Wilfred’s success in Boston led to an invitation to speak in New York City. Wilfred decided to make the most of the opportunity and headed south. When he arrived in New York, two letters were waiting for him. The first was from the council of the National Mission to Deep-Sea Fishermen. As Wilfred ripped it open, a chill went down his spine. He read, “Dr. Grenfell, you are requested to return home, if at all possible in time for the Annual Meeting, in order that the Council might make arrangements for you to conduct ALL of your future work in England.”
The second letter was from his old friend and mentor Dr. Treves, who tried to explain to Wilfred why he was being recalled to England. “You have established the mission in Labrador,” Wilfred read, “and done the pioneer work, but the North Sea is suffering. Things are not going so well at Gorleston, and as a matter of duty you ought to return.” The word duty was underlined.
Wilfred knew he had to return to England, but he had one more thing he felt he had to do first. He wanted to sail aboard a sealing ship to document the conditions the men worked under and to test the possibilities of sending missionaries out on the sealing ships themselves. He was aware it would be a particularly dangerous assignment, but he felt that someone had to do it, and Wilfred never asked another missionary to do something he was not willing to do himself.
Chapter 10
Seal Hunt
At noon on March 30, 1896, the church bells of St. John’s pealed loudly. Wilfred stood on the deck of the Greenland, crammed in alongside three hundred seal hunters. A huge cheer went up from them all as the bells rang out—the signal that the five-week seal-hunting season had officially begun. Ship sirens wailed and flags fluttered in the stiff breeze.
Finally, after years of hearing about it, Wilfred was on his way to a seal hunt. When he first arrived in St. John’s four years before, he learned that in mid-February huge ice pans broke off from the Arctic ice sheet and were driven south by the spring winds. Perched on these ice pans were hundreds of thousands of hood and harp seals that hitched a ride all the way to Belle Isle Strait, between Newfoundland and Labrador, where the winds died down and the ice pans bobbed about in one place. There the female seals gave birth to their whelps. The baby seals thrived on the ice pans, and within a month they weighed as much as fifty pounds. It was then, when the whelps were large enough to catch fish for themselves, that the seal-hunting season was declared open.
Steam was quickly raised, and soon twenty or more ships were jostling for position to clear the bottleneck exit of St. John’s Harbor. The Greenland took her place between the Neptune and the Windsor as she lined up to pass between the cliffs and race toward Belle Isle Strait for her share of the seal pelts.
With the exception of his doctor’s satchel, which he had slung over his shoulder, Wilfred looked just like his fellow seal hunters, dressed in thick woolen pants and jacket, fur cap, and knee-high boots. As the Greenland headed for open water, Wilfred moved among the seal hunters, reacquainting himself with those he had met before when they worked on fishing boats over the summer and introducing himself to unfamiliar faces. The atmosphere was electric; adrenaline ran high. If things went well, the sealers would have money to buy fishing equipment for the summer’s fishing. If things did not go well, they and their families would struggle until next year, when they would head out again for another chance at the seal pelts.
The Greenland made swift progress. The first night out from St. John’s, everyone who was not on watch slept on a straw mattress in the hold. It was a luxury to be inside. As soon as the holds started to fill with seal pelts, the crew would have to sling their mattresses down on the frozen deck and sleep there.
The next morning Wilfred was up bright and early. He did his usual exercise routine and followed it up with a dousing of icy water. As the others awoke, he lashed a ladder he had brought with him to the center mast. Then he climbed to the top rung, and with one arm hooked inside the rung for support against the rolling of the ship, he preached his first sermon of the voyage. It was short and to the point, something that each man, no matter how educated, could identify with. Then he climbed down, handed out some hymnals, and started singing. Many of the men joined in, and soon the ship was vibrating with hymns.
Once the service was over, Wilfred joined the other men scrubbing the deck and untangling ropes. As he did so, he kept an eye out for the sealers who wanted to discuss his message further. He found several men who were ready to listen as he told them about his Christian faith.
The Greenland and several other ships reached the strait at the same time. Wilfred peered over the side at an amazing sight. Carried by the wind and the tide, huge ice pans swished back and forth in the water. The captain climbed the rigging and scrambled into a large basket lashed to the masthead. He pulled an eyeglass out of his pocket and began combing the scene.
“Twenty degrees north,” he yelled. “It’s a wide vein. Should take us a way.”
Wilfred watched as the helmsman turned the wheel and the Greenland began to move to a northerly heading as she crashed through a thin ice pan. He said a quick prayer under his breath. He knew that this was the most dangerous part of the voyage. The captain was looking for veins or paths through the ice, but if the wind changed, those veins could close up in an instant, crushing a ship like a walnut. Wilfred listened as the hull creaked and groaned, but it held, and the ship steamed on into the northerly vein.
Then the captain yelled, “Seals ahead, lads. Prepare to go over.”
In an instant hundreds of men sprang into action. They grabbed their equipment—a club or pole to kill the seals and a length of rope with which to drag the skins back to the ship—and a small canvas bag containing their food ration, a mixture of oatmeal and sugar that they could moisten with melted ice and eat out on the ice pan.
Wilfred planned to go over the side with the sealers, not with a hunting kit but with his medical bag. He knew that there would be many injuries as the men worked to catch as many seals as they could.
