Chapter XII: A Wide, Wide “parish”

To take the measure of the man Dr. Grenfell is and the work he does it is necessary to know something of the land and the waters round about, where he puts his life in jeopardy year after year, day unto day, to save the lives of others. There is much more to “Dr. Grenfell’s parish” than the “rock, fog and bog” of the old saying. Such observations as are here assembled are the raw material for the Doctor’s inimitable tales of life on the Labrador.

The great fact of life here is the sea, and much of existence is in giving battle to it. The little boys practice jumping across rain-barrels and mud-puddles, because some day they hope to get a “ticket” (a berth on a sealer) and go to the ice, and when it is “a good big copy from pan to pan”—that is to say, a considerable distance from one floating ice-cake to the next—their ability to jump like their own island sheep may save their lives.

The word “copy” comes from the childish game of following the leader and doing as he does. A little piece of ice is called a knob, and a larger piece is a pan. A pan is the same thing as a floe, but the latter expression is not in common usage.

Every youth who aspires to qualify as a skipper must go before an examining board of old sea-wise and weather-wise pilots, and prove himself letter-perfect in the text of that big book, “The Newfoundland and Labrador Pilot and Guide.” His examiners scorn the knowledge of the book, very often, for they have the facts at the fingers’ ends from long and harsh experience of the treacherous waters, with the criss-cross currents, the hidden reefs, the sudden fogs, the contrary winds. So they delight to make life miserable for the young mariner by heckling him.

The disasters that now and then overtake the sealing-fleet are ever present in the minds of those who do business in these waters. They know what it means for a ship’s company to be caught out on the ice in a snow-storm, far from the vessel. In early March the wooden ships race for the Straits of Belle Isle, and three days later the faster iron ships follow. When they get to where the seals are sunning themselves around the blow-holes in the ice, the crew go out with their gaffs (staves) and kill the usually unresisting animals by hitting them over the back of the head. It sounds like simple and easy hunting, and in good weather it is. But a long-continued storm changes the complexion of the adventure to that of the gravest peril.

One captain saved his men by making them dance like mad the long night through, while he crooned the music to them. At the end of each five minutes he let them rest on their piles of gaffs, and then they were made to spring to their feet again and resume the frantic gyrations that kept them from freezing to death. In the same storm, the _Greenland_ of Harbour Grace lost 52 of her 100 men.

They still talk of the fate of the _Queen_ on Gull Island off Cape St. John, though the wreck took place nigh unto forty years ago. There was no lighthouse then. The island lifts its head hundreds of feet above the mean of the tides, and only the long rank grass and the buttercups live there in summer. But this was in a December night, and the wind blew a gale. There were six passengers—a woman among them. When the passengers had battled their way ashore through the leaping surf, the crew went back on the doomed ship to salvage some of the provisions. For they knew that at this forsaken angle of the island no help from any passing ship was likely till the spring.

The passengers toiled to the top of the bleak islet, lugging with them a fragment of a sail. The crew, aboard the vessel, were carried by the furious winds and waters out to the Old Harry Shoals, where they lost their lives when the sea beat the vessel to pieces.

The sequel is known by a little diary in which a doctor—one of the hapless half-dozen—made notes with his own blood till his stiffening fingers refused to scrawl another entry.

It seems from this pathetic note-book that the six at the end of a few days, tortured with thirst and starvation, drew lots to see who should die.

The lot fell to the woman. Her brother offered himself in her place.

Then the entries in the book cease; and the curtain that fell was not lifted till spring brought a solitary hunter to the island. He shot a duck from his boat, and it fell in the breakers. Afterwards he said it was a phantom fowl, sent from heaven to guide him. For he did not see it again, though he landed and searched the beach.

But he saw splinters flung high by the surf that seemed to him a clear indication of a wreck.

He clambered to the top of the islet. There he found, under the rotted sail, the six bodies, and in the hand of one, was a piece of flesh torn from one of the bodies.

Even when their lives are endangered the fishermen preserve their keen mindfulness of the religious proprieties. Caught on an ice-pan together, Protestants and Catholics prayed, their backs to one another, on opposite sides of the pan—and the same thing has happened in ships’ cabins. The sailors are not above a round oath now and then, but there are many God-fearing, prayerful men among them. “These are my sailing orders, sir,” said an old retired sea-dog to me as he patted the cheek of his Bible.

