Progress up the Labrador coast was slow because the captain would not sail in darkness. There were too many icebergs and uncharted rocky outcrops to risk doing that. In fact, the maps and charts the captain was using were based on those made by Captain Cook when he visited the area in 1770. Wilfred took this as a challenge, spending many hours taking readings on headlands and coves to add more detail to the aging maps.
Wilfred also made hourly notations on the weather as the Albert progressed up the coast. They were sailing in the same latitudes as the British Isles, but the climate was completely different. The ocean currents around the British Isles came from the South Atlantic Ocean, and they created a warm cushion of air around the islands. Labrador’s current, on the other hand, swept down from the Arctic Circle to meet a warmer southern current. As the two currents clashed, they produced weather that could go from warm to freezing in less than an hour. Howling winds could whip up in an instant, creating treacherous conditions for fishermen.
On the fourth day, the Albert sailed through a channel called Domino Run and into a sheltered harbor, where they dropped anchor for the night. The mission flag was raised, and within minutes boats began to draw alongside, as curious fishermen came aboard to meet the doctor. Many of them told Wilfred they had heard that a mission ship with a doctor aboard was headed their way, but they hardly believed it was true.
Wilfred greeted everyone who came on board and took the visitors on tours below deck. He treated some of the fishermen for stomach ailments and infected cuts. Many of them had never seen a doctor in their lives, and they were eager to see what Wilfred could do for them.
About two hours after they had anchored, Wilfred noticed an unseaworthy boat tie up alongside the Albert. In it sat a wizened old man. He stared up at Wilfred for a minute and then yelled, “Be you a real doctor?”
Wilfred nodded and leaned over the gunwale. “Yes, I am,” he called down.
“Us hasn’t got no money, but there’s a sick man ashore. You’d come and see him?”
“I’ll get my bag and be right with you,” Wilfred said.
Wilfred smiled to himself as he went below to get his medical bag. The old man was a Liveyere, the people who lived along the coast year-round. Most of them were of Irish, Scottish, and Cornish descent, and they had a peculiar way of speaking. Their name for themselves came from being asked where they came from. They replied, “We live here,” which got shortened to Liveyeres.
Wilfred did not think twice about getting into the lopsided little boat. If the worst happened and it capsized, he knew he could easily swim to shore.
All went well, and when they reached land, the old man climbed out and summoned Wilfred to follow him up a mossy path that led to a tiny hut with a turf roof and one small window with a piece of broken glass in it. Wilfred had to stoop down to get through the door. Inside, a dank smell greeted him, and it took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the darkness. Rough-hewn bunks lined the walls, and a little cast-iron stove sat in the middle of the room. Apart from that there was no furniture in the place. Six half-clad, wide-eyed children sat on the pebble floor staring up at Wilfred.
“Hello,” he said. “What are your names?”
One by one they mumbled their names, and then the oldest one said, “Be it true? Came you here to doctor our pa?”
Then Wilfred heard the sound of a hacking cough, and he looked closely at the pile of rags on one of the bottom bunks. There was a person in there.
“That be our pa,” one of the other children said.
“And where is your mother?” Wilfred asked.
“She be down salting fish. I’m in charge,” the oldest boy said.
Wilfred tousled the boy’s hair and walked over to his patient. He knelt down beside the man and felt his pulse. It was faint. Then he examined his chest. There was only one diagnosis—a death sentence—tuberculosis.
Wilfred gave the oldest child some medicine to relieve his father’s cough and instructed him to come out to the Albert in the morning. He promised them clothing and blankets for their father and some fat and flour for cooking. Then he gathered the children around and prayed for them.
He left the hut with a heavy heart. Although what he had just seen matched exactly what Francis Hopwood had described in his article in Toilers of the Sea, it was still shocking to see such poverty up close, especially when there was nowhere the people could turn for help. In London the poorest people could line up at the Salvation Army soup kitchens or go to the emergency ward at London Hospital for treatment. But here on the remote Labrador coast, there were no charities, no hospitals, and no schools.
As he was ferried back to the Albert, Wilfred wondered about his call to deep-sea fishermen. Yes, of course they needed medical attention and the gospel, but the hopelessness in the eyes of the children he had just visited haunted him. Surely there was something he could do for them as well.
Chapter 7
Back to Labrador
The Albert made her way farther up the Labrador coast, alternating between visiting the fishing fleet working the rich fishing ground of the Grand Banks and visiting the small communities dotted along the coastline. Wherever the men were, the people were excited to see them.
As the ship made her way up the coast, Wilfred found variations of the circumstances he had seen at Domino Run. Teenagers had rickets, young men coughed blood, and little girls suffered from exposure from wearing nothing more than two flour sacks sewn together with fishing line. And he met with the same level of surprise. Although news of the presence of the Albert spread quickly up the coast, few people believed it would actually stop in their tiny settlement or that there really was a doctor on board who would treat them for free.
