Wilfred’s personality, which drew so many fishermen to the club, was also a great asset in fundraising. Keeping a ministry like the National Mission to Deep-Sea Fishermen running required a lot of money, and along with his other responsibilities, Wilfred traveled the country talking in churches and at living-room meetings about the work of the mission and asking people to support it. Wilfred’s homespun way of speaking was both exciting and engaging as he told stories of the practical ways the mission was attempting to share the gospel message among the fishermen of the North Sea. His approach won people over, and they willingly stepped forward to support the mission. Wilfred was gratified with the generosity of such people, and he looked forward to new challenges that the National Mission to Deep-Sea Fishermen could take on.
Chapter 6
Labrador
Have you seen this month’s issue of Toilers of the Sea yet?” William Cockrill asked Wilfred.
Toilers of the Sea was the official magazine of the National Mission to Deep-Sea Fishermen, and Wilfred had not yet seen the latest edition. “No,” he replied, “I’ve been down at the boathouse all day. Does it have a good article in it?”
“Good article!” William exclaimed. “This one will rock England, if I’m not mistaken. It’s about the pitiful conditions along the Labrador coast. Hard to believe that there are people in a British colony leading such desperate lives. Here, take a look.”
Wilfred leaned over and took the magazine, which was open to an article by Francis Hopwood. He began to read. Hopwood had recently visited the Labrador coast, and he described in detail the deplorable conditions he had encountered under which the people there were living.
When he had finished reading, Wilfred let out a whistle. “I agree with you. This is going to stir things up. The Church of England minister in St. John’s has been writing to the mission for years, asking for help, but we haven’t had the funds to get over there. God willing, Hopwood’s article might change all of that. The people certainly sound in a bad way.”
Over the next two weeks, the article did stir up a great deal of interest, not only in Great Britain but also in Canada and the United States. It was reprinted in every important newspaper in these countries, and a public cry of protest went up for the fishermen who worked under such deplorable conditions. Money began to flow into the National Mission to Deep-Sea Fishermen, earmarked for work among the Labrador “fisherfolk.”
This cry to do something was amplified in early 1892, when news arrived in England that forty of the two hundred fishermen working out of Trinity Bay in eastern Newfoundland had perished. The men had gone out to fish before all the ice had thawed in the bay and had been caught in a blizzard. Their fishing boats were crushed in the ice, and the men were left to freeze to death. Far out to sea other fishermen found the haunting remains of crushed boats, their crews, frozen solid, clinging to them.
Once again public sympathy was aroused. The Lord Mayor of London opened a fund for the families of the frozen men, and Queen Victoria contributed and sent a personal message to the widows and children.
Everyone in the mission agreed that something had to be done. The money and the public interest were there. It was time for the men to take an exploratory voyage to see how they could help. Without a moment’s hesitation, Wilfred volunteered for the voyage. The vote to accept him as leader of the expedition was unanimous, and a month after news of the disaster among the fishermen broke in England, Wilfred found himself preparing one of the mission’s ships, the Albert, for his longest voyage yet.
Wilfred attacked his new assignment with gusto, helping the mission’s carpenters to sheath the hull of the Albert in an extra layer of timber and reinforce her bow so that she could plow her way through ice. The area below deck was remodeled so that partitions could be slid aside, allowing up to one hundred people to attend Christian services on board. In another area of the vessel, nursing bunks, an operating room, and a dispensary were installed. Since the hatches were too small to pass through a man on a stretcher, they were enlarged and fitted with metal hatch covers.
As Wilfred wrote reports of his preparations in Toilers of the Sea, donations began to flow in for the people of Labrador. There were bales of used clothing from church drives in Cornwall, books schoolchildren had collected in Scotland, and medical supplies from Sunday schools in Wales. When it was time to depart, there was so much cargo on board that one of the mission helpers jokingly complained to Wilfred, “She’s loaded to the gunwales, and that’s because she has so much reading in her, and it ain’t light reading, neither.”
The mission committee decided that June was the best time of year to begin the voyage, and on June 12 Wilfred proudly boarded the Albert. He, like the rest of the crew, was dressed in serge trousers and a blue jersey with the name of the mission embroidered in gold lettering on the chest.
The Albert was towed out of the River Yare. At 110 feet long, she was the biggest vessel in the mission’s growing fleet, and Wilfred was confident that her newly reinforced oak and teak hull could take the pounding of the wild Atlantic Ocean. The town’s pier was crowded with people as the ship departed, and others spilled out along the river’s edge as the Albert was towed by. Wilfred could make out the faces of many fishermen, their wives, and their children. He knew their lives were better now because of the work of the National Mission to Deep-Sea Fishermen, and he prayed that he would find a way to help the fishermen of Labrador and Newfoundland as well.
Once the ship was across the bar and into the open ocean, Captain Trezisse yelled his orders. “Man the rigging. Hoist the square sail.”
Wilfred leaped into action. It felt so good to be on board a ship again.
The plan was to sail nonstop to Newfoundland, but the weather proved to be their enemy. From the start the Albert faced fog and strong headwinds, and three days out she sprang a leak, taking on thirty inches of water a day.
The captain called Wilfred into his cabin. “I think we need to beach her and find that leak,” he said, shaking his head. “It’s manageable at the moment, but we can’t take a chance in the Atlantic. I’m changing course to head for Crookhaven, Ireland.”
“Quite right,” Wilfred agreed, although he was disappointed. He had wanted to see how quickly they could make the run across the Atlantic Ocean, and here they were, meeting delays within days of leaving Yarmouth.
