One day, Sir Frederick Treves said to him: "Go to the North Sea, where the deep-sea fishermen need a man like you. If you go in January, you will see some fine seascapes, anyway. Don"t go in summer when all of the old ladies go for a rest."
Grenfell turned the idea over and over in his mind. He had always loved the sea and been the friend of sailors and fishermen. He liked the thought of the help he could be as a doctor among them. So he decided to cast in his lot with the fishermen who go from England"s East Coast into the brawling North Sea.
Yarmouth, about 120 miles northeast of London, is the headquarters of the herring fisheries, which engage about 300 vessels and 3,000 men.
A short distance off the sh.o.r.e are sandbanks, and between these and the mainland Yarmouth Roads provides a safe harbor and a good anchorage for ships drawing eighteen or nineteen feet of water.
So one pitch-black and rainy night Grenfell packed his bag and went to Yarmouth. At the railway-station he found a retired fisherman with a cab that threatened to fall apart if you looked at it too hard. They drove a couple of miles alongsh.o.r.e in the darkness, and found what looked like two posts sticking out of the sand.
"Where"s the ship?" asked Grenfell.
"Those are her topmasts," answered the sea-dog. "Tide"s low. The rest of her is hidden by the wharf."
Grenfell scrambled over a hillock and a dim anchor-lantern showed him the tiny craft that for many days and nights was to be his tossing home in the great waters.
In answer to his hail, a voice called back cheerily: "Mind the rigging; it"s just tarred and greased."
But Grenfell was already sliding down it, nimble as a cat, though it was so sticky he had to wrench his hands and feet from it now and then.
The boat was engaged in peddling tobacco among the ships of the North Sea fishing-fleet, and for the next two months no land was seen, except two distant islands: and the decks were never free from ice and snow.
Aboard many of the boats to which they came the entire crew, skipper and all, were "prentices not more than twenty years old. These lads got no pay, except a little pocket-money. Many of the crew were hard characters, and the young skippers were harder still. Often they had been sent to sea from industrial schools and reformatories.
One awkward boy had cooked the "duff" for dinner and burned it. So the skipper made him take the ashes from the cook"s galley to the fore-rigging, climb to the cross-tree with the cinders one by one, and throw them over the cross-tree into the sea, repeating the act till he had disposed of the contents of the scuttle.
A boy who had not cleaned the cabin as he should was given a bucketful of sea water, and was made to spend the whole night emptying it with a teaspoon into another bucket, and then putting it back the same way.
Most of the boys were lively and merry, and always ready for a lark.
Grenfell, who has never been able to forget that he was once a boy, got along famously with them, and was hail-fellow-well-met wherever he went.
Once, when he was aboard a little sailing-vessel, he was playing cricket on the deck, and the last ball went over the side.
He dived after it at once, telling the helmsman to "tack back." When the helmsman saw Grenfell struggling in the water, he got so rattled that it was a long time before he could bring the boat near him.
At last Grenfell managed to catch hold of the end of a rope that was thrown to him and climb aboard.
But the cricket ball was in his hand!
III
WESTWARD HO! FOR LABRADOR
"In eighteen hundred and ninety-two Grenfell sailed the ocean blue----"
from Yarmouth to Labrador in a ninety-ton ketch-rigged schooner.
This wasn"t such an abrupt change of base as it sounds, for it meant that the Royal Mission to the Deep Sea Fishermen, which works in the North Sea, had decided to send a "Superintendent" to the coast of the North Atlantic, east of Canada and north of Newfoundland, where many ships each summer went in quest of the cod.
If you will look on the map, you will readily see how Labrador lies in a long, narrow strip along the coast from the mouth of the St.
Lawrence to Cape Chidley. This strip belongs to the crown colony of Newfoundland, the big triangular island to the south of the Straits of Belle Isle, and Newfoundland is entirely independent of the Dominion of Canada. Fishermen when they go to this region always speak of going to "the Labrador," and they call it going "down," not "up," when it is a question of faring north.
The tract that lies along the north sh.o.r.e of the St. Lawrence, west of the narrow strip, is also called Labrador--but it belongs to Canada.
Generally "Labrador" is used for the part that belongs to Newfoundland.
"Labrador" itself is a queer word. It is Portuguese. It means a yeoman farmer. The name was given to Greenland in the first half of the sixteenth century by a farmer from the Azores who was first to see that lonesome, chilly country. Thence the name was moved over to the peninsula between Hudson Bay and the Atlantic.
Cabot sailed along the coast in 1498, but the interior remained unseen by white men till the Hudson"s Bay Company began to plant their trading-stations and send their agents for furs in 1831.
Jacques Cartier said Labrador was "the land G.o.d gave to Cain," and that there was "not one cartload of earth on the whole of it." Along the coast are mountains rising to 7,000 or even 8,000 feet. There are many lakes inland, 50 to 100 miles in length. Hamilton Inlet is 150 miles long, and from two to 30 miles wide. The Hamilton River which empties into it, in twelve miles descends 760 feet, with a single drop of 350 feet at the Grand Falls, the greatest in North America, surpa.s.sing even Niagara.
[Ill.u.s.tration: LABRADOR]
The population is about 14,500 in more than half a million square miles. There are some 3,500 Indians, 2,000 Eskimos, and 9,000 whites (along the coast and at the Hudson"s Bay posts).
It was to such a "parish" that Grenfell came in 1892, that he might give the fishermen the benefit of his surgical knowledge and practical experience acquired not only on the land but aboard the tossing ships in the North Sea.
A ninety-ton boat is a tiny craft in which to make the voyage across the Atlantic. Grenfell must have known just how Columbus felt, four hundred years ago, when he said to the sailors of his tiny caravels "Sail on! sail on!"
First there were head winds for eleven days.
"Wonder if the wind"s ever goin" to quit blowin" against us!" muttered a sailor, as he coiled a rope to make a bed for a dog in the stern.
"I"m about fed up with this kind o" thing."
The man to whom he spoke was in his bare feet, washing the deck with the hose. "What does anybody ever wanna go to Labrador for, anyhow?"
he grumbled back. "It"s a lot better in the North Sea. More sociable.
You get letters from home an" tobacco regular. An" you can see somebody once in a while."
"Sh.o.r.e leave"s no good to a fellow in Labrador," the first man went on, as he watched the dog turn round and round before lying down.
"Ain"t no place to go. No movies nor nuthin", just fish an" rocks an"
people lookin" thin an" half-starved."
"You ever been there?"
"No, but I was talkin" with fellows that got shipwrecked there once.
Gee whiz, what"s that?"
"That? That"s an iceberg. Didn"t you ever see an iceberg before?"
"No. Looks like a ship under full sail, don"t she?"
To the north out of the grey mist on the water loomed a mountain of ice.
"Glad we didn"t run into the old thing," the dog"s friend went on.
"They say what you see stickin" out o" the water"s only a small part of it."