Chapter V: The Captain of Industry

Dr. Grenfell in his battles with profiteering traders has incurred their enmity, of course—but he has been the people’s friend. The favourite charge of those who fight him is that he is amassing wealth for himself by barter on the side, and collecting big sums in other lands from which he diverts a golden stream for his own uses. The infamous accusation is too pitifully lame and silly to be worth denying. The most unselfish of men, he has sometimes worked his heart out for an ingrate who bit the hand that fed him. His enterprise, whose reach always exceeds his grasp, is money-losing rather than money-making.

The International Grenfell Association has never participated in the trading business. Dr. Grenfell, however, started several stores with his own money and took it out after a time with no interest. He delights in the success of those whose aim is no more than a just profit, who buy from the fisherman at a fair price and sell to him in equity. There is a co-operative store of his original inspiration and engineering at Flower’s Cove, and another is the one at Cape Charles, which in five years returned 100 per cent. on the investment with 5 per cent. interest.

Accusations of graft he is accustomed to face, and a commission appointed by the Newfoundland Legislature investigated him, travelled with him on the _Strathcona_, and completely exonerated him. Some persons had even gone so far as to accuse him of making money out of the old clothes business aboard what they were pleased to term his “yacht.” They descended to such petty false witness as to swear that he had taken a woman’s dress with $12 in it. It is wearisome to have to dignify such charges by noticing them. They are about on a par with the letter of a bishop who wrote to him: “I should like to know how you can reconcile with your conscience reading a prayer in the morning against heresy and schism, and then preaching at a dissenting meeting-house in the afternoon.”

A vestryman objected to his preaching in the church at a diminutive and forlorn settlement because “he talks about trade.”

The Doctor is never embittered by his traducers. He knows the meaning of J. L. Garvin’s saying, “He who is bitter is beaten.” Nothing beclouds for long his sunny temperament, but his unfailing good-humour never dulls the fighting edge of his courage.

“I bought a boat for a worthy soul, to set him on his feet,” the Doctor told me. “She had been driven ashore in North Labrador. I had to buy everything separately—and the total came to $500. The boat was to work out the payment. This she did—Alas! later on she went ashore on Brehat (‘Braw’) Shoals. Only her lifeboat came ashore, with the name—_Pendragon_—upon it.”

The Doctor put $1,000 of his money into the co-operative store at Flower’s Cove, and when the enterprise was fairly launched and the Grenfell Association decided to abstain from lending help to trade he drew it out, and asked no interest. That store in its last fiscal year sold goods to the value of more than $200,000, paying fair prices and selling at a fair profit. It had three ships in the summer of 1919 carrying fish abroad—“foreigners.” The proprietor bought for $50 a schooner that went ashore at Forteau, dressed it in a new suit of sails worth $1,250, and now has a craft worth $8,000 to him. Dr. Grenfell has personally great affection for some of the traders—it is the “truck system” he hates. “Trading in the old days,” the Doctor observes, “was like a pond at the top of a hill. It got drained right out. The money was not set in circulation here on the soil of Newfoundland. The traders in two months took away the money that should have been on the coast. 1919 was the first year in which the co-operative stores themselves sent fish to the other side. A vessel from Iceland came here to the Flower’s Cove store; another was a Norwegian; a third came from Cadiz with salt; and today a small vessel is preparing to go across.”

At Red Bay is another store to which Dr. Grenfell loaned money, which he drew out, sans interest, when it was prosperous. It has saved the people there, as every soul in the harbour will testify.

The fishermen on the West Coast in 1919 enjoyed something like affluence as compared with their brethren on the East Coast, where the fish were scarce.

Where there were lobsters, they were getting $35.50 or $35.00 per case of 48 one-pound cans. For cod, $11.20 a quintal of 112 pounds was paid. In 1918 over $15 per quintal was paid.

On the other hand, with pork at $100 a barrel, coal at $24 a ton, and gasoline at 70 cents a gallon, the big prices for fish were matched by an alarming cost of the necessaries of life.

Some fishermen make but $200 a year; a few make as much as $2,000 and even more. The merchant princes as a rule are the store-keepers who deal with the fishermen. There were two big bank failures in St. John’s years ago, and since that time many persons have hidden their money in the ground. One fisherman of whose case I heard had but $35 in cash as the result of his season’s effort, and he had eight to support besides himself. The small amount of ready money on which people can live with a house, a vegetable garden, and a supply of firewood at their backs in the timbered hillsides is unbelievable. If a man was fortunate enough to possess any grassland, he might get as much as $65 a ton for his hay in 1919, if he could spare it from his own cows and sheep. It is too bad that for the sake of the sheep the noble Newfoundland dog that chased them has had to perish. It is almost impossible today to find a pure-breed example of the dog that spread the name of the island to the ends of the earth. Such dogs as there are are remarkably intelligent and make excellent messengers between a man at work and his house.

