As he spoke about his time in Labrador, Wilfred realized that his heart was still with the people there, though he had resigned himself to taking his orders from the mission committee in London.
Then, in July 1899, a single letter changed everything. The letter was from Dr. Fred Willway, and in it he reported that his wife was seriously ill and needed to return to Great Britain for a long period of rest. Dr. Willway was asking to be relieved of his post as director of the work in Newfoundland and Labrador.
Wilfred’s pulse raced as he read the letter, but he tried not to get his hopes up. Perhaps, he told himself, just perhaps he would be allowed to go back and lead the work there. Sure enough, Wilfred’s name was proposed as a replacement for Fred Willway. And when a vote was taken, Wilfred had the job! He hardly knew what to do first, he was so excited at the thought of returning to the rugged coastline that had been the focus of so many of his dreams in recent years.
It was a perfect time for Wilfred to leave for Labrador, because the money for the new hospital ship had come in and by the end of summer the ship would be outfitted and ready for service. The vessel was named the Strathcona, after Sir Donald Smith, who was now Lord Strathcona. Sir Donald had paid a generous portion of the cost to purchase the ship.
Wilfred could not wait until the Strathcona was finished and ready to put to sea. He and Andrew Beattie, a Scottish fisherman friend, took passage on the first ship they could find, an ore-carrying steamer bound for Tilt Cove, on the eastern coast of Newfoundland. Once there, the two men would wait for one of the mission’s ships, the Julia Sheridan, to pick them up and take them north to Labrador.
Everything went as planned, and Wilfred arrived back on the coast he loved so much in early September 1899. The residents at Tilt Cove welcomed him with open arms, and when the Julia Sheridan arrived to pick up the two men, they gave generous supplies of food and coal to send the vessel with their doctor aboard on its way.
Wilfred arrived in Battle Harbor on September 25. He was delighted to see the hospital full and functioning efficiently. Dr. Apsland, one of the new batch of doctors, had married Nurse Ada Carwardine, and the couple worked happily together at this remote location.
As the hospitals grew, the mission had gained a new level of respect, and soon after Wilfred arrived back, the government of Newfoundland announced that each mission doctor was automatically accorded the position of justice of the peace. Since there were no policemen on the coast, this was an important position. It empowered the doctors to settle disputes or refer to the courts in St. John’s those that could not be settled or were criminal acts.
One other aspect of being a justice of the peace was particularly exciting to Wilfred. Any kind of alcohol was illegal on the Labrador coast, but ships from Nova Scotia still brought it in, and many Liveyeres had stills hidden along the rocky coastline. Since his earliest days with the mission on the North Sea, when the mission ships had to compete with the coper boats, Wilfred had hated what alcohol did to the fishermen and their families. It caused accidents and fights and left women without money for food and children without fathers. Now, at last, the mission could play an active role in keeping alcohol off the Labrador coast.
As Wilfred headed north up the Labrador coast in the Julia Sheridan, his excitement mounted as he came up with a plan to fulfill a long-term dream. This winter, for the first time, he planned to stay over in Newfoundland. A trader named George Moore had invited Wilfred to stay with him at St. Anthony, located at the northern tip of Newfoundland island. The community at St. Anthony had also been asking the mission to place a hospital in their bay for some time, and over the past two years, Dr. Willway had allowed a mission doctor to stay there. The doctors had proved to be an invaluable resource to the people for miles around.
Now Wilfred wanted to see firsthand what could be done for the people during the winter months. He laid up the Julia Sheridan in the harbor at St. Anthony for the winter and set up a surgery unit in George Moore’s back room. His friend and traveling companion, Andrew Beattie, opened up a school to which thirty children flocked. The children were grateful for something to do over winter, and every recess was a wonderful treat for them. The boys of Mostyn House School had sent out ten soccer balls with Wilfred, who set about teaching everyone how to play soccer on the ice. The game became so popular that old men left their sickbeds to take up the sport and young mothers, with their babies strapped to their backs, giggled and whooped as they passed the ball to their team members.
During this time Wilfred also set out to master a new skill—dogsledding. Dogsleds were the main form of transportation in Newfoundland and on the Labrador coast during the winter. Wilfred knew that if he were to visit sick patients in outlying areas, he needed to know how to work a dog team. He soon found that it was not as easy as it looked. Eight to ten dogs were harnessed to a komatik, a long, narrow dogsled, by traces (straps) made of walrus hide. With the dogs harnessed to the sled, the driver would yell “Oo-isht,” and the dogs would run off, pulling the sled behind them. The first few times Wilfred tried this, his attempts ended in a tangle of dogs and traces, the sled on its side and Wilfred facedown in a snowbank. On one occasion half the dogs went one way around a tree and the rest the other! But slowly Wilfred got the hang of it. He learned how to keep his balance and how to make the dogs do what he wanted them to do. Soon he was confidently racing across snow and ice with a dog team and komatik.
Opportunities for Wilfred to use his komatik and dogs soon presented themselves, and he was off across the bay ice to one emergency after another. During the winter he traveled over sixty miles in each direction and performed operations on rough-hewn kitchen tables and benches. Once the patient had been attended to, Wilfred would normally settle in for an overnight visit. He loved to listen to the locals tell their stories of living in the north and their half-remembered tales from their distant ancestral lands of Ireland, Scotland, and France. Wilfred ended each visit with a Bible reading and prayer, encouraging his ever-growing circle of friends to have faith in God.