As he looked out across the ice pans, Wilfred saw thousands of big, brown seals, many with white-coated whelps at their sides. It was an awesome sight, and for a brief moment he wished his father were at his side. Wilfred’s father had loved geography and would have been fascinated to see something that he had only read about.
But there was little time to reflect on the past; while 280 of the men were climbing down ropes onto the ice, the remaining twenty men would take their turn staying with the ship. Wilfred grabbed his bag and his food ration and joined the throng. When he stood on the ice pan, he found it was not as smooth as it looked from the ship. In fact it was quite broken up, with large, jagged points. Running and falling on it was a sure formula for gashed legs.
The men roped themselves together in pairs. That way, if one sealer went through the ice, he had a chance of being pulled out. If they both fell together, there was little hope for either man. Wilfred did not have a partner, so he stayed close behind the men, following in their exact footsteps.
Soon the hunt began. The men went after the seals with white fur first and removed their pelts on the spot. The pelts were piled up and pulled back to the Greenland, where they were stowed in the hold.
Wilfred watched the scene with fascination until the wounded started to call for him. Some sealers had cut themselves on the ice, others with the knives they used to skin the seals. Still others had dislocated or broken ankles from running across the uneven surface. All the men were grateful to have the doctor right there with them. They hoped he could patch them up well enough so they could go on with the hunt. And no wonder, Wilfred told himself. The white pelts fetched up to ten shillings each at market. There was nothing else these men could do that would bring in that kind of money so fast.
Wilfred was busy until late afternoon, when the wind suddenly died. He looked up to see that the Greenland had disappeared over the horizon. He and about thirty men around him were alone on the ice together. It was a sobering moment, but Wilfred knew they must not panic. The captain knew where they were, and he would come back for them as soon as he could find a vein to work the ship through. In the meantime cold was their greatest enemy. The men had dressed thinly to run across the ice, and now as night descended they were beginning to shiver. Every year men were left behind and froze to death on the ice, and Wilfred had no intention of being one of them.
Thankfully, the men were on a large ice pan, large enough for them to exercise on. Wilfred started a game of leapfrog to keep them all warm. Darkness finally fell. The men smeared seal fat on their wooden poles and then set fire to them to attract the attention of the ship. The hours slipped by, and Wilfred kept the men exercising, singing, and praying until, around midnight, they saw the distant lights of the Greenland. The ship inched toward them, and by one o’clock the men were safely back on board. By now several of them were frostbitten, and Wilfred got them below deck for treatment.
As the days carried on in an efficient pattern of hunting, skinning, and stowing seal pelts, Wilfred’s medical skills were needed often.
Sunday was the day the law decreed that no seal hunting be carried out. Wilfred conducted an extra long service in the morning and looked forward to spending time talking to the men on deck in the afternoon. But it was not to be. Soon after lunch the watch spotted a group of about twenty men toiling across the ice. Wilfred and the sealers watched as they grew closer and finally came within shouting range.
“Where are you from?” the captain yelled.
“Off the SS Wolf,” was the reply. “She’s gone down, and we’ve fanned out to get help.”
Soon the men were drinking hot tea on board the Greenland and telling their story. Early in the morning a breeze from the south had driven the ice away from the southern shore of Fogo Island. The Wolf was working her way successfully north between the island and the ice flow when the wind changed, driving the ice back toward the shore. The Wolf was trapped. The captain tried to maneuver his ship into a small, iced-over indentation in the cliff face. It was not enough to keep the ship safe, but it did give the men time to scramble overboard before the impact of the ice crushed the ship, sending her to the bottom of the ocean.
The men reported that just about everyone had made it over the side, but the others were all adrift on the ice and needed to be picked up as soon as possible. All hands were called for, and the Greenland steamed off in the direction of the island.
As Wilfred manned the ropes, he thought of all the hopes that had been crushed along with the SS Wolf. Three hundred sealers were now penniless, and their captain ruined, all because of the power of the ice.
Later that day the Greenland and several other sealing ships picked up the men from the SS Wolf.
The hunting went on, and by the time the Greenland headed back to St. John’s, pelts worth forty-three thousand dollars were safely stowed in her hold. Although Wilfred had put his other duties first, he had still managed to bring back his share of pelts to the ship, a fact that impressed the men. When they reached port, the men took up a collection and handed Wilfred thirty-seven dollars for the mission fund. They told him they were grateful to have a doctor and a minister on board and encouraged him to come back the following year. Wilfred said he would try, but the letter from the mission committee weighed heavily on his heart.
As the ocean liner that was taking him back to England slipped out of St. John’s Harbor, Wilfred wondered whether he would ever again see the people and the coast that had become so dear to him.
Chapter 11
Red Bay Cooperative Society
On May 1, 1896, Wilfred stood before the council of the National Mission to Deep-Sea Fishermen giving a report on the work in Newfoundland and Labrador. For the most part, the council was impressed with all that had been done and the money Wilfred had raised in Canada and the United States. But the council did have one problem with Wilfred’s work. While he was away, the mission council had come to the conclusion that the work across the Atlantic Ocean had become too closely linked with the name Wilfred Grenfell. To illustrate their concern, the council produced letters that had been addressed to “The Grenfell Mission,” when in fact they were meant for the National Mission to Deep-Sea Fishermen.
