Captain Coté was a lighthouse keeper at a Canadian lighthouse located one hundred miles away at the south end of the Strait of Belle Isle on the Quebec side. As quickly as he could, Wilfred got up steam in the Strathcona and set off to help Captain Coté.
It was late afternoon when they rounded the northern tip of Newfoundland island and into a howling gale. Even with a full head of steam up, the Strathcona could make no headway against the wind, and Wilfred was eventually forced to take shelter in a bay and drop anchor overnight.
The following morning the gale had subsided, and the Strathcona got under way again. She steamed on through the Strait of Belle Isle and made her way to the Quebec side. Once the crew spotted the lighthouse, the Strathcona maneuvered as close to it as possible. The ship was about one hundred feet from the lighthouse when a small motorboat was lowered into the water to bring Captain Coté from the lighthouse to the Strathcona. Water crashed over the rocks around the lighthouse as the small motorboat gingerly made her way toward the small lighthouse jetty. Captain Coté waited on the jetty, and as soon as the boat was close enough, he clambered onto it. Minutes later he was in surgery on the Strathcona.
Wilfred administered a local anaesthetic to the lighthouse keeper and then set to work removing the abscess at the back of his throat, which was obstructing his breathing. Captain Coté thanked Wilfred profusely for coming to his aid, and the Canadian government gave Wilfred four and a half tons of coal to replace the coal he had burned getting the Strathcona to the lighthouse. Then it was back to St. Anthony.
Once the Grenfell family had relocated from St. Anthony and was settled in Brookline, Wilfred set off on a whirlwind tour of the United States. He was a famous man now, and everyone wanted to hear him speak. He would speak as many as three times a day in halls and churches overflowing with listeners. He was welcomed by President Harding to the White House and received in the wealthiest homes in the country.
At the end of three months, Wilfred had raised half a million dollars, and by year’s end that total had risen to nearly eight hundred thousand dollars. Prominent organizations promised to hold annual fundraisers for the International Grenfell Association. One of them, the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City, sent off a check for nine thousand dollars and promised a similar amount for the years that followed.
The next spring Wilfred was back in St. Anthony working on his next project. It was dubbed “Grenfell’s Folly” by many who had heard about it, but Wilfred was sure his idea to build a first-class dry dock at the settlement would work.
Until this time the only dry docks where ships could be pulled from the water to have their hulls repaired were at St. John’s. Many of the ships sailing in the northern regions were so badly damaged by storms or by collisions with rocks that there was no way they could make it to St. John’s to be repaired. Believing that having a dry dock at St. Anthony was the next step in helping the fishermen, Wilfred prayed and planned for it to become a reality. In summer he received word that an anonymous donor had given money especially for the project, and work on building it was soon under way.
When it was finished, the dry dock was able to accommodate ships up to 150 feet long. The dry dock not only helped save many fishing schooners but also provided a source of income for the men who worked on the boats over the winter. Far from being a folly, the dry dock turned out to be a welcome addition to the village.
The year 1921 turned out to be a year of memories for Wilfred. His mother, who was ninety-one years old, died that year. She had been an invalid for many years, and although Wilfred was glad to think that her suffering was over, he knew he would miss her long, encouraging letters.
That year Wilfred’s faithful ship, the Strathcona, sank as she crossed Bonavista Bay, on the Newfoundland coast. Wilfred was not aboard when she went down, but her end had been described to him, and he relived it in his mind many times. The sinking occurred as the Strathcona was crossing the bay under a strong northwest wind and heavy seas. As the vessel moved along, she began to fill with water. The captain, William Sims, asked a nearby schooner to stand by, and the schooner captain came aboard and surveyed the state of the ship. He urged Captain Sims to abandon the Strathcona. Reluctantly Captain Sims agreed that nothing could be done to save her. The Strathcona was too old and weakened to withstand the onslaught. The crew wept quietly as they climbed from the ship and onto the schooner. Half an hour later the Strathcona listed to port and sank.
It was a hard blow for Wilfred. He and the Strathcona had been traveling companions for nearly twenty-two years, and he admired her toughness. He wrote a newsletter explaining the loss. In it he said:
How many busy days we have shared together, how many ventures we have essayed. How many times her decks have been crowded with our brethren seeking healing of the body—relief from pain—counsel in anxiety. Babes have been born on board her, helpless children saved and carried to the permanent care of loving hands. Some have been married and others have died in her accommodating shelter.… Once she towed nineteen shipwrecked crews to safety; once she saved from a wreck nearly two hundred persons. Five times she has been on the rocks herself…. Many have gathered in her cabin for worship and praise…. A thousand times the sound of her whistle and the flutter of her flags have brought to eager, waiting hearts the message of hope and help.
Wilfred and the Strathcona were both legends on the Labrador coast, and as Wilfred lamented the sinking of the ship, he could not help thinking he was beginning to lose some of his usefulness to the mission as well. He continued to do what he could, but he was not as well as he once had been. His blood pressure soared, and he suffered from headaches and heart palpitations. In 1926, while climbing a hill in Labrador, Wilfred suffered a heart attack. It was not enough to kill him, but it did give him a scare. He returned to Boston to recover, and bad news awaited him there. Anne had been diagnosed with stomach cancer. As a result, the ailing couple decided to move to a house in Vermont on the shore of Lake Champlain, where they could retire together.