Wilfred loved staying in St. Anthony just as much as he enjoyed his mercy dashes across the white countryside. Using his newly bestowed powers as a justice of the peace, he turned the little-used courthouse and jail into a community clubroom. He papered it with old magazines and brightly illustrated Bible texts. Local people donated tables and chairs, and soon, for the first time, the people of St. Anthony met together to play games and read magazines and books.
Christmas 1899 and New Year 1900 were two celebrations that would live long in the memory of everyone present. In December Wilfred insisted on cutting down a tree and decorating it, a wonder the children had never seen before. New Year’s Day brought with it a huge sports gala, with obstacle races in which the competitors had to scramble over a wrecked schooner that was stuck in the ice and crawl under seal nets.
Such activities helped to pass the long winter, and more important to Wilfred, they got the locals thinking about themselves as a group. This was important to him because toward the end of winter he hoped to get enough volunteers together to go inland and cut down trees to start building a hospital in the community. It would be muscle-straining work, and Wilfred had no money to offer the people for their effort, only the satisfaction of helping their community and the communities around them.
When the time came for the tree felling, Wilfred was delighted with everyone’s team spirit. In just a month, over 350 large trees were felled, trimmed, and carted by komatik back to the hospital site. The building itself would have to wait until next winter because it was now time for the people of St. Anthony to prepare for the fishing season.
Wilfred and Andrew set about preparing the Julia Sheridan for another summer of mission work. As soon as the ice was gone, they set off north for a tour along the Labrador coast. Wilfred was delighted to find that the Red Bay Cooperative was running well and that, with the good prices the co-op got for their fish, the members of the community had enjoyed their best winter ever. Everyone had enough food and clothing, and there was even money left over to buy new fishing supplies. For the first time in memory, the fishermen did not start the new season in debt to the traders. Wilfred encouraged the men to spread the news of their success to other fishermen they met that summer. He hoped that this would stir up interest and there would be a string of co-ops along the coast by fall.
In August Wilfred was back in Battle Harbor for the arrival of the Strathcona. The vessel was quite a sight tied up alongside the wharf in the bay. She was ninety-seven feet long and had a steel hull, reinforced for work in the ice. Her lines were sleek, and she was rigged as a ketch, with masts fore and aft. Her funnel was set midway along the ship. She could make five knots using her steam engine and nine knots if the sails were raised to help the steam engine power her forward.
Wilfred had worked hard to raise the money to buy the ship, and he eagerly clambered aboard to check her out. Her decks were teak, and the wood below deck was polished mahogany. Below deck and just forward of amidships and the engine room was a spacious hospital with six beds, a dispensary, and X-ray equipment. In the rear was a saloon and crew quarters. The ship was also fitted with the latest conveniences, such as electric lights and bathrooms. On deck, all the brass fittings were polished to a gleaming shine, and engraved on her large steering wheel were the words “Follow Me, and I will make you fishers of men.”
Wilfred took up residence in one of the Strathcona’s new cabins and spent the rest of the summer traveling up and down the coast, visiting the mission’s hospitals, making new friends, and dreaming of ways to help the local people.
There were still many tragic incidents, all of which Wilfred recorded in his log. In one case Wilfred helped a three-year-old girl whose feet had been severely frostbitten. The frostbite had turned to gangrene, and the girl’s father, rightly fearing that she would die if nothing were done, had chopped off both her feet at the ankles. When Wilfred found the girl he took her to Battle Harbor Hospital, where the wounds were cleaned up and she was fitted with a pair of hand-carved wooden feet.
It was this girl’s plight and the plight of other children that touched Wilfred the most. At another remote inlet, a woman handed him two baby girls, saying, “They’re twins. I know there’s somethin’ wrong with ’em, though I don’t know what. Here, you take ’em. I’ve got seven others, and I can’t raise these two as well.”
Wilfred took the two little girls and observed their behavior. He soon concluded that the mother had been correct. There was something wrong with them: they were both blind.
There were many other children, orphaned, abandoned, or too ill for their parents to care for them. Wilfred welcomed them all aboard the Strathcona and cared for them as best he could. When he got back to St. John’s he wrote to various friends in the United States, Canada, and England, urging them to find adoptive homes for the children. Eventually many of the children did get sent on to better lives elsewhere. However, one of Wilfred’s dreams was to have an orphanage somewhere along the coast so that the children did not have to be relocated. It was just one of many schemes Wilfred had rolling around inside his head for Labrador and Newfoundland.
In 1902 Wilfred had an unexpected opportunity to do something about the illegal liquor trade on the Labrador coast. In late summer that year, an English barquentine, the Bessie Dodd, had been reported wrecked at Smoky Tickle, at the entrance to Hamilton Inlet. The vessel’s captain and owner had made an insurance claim with Lloyds of London for the loss of the boat. But Lloyds was suspicious of the claim and sent a cable to Wilfred asking if he would investigate the wreck.
