“A DOCTOR ... THE PROPHET AND CHAMPION OF A PEOPLE” Dr. Grenfell’s Parish The Deep Sea Fishermen By NORMAN DUNCAN Author of “Doctor Luke of the Labrador” New York   Chicago   Toronto Fleming H. Revell Company London and Edinburgh Copyright, 1905, by FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY THIRD EDITION TO THE CREW OF THE “STRATHCONA” TO THE READER This book pretends to no literary excellence; it has a far better reason for existence—a larger justification. Its purpose is to spread the knowledge of the work of

Doctor Wilfred T. Grenfell is the young Englishman who, for the love of God, practices medicine on the coasts of Newfoundland and Labrador. Other men have been moved to heroic deeds by the same high motive, but the professional round, I fancy, is quite out of the common; indeed, it may be that in all the world there is not another of the sort. It extends from Cape John of Newfoundland around Cape Norman and into the Strait of Belle Isle, and from Ungava Bay and Cape Chidley of the Labrador south

The coast of Labrador, which, in number of miles, forms the larger half of the doctor’s round, is forbidding, indeed—naked, rugged, desolate, lying sombre in a mist. It is of weather-worn gray rock, broken at intervals by long ribs of black. In part it is low and ragged, slowly rising, by way of bare slopes and starved forest, to broken mountain ranges, which lie blue and bold in the inland waste. Elsewhere it rears from the edge of the sea in stupendous cliffs and lofty, rugged hills. There is

It is to be remarked that a wreck on the Labrador coast excites no wide surprise. Never a season passes but some craft are cast away. But that is merely the fortune of sailing those waters—a fortune which the mission-doctor accepts with a glad heart: it provides him with an interesting succession of adventures; life is not tame. Most men—I hesitate to say all—have been wrecked; every man, woman, and child who has sailed the Labrador has narrowly escaped, at least. And the fashion of that escape

It was to these rough waters that Dr. Grenfell came when the need of the folk reached his ears and touched his heart. Before that, in the remoter parts of Newfoundland and on the coast of Labrador there were no doctors. The folk depended for healing upon traditional cures, upon old women who worked charms, upon remedies ingeniously devised to meet the need of the moment, upon deluded persons who prescribed medicines of the most curious description, upon a rough-and-ready surgery of their own, in

While the poor “liveyeres” and Newfoundland fishermen thus depended upon the mail-boat doctor and their own strange inventions for relief, Wilfred Grenfell, this well-born, Oxford-bred young Englishman, was walking the London hospitals. He was athletic, adventurous, dogged, unsentimental, merry, kind; moreover—and most happily—he was used to the sea, and he loved it. It chanced one night that he strayed into the Tabernacle in East London, where D. L. Moody, the American evangelist, was preaching

When Dr. Grenfell first appeared on the coast, I am told, the folk thought him a madman of some benign description. He knew nothing of the reefs, the tides, the currents, cared nothing, apparently, for the winds; he sailed with the confidence and reckless courage of a Labrador skipper. Fearing at times to trust his schooner in unknown waters, he went about in a whale-boat, and so hard did he drive her that he wore her out in a single season. She was capsized with all hands, once driven out to se

Doctor Grenfell’s patients are of three classes. There is first the “liveyere”—the inhabitant of the Labrador coast—the most ignorant and wretched of them all. There is the Newfoundland “outporter”—the small fisherman of the remoter coast, who must depend wholly upon his hook and line for subsistence. There is the Labradorman—the Newfoundland fisherman of the better class, who fishes the Labrador coast in the summer season and returns to his home port when the snow begins to fly in the fall. Som

In the early spring—when the sunlight is yellow and the warm winds blow and the melting snow drips over the cliffs and runs in little rivulets from the barren hills—in the thousand harbours of Newfoundland the great fleet is made ready for the long adventure upon the Labrador coast. The rocks echo the noise of hammer and saw and mallet and the song and shout of the workers. The new schooners—building the winter long at the harbour side—are hurried to completion. The old craft—the weather-beaten,

Doctor Grenfell appears to have a peculiar affection for the outporters of what is locally known as the “French Shore”—that stretch of coast lying between Cape John and the northernmost point of Newfoundland: it is one section of the shore upon which the French have fishing rights. This is the real Newfoundland; to the writer there is no Newfoundland apart from that long strip of rock against which the sea forever breaks: none that is not of punt, of wave, of fish, of low sky and of a stalwart,

It had been a race against the peril of fog and the discomfort of a wet night all the way from Hooping Harbour. We escaped the scowl of the northeast, the gray, bitter wind and the sea it was fast fretting to a fury, when the boat rounded Canada Head and ran into the shelter of the bluffs at Englee—into the damp shadows sombrely gathered there. When the punt was moored to the stage-head, the fog had thickened the dusk into deep night, and the rain had soaked us to the skin. There was a light, a

It is, then, to the outporter, to the men of the fleet and to the Labrador liveyere that Doctor Grenfell devotes himself. The hospital at Indian Harbour is the centre of the Labrador activity; the hospital at St. Anthony is designed to care for the needs of the French shore folk; the hospital at Battle Harbour—the first established, and, possibly, the best equipped of all—receives patients from all directions, but especially from the harbours of the Strait and the Gulf. In the little hospital-sh

The Deep-sea Mission is not concerned chiefly with the souls of the folk, nor yet exclusively with their bodies: it endeavours to provide them with religious instruction, to heal their ailments; but it is quite as much interested, apparently, in improving their material condition. To the starving it gives food, to the naked clothing; but it must not be supposed that charity is indiscriminately distributed. That is not the case. Far from it. When a man can cut wood for the steamer or hospitals in