The “Southerners” go to the Grand Banks for their fishing; the others go to the Labrador. The three classes of fishermen are the shore fishermen, the “bankers,” and the “floaters”—those of the Labrador. Ordinarily the catch is reckoned by quintals (pronounced kentals) of 112 pounds. Those who live on the Labrador coast the winter through are known as the “liveyers”—the live-heres—and those who come regularly to the fishing are “stationers” or “planters.”

During the war big prices have been realized for the fish, and unprecedented prosperity has come to the fishermen. The growth in the number of motor-boats is an index of this condition, though with gasoline at 70 cents a gallon on the Labrador (for the imperial gallon, slightly larger than ours), the question of fuel has been a disturbing one to many. Of late much of the fish has been marketed on favourable terms in the United States and Canada, but before this the preferred markets in order have been Spain and Portugal, Brazil and the West Indies. The three grades recognized, from the best to the lowest, are “merchantable,” “Madeira,” and “West Indies” (“West Injies”), the last-named for the negroes.

An industry of growing importance to the future of the Grenfell mission is the manufacture and sale of “hooked” rugs by the women trained at the industrial school at St. Anthony. Large department stores in the United States have begun to buy these rugs in considerable quantities, and the demand is lively and increasing.

The Doctor’s delightful sense of humour comes to the fore in his designs for these rugs, made of rags worked through canvas. The dyes are vivid green, blue, red, black, brown—the white rivals the driven snow, and the workmanship is of the best. A favourite pattern shows the dogs harnessed to the komatik eager to be off, turning in the traces as if to ask questions of the driver, their attitude alert and alive, while their two masters standing by the baggage on the komatik, in hoods and heavy parkas (blouses) rimmed with red and blue, are discussing the route to take and pointing with their mittened hands. Or the design may show Eskimoes stealthily stalking polar bears upon an ice-pan of a wondrous green at the edges. There is a glorious Turnerian sunset in the background; the sea bristles with bergs arched and pinnacled. The wary hunters approach their hapless quarry in a kyak. One is paddling and the other has the rifle across his knees, and the polar bears are nervously pacing the ice-pan as though conscious of the fate impending. Another motif in these diverting rugs—which are often used for wall adornments instead of floor-covering—is a stately procession of three bears uphill past the solemn green sentinels of pagoda-like fir trees. What an improvement these designs are over the former rugs which showed meaningless blotches of pink and green that might have been thrown at one another, as if a mason’s trowel had splashed them there!

Since the Labrador is innocent in most places of anything like a store where you can go to the counter, lay down your money and ask for what you want, the nearest thing the women know to the luxury of a shopping-expedition or a bargain-sale is a chance to exchange firewood or fish for the old clothing carried on her missionary journeys by the _Strathcona_.

“Why isn’t this clothing given away?” someone may query unthinkingly.

The object of the mission is not to pauperize, and the pride of the people themselves in most cases forbids the acceptance of an outright gift.

To preserve self-respect by the exchange of a _quid pro quo_, some of the clothing contributed by friends in the States and elsewhere is allocated to the fishermen’s families in return for the supplies of firewood. The value varies according to the place where the wood is cut and piled. It may be worth $7 a cord on a certain point or $3 at the bottom of a bay. (Cutting the wood is called “cleaving the splits.”) The payment must be very carefully apportioned, so that Mrs. B. shall not have more or better than Mrs. A.—or else there will be wailing and gnashing and heart-burning after the boat weighs anchor.

Before making the rounds of the Straits or of White Bay, or going on the long trail down North, or wherever else the _Strathcona_ may be faring on her mission, the big boxes of wearables are opened on the deck and stored in a pinched triangular stateroom forward of the saloon. There are quantities of clothing for men—overcoats, sweaters of priceless wool, reefers, peajackets, shooting-coats, dressing-gowns, underwear—some of it brand new and most of it thick and good; there are woolen socks excellently made by many loving hands, shoes joined by the laces or buttoned together, trousers, jackets, whole suits more or less in disrepair but capable of conversion to all sorts of useful ends. Generally the Doctor and Mrs. Grenfell find a pretext for giving some of the clothing to a needy family even when the fiction of payment in kind is not maintained. Rarely does the article offered—let us say a hooked rug in garish colours—meet the value of the garments that are given. But the important thing is that the recipient is made to feel that he pays for what he gets and is not a pauper.

