Though Grenfell was far more religious, his religion had a very soft touch. He said in his autobiography that he didn’t like being called a missionary because it implied “someone without practical abilities and a hypocrite.”
Like his mentor Moody, Grenfell had an unusually pragmatic approach to religion, one that was compatible with a secular scientific mind like Birdseye’s. Grenfell wrote a story about a blind man who traveled to a shrine in Quebec to get back his sight and, accustomed to the kindness of Labradoreans, was shocked by the harsh indifference of people there. The shrine didn’t restore his sight, and he only made it back to Labrador through the kindness of one stranger. Grenfell’s point was that it was a mistake to look for the help of saints in heaven. It was the kindness of people on earth that mattered.
Grenfell, like Birdseye, was an adventurer forever trying out new ideas. He started the first cooperative so the locals could buy provisions at reasonable prices and not just hand over their fish and furs. He experimented with bringing in reindeer from Lapland as domestic animals that could haul goods like sled dogs.
But more interesting to Birdseye was his idea about fox farming. Grenfell, always searching for ways to get Labradoreans into cash trade and out of barter, experimented with fox farming—breeding the animals and selling the pups. It had never been done in Labrador, and it not only seemed to Grenfell to have the potential of earning a considerable amount of cash for locals but struck him as more humane than letting foxes starve to death with a leg in the steel jaw of a trap. Grenfell knew nothing about the breeding of foxes, but he was confident that it was feasible because he had seen a litter at the Washington zoo that had been born in captivity.
Grenfell established the farm in St. Anthony, a handful of scattered houses in northern Newfoundland. It had one of the harshest climates in the region, but it was a convenient location because he had a hospital there. He brought the foxes in from Labrador on his ship, and a visiting Harvard scholar recalled the frisky puppies playing on deck with dogs and people. The red foxes were particularly friendly and would run up to greet visitors. The whites and silvers were shier. But they were difficult to breed, it was hard to keep the young alive, and after a few years some foxes who had become favorite pets died of a spreading disease, and Grenfell closed down the project and turned the farm into a summer vegetable garden.
When Grenfell talked about fox farming, it caught Birdseye’s interest. He had made money in furs before, and animals were something with which he was experienced. Birdseye had decided, as he later put it, that he “was not cut out for a career in pure science and wanted to get into some field where I could apply scientific knowledge to an economic opportunity.”
By the time Birdseye arrived, a successful fox farm had been established in the interior of Labrador, and fox farming had become the most important industry on Prince Edward Island, with high prices being paid for live foxes.
At every port where the Strathcona landed, Birdseye talked to fur traders and other men involved with foxes, and he concluded that there was money to be made in trapping silver foxes and shipping them to the United States as breeding stock.
By July Birdseye was back in New York looking for an investor. According to his journal, his father wrote a letter to Harris Hammond, a wealthy contact. This is the earliest record of a link between Birdseye and the city of Gloucester, Massachusetts; the Hammond family spent part of their time there. Harris was the son of John Hays Hammond, a wealthy mining engineer who had worked in Mexico and South Africa. The elder Hammond was a close friend of the U.S. president and later Supreme Court justice William Howard Taft and had many other contacts well placed for anything the Hammond family wanted to do. When his son John Hays Hammond Jr. said he wanted to be an inventor, the father had the boy sit down with Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell to talk about his ideas. John’s older brother Harris was more in the mold of his father. He understood about adventures. When he was only a baby, his family had dragged him through an insurrection in Mexico. His father wrote in his autobiography, “Fortunately, he turned out to be an indestructible baby.”
At the time Birdseye met the indestructible baby, he was in his thirties, only a few years older than Birdseye. He had just lost out on a major investment in Mexico because of the outbreak of what became the Mexican Revolution. He continued looking for mineral wealth and finally made his fortune at the height of the Depression in California oil fields.
Hammond perplexed Birdseye. It was difficult to get a meeting with him, and he went to his office day after day. When finally he did meet with him, he explained his idea of fox farming in broad terms. Hammond asked few questions and sought no details. He agreed to give the venture some backing and handed Birdseye a check for $750 to get him started. All Hammond said was “Keep me informed.” This was the beginning of the Hammond and Birdseye Fur Company.
The next day Birdseye spent $350 on supplies and deposited the remaining $400 in a bank in St. John’s, the Newfoundland capital. Among his purchases was a life insurance policy. Birdseye later said that he also got backing from Grenfell’s New York connections. It would take thousands of dollars to buy enough animals to start breeding foxes.
When Birdseye got to Prince Edward Island, breeding foxes were selling for as high as $8,000, a huge sum in those days. There was a daunting amount of information and skills that Birdseye had to learn to start fox farming. He studied the farms on Prince Edward Island and drew detailed diagrams. He learned that foxes could die from drinking too much milk. They died easily, and puppies were even more fragile. They would eat cod heads, which were virtually free. “Moldy bread was good fox feed. Fish in seal oil was cheap, kept well through the winter and was a good feed. Liver tends to loosen foxes bowel. For breeding one male can serve two females although it took experience to accomplish this—that is, on the part of the breeder.” Birdseye was almost never without humor.
