“Wonderful,” Wilfred responded. “That’s the kind of work I’d love to do.” He watched as Dr. Treves raised his eyebrows.
“I thought that’s what you might say,” the doctor said. “As a matter of fact, the mission has decided to expand its work on a trial basis. They want to put a doctor on board a boat so that medical work can be carried out on the spot. Many lives could be saved that way, and the mission boats would be an even more welcome sight among the trawlers. What do you think? Are you up for the challenge?”
Wilfred laughed. “Up for the challenge! When do I start?”
Dr. Treves also laughed. “A new ship, the Thomas Grey, sails out of Gorleston in early January. Being out on the North Sea in the dead of winter should test your mettle. You’ll soon know whether this is the life for you. Shall I tell them you’ll be there?”
“Absolutely,” Wilfred replied. “This is just what I’ve been waiting for.”
After working nine months as a house surgeon at London Hospital and waiting for the right opportunity to come along, Wilfred was eager to get started on this new challenge. In the following weeks, he wound up his affairs in London and handed over the responsibility for the boys’ club to another young Christian student, who was happy to take on the job. Then he returned to Parkgate for Christmas. Finally, on January 1, 1888, he set out for London by train. At Liverpool Street Station he transferred to the train to Yarmouth, located on the east coast of England.
It was early evening when the train reached Yarmouth. A steady rain had set in, and wind whipped around Wilfred as he stepped onto the station platform. A sailor dressed in an oilskin raincoat was waiting to greet him and escort him to the ship docked at nearby Gorleston. When they reached the harbor, Wilfred scanned the horizon for the Thomas Grey, but he could see no boat big enough.
“Where is the boat docked?” he asked the sailor accompanying him.
“Down there,” the sailor replied, pointing to the top of the masts rising above the dock. “It’s a particularly low tide tonight.”
Surprised, Wilfred walked to the edge of the dock and looked down. There was the Thomas Grey. He let out a gasp. He had been expecting a large ship, but the Thomas Grey was not much bigger than the fishing trawler he and Algernon had sailed around on the River Dee estuary. It looked barely big enough to survive the turbulent waters of the North Sea.
Wilfred threw his bag down onto the deck of the boat and then slid down a yardarm after it. It wasn’t until he was standing on the deck that he realized that the yardarm had just been greased and tarred in preparation for putting to sea, and now his suit was smeared with grease and tar.
Once Wilfred was on board, the captain introduced himself to him and showed him to his small cabin below deck. Wilfred slept soundly in his new quarters, and the following morning the Thomas Grey put to sea.
The first port of call was Ostend, Belgium, where the captain would buy duty-free goods to sell to the fishermen for a small profit. Even getting that far was a test of Wilfred’s commitment to his new call in life. It was bitter cold, one of the coldest winters in years, and Wilfred soon discovered that sailing on the open ocean in the middle of winter was much different from puttering around in a boat on the water off Parkgate in summer.
Much to Wilfred’s surprise, one day into the voyage he got seasick. His stomach churned with every rise and fall of the boat. The only heat in his cabin was from a small oil stove whose strong fumes added to his misery. He soon turned the stove off, and the second morning he awoke to find that icicles had formed on the deck head above him. Determined not to be beaten by seasickness, Wilfred decided that what he needed was physical exercise. He dragged himself up on deck and forced his body to run around the perimeter of the deck.
It was a difficult feat, since the little boat was pitching and rolling and the deck was constantly doused with seawater that turned to ice. But after half an hour of this activity, Wilfred began to feel a little better. He stayed up on deck talking to the captain about navigation until lunchtime.
The boat reached Ostend in two and a half days, and Wilfred was glad to see land again. He wrote home to his mother, “I wish I were a better sailor, and hope this trip will make me one, as it will be impossible to doctor others if I am ill myself.”
Wilfred had never been outside the United Kingdom before, and he looked forward to meeting some Flemish people. As soon as the Thomas Grey docked in Ostend, he went ashore and made friends. Soon he was skating along the frozen rivers and canals with them.
The weather continued to grow colder, and by the time four tons of supplies had been loaded into the little ship’s hold, the vessel was stuck firmly in the ice. A steamship, which was also heading out to sea, obligingly churned up the ice enough for the captain of the Thomas Grey to cast off and maneuver into the deep channel that led to the open sea. If everything went well, they would see land again in eight weeks.
Much to Wilfred’s relief the seasickness left him, which was a good thing because he was headed into some of the world’s roughest water. The North Sea was actually a very shallow stretch of water, at times a barely submerged bridge between England and the European continent. Because it was so shallow, the water whipped up into huge waves at the first sign of a storm.
Every morning, impervious to the cold, Wilfred stripped naked and took a snow bath on the deck of the ship. His shipmates could hardly believe anyone would volunteer to do this, but Wilfred explained that it was good for the circulation. After lunch he practiced gymnastics on the foredeck, much to the continued amazement of his shipmates.
Five days out of Ostend the captain yelled, “Fleet ahead.” Wilfred stared out across the waves. Sure enough, to starboard he could make out the shape of a smack rising and falling in the churning ocean, and then he saw another and another. Each of them was flying the fleet’s green-and-red flag.
“Will we go aboard?” Wilfred asked the captain.