Phrases of the sea enter into every phase of daily human intercourse. “You should have given yourself more room to veer and haul,” said the same old sailor to me when I was in a hurry. Fish when half-cured are said to be “half-saved,” and a man who is “not all there” is likely to be styled “half-saved.”

“Down killik” is used impartially on arrival at the fishing grounds or at home after a voyage—the “killik” being a stone anchor for small craft or for nets. (A “killy-claw” is of wood with the stone in the middle.) You may hear an old fisherman say of his retirement from the long warfare with the sea for a living: “My killiks are down; my boat is moored.” One of them who was blind in his left eye, said as he lay dying, referring to his own soul: “She’s on her last tack, heading for I don’t know where: the port light is out, and the starboard is getting very dim.” A few minutes later he passed away.

The ordinary talk is full of poetry. “If I could only rig up a derrick, now, to hoist me over the fore part of the winter,” an old salt will say, “wi’ the help o’ God and a sou’westerly wind and a few swyles I could last till the spring.” By “swyles,” of course, he means “seals.” A man’s a man when he has killed his seal. Seal-meat is an anti-scorbutic, and the sealers present the “paws,” or flippers, as great delicacies to their friends. A “big feed” is a “scoff.” Sealing brings men together in conviviality and comaraderie, and it is the great ambition of most of the youth of Newfoundland to “go to the ice.” Many are the stowaways aboard the sealing craft. If a man goes “half his hand” it means he gets half his catch for his labour.

“Seal” is pronounced “swyle,” “syle,” or “swoyle” and Swale Island also takes its name from this most important mammal. Seals wandering in search of their blow-holes have been found as far as six or seven miles inland.

As might be expected, there survives in the vernacular—especially of the older people—many words and phrases that smack of their English dialect origin, and words that were the English undefiled of Chaucer’s or Shakespeare’s day. Certain proper names represent a curious conversion of a French name no longer understood.

In Dorsetshire dialect v is used for f, and in Newfoundland one hears “fir” pronounced “vir” or “var.” Firewood is “vir-wood.” Women who are “vuzzing up their vires” are fussing (making ready) their fires. We have “it wouldn’t be vitty” in place of “it wouldn’t be fitting.” A pig “veers”; it does not farrow. The use of “thiccy” for “this” is familiar to readers of “Lorna Doone.” “The big spuds are not very jonnick yet” means that the potatoes are not well done. If something “hatches” in your “glutch,” it catches in your throat. Blizzard is a word not used, and a lass at school, confusing it with gizzard, said it meant the insides of a hen. The remains of birds or of animals are the “rames.” “O yes you, I ’low” is a common form of agreement. To be photographed is to be “skitched off,” and of snapshots it is sometimes said by an old fisherman to a “kodak fiend”: “I heard ye firin’ of ’em.”

“Cass ’n goo,” for “can’t you go” may be heard at Notre Dame Bay, as well as “biss ’n gwine” for “aren’t you going?” and “thees cass’n do it” for “thee can’t do it.” The berries called “harts” (whorts) are, I presume, the “hurts” of Surrey.

A vivid toast for a sealer going to the icefields was “Bloody decks to ’im!”

When bad weather is brewing, “We’re going to have dirt” is a common expression.

A fisherman who had hooked a queer creature that must have been first cousin to the sea-serpent said, “It had a head like a hulf, a neck like a harse; I cut the line and let it go to hell.”

Here is a puzzler: “Did ye come on skits or on cart and dogs?” That means, “Did you come on skates or on a dog-sledge?” Dog-cat is a dog-sledge. Cat is short for catamaran, which is not a sea-boat but a land-sledge, so that when you hear it said: “He’s taken his dog and his cat and gone to the woods” you may know that it means “He’s taken his dog and his sledge.”

Just as we change the position of the _r_ in going from _three_ to _third_, we find the letters transposed in “aps” for aspen, “haps” for hasp, “waps” for “wasp” and “wordle” for world. Labrador is Larbador, and “down to the Larbador” or “down on the Larbador” are common expressions.

Instead of “the hatch” the telescoped form “th’ ’atch” is used. We have “turr” for “tern” and “loo” for “loon,” and “yammit” (emmet) for “ant.”

The tendency to combine syllables is illustrated in the pronunciation of Twillingate as Twulngate.