Wilfred soon recovered from his heart attack, and although he was pleased to be in Vermont for Anne’s sake, he was sorry to be so far from the sea. He bought a sixteen-foot yacht and sailed it on the lake, but it was no substitute for being on the gray, restless sea.
Anne was under the care of the best specialists, and after the initial crisis, she seemed much better. Her friend Eleanor Cushman, the Grenfells’ secretary, agreed to stay with her as long as she was needed. This freed Wilfred up to travel once again, and in the spring of 1927, he headed back to St. Anthony for a special event—the opening of the new, large, brick hospital building.
Just as he had with the opening of the Seaman’s Institute at St. John’s fifteen years before, Wilfred almost missed the event! He had taken the Strathcona’s replacement, the Strathcona II, north to tend to a fisherman’s wife who was very ill. On the way south again, they encountered heavy fog. Wilfred, who was standing on deck at the time, heard the sickening sound of grinding metal. In the fog the ship had struck the rocks. The waves beat relentlessly over her bow, and Wilfred could do nothing but hail a passing ship and ask that he and the crew be transferred onto it.
By the time Wilfred scrambled to safety, the Strathcona II was listing dangerously. Wilfred asked the schooner captain to stay nearby until she sank. Amazingly this did not happen. Wilfred watched as the unmanned hospital ship floated clear of the rocks on the high tide. Although she still listed precariously, Wilfred began to wonder if she might not be repairable. He asked the captain to return him to the ship, where he found everything inside smashed but her hull still intact. The Strathcona II would live to sail another day, after all!
The pumps were blocked with coal, so Wilfred and the crew bailed water out of the ship using a bucket brigade. Once enough water had been bailed out, the boilers were lit, and the ship limped back to St. Anthony, escorted by several schooners.
They arrived on July 24, the day before the opening ceremony of the new hospital building. Everyone else, including the governor of Newfoundland, Sir William Allardyce, and his wife, was already there. The ceremony was a moving experience, perhaps most of all for Wilfred. He recalled when he spent his first winter at St. Anthony. He had played soccer on the ice and encouraged the locals to think of themselves as a community. Together they had cut down the trees for the original hospital building, hardly daring to imagine that something so vital could happen in their bay. Now St. Anthony was a thriving hub of activity, with its cottage industries, dry dock, and state-of-the-art hospital.
The community was in good spirits too. Wilfred looked out over the St. Anthony Church Boys’ Brigade and the mission’s Boy Scouts and Girl Guides as they formed an honor parade for him. Salutes were fired from the HMS Wistaria, the Royal Navy ship that had brought the dignitaries north from St. John’s.
It was a proud day for Wilfred, though he had no idea that another ceremony besides the opening of the hospital building had been planned. After Sir William Allardyce officially opened the hospital building and cut the ribbon, he turned to Wilfred and said with great pomp, “His Majesty, King George V, is pleased to confer the honor of Knight Commander of St. Michael and St. George on Dr. Grenfell.”
Wilfred gasped. He was now Sir Wilfred Grenfell.
Chapter 16
Home at Last
Wilfred’s new title seemed to open a floodgate of honors for him. He found himself accepted as a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, he was a guest at the British prime minister’s home, and he was a welcomed friend at the royal palace. Prominent English businessmen sought him out for advice, and duchesses organized flower shows to aid his cause.
Wilfred was never impressed with the honors themselves, but he was grateful for the doors they opened for him and the International Grenfell Association. His place in the Royal Geographical Society led to the fulfillment of another of Wilfred’s ambitions, this time to map the entire coast of Labrador. Accurate maps would save many fishermen’s lives and make fishing itself more profitable. Wilfred approached the British Air Ministry for an aircraft to carry out the survey, and although it was sympathetic, it could not spare the men or machines to help.
Once again Wilfred turned to the United States. He had a friend, a Harvard professor by the name of Alexander Forbes, who owned both an airplane and a motorized schooner. Wilfred persuaded Forbes to lend them both to the project. The Royal Geographical Society endorsed the charting, and the Newfoundland government agreed to carry all freight associated with the project free of charge and to waive all customs fees and licenses.
In the spring of 1931, Wilfred sat in the cockpit of Forbes’s airplane, peering out over the landscape that he knew so well from an ocean perspective. The pilot swooped and dipped the wings as the plane flew over mountains, fjords, cascading waterfalls, and the tiny settlements that clung to the rocky coastline.
Slowly, accurate readings showing rocky outcrops, shoals, water depths, and dangerous bluffs emerged. The information was sent off to the New York Geographical Society, which had offered to turn the data into maps and charts. By the end of the year, many fishermen along the coast had access to more information than had ever before been available.
Still Wilfred pressed on. For every task he completed, he thought of five more he should start. He and the other doctors had long been concerned about the nutrition of the people who lived on the coast. Many of the people suffered from beriberi, a disease caused by lack of a B-vitamin found in vegetables. In fact, there were no vegetables grown on the coast; everyone argued that the growing season was too short. And they were right. But a short growing season was just another challenge to Wilfred Grenfell, who exclaimed, “If the season is too short, we’ll make it longer!”
