Grenfell: Knight-Errant of the North Part 7

"That I will, Doctor!" answered Bartlett heartily. "Drop in on your way back."

The Doctor did so--and he found Captain Will had put aside a full boat-load of provisions of all sorts for the starving family.

Happy in the thought of the good it would do, Grenfell started back for the promontory at Big River where he had every reason to expect the family would be watching for him anxiously.

As he neared the land--he saw no one moving. The boat was beached, and the Doctor went up to the house.

The door was locked: there was no one within hail, though he shouted again and again.

Grenfell knew this absence must mean that the whole family had gone to the distant islands for the fishing.

So he broke in the door, piled the things he had brought inside, and wrote a letter.

"This is the price of your pelt. Put all the fur you catch next winter in a barrel and sit on the top of the barrel till the spring, when we are coming back again. Be sure not to let anybody get it from you at a low price."

During the winter, accordingly, the family put by the furs that they got from the animals which the boys caught in their traps. In the summer, Grenfell took the pelts to the nearest cash buyer, and with the money supplies were bought in St. John's. The poor fisherman found that he had more food than he needed, so he sold the surplus, at a fair profit, to his neighbor.

Year after year this was kept up, and when the father died he left Grenfell $200 in cash to be divided among the children.

Thus the Doctor had the satisfaction of bringing this family up from a blanketless poverty, on the flat brink of starvation, to something like wealth in a land where a man with fire-wood, lettuce, dogs, codfish in the sea and a few dollars in hand thinks he is well off and piously thanks Heaven for his good fortune.

As for the sealers--the men who stand a chance to make anything are those who buy what they call a ticket to the ice--that is to say, a share in a sealing venture--and go out from St. John's in the steamers or sailing vessels at the beginning of March. The ship has sheathed wooden sides a foot and a half thick, and is bound with iron at the bow, to aid in battering the ice-pack. For the auxiliary engine 500 tons of coal are carried: and a crew of 300 men will use 500 gallons of water in a day--but the easy way to get more is to boil the ice, so n.o.body worries about that. Tragedies of the sealing fleet are without number. The worst have happened when blizzards caught the men out on the ice-floes far from their ship. One captain saved all his men by having them pile up their gaffs and lie down on them for cat-naps.

Then he would make them get up and dance like mad for five minutes, while he crooned "chin-music" to them. Thus he saved them from freezing to death. In that storm the _Greenland_ of Harbor Grace lost 52 of her 100 men. Grenfell tells of sixteen fishermen on Trinity Bay who, without fire or food or sufficient clothing, after thirty-six hours of suffering dragged their boats ten miles across the ice to the land.

_The Southern Cross_ in 1914 was coming from the banks with 174 men and a full load. She was lost with all hands, and her fate remains a mystery. A life-belt picked up on the Irish coast was all that was ever recovered from the doomed ship. In the same year the men of the _Newfoundland_ were caught out on the ice and unable to get back to the ship. Of the company seventy-seven lost their lives and forty-two were crippled.

Two boys and two men were tending seal nets when a "divey" or snowstorm blew them helplessly to sea. They crashed on an island, but ere they could land they were blown off again. During the night and the morning that followed, both men and one of the boys died. The other boy dressed himself in the clothes of the three who died, and kept their bodies in the boat.

They had caught an old harp seal, and he ate its flesh and drank its blood. On the third day he gaffed another seal as it floated past on a cake of ice. Then he had another drink of warm blood. Two days later he killed another seal.

By that time he began "seeing things." He thought he saw a ship in the distance. He clambered out of his boat and hobbled five miles over the ice, only to find that it was not a sail that he had seen, but a hummock of ice. The only thing to do was to make his way back over the weary miles to the boat he left.

On the seventh day, with despair gnawing at his heart, one of the sealing fleet, the _Flora_, came in sight.

It was dark, and this was his one chance of rescue. He shouted with all his might. But the boat immediately backed as if to leave him.

He screamed again, and the merciful wind caught up his voice and carried it to the vessel.

He shouted once more: "For G.o.d's sake, don't leave me with my dead father here!"

Then the ship hove to, and when the brave boy was lifted aboard the watch explained to him:

"Ye see, lad, the first time we heard ye call we thought it was sperrits."

They picked up the boat as well as the boy, and finally put them aboard another vessel that was going toward the lad's fatherless home.

Grenfell went out with the sealing fleet and took his full share of all the hardships of the mariners who from boyhood look on sealing as life's great adventure. While they are still tiny tads, the boys of St. John's and the outposts practise leaping across rain-barrels and mud-puddles. They are looking forward to the time when a running jump from one cake of ice to another may be the means of saving their lives. To "copy" is to play the game of follow-my-leader: and so the boys use the phrase "a good big copy from pan to pan" when they mean it is a long leap between.

There is uncontrollable excitement aboard a sealer when the prize is in sight at last. Perhaps the ship has been buffeting the ice for many weary days, bucking the floes and backing away again with the lookout in the crow's nest scanning the horizon in vain with powerful spy-gla.s.ses.

But at last the joyful cry is heard: "Whitecoats!" or "Dere'm de whitey jackets!" In less time than it takes to tell the men swarm over the bulwarks with their gaffs and knives and are deployed among the seals.