After studying the farms’ operations, he was able to find three pairs to begin with, which he bought for only $1,000 a pair. In St. John’s he learned there was a proposal to ban the export of foxes, and he met with legislators to try to dissuade them from this measure. Finally he found his loophole: there was to be no ban on the export of locally raised offspring.
Birdseye then obtained a license to capture wild foxes for breeding. He also met with the fishing commissioner and other officials, went to shops, visited a seal factory. On his crossing to Labrador he met fishermen and grilled them about their techniques and their problems. He operated like a journalist constantly hunting down information.
A persistent myth is that Birdseye went to Labrador to work for the Hudson’s Bay Company. This clearly is not true. Both Birdseye and Grenfell tried to interest this long-established trader of Canadian fur in the farmed-fox trade but failed to do so. The confusion comes from the fact that the Hudson’s Bay Company maintained stores in Canada that years later during World War II carried the Birds Eye line of frozen food. The company was founded by an English royal charter in 1670 and was made the sole proprietor of the Hudson Bay area. The official name was Governor and Company of Adventurers of England Trading into Hudson’s Bay. In 1912 both Birdseye and Grenfell found the Hudson’s Bay Company to be a very old establishment, very set in its ways, and those ways did not include fox farming, which was, given the cost of the animals and their tendency to die in captivity, a high-risk business.
Birdseye bought an abandoned outpost of the Revillon Frères, a French competitor that the Hudson’s Bay Company later bought out, in Sandwich Bay, which was 250 miles up the coast from Battle Harbour, where the ships came in from Newfoundland. He seemed fond of the animals, describing some as playful, some, especially females, as gentle. They seemed almost like pets if you didn’t contemplate their fate. He wrote in his journal, “Considering that the foxes are supposed to be wild, they aren’t at all bashful any longer.” The problem was that they were constantly dying, especially new pups.
Birdseye also had to learn
many things just to survive a Labrador winter. He had to learn to dress in clothing that was heavy enough to hold in his body heat and yet light enough to keep him from sweating. Sweat would freeze and chill you, especially at night.
He had to learn about sleds and sled dogs and managing a team of them. He was impressed at his first encounter with huskies. “Here for the first time we have met the full-blood husky dog of northern Labrador,” he wrote in his journal. He referred to their howling as “canine music.” After listening to them through a sleepless night, he wrote that it reminded him of the noise made by a large crowd on an election night, which is as close as he ever came to a political observation.
The Labrador sled dog was close to a wolf in appearance and often in temperament. It was an extremely strong dog, fearless, and ready to attack whatever threatened, even a polar bear or a man, both of which a real wolf would shy away from. The dogs seemed impervious to cold even when covered in ice. They could save a man’s life because they could always find their way even when snow blindness or fog bewildered the human driver. They average about six miles an hour but could travel two or three times that speed. Each dog has its unique personality and temperament, and a driver needed to know his dogs.
The sled, the komatik, was designed for hauling freight for scientific expeditions and for traders. It was very different from the Alaskan racing sled with the perch in the back that most people picture as a dogsled. These were eleven-foot-long platforms on long runners ideally made of light and durable black spruce, although there were many variations. There were even stories of drivers in an emergency breakdown finding whale ribs to use. The runners were slightly more than two feet apart. Packing a komatik required skill. It was extremely important that the weight be right for the terrain and that the freight be well balanced.
Birdseye traveled all over Labrador, often for days at a time, by dogsled. For instance, on January 10, 1913, he averaged almost ten miles an hour, covering sixty-five miles in six and a half hours, which is the total amount of daylight in Labrador that time of year. His journal shows him frequently gone for three, sometimes even six weeks procuring foxes or provisions. He often wrote of six-hour journeys just to visit a neighbor. Surviving the weather was challenging. It was often well below zero degrees Fahrenheit, sometimes as low as forty below zero. He later said that he regularly suffered from frostbite. “After a while you get used to it just like mosquito bites.”
Provisioning a journey properly was important since there was always a possibility of spending some extra time lost in the snowy wilderness. The komatik traveler had to know what kinds of provisions to take, that salted food such as pork or cod resisted freezing and was therefore better than canned food, which would quickly freeze up and be very difficult to thaw and which also had extra inedible weight. Grenfell liked to travel with “pork buns”—bread filled with salt pork—and Birdseye picked up this practice. His first winter, though, he did not have the recipe exactly right, and so in his journal he laughed at what a rube he was and labeled his attempt “unleavened pork loaf”:
Bread with pork in it is common here—Rube forgot to take any baking powder with the barrels this trip so that the pork loaf was simply an unleavened mixture of flour, water, pieces of salt pork, and a few raisins fried brown on both sides. This bread is very soggy but each hunk is a square meal and it certainly sticks to the ribs for a long while.
More is known about Bob Birdseye in this period than at any other time in his life. He had long evenings alone, and he filled them by writing page after page to mail to his family, even though the mail-carrying ships could not get past the ice for the entire winter and much of the spring. In 1914 the ice did not melt enough for ships to arrive until July. But Bob kept writing and sent off a thick pile of pages when he had a chance.