The more Wilfred saw of conditions on the Labrador coast, the angrier he became. These fishermen and their families, both the Liveyeres and those who wintered over in St. John’s and came north to fish off Labrador in the summer, found themselves in hopeless situations. In talking with Captain Fitzgerald, Wilfred learned that the trawler owners and the fish merchants liked it that way. They preferred to keep the fishermen, particularly the strong young men, in debt to them as a way of keeping them fishing year after year. To do this, they set the price of the catch, no matter how large or small it was, to cover only the bare necessities of life. A Labrador fisherman found himself working nonstop for the five-month fishing season, then subsisting with his family on a few barrels of flour, several quarts of molasses, tea, and fat, all sold to him by the trawler owners at inflated prices.
The fishermen supplemented their diet with any fish they had managed to dry for themselves during the summer, and those who owned rifles and could afford bullets shot small game, such as foxes and deer, to eat. There was no money left over to buy clothing or fishing equipment, and year after year the fishermen and their families sank further and further into debt buying their basic commodities from the trawler owners.
Wilfred met only one missionary working among the Liveyeres, but in Hopedale, the northernmost point of the Albert’s voyage up the coast, he did encounter a band of Moravian missionaries. The Moravians, whose predecessors had been coming to Labrador for over a hundred years to work among the Eskimos, welcomed Wilfred and put him straight to work. One of the first patients he saw there was a man whose arms had both been blown off when a cannon misfired. Although the Moravians had done what they could, the stumps of the man’s arms had become gangrenous. Wilfred took the man back to the Albert and operated to remove the gangrene. It was uncertain whether or not the man would live, but Wilfred knew that without the medical aid he had given, the man would have died an agonizing death.
Other cases were more straightforward to treat and yet rendered dramatic results. A fisherman had hobbled around for three years with what he thought was an incurable foot ailment. It turned out to be nothing more than an ingrown toenail, which Wilfred was able to correct in a matter of minutes. The fisherman was then able to go back to work making a scant living for his family.
In October the fishing boats sailed back to St. John’s to avoid being iced in for the winter. By this time Wilfred and the crew of the Albert had given away all the clothing, books, and magazines aboard, visited fifty settlements, treated nine hundred patients, and held hundreds of church services on land and sea. Most of Wilfred’s patients had never before seen a doctor or a midwife, and they knew very little about medical matters. In the absence of a doctor, many people had invented “cures” for themselves. Some of these cures appalled Wilfred, who wondered how such superstitions could be passed on as medicine along the coast. One old woman he met prescribed swallowing nine lice every third day for nine days as a cure for stomach ailments. Another time he saw an amulet around a man’s neck that contained the tooth of a dying deer, a sure way to stop fits, he was told. Perhaps the most common cure that Wilfred saw was a mixture of white paint and herbs, which was supposed to draw out an abscess.
The Albert followed the fishing fleet back to St. John’s. On the way down the coast, she stopped in once again at Domino Run, where Wilfred had tended his first patient. It was a somber moment when he walked past a freshly dug grave on his way up the mossy trail to the dirt hut. A woman confirmed his worst fears: her husband had died two weeks before. Wilfred’s heart broke as he surveyed the scene: six young children and their widowed mother, all looking thin and ill. He offered them some of what was left of the ship’s supplies and once again prayed for them before he left.
The Albert sailed into St. John’s Harbor to a rousing welcome. Many of the fishing boats were already anchored in the harbor, and news of the Albert’s service to the fishermen and residents of Labrador had spread throughout the town. Willing hands reached out to take the Albert’s mooring lines as she tied up alongside the wharf, and many people offered food and housing to the crew. Wilfred was invited to stay with Governor Sir Terence O’Brien, who had returned from England. As Wilfred accompanied the governor to his house, he was amazed to see the progress that had been made in rebuilding the town. Many new wooden houses and warehouses dotted the rocky inlet.
Everywhere Wilfred went, fishermen and their families flocked around him, thanking him for his service and the encouraging work he was doing.
Within hours of arriving back in St. John’s, it seemed that every door in the place was open to the National Mission to Deep-Sea Fishermen. A reporter from the local newspaper interviewed Wilfred for a lead article on the work of the mission. A committee of politicians and merchants invited Wilfred to address them on the needs he had seen on his trip and to offer suggestions on how to meet those needs. Wilfred and Captain Trezisse attended the meeting together, and they were excited to see how serious those in attendance were about tackling the problems fishermen faced. At the meeting Dr. Moses Harvey proposed a resolution thanking the National Mission to Deep-Sea Fishermen and their missionaries. Then he added, “This meeting also desires to express the hope that the directors of the mission may see their way to continue the work thus begun, and should they do so, they may be assured of the warmest support and cooperation of all classes in this community.”
Another meeting followed the first, and Wilfred was delighted to see just how much help the politicians and merchants of St. John’s were willing to give. The government offered to erect two hospitals, leaving the sites for them up to the mission to decide. They also offered to furnish the hospitals according to the directions submitted by the mission’s hospital committee and to pay for the maintenance and upkeep of the buildings. A prominent merchant, Baine Grieve, offered a large house in Battle Harbor, on the south coast of Labrador, to be used as one of the hospitals. Wilfred thought the second hospital should be situated at Indian Harbor at the mouth of Hamilton Inlet, midway up the coast.