There is ever a want of clothing for the women and children. Few complete dresses for women find their way to the _Strathcona’s_ storeroom. There are not nearly enough garments for babies or suits for little boys. Women’s underclothing is badly needed. But most of those who come aboard in quest of clothing are grateful for whatever is given them and make no fuss. They will ingeniously adapt a shirt into a dress for Susy, and cut a big man’s trousers in twain for her two small brothers. The Northern housewife learns to make much of little in the way of textile materials. A barrel of magazines and cards and picture scrap-books shielded with canvas, stands at the head of the companion way. Bless whoever pasted in the stories and pictures on the strong sheets of brown cartridge-paper! Those will be pored over by lamp-light from cottage to cottage till they fall apart, just as the wooden boxes of books carried aboard for circulating libraries will provide most of the life intellectual all winter long for many a village. Many of the fishermen’s families from the father down are unlettered, but those who can read and write make up for it by their intellectual activity, and even the little boys sometimes display a nimbleness of wit and fancy altogether delightful. They will sing you a song or tell you a fairy-tale with a naïveté foreign to the American small boy.

A woman came aboard with her husband—pale, thin, forlorn she was—and asked for clothing for him. She held each garment critically to the light, and somewhat disdainfully rejected any that showed signs of mending. Finally I said: “You’re not taking anything for yourself. Don’t you need something?” I knew the pitiful huddle of fishermen’s houses ashore from which she came—the entire population of the settlement was 141, not counting the vociferous array of Eskimo dogs that greeted us when we landed.

“I’d like a dress,” she admitted—“for street wear.”

I thought of the straggling path amid the rocks where the dogs growled and bristled, but I did not smile. For I realized what this chance to go shopping meant to her isolated life. In the city she would have had huge warerooms and piled counters from which to make a choice. Here two bunks, a barrel and a canvas bag held the whole stock in trade.

She rejected a sleeveless ball gown of burgundy. “I must have black,” she said—“we lost a son in the war.”

The husband began to apologize for the trouble they caused. But we were more than ever bound to please them now. All the new skirts were found to be too short or too long or too gay or too youthful or something else, and the upshot of the dickering was that two pairs of golfer’s breeches were given in lieu of proper habiliments for a poor, lonely woman in Labrador. They could be cut down, she explained, for her boys.

There isn’t much for a woman, in most of these places, but cooking and scrubbing the floor and minding the baby—something like the Kaiser’s ideal of feminine existence. And when the floor is clean, booted fishermen come in and spit upon it even though the white plague is plainly written in the children’s faces.

A new chapter in the industrial history of the Labrador will be written when it becomes possible to utilize the vast supply of news-print available from the pulp-wood of the Labrador “hinterland,” even as Northcliffe is getting paper for his many publications from the plant at Grand Falls in Northern Newfoundland. The difficulty, of course, will be to get the timber away from the coast in the short season when the land is released from the grip of the ice-pack. But the great demand for news-print which leads to anxious examination and utilization of the supplies of Alaska and Finland cannot much longer neglect the available resources so near at hand on the coast of the North Atlantic.

At Humbermouth it was my good fortune to encounter Captain Daniel Owen, of Annapolis Royal, Nova Scotia, Captain of the H. V. Greene Labrador Aerial Expedition. The little vessel _Miranda_ had limped in on her way to Halifax, to get her boiler mended.

Captain Owen, himself, deserves more than passing mention. A member of the Royal Flying Corps, he had his left eye shot out in combat with five German planes that brought him to the ground 60 miles within their lines. The observer’s leg was shattered in nine places by their fire. There followed a sojourn of seven months in three German prison-camps. The chivalrous surgeon who was first to operate on Captain Owen’s comrade amused himself and the nurses by twisting bits of bone about in the leg, laughing, while the nurses laughed too, at the patient’s agony.

Flying at a height of 2,000 to 8,700 feet, Captain Owen’s party in Labrador added to the industrial map 1,500,000 acres (about 2,300 square miles) of land timbered with firs and spruces suitable for pulp-wood, the property lying on the Alexis, St. Louis and Gilbert Rivers about 15 miles north of Battle Harbour. This tract will, it is estimated, produce as much as 115 cords to the acre for a maximum, and on the average 40 to 50 cords. 15,000 photographs were taken, and moving pictures also were made. The aerodrome was 28 miles up the Alexis River, and according to Captain Owen it was an extremely serious matter to find the way back to it each time after a flight for there was no other suitable place to land anywhere in the neighbourhood. “I never felt so anxious for the return of an aeroplane in the Western Front as I felt for the safety of ours,” he said.