“Not while they have their nets down, Doctor,” the captain replied. “Even the most pious captain would not welcome us at that moment. No, we will fall into formation with them, put our own nets over the side, and do a little fishing ourselves. When the nets are all hauled in and the fish stowed away, then it will be visiting time.”
Wilfred helped as the Thomas Grey’s nets were lowered over the stern of the vessel. Once the net was overboard, the captain ordered the sails hoisted, and the ship began to trawl for cod.
When the “admiral,” the man who coordinated the actions of the fishing fleet, fired off a flare, it was time to start hauling in the nets. This was hard, backbreaking work, and Wilfred pitched in to help the crew. Slowly the net began to emerge from the frigid, gray water of the North Sea until only the cod end, the end of the net where the fish were trapped, was still in the water. Wire ropes were then put through the net, and the cod end was hoisted up and swung over the deck. One of the crewmen agilely undid the knot that held the cod end closed, and the catch of cod spilled out onto the deck. Now it was time to gut and process the fish to get them ready to take to market. This was a messy and dangerous undertaking, as fishermen wielded razor-sharp knives while they were jostled back and forth by the ocean. Again Wilfred willingly got to work, eager to learn as much as he could about fishing in the North Sea.
Eventually all the cod were processed and ready to be transported to market by carrier boats that serviced the fishing fleet. The money raised selling the fish that the crew of the Thomas Grey had caught went toward helping to finance the work of the National Mission to Deep-Sea Fishermen.
It wasn’t long after the nets had been hauled aboard the Thomas Grey that the first patient arrived for Wilfred to treat. He was a twelve-year-old boy with a fishhook stuck in his hand. He was ferried to the Thomas Grey in a small dinghy that pitched and rolled and beat against the side of the ship as the boy climbed precariously up a rope ladder using only one hand.
Wilfred carefully removed the large hook that was embedded deep in the palm of the boy’s right hand. Once he had removed the hook, he dressed the wound and wrapped a thick bandage around it. When he learned that the boy had no hat to keep his ears warm against the biting winter wind, Wilfred quickly found him one from a supply kept aboard the Thomas Grey for such situations. Soon the boy was on his way back to his trawler, his hand bandaged tightly and a warm new woolen cap pulled down over his ears.
Two more men were ferried to the Thomas Grey. They were both in their twenties. One had been injured when a boom had broken loose, and the other had infected sores on the back of his neck where his oilskin raincoat had rubbed the skin bare. Not only did the first man have a nasty gash on the side of his face from his encounter with the boom but also his left arm was broken, and as Wilfred examined him further, he discovered that two of his ribs had been crushed. Wilfred set to work, first setting the man’s broken arm and then attending to the gash. Finally he wound a bandage around the man’s midsection to strap his fractured ribs.
Then it was on to the next patient. This man’s ailment was common among the nearly twenty thousand fishermen who served on some three hundred fishing trawlers and smacks on the North Sea. The fishermen believed that it brought them bad luck if they bathed while they were at sea. They lived in the same set of clothes, which were often damp, for up to three months at a time. The damp clothing and the oilskin wet-weather gear the men wore often caused chafing, which, if left unattended in the unsanitary conditions aboard most of the boats, soon turned septic. Since Wilfred was the only doctor among the fishing fleet, he soon found much of his time taken up dressing such wounds.
By the time he arrived back in Gorleston, Wilfred Grenfell was convinced of one thing—working among fishermen was to be his life’s work. He signed on for another trip out to the fishing fleet, and by Christmas 1888 he was a valued member of the National Mission to Deep-Sea Fishermen. Indeed, he was so valuable that Ebenezer Mather offered him a permanent position and a salary of three hundred pounds a year. Wilfred eagerly accepted the offer.
Within a year Wilfred had been promoted all the way up to superintendent of the mission and was in charge of all the activities at Gorleston as ships and crews came and went from there. This new responsibility meant that he had to live permanently in Gorleston, where he found lodging with William Cockrill, a prominent architect who had built a spacious home on a bluff overlooking the River Yare and the North Sea.
One day, as he sat looking out the picture window of his new sitting room, Wilfred had to admit that as beautiful as his surroundings and the view were, he would still rather be at sea. Being holed up in a pokey cold cabin while the ship pitched and rolled with the tide was much more exciting to him than being stuck on land most of the time, as Wilfred now was taking care of administration. Yet he knew that this was where he could do the most good at the present time.
Wilfred could not give up his ties with the ocean entirely. Every morning, winter or summer, he climbed down the bluff to the sea below and leaped into the surf for an invigorating swim. He built a small canvas canoe, which he named Tip-Me-Not, and on the most storm-swept days, he launched her and paddled far out into the ocean.
Alcohol was one of the biggest enemies that affected the lives of the fishermen. When the men came ashore, they collected their pay and went straight to the public houses, where they quickly drank away their wages, often leaving their wives and children without enough food or clothing. Wilfred decided to do something about this situation. When an old seamen’s hall in Gorleston came available, the National Mission to Deep-Sea Fishermen took over the facility and set up a club for fishermen. The club was a great success, and soon the building was brimming with fishermen who came to play games, read, and talk to people about their faith in an environment where there was no alcohol.
