A Labrador Doctor Part 21

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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: COMMODORE PEARY ON HIS WAY BACK FROM THE POLE, 1909]

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 a.s.sured 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 G.o.d's plan for us on this earth.

CHAPTER XXI

NEW VENTURES

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 repet.i.tion, 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 lat.i.tude 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 a.s.set 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 grat.i.tude 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.

Ill.u.s.trating 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 b.u.mp 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 pa.s.s the time. There is no "Foyer des Pecheurs"; 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 a.s.sist them; and the Inst.i.tute 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 Inst.i.tute 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 pa.s.sing 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 Inst.i.tute, 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 inst.i.tution 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 inst.i.tute 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 b.u.t.ton 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 pa.s.sed, 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 Inst.i.tute 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 Inst.i.tute 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 anch.o.r.ed 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE INSt.i.tUTE]

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!

CHAPTER XXII

PROBLEMS ON LAND AND SEA

The year 1912 was a busy season. The New Year found us in Florida with the donor of the ship George B. Cluett, consulting him concerning its progress and future. Lecturing then as we went west we reached Colorado, visited the Grand Canyon, and lectured all along the Pacific Coast from San Diego to Victoria--finding many old friends and making many new ones.