He also kept what he called “a field journal.” It is not certain exactly why he kept these journals. It may have had something to do with his training as a biologist or with working for the U.S. Biological Survey. But the style, tone, and even content of these journals, index and accounting aside, were not very different from the letters he wrote home.
He continued his relationship with the U.S. Biological Survey. At its request he was stuffing birds and other specimens to ship to Washington. An entomologist on the survey had asked for certain insects. Another wanted intestinal parasites. The Canadian Department of Agriculture was interested in plant samples. He started getting other requests. One man wanted a dozen stuffed great horned owls.
The journals were handwritten in bound hardcover doeskin notebooks with lined pages. He started the first one during his last summer in Montana and continued the practice in Labrador until his final entry in the twelfth notebook in July 1916.
The letters and notebooks tell much about Bob Birdseye, even though one of the things they show is that he did not readily talk about emotions or matters of the heart. His visits to fox farmers on Prince Edward Island reveal a man who makes very quick assessments of other people—especially observations such as “very open”—and then sucks volumes of information out of everyone he meets. Some were not open. One man he found “suspicious and secretive,” and he wrote, “Most of the facts obtained were therefore wiled out of him.” But that comment was after seven handwritten pages of information obtained.
These are clearly the journals of an extremely methodical man. In the early notebooks he numbered each page and used the last pages for a detailed index. In later notebooks the index was dropped, and the final pages were devoted to a detailed accounting of his expenses.
His journals also show him to be a tireless worker. After his first winter he realized that he needed help, someone to run his fox farm while he was away on trips, and he brought in a recruit from his hometown of Montclair, Perry W. Terhune. The fact that among Terhune’s tasks while Birdseye was away was maintaining his journal proves that he was keeping these notes as more than just a personal record. The parts of the journal written by Terhune are in a much more careless script, with no food descriptions and no index and many days skipped or simply marked “No work done.” Birdseye never had such days. He either worked on his journals or indexed them, balanced his accounts, or spent the day reading, but he always reported some profitable use of his time.
The writings to his family show that he had a self-effacing, sometimes corny, but endearing sense of humor. He frequently referred to himself as “the prodigal son,” “Labrador Bob,” or “the floating rib.” He poked fun at his rapidly balding head, saying that Eleanor could give him a haircut with three snips behind and a rub of steel wool on top. He laughed at how lengthy his letters were, and when he learned that his brother Roger, serving in the army, was only allowed by military censors to send form postcards with certain selected phrases, he wrote to his family, suggesting that he should have a censor as well. “Wouldn’t you folks welcome a rest from this long-winded journal, and a few weeks of ‘I am well! I am warm!’ ‘I am sleepy,’ ‘I have frozen toe,’ ‘I went to Cartwright and frost burned my nose’?”
He enjoyed, was even fascinated by, children, even if as a single young man his concept of children and how to relate to them was still somewhat unevolved—largely centered on luring them with candy. In Labrador he began what became a lifelong habit of befriending children in the neighborhood. Of course, in Labrador the neighbors might be a hundred miles away. All his dogsled journeys were provisioned with candy in case he ran across any children. He wrote to his family:
The children of the families which live a long way from neighbors are always a source of great interest to me. They are for all the world like so many little fox pups. Usually when a stranger, especially a man, and especially a “skipper-man,” comes into the house they hide behind the stove or under the bed or run up the ladder to the loft (if there is such a luxury), and from their hiding place peep out like so many scary little kittens. Taming wild animals has always been my hobby, and trying to make friends with these kids and tame them so they will com
e close enough to take a candy out of my fingers is great fun.
It is evident that personally he did not care much for candy because, uncharacteristically, he never describes what kind of candy it was. Normally, he liked to describe food, such as in his letter to his parents on rabbit: “Mostly we had ’um fried! But there’s a scattered pie, and an occasional stew. One of the favorite breakfasts is fried rabbit livers, the thinnest crispiest deliciousest bacon, hot cornbread, and powerful good coffee. Doesn’t that sound good?”
Despite his wanderlust, he felt close to his family and missed them. He seemed male oriented, closer to his father than his mother and to his brothers Kellogg, Henry, and Roger than his sisters. On June 20, 1915, he wrote home:
The one thought that engrosses my mind almost constantly is H O M E. I want news—good news—of Mother and you, and of all my brothers and sisters … I shall probably be unable to leave Labrador by the first steamer, for various reasons. But on the second, which should leave here about July 10th, I must start out. Then in ten days more I shall be in Orange. Hooray. It makes me shout just to think of it.
All his life Birdseye was a friendly man, very accessible to all kinds of people. Is that why he changed his name to Bob? A man named Bob is easier to approach than a man named Clarence. His journals demonstrate how much he relished time spent with others, none more than Grenfell, whom he always referred to as Dr. Grenfell. “Golly it was so good to see him again,” Birdseye wrote of Grenfell to his family after the Englishman visited him in the summer of 1914. “He is certainly a Prince, and it is one big life-size pleasure to meet him.” Bob loved hearing his stories from his travels both around Labrador and abroad, such as his trip to Turkey.
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