Dr. Grenfell's Parish: The Deep Sea Fisherman. Duncan Norman

When in the harbour you is shot,

       Four fathoms you has got.”

      The old song was chart enough for Skipper Zachariah. Three times the Heavenly Rest ran in and out. Then she sighted Dane’s Rock, which bore due west, true enough. West-nor’west was the course she followed, running blindly through the fog and heeling to the wind. Brimstone Head appeared in due time; and in due time the rocks of the tickle—that narrow entrance to the harbour—appeared in vague, forbidding form to port and starboard. The schooner ran to the starboard for the deeper water. Into the harbour she shot; and there they dropped anchor, caring not at all whether the water was four or forty fathoms, for it was deep enough. Through the night the gale tickled the topmasts, but the ship rode smoothly at her anchors, and Skipper Zachariah’s stentorian sleep was not disturbed by any sudden call to duty.

      And the doctor of the Deep Sea Mission has had many a similar experience.

IV—DESPERATE NEED

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      It was to these rough waters that Dr. Grenfell came when the need of the folk reached his ears and touched his heart. Before that, in the remoter parts of Newfoundland and on the coast of Labrador there were no doctors. The folk depended for healing upon traditional cures, upon old women who worked charms, upon remedies ingeniously devised to meet the need of the moment, upon deluded persons who prescribed medicines of the most curious description, upon a rough-and-ready surgery of their own, in which the implements of the kitchen and of the splitting-stage served a useful purpose. For example, there was a misled old fellow who set himself up as a healer in a lonely cove of the Newfoundland coast, where he lived a hermit, verily believing, it may be, in the glory of his call and in the blessed efficacy of his ministrations; his cure for consumption—it was a tragic failure, in one case, at least—was a bull’s heart, dried and powdered and administered with faith and regularity. Elsewhere there was a man, stricken with a mortal ailment, who, upon the recommendation of a kindly neighbour, regularly dosed himself with an ill-flavoured liquid obtained by boiling cast-off pulley-blocks in water. There was also a father who most hopefully attempted to cure his little lad of diphtheria by wrapping his throat with a split herring; but, unhappily, as he has said, “the wee feller choked hisself t’ death,” notwithstanding. There was another father—a man of grim, heroic disposition—whose little daughter chanced to freeze her feet to the very bone in midwinter; when he perceived that a surgical operation could no longer be delayed, he cut them off with an axe.

      An original preventative of sea-boils—with which the fishermen are cruelly afflicted upon the hands and wrists in raw weather—was evolved by a frowsy-headed old Labradorman of serious parts.

      “I never has none,” said he, in the fashion of superior fellows.

      “No?”

      “Nar a one. No, zur! Not me!”

      A glance of interested inquiry elicited no response. It but prolonged a large silence.

      “Have you never had a sea-boil?” with the note and sharp glance of incredulity.

      “Not me. Not since I got my cure.”

      “And what might that cure be?”

      “Well, zur,” was the amazing reply, “I cuts my nails on a Monday.”

      It must be said, however, that the Newfoundland government did provide a physician—of a sort. Every summer he was sent north with the mail-boat, which made not more than six trips, touching here and there at long intervals, and, of a hard season, failing altogether to reach the farthest ports. While the boat waited—an hour, or a half, as might be—the doctor went ashore to cure the sick, if he chanced to be in the humour; otherwise the folk brought the sick aboard, where they were painstakingly treated or not, as the doctor’s humour went. The government seemed never to inquire too minutely into the qualifications and character of its appointee. The incumbent for many years—the folk thank God that he is dead—was an inefficient, ill-tempered, cruel man; if not the very man himself, he was of a kind with the Newfoundland physician who ran a flag of warning to his masthead when he set out to get very drunk.

      The mail-boat dropped anchor one night in a far-away harbour of the Labrador, where there was desperate need of a doctor to ease a man’s pain. They had waited a long time, patiently, day after day. I am told; and when at last the mail-boat came, the man’s skipper put out in glad haste to fetch the government physician.

      “He’ve turned in,” they told him aboard.

      What did that matter? The skipper roused the doctor.

      “We’ve a sick man ashore, zur,” said he, “an’ he wants you t’ come——”

      “What!” roared the doctor. “Think I’m going to turn out this time of night?”

      “Sure, zur,” stammered the astounded skipper. “I—I—s’pose so. He’s very sick, zur. He’s coughin’——”

      “Let him cough himself to death!” said the doctor.

      Turn out? Not he! Rather, he turned over in his warm berth. It is to be assumed that the sick man died in pain; it is to be assumed, too, that the physician continued a tranquil slumber, for the experience was not exceptional.

      “Let ’em die!” he had said more than once.

      The government had provided for the transportation of sick fishermen from the Labrador coast to their homes in Newfoundland; these men were of the great Newfoundland fleet of cod-fishing schooners, which fish the Labrador seas in the summer. It needed only the doctor’s word to get the boon. Once a fisherman brought his consumptive son aboard—a young lad, with but a few weeks of life left. The boy wanted his mother, who was at home in Newfoundland.

      “Ay, he’s fair sick for his mother,” said the father to the doctor. “I’m askin’ you, zur, t’ take un home on the mail-boat.”

      The doctor was in a perverse mood that day. He would not take the boy.

      “Sure, zur,” said the fisherman, “the schooner’s not goin’ ’til fall, an’ I’ve no money, an’ the lad’s dyin’.”

      But still the doctor would not.

      “I’m thinkin’, zur,” said the fisherman, steadily, “that you’re not quite knowin’ that the lad wants t’ see his mother afore he dies.”

      The doctor laughed.

      “We’ll have a laugh at you,” cried the indignant fisherman, “when you comes t’ die!”

      Then he cursed the doctor most heartily and took his son ashore. He was right—they did have a laugh at the doctor; the whole coast might have laughed when he came to die. Being drunk on a stormy night, he fell down the companion way and broke his neck.

      Deep in the bays and up the rivers south of Hamilton Inlet, which is itself rather heavily timbered, there is wood to be had for the cutting; but “down t’ Chidley”—which is the northernmost point of the Labrador coast—the whole world is bare; there is neither tree nor shrub, shore nor inland, to grace the naked rock; the land lies bleak and desolate. But, once, a man lived there the year round. I don’t know why; it is inexplicable; but I am sure that the shiftless fellow and his wife had never an inkling that the circumstance was otherwise than commonplace and reasonable; and the child, had he lived, would have continued to dwell there, boy and man, in faith that the earth was good to live in. One hard winter the man burnt all his wood long before the schooners came up from the lower coast. It was a desperate strait to come to; but I am sure that he regarded his situation with surprising phlegm; doubtless he slept as sound, if not as warm, as before. There was no more wood to be had; so he burnt the furniture, every stick of it, and when that was