A scaffolding for fish is known as a “flake.” Here the split cod are outspread to dry and, by the way, a decision of the Newfoundland Supreme Court declares “cod” and “fish” synonymous. The scaffolding is made of poles called longers, and it is suggested that these “longers” are the “longiores” which Caesar used to build bridges, according to his Commentaries. A silk hat is known as a beaver, or behaviour, and so when you hear it said, “I saw Tom Murphy; he must have been at a funeral; he had his behaviour on,” it means not that he was circumspect in his conduct, but that he wore the formal headgear. “Sammy must ’a’ been writin’ some poetry. I saw him just now a-humourin’ of it with his foot.” Cannot you see the bard beating out the rhythm with his foot, as a musician sometimes does when he is sure that he is in time and the rest are mistaken?

“South’ard,” “north’ard,” “east’ard,” “west’ard” are current maritime usage, and the adjective “wester” is heard.

Legal Latin is drawn upon for “tal qual”—_talis qualis_—applied in a bargain for fish “just as they come.”

Here is a quaint one. The end of a pile, above the surface of a wharf, is a gump-head. Gump and block are one and the same thing. We of the United States use the word “gump” or “chump” figuratively for a “blockhead.”

“The curse o’ Crummle on ye” is a rural expression still heard, and refers to Cromwell’s bloody descent on Ireland.

“I find my kinkhorn and I can’t glutch” means “I have a pain in my throat and I can’t swallow.” The kinkhorn is the Adam’s apple. A man at Chimney Cove remarked: “I have a pain in my kinkhorn and it has gone to my wizen (chest).”

A dog is often called a “crackie.” Caribou is shortened to “boo.” A door that has stuck is said to be “plimmed up.” A man who ate hard bread and drank water said “It plimmed up inside and nearly killed me.”

To say of a girl that she “blushed up like a bluerag” refers to the custom of enclosing a lump of blueing in a cloth when laundering clothes. “The wind baffles round the house” is a beautiful way of saying that it was blustering.

“Bruise” is a very popular dish of hard bread boiled with fish, and with “scrunchins” (pork) fried and put over it. It is the equivalent of Philadelphia’s famous “scrapple.” A guide, admitting that bread and tea are the staple articles of diet in many an outpost, said reflectively: “Yes, that’s all those people live on. Now there’s other things. There’s beans.”

When a man says that his hands are “hard afrore” (hard frozen) we remember Milton in “Paradise Lost,” “the air burns frore.” Frozen potatoes are “frosty tiddies.” Head is often called “heed.” “Tigyer,” said by an old man to a mischievous lad, means “Take yerself off.” “Is en?” is a way of saying “Is he?” An old man cut his finger and said that he had a “risen” on it, which is certainly more of a finality than a “rising.” “I’m going chock to Gargamelle” means “I’m going all the way to Gargamelle,” the latter name from “garçon gamelle,” said to signify “the boy who looks after the soup.”

Instead of “squashed,” “squatted” is a common word, as in the expression “I squatted my finger.” And there are many other provincialisms not in the dictionaries.

The fathom is a land-measure of length, as well as a sea-measure of depth. The leading dog of a team is six or seven “fathoms” ahead of the komatik.

“Start calm” means perfectly calm, and then they may say expressively “The wind’s up and down the mast.”

“Puddick” is a common name for the stomach.

“Take it abroad” is “take it apart”; “do you relish enough,” is “have you eaten plenty?” “Poor sign fish” means that fish are scarce. Woods that are tall are said to be “taunt.”

These few examples of distinctive phraseology might be multiplied a thousand-fold.

As for the proper names, a fascinating field of research lies before a patient investigator who commands the leisure. Here are but a few of countless examples that might be cited.

French names have been Anglicized in strange ways. Isle aux Bois thus becomes Isle of Boys—or, as pronounced on the south coast, Oil of Boys or Oil o’ Boy. Baie de Boules has lost the significance of boulders that bestud its shores in the name Bay Bulls. The famous and dreaded Cape Race, near the spot where the beautiful _Forizel_ was lost, gets its name from the French “razé,” signifying “sheer.” Reucontre is Round Counter; Cinq Isles has become St. Keels, and Peignoir is altered to Pinware or Pinyare. Grand Bruit is Grand Brute; the rocky headland of Blomidon that nobly commands the mouth of the Humber is commonly called Blow-me-down; Roche Blanche is Rose Blanche.

One would scarcely recognize Lance-au-Diable in Nancy Jobble. Bay d’Espoir has been turned into its exact antithesis, in the shape of Bay Despair. L’Argent Bay is now Bay Le John. Out of Point Enrage is evolved Point Rosy, and St. Croix is modified to Sancroze (Sankrose).

