for the present homely little Fishermen's Inst.i.tute exactly across the road from the docks before you came to the saloons.

I shall not soon forget our first view of the cliffs of the southern coast of Iceland. We had called at Thorshaven in the Faroe group to see what we could learn of the boats fishing near Rockall; but none were there at the time. As we had no chronometers on our own boat we were quite unable to tell our longitude--a very much-needed bit of information, for we had had fog for some days, and anyhow none of us knew anything about the coast.

We brought up under the shadow of the mighty cliffs and were debating our whereabouts, when we saw an English sailing trawler about our own size, with his nets out close in under the land. So we threw out our boat and boarded him for information. He proved to be a Grimsby skipper, and we received the usual warm reception which these Yorkshire people know so well how to give. But to my amazement he was unable to afford us the one thing which we really desired. "I've been coming this way, man and boy, for forty years," he a.s.sured me. "But I can't read the chart, and I knows no more of the lay of the land than you does yourself. I don't use no chart beyond what's in my head."

With this we were naturally not content, so we sent back to the boat for our own sheet chart to try and get more satisfactory information.

But when it lay on the table in this old sh.e.l.lback's cabin all he did was to put down on it a huge and h.o.r.n.y thumb that was nearly large enough to cover the whole historic island, and "guess we were somewhere just about here."

Our cruise carried us all round the island--the larger part of our time being spent off the Vestmann Islands and the mouth of Brede Bugt, the large bay in which Reikyavik lies. It was off these islands that Eric the Red threw his flaming sticks into the sea. The first brand which alighted on the land directed him where to locate his new headquarters. Reikyavik means "smoking village," so called from the vapours of the hot streams which come out of the ground near by.

There is no night on the coast in summer; and even though we were a Mission ship we found it a real difficulty to keep tab of Sundays. The first afternoon that I went visiting aboard a large trawler, the extraordinary number of fish and the specimens of unfamiliar varieties kept me so interested that I lost all count of time, and when at last hunger prompted me to look at my watch I found that it was exactly 1.30 A.M.

At that time so many plaice and flatfish were caught at every haul, and they were so much more valuable than cod and haddock, that it was customary not to burden the vessel on her long five days' journey to market with round fish at all. These were, however, hauled up so rapidly to the surface from great depths that they had no time to accommodate the tension in their swimming bladders to the diminished pressure, with the result that when thrown overboard they were all left swimming upside down. A pathetic wake of white-bellied fish would stretch away for half a mile behind the vessel, over which countless screaming gulls and other birds were fighting. A sympathy for their horribly unprotected helplessness always left an uneasy sinking feeling at the pit of my own stomach. The waste has, however, righted itself in the course of years by the simple process of an increasing scarcity of the species, making it pay to save all haddock, cod, hake, ling, and other fish good for food, formerly so ruthlessly cast away.

One had many interesting experiences in this voyage, some of which have been of no small value subsequently. But the best lesson was the optimism and contentment of one's fellows, who had apparently so few of the things that only tyrannize the lives of those who live for them. They were a simple, kindly, helpful people, living in a country barren and frigid beyond all others, with no trees except in one extreme corner of the island. The cows were literally fed on salt codfish and the tails of whales, and the goats grazed on the roofs of the houses, where existed the only available gra.s.s. There were dry, hard, and almost larval deposits over the whole surface of the land which is not occupied by perpetual snow and ice. The hot springs which abound in some regions only suggest a forlorn effort on the part of Nature at the last moment to save the situation. The one a.s.set of the country is its fisheries, and of these the whale and seal fisheries were practically handed over to Norwegians; while large French and English boats fell like wolves on the fish, which the poor natives had no adequate means of securing for themselves.

We were fishing one day in Seyde Fjord on the east coast, when suddenly with much speed and excitement the great net was hauled, and we started with several other trawlers to dash pell-mell for the open sea. The alarm of masts and smoke together on the horizon had been given--the sign manual of the one poor Danish gunboat which was supposed to control the whole swarm of far smarter little pirates, which lived like mosquitoes by sucking their sustenance from others.

The water was as a general rule too deep outside the three-mile limit for legitimate fishing.

The mention of Iceland brings to every one's mind the name of Pierre Loti. We saw many of the "pecheurs d'islande" whom he so effectively portrays; and often felt sorry enough for them, fishing as they still were from old square-rigged wind-jammers. On some of these which had been months on the voyage, enough green weed had grown "to feed a cow"--as the mate put it.

On our return home we reported the need of a Mission vessel on the coast, but the difficulty of her being where she was wanted at the right time, over such an extended fishery ground, was very considerable. We decided that only a steam hospital trawler would be of any real value--unless a small cottage hospital could be started in Seyde Fjord, to which the sick and injured could be taken.