Evening star. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1854-1972, 1905-04-15

III Ia eprurE,, Sc
II, ~iNTEs peAcr,cs-..S
Written for The Evening Star.
In most bleak country where the Ice
bergs from Davis strait below reply to the
ceaseless wrath of white north storms
where the Laurentian granite, piled In
mountain chaos when the world was young
grudges foothold even to sparse moss
where humanity is poor and unbeautiful
as nature-there lives a man.
Oxford graduate, friend of Sir Frederick
Treves, physician to the king, with all those
things that the world calls brilliant pros
poets held out before him and his for the
taking, he stood on the mountain thirteen
years ago, and on one side he saw all this
all that is life to most men; and on the
other side he all that men seek to
avoid-poverty and loneliness and obscurity
"a life on rock.
He made his choice. For thirteen years
he has cruised in launch and smack through
ice and storm, plodded over foe and drift
along a thousand miles of grim coast with
snowshoe and dog sled, lived in snow huts
and in mud novels, dwelt with the poorest
and most ignorant.
Last January there came to him a chance
to run away and play for the first time
in three years. For three years he had
planned for that chance-to return once
more to his England where family and
friends were looking for him. There would
have been such welcome for him as awaits
conquerors, for this England of his had
begun to find out about her son, and the
name of Wilfred 7. Grenfell, superintendent
of the Labrador Medical Mission, is honored
wherever men honor good deeds.
But when he was ready to go he saw
that there was need of money for the work.
Instead of going home he visited the United
tongue and pen, with lecture and personal
appeal, to get money for his poor.
"Only One Sacrifice"
An American who knew all this said to
him then:
Doctor l am proud to meet a man who
makes such great sacrifice for his kind
And DR.. Grenfel answered, with a jovial
honest laugh:
Sacrifice? There is no sacrifice in what
am doing. The only sacrifice that man
can make in the world, l think, is to waste
his time
And what he said a little later, when
he talked about his work. might have
sounded like preaching from most men,
but it did not sound coming as it did
from him, and spoken through simple mat
ter-of-fact conviction of Its truth:
people long ago accepted the saying
that 1t is more blessed to give than to re-
ceive. But few Of them seem really to
others without being repaid a hundred
times over"
That is DR.. Grenfell-a missionary who
helps men make their earthly life better
While he tells them about the spiritual one:
preacher whose arguments are medicine
and the surgeons knife; a modern viking
following on where Eric the Red and Thor
fin Karlsefne came with sword and ak when
they first landed on what they called Vim
land, healing where they slew and battling
against wrong and poverty and starvation
and pain where they fought men
A Thousand Mile Round.
A thousand miles of iron coast is his prac
tice and his parish. From the Straits of
Belle Isle in the south to the weather-whip-
ped Cape Chidley in the entrance to Hud-
son bay. he makes his rounds, year after
year. He has a little steamship now. the
Strathcona, given to the Labrador Medical
Mission by Lord Strathcona. Before that.
he went up and down In sailing boats and
in launches.
The first of those launches was FORTY
five feet long and eight feet wide. In that
crazy thing, made crazier by the fact that
she was carvel built, which caused her to
roll wildly, DR.. Grenfell not only crossed
from st. Johns Newfoundland, to the Lab
rador coast, but went up that coast, whose
cliffs are often washed fifty feet high by
dashing seas, over an ocean so impetuous
that sometimes there are breakers even in
water twenty feet deep and more
More than once they struck rock and berg
with her, as with the vessel that followed
the Princess May, the Julia Sheridan, the
Urelia McKinnon, the Sir Donald. One by
one they were lost or worn out in the SER
vice. Today the Strathcona is driving over
the same course, to be lost or worn out as
may chance, in the service of the lonely
fishermen of the hard Labrador
Eight thousand of them dwell on that
fierce coast all the year around, hang
ing on to their home even in the winter
than oher
face starvation. Twelve thousand more
seek the coast each summer 10 fish through
the brief open season, from July, when the
Ice breaks up, to October, when it shuts in
again.
Before DIR. Grenfell went there that first
time in 1892 in the little schooner Albert,
which carried him across from England all
| these people were without single doctor.
Travellers along that forbidding shore today
see men, women and children without
hands, feet or ears, having lost them from
freezing. He will find graves where as
| many as thirty and more are lying to-
gether. the victims of diphtheria, smallpox
or pneumonia, who died without the least
medical aid He will see terribly deformed
people, crippled through miior injuries that
they were forced to treat with the rough
surgery of axe or fish knife, because the
nearest professional help was many hun
dreds of miles away
They will tell the traveller terrible stories
along the Labrador-theSe quiet, uncom-
planning, brave people, VINO live in the
WOTSt idHu III TIE NOflu BECAUSE tney love
II as any dweller in beautiful lands loves
his own
There have been sealers who lay for
weeks. dying in unreliable agony, with
hands and arms shot away through acct
dental discharges of their guns. There
have been fathers who killed their children
to save them from starvation. There have
been women who saw child after child die
to be carried away and bedded in a shallow
grave scooped into the snow, and none In
the settlement to know what 1t was that
was killing them.
A Frightful Experience.
DR. Grenfen tells this story of what he
found his first trip
.T was called to see one poor fellow who
had accidentally shot of both his arms be-
low the elbows fourteen days previously.