Children’s names are likely to be Biblical. They are often called by the middle name as well—William James, Henry George, Albert Edward. Merchants’ ledgers must take account of a vast number of nicknames that are often slight variants on the same name—Yankee Peter, Foxy Peter, Togo Ben, Sailor Ben, Bucky Ben, Big Tom, Deaf Tom, Young Tom, Big Jan, Little Jan, Susy’s Jan, Ripple Jan, Happy Jack. Thomas Cluett comes to be called Tommy Fiddler, whereupon all the children become Fiddlers, and the wife is Mrs. Fiddler. The family of Maynards is known as the Miners.

The little boys have a mischievous way of teasing one another as “bay noddies.” The noddy is a stupid fish that is very good at catching the smaller fry and then easily allows itself to be robbed of its prey. The children cry:

“Bay boy, bay boy, come to your supper,
Two cods’ heads and a lump o’ butter.”

We find the children using instead of “Eeny, meeny, miny, mo” this formula:

“Hiram, Jiram, bumbo lock
Six knives in a clock;
Six pins turning wins.
Dibby, dabby, o-u-t spells out.”

Or:

“Little man driving cattle
Don’t you hear his money rattle?
One, two, sky blue,
Out goes y-o-u.”

Or:

“Silver lock, silver key,
Touch, go run away!”

Or:

“Eetle, ottle, blue bottle,
Eetle, ottle, out!”

Still another is:

“Onery, ury, ickery, Ann,
Fillissy, follissy, Nicholas John,
Kubee, Kowbee, Irish Mary

They throw marbles against a wall for a sort of carom-shot, and call it “bazzin’ marbles.” “The real precursor of the spring, like the sure mating of the birds,” said an old man of the game.

In some places there is a local celebrity with a real talent for the composition of what are known as “come-all-ye’s,” from the fact that the minstrel is supposed to invite all who will to come and hear him chant his lay. Every big storm or shipwreck is supposed to be commemorated in appropriate verse by the laureate. For instance, one of these ballads begins:

“The Lily Joyce stuck in the ice,
So did the Husky too;
Captain Bill Ryan left Terry behin’
To paddle his own canoe.”

Another runs thus:

“’Twas on the 29th of June,
As all may know the same;
The wind did blow most wonderful,
All in a flurry came.”

This was written and sung to a hymn tune.

Song is a common accompaniment of a shipboard task:

“Haul on the bow-line,
Kitty is me darlin’;
Haul on the bow-line,
Haul, boys, haul.”

If a boy doesn’t go across the Straits before he is sixteen, he must be “shaved by Neptune.” It is almost a disgrace not to have gone to the Labrador. Neptune is called “Nipkin.” “Nipkin’ll be aboard to shave you tonight.”

When they are cleaning fish, the last man to wash a fish for the season gets ducked in the tub.

Some of the older residents are walking epitomes of the island lore. They know a great deal that never found lodgment in books. Matty Mitchell, the 63-year old Micmac guide, now a prospector for the Reid-Newfoundland Company, was a fellow-passenger on the mail-boat. He was full of tales of the days when the wolf still roamed the island’s inner fastnesses. I asked him when the last of which he knew were at large. He said: “About thirty years ago I saw three on Doctor’s Hill. I have seen none since. There are still lots of bears and many lynxes. Once I was attacked by six wolves. I waited till the nearest was close to me—then I shoved my muzzle-loader into his mouth and shot him and the other five fell away. Another time I was attacked by three bears who drove me into a lake where I had to stay till some men who had been with me came to the rescue.

“My grandfather was with Peyton when Mary March and another Indian woman were captured at Indian Lake. Mary March died at St. John’s, and was buried there; the other one was brought back to the shore of the lake.”

“How do you know what minerals you are finding when you are prospecting?” I asked.

“I was three times in the Museum at St. John’s,” he answered. “I see everything in the place. That way I know everything that I look at when I go to hunt for minerals and metals. I hear a thing once—I got it. I see a thing once—I got it. I never found gold—but I got pearls from clams, weighing as much as forty grains. I can’t stay in the house. I must be out in the open. If I stay inside I get sick. I take colds. I’ve been twice to the Grand Falls in Labrador. At the upper falls the river rises seven times so”—he arched the back of his hand—“before the water goes over. The biggest flies I ever saw are there. They bite right through the clothes. You close the tent—sew up the opening. You burn up all the flies inside. Next morning there are just as many.”