The flying took place on five different days—and in that time as much was accomplished as might have been done in from six to ten years of the usual land cruising which—in sample areas—was used to check up the results of the airmen.

The propeller of the Curtiss biplane was a mass of blood from the flies it sucked in. Dr. Murdock Graham, second in command, kept some of these flies in a bottle as souvenirs, and they were portentous insects.

“We enjoyed nothing more,” said Dr. Graham, “than an evening spent with Dr. Grenfell at Battle Harbour where, lolling at ease in corduroy and his old Queen’s College blazer with the insignia over the left breast-pocket, pulling a corn-cob pipe, he spun one yarn after another of the life at the Front with the Harvard contingent in 1915-16.

“Murphy, the mail-man from Battle Harbour, friend of the Grenfell mission, friend of everybody, is a man worth knowing. I can hear now his genial ‘Does ye smoke, boy? Has ye any on ye? Does ye mind, boy?’ He said to one of our Greene Expedition doctors, ‘Doctor, are all the Americans like ye? Ye has a kind word for everybody. Has ye any tobacco?’ ‘By gorry, that’s fine,’ he said of the aeroplane. ‘How do it do it?’ He was as modest as he was plucky. ‘I don’t want to go and eat with all those gentlemen, with their fine clothes on,’ he would say. Of one of the young ‘liveyeres’ he remarked: ‘If he had the learn there’d be a fine job for him’—which alas! is true of so many on the Labrador.

“No member of our expedition heard any swearing from the forty men we employed—with the exception of a single Newfoundlander. I asked one of the men how they came to be so clean of profanity, and he answered simply: ‘We doesn’t make a practice of that, we doesn’t.’

“At Williams Harbour on the Alexis River there was three weeks’ schooling by a visiting teacher from the Grenfell mission. In two families with a joint membership of eighteen one person could read and write.

“They have had no minister since the war and in the winter the bottom falls out of everything. The people on the rivers have no doctor for a year and a half and two years at a time. At Williams Harbour they swarmed to Dr. Twiss and Dr. MacDonald. One woman in desperation had been treating pneumonia with salt-water, snow and white moss.

“Dr. Grenfell and his people have more than they can do. We all of us realize today as we never understood before the meaning to the people of the North of the presence of Grenfell and his people among them. We caught the spirit of the work inevitably, and tried to do what good we could while we were there.

“The folk of the Alexis and the St. Louis River districts, as a rule, can’t afford the price of gas to go to Battle Harbour. It’s a day’s run, and there’s nobody to mind their cod-traps when they’re away. So one can imagine how completely they’d be shut out of the world but for the contacts which the mission provides even at such long intervals.

“William Russell is the grand old man of Williams Harbour. He is the most-travelled and the best-educated man of those parts, and he represents the finest type of patriarch. He never saw a horse or a cow or an automobile; he has never been south of Battle Harbour, though he has visited that diminutive settlement four times. He was dumfounded at our aeroplane.

“In his family the father’s word was law to the twelve children. They never thought of questioning his authority. They were the best behaved and most dutiful children I have ever seen. Their obedience was absolute, and their manner to strangers was deferential. They always said ‘Yes, sir,’ and ‘No, sir,’ most politely.

“At his house thirty-one gathered to hear the gramophone—for the first time. They were packed in as tight as could be, choking the room with their tobacco-smoke. The first night they were silent. The next night they were excited, and on the third they became hilarious.

“As I said, following the Grenfell example, we did what doctoring we could on the side. The constant diet of bread and tea, tea and bread is hard on the teeth. There is much pyorrhea due to this diet, to limestone in the water, and to failure to clean the teeth. At Blanc Sablon we treated a little boy who had suffered for three weeks with the toothache. It was a simple case of congested pulp. The relief was immediate. It is a joy and a reward to behold the gratitude of those who are helped.

“I tell you if these people who question the value of Grenfell’s work, or wonder why he chooses to spend his life in bleak and barren places, could just see his ‘parishioners’ and know their gratitude toward their benefactors, they would understand.

“There was a picturesque soul at Blanc Sablon who asked for tobacco, which we gave him. He was never off the coast. I don’t know where he had heard a violin. But to make some return to us for the smoke, he gave us an imitation of a man first tuning and then playing a violin, which was perfect in its way.”