The "whitecoats" are the helpless young ones, mild and innocent as puppies, with great tears in their eyes and as pettable as woolly lambs if the sealers did not have to steel their hearts and think of their own young ones at home. Can you blame the man with the knife, any more than you blame the butcher who serves your household with lamb chops, if he goes to the red-handed slaughter with might and main? Those "whitey jackets" may spell to his family the difference between starvation and sufficiency if not plenty. He cannot afford to let sentiment interfere with his grim business.

The young seals are gaffed without trouble: the old ones are shot. The adult males are called "dogs"--and a "dog" hood seal, brought to bay and standing up on his flippers like a bear, is an ugly customer. It needs two men to tackle him, and if they are not careful he will bite off an arm or a leg in a jiffy. Yet the "dog" takes to the water, if he can get there, without paying the slightest heed to what becomes of the mother seal or the young one. He is generally a poor defender of his own family.

For the hood seal family consists of but the three. Father--the "dog"

hood--blows a big skin bag over his head when he is attacked, and the blows of the gaff rain upon it harmlessly. So terrific is his bite, when he gets a chance at his a.s.sailant, that the Newfoundlanders say the carca.s.s itself can bite after the head has been cut off. A mature "dog" seal weighs from 600 to 900 pounds.

Bucking the ice to get at the main herd is a big part of the battle.

Sometimes the skipper shouts: "Bombs out!" Then the blasting powder is produced, and the cry comes: "Hot poker for the blasts!" The fuse is then touched off with the red-hot implement. The bomb is thrust into an ice-crevice, whereupon all hands "beat it" as fast as ever they can--and a little bit faster.

Then comes a deafening explosion that rocks the ship: and the ice rains on the deck in chunks, like bursting sh.e.l.ls in an artillery bombardment.

With all the watchfulness, and the desperate risks the skipper takes as he drives the vessel into the pack ice, there is an excellent chance of missing the main herd entirely. An "Aerial Observation Company," started by a plucky Australian flyer at Botswood, was successful in showing the sealers of 1922 where to go, by dropping letters on or near the ships--but they could not make their way through the ice to the place indicated. During 1923 the fog was so dense that the sealing-season was almost a failure.

On his first voyage to the sealing grounds Grenfell saw the seals like black dots by the thousands, all over the floes as far as the horizon.

The ships b.u.t.ted and rammed their way into the thick of the herd, the men overjoyed at the prospect of plenty. As soon as the engines stopped they were over the side, booted and sweatered, in a jiffy.

There was plenty of work for Dr. Grenfell. Many a man twisted his leg or his ankle as he slipped between the blocks of ice. Presently there were thirty or forty at a time surrounding him begging him to put some liniment in their eyes to cure the snow-blindness due to the fierce glare of the sun upon the ice-fields.

The Eskimos, not having gla.s.ses, use spectacles of wooden discs with narrow slits, and do not suffer so much--but very few of the sealers from "the Old Rock," as Newfoundland is called, think to provide themselves with smoked gla.s.ses.

One day Grenfell was kept busy for a long time rubbing arms and legs and anointing smarting eyes. The men were nearly all scattered about on the ice, near and far, when he got through--so he thought he would drop over the side and watch them at their work. By this time it was late afternoon.

Till now, a strong wind had been blowing, and this had kept the ice packed together. The wind died down and the bits of ice began to "run abroad" as the sailors say. Grenfell and a dozen men with whom he found himself were far from the ship, and darkness was fast coming on.

Of course they had no boat, and the only way they could get back to the ship was to float on one piece of ice to another. They had no oars with which to propel themselves--all they could do was to beat the water with the seal-gaffs.

This was so slow a process that by and by they gave it up, and decided to wait for the ship to come and find them. The ship by this time was out of sight.

It grew colder and colder after the red sun went down. They had a little sugar and oatmeal. This they mixed with snow and devoured. Then they took their "seal bats" and cut them up with their big knives.

They dipped the pieces in the fat of the dead seals, and with these they made bonfires to let the ship know where they were.

In the light of the occasional blaze of their beacon fires they played games to keep from freezing. "Leap-frog" and "one old cat" were the favorites. Men not accustomed to the toughening Northern life might have been whimpering with the piercing cold and the fear of the sea's anger by this time. Not so with these men.

The night wore on--and suddenly out of the darkness they heard the welcome sound of the little steamer crunching her way through the ice-pack.

The wrath of the skipper leaning over the bow was almost more terrible to face than any ice-storm would have been.

Did he respect the Doctor of the Deep Sea Mission? He did not. His tongue-lashing included them all.

"It was the worst blowing-up I ever received since my father spanked me," says Grenfell with a laugh, remembering that anxious night.

Later, the skipper came to him. "Doctor," he said, "the truth is I was that torn in my mind while ye were gone, and that relieved of worry when I came on ye in the ice-pack, that I do not know the words I may have used. If I was wicked or profane--the good G.o.d forgive me. It was my upside-down way of saying my grat.i.tude to G.o.d for His salvation."

The Doctor's day's work was not yet ended. He clambered down into the hold, a man ahead of him carrying a candle and matches. In his hand was a bottle of cocaine solution, for some of the men were suffering such agonies with the snow-blindness that they were all but out of their minds. They would moan and toss in frenzy, hardly knowing when the Doctor came to them.