Another passenger was the Rev. Thomas Greavett, Church of England “parson,” with a parish 100 miles long on the West Coast between Cow Head and Flower’s Cove. He had to be medicine-man and lawyer too, and in his black satchel he carried a stomach-pump, a syringe, eight match-boxes of medicine and Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall.” He told me how he hated to use the mail-boat for his parish visiting, for it generally meant sleepless nights of pacing the deck or sitting in the lifeboat in default of a berth. He carried a petition, to go before the Legislature, reciting the many reasons why the poor little boat on which we were travelling is inadequate to the heavy freight and passenger traffic in which she is engaged. With accommodations for hardly more than 50 passengers, she has carried 210, 235 and even 300, which meant acute discomfort for everybody and the open deck, night and day, for many passengers. What is wanted is a big, heavy ice-breaker. The _Ethie_ never was meant by her Glasgow builders to fight the Humboldt Glacier bit by bit as it falls into the sea. In December she was wrecked off Cow Head in a gale, fortunately with no loss of life.

I don’t know of a harder-working lot than the crew and captain of a boat that undertakes to carry freight and passengers between southern ports of Newfoundland and the Labrador.

Take the experience of this vessel, the _Ethie_, in the summer of 1919 as an example. Under a thoroughly capable and chart-perfect skipper, Captain English, she made several ineffectual attempts to get to Battle Harbour through the dense ice-jam before she finally made that roadstead on June 24. When I met her at Curling to go north, a week late, at the end of August, she had just come out of a viscous fog of four days’ duration in the Strait of Belle Isle and in that fog she had escaped by the closest of shaves a collision with a berg that towered above her till the top of it was lost in the fog. She carried so many passengers, short-haul or long-distance, that every seat in the dining saloon was filled with weary folk at night and some paced the decks or sat on the piles of lathes or the oil-barrels. Lumber and barrels were stored everywhere, the hold was crammed, and cattle in the prow came and went mysteriously as the vessel moved into one cove or bight or tickle after another in the dead of the night or the silver cool of the early morning. The clatter of the steam-winch with the tune of babies strange to the sea-trip, the slap and scuffle of the waves on our sheet-iron sides and the banging of the doors as the vessel writhed in her discomfort made an orchestra of many tongues and percussions. The boat was so heavy with her cargo of machinery, oil, lumber, flour ($24 a barrel at Battle Harbour), cattle and human beings that the deck outside my stateroom was hardly two feet out of water. There were four of us in the stateroom, but the population changed almost hourly from port to port, so that I had barely time to get acquainted with a fellow-passenger ere I lost him to look after his lobster or fish, or his missionary labours. One of the ship’s company was going to teach school at Green Island Cove at the northern tip of Newfoundland. He told me he would get $275 for ten months’ work and out of it would have to pay board. Yet out of that salary he meant to put by money to pay for part of a college education at St. John’s. “How old are you?” I asked. “Not yet eighteen, sir.”

It is easy to see why Dr. Grenfell’s heart and hand go out in a practical and helpful sympathy to those whose battle with grim, unmitigated natural forces and with harsh circumstance is unending. The commonest question asked of anyone who returns from a visit to the Labrador is “Why do people live there?” Despite the fog and the cold, the sea-perils and the stark barrenness of the rocks, the Labrador has an allurement all its own. It has brought a sturdy explorer like William B. Cabot of Boston (“Labrador” Cabot) again and again to the rivers and inlets and the central fastnesses, where he shares the life of the Montagnais and the Nauscapee Indians; and the same magic has endeared the Labrador to those who year upon year continue the quest of the cod and the seal and know no life other than this. Whatever place a man calls his home is likely to become unreasonably dear to him, however bare and poor it looks to visitors; and that is the way with the Labrador. But he who cannot find by sea or land a wild and terrible beauty in the waters and the luminous skies and the long roll and lift of the blue hills must be insensible to some of the fairest vistas that earth has to show. Grenfell and his colleagues do not concede that life on the Labrador is dull or that the environment is sterile and monotonous and cheerless. As one of the brave Labrador missionaries, the Rev. Henry Gordon, has written, “Not only does Labrador rejoice in some of the finest scenery in North America, but she also possesses a people of an exceptionally fine type.” Surely it is not right to think of such a country as a land only of rocks, snows and misery.