Still, Wilfred made the most of it. These were coastal people, and many of them read Toilers of the Sea and were familiar with Wilfred’s mission. They flocked to see the Albert, now beached in shallow water, and to get medical advice and supplies from Wilfred, who happily obliged and was paid for his effort in eggs and vegetables for the voyage.
On July 3 Captain Trezisse announced that he had been unable to find the leak and he hoped it had sealed itself. They needed to be on their way, and so on the high tide, the Albert was towed to deeper water, and she sailed from Crookhaven the following day.
Much to everyone’s relief, the ship did not take on any more water. The head winds were strong, and a thick fog persisted until they were over a thousand miles out into the Atlantic. Still, despite the weather conditions, the ship managed to cover about 130 miles a day. Then, unexpectedly, the winds died, leaving the Albert to limp along, taking advantage of every puff of wind that came her way.
Wilfred and the rest of the crew busied themselves keeping everything shipshape. They painted and polished for hours each morning, and in the afternoons Wilfred held a Bible study. The carpenter was a cornet player, and he accompanied the crew as they sang hymns on deck.
Finally, on the morning of July 21, the captain announced that, according to his calculations, they should be nearing St. John’s, and he sent a watch up to the crow’s nest. Around lunchtime the welcome words “Land ahoy!” reverberated around the ship. Wilfred took out his spyglass and aimed it westward. He looked through it and stared in disbelief. There was land ahead all right, but there was something else as well. Above the rugged coastline, a plume of black smoke rose into the sky.
Wilfred turned to speak to Captain Trezisse, who was also viewing the scene through a spyglass.
“What do you make of it?” he asked.
Captain Trezisse shook his head. “Grim news for the people of St. John’s,” he replied. “There’s so much smoke, the whole town must be ablaze.”
“So it is St. John’s that is burning?”
“Without a doubt,” the captain said.
As the Albert inched closer to her destination, the scene became clearer. Although the town of St. John’s itself was shielded from the Atlantic Ocean by a rocky cliff, Wilfred could soon make out huge plumes of flame shooting into the late afternoon sky. Occasionally tiny cinders landed on the ship, and the captain posted everyone on watch in case a cinder ignited the ship.
No tug came out to guide them into the harbor, so the captain ordered the sails lowered, and the ship dropped anchor outside the port for the night. Wilfred sat on deck all evening watching the reflection of the flames dance eerily on the frigid ocean. He prayed for the people of St. John’s and for the work he hoped to do on this rocky coast.
As dawn broke, a tugboat approached the Albert. The news from the pilot was grim. He reported that a fire had been started by a young boy carelessly throwing a lighted match into a barn situated on a hill above the town. Fanned by a strong northwest wind, sparks and cinders from the barn fire quickly set the rest of the town afire.
Soon the Albert was being towed into St. John’s Harbor. As she rounded the headland of the cliff, the crew got their first opportunity to see what the fire had done. Most of the buildings had been reduced to piles of smoking, black embers. Only the stone chimneys of the buildings remained standing, blackened witnesses to the devastation around them.
Amazingly, no one had been killed in the fire, though two thousand buildings had been destroyed, leaving eleven thousand people dazed and homeless. Most of them had escaped with only the clothes on their backs, and Wilfred was grateful for the bails of used clothing stowed away in the Albert’s hold. He and the rest of the crew spent the day unpacking and distributing them.
Newfoundland was a self-governing British colony. At about two o’clock in the afternoon, Wilfred looked up from his work to see a procession coming toward him. It consisted of the premier of Newfoundland, Sir William Whiteway, and five members of the colony’s government. The colony’s governor, Sir Terence O’Brien, was away in England at the time. The delegation had come to welcome the Albert and offer any assistance they could to Wilfred and the crew. Wilfred was impressed; even in the midst of their own tragedy, they wanted to help the mission get established along the coast. They even offered to hire a pilot for the trip north, as the rocky outcrops around the coast could easily prove fatal to someone who did not know the waters, especially since the coast was too remote to have lighthouses.
As the days went by, many people, including Dr. Moses Harvey, the Church of England minister in the city, offered advice to Wilfred. There were still three months of the cod-fishing season left, and they suggested that Wilfred go north along the Labrador coast until he found the fleet of one hundred or so fishing schooners. Wilfred and the crew, along with their new pilot, a lively Irishman named Captain Fitzpatrick, were eager to get under way, but fog delayed them until Tuesday, August 2, 1892.
The expedition headed north from St. John’s, past the coast of Newfoundland island and across the Strait of Belle Isle, which separated the island from Labrador. A week later Wilfred had his first glimpse of the Labrador coast. The Albert emerged from a bank of thick fog into a beautiful, bright, sunny morning. On the horizon Wilfred could see rocky cliffs rising straight up from the sea. Beyond the cliffs, dense vegetation covered hills that climbed slowly to become jagged, snow-covered peaks. Small, rocky, treeless islands jutted from the sea like sentinels guarding the coastline. Between the islands and the ship bobbed icebergs, broken off from glaciers in Greenland and drifting south on the current. They reflected the sun in a shower of radiance. Beneath the Albert schools of cod and other fish teemed, roiling the water silver. Whales fed blissfully on these fish, breaking the surface intermittently with a hiss and a spout as they arched up for a breath. Overhead the sky was filled with gulls and other seabirds, some of which Wilfred had never seen before. Wilfred watched as birds threw themselves headlong into the ocean and emerged with squirming fish held firmly in their beaks. The birds headed with their catch for the rocky cliffs, where thousands of nests clung to the nooks and crags. Standing on deck a long time to take in the vista, Wilfred marveled at the sight.
