Birdseye

by Mark Kurlansky

  In the meantime Bob’s parents were in complete despair. Their youngest son, Roger, had secretly gone to Canada and joined the Eighth Royal Rifles. The New York Times identified his outfit as the “First Canadian Contingent.” The Royal Rifles was a Canadian contingent of the British army, originally formed in the eighteenth century to raise soldiers in the American colonies to fight the French in Quebec. They were to be an American regiment fighting for the empire. Now they were going to fight in Europe, and Roger Birdseye was going with them. “He was brave, if foolish, to do that,” Bob wrote in his journal. “If he lives through unmaimed he will be the better for it. But it’s going to be mighty hard on mother and father.”

  It was hard on Roger too. He had volunteered in August 1914 as the war began and was the only American in a completely Quebecer battalion. He rapidly rose in rank from private to lieutenant and according to Birdseye family history was the only American to become an officer in the British army without relinquishing his U.S. citizenship. The Second Battle of Ypres, a town in Belgium, was actually a series of battles and one of the most infamous World War I slaughters. It was the first time the Germans used poison gas on the western front. In just one of these battles one thousand Canadians were killed and almost five thousand more wounded out of a force of ten thousand. The remainder took 75 percent casualties in the next action. Roger was awarded the Distinguished Conduct Medal for carrying a wounded soldier through heavy fire. He was one of the few unwounded soldiers left in the battle when he himself was finally wounded. The New York Times reported that most of the men and officers in his outfit were lost and that he was the last casualty in his unit. But he survived and in 1919 married Effie May Dixon, a Canadian nurse he had met on his transport ship when he was first sent to France in 1914. He later moved to Arizona and became a publicity agent.

  In July 1915 Bob left Labrador, and from St. John’s he wired his parents to say he was coming home. According to his journal, he also wired “EG.” This was the first time he ever mentioned Eleanor Gannett in his journal, and all it said was that he “wired EG.” Later in life he would explain that the substantial earnings from fur that year made him feel ready to marry the girl he loved. Conventional wisdom sometimes claims that once people get married and have children and become weighted with responsibilities, they become less creative. But sometimes having people to protect and look after, thinking about people other than yourself, gives you your best ideas. Though it took him some time to realize it, that is exactly what happened to Bob Birdseye.

  On July 25, 1915, Clarence Birdseye was back in New Jersey, and that night he sat down with his older brother Kellogg to discuss business. And he told him that by the way, he was engaged to marry the one he kept referring to in his journal as EG. This EG business is curious. It was not that he identified everybody by initials. He writes not that he told “KB” of his engagement to EG but that he told Kellogg about EG. It was almost as though he didn’t want her to be identified in his journal.

  He had a meeting at Kellogg’s office with Louis Underwood, a General Electric engineer and executive who was interested in Labrador and was probably a cousin. He made a number of mentions of shopping for a diamond but didn’t say why. Feeling financially secure because his furs had been assessed and his fur company showed an estimated profit for the year of between $3,000 and $4,000, he finally chose a diamond and wrote that he was having it set as an engagement ring.

  For almost an entire month there were no entries in his journal. Then, on August 29, he returned with Eleanor by car from Berlin, New York. He described the hotel in Berlin, the Taconic Inn owned by T. D. Taylor, and wrote that rooms were $20. He described various people on the property and who their families were. Birdseye was always interested in people. A reader of these journals would know more about the young couple that gave them a tour of a nearby cave than he or she would learn about EG. He included in the journal the torn upper half of two pieces of stationery that were the letterhead with a picture of the Taconic Inn, which boasted electric lights and steam heat. Saving these and pressing them in his journal were, for Birdseye, rare sentimental gestures. But why not? Though he never mentioned it, this was his honeymoon. He also didn’t mention that a week earlier, on August 21, they were married. But at least he now started referring to her in the journal as Eleanor rather than EG.

  Life had now changed. Suddenly the preparations for returning to Labrador included not only the usual shopping for shotguns, ammunition, and equipment but a week of daily shopping at Wanamaker’s. This was one of America’s first department stores, founded in Philadelphia in 1876. The founder, by coincidence, was also a fan of Dwight Moody and had once let his Philadelphia store serve as a meeting place for the popular evangelist. In 1915, New York’s Wanamaker’s was at its height, known for its numerous and helpful staff and for inventing thematic sales such as “the white sale.” It had its own wireless terminal and in 1912 was one of the first places in New York to receive news of the sinking Titanic.

  In Wanamaker’s day after day, Eleanor and Bob’s sister Miriam bought bedroom furniture and dining room furniture and a great deal of aluminum and white agate kitchenware—all to be shipped to Labrador. Bob did take the time to sell two pairs of snowshoes he had brought from Labrador to Abercrombie and Fitch for $10 each, a neat little profit. New York was no longer just about business. They all went to the American Museum of Natural History together, an old friend for Bob, and then to their first movie, D. W. Griffith’s pioneering but shamelessly racist Birth of a Nation, though there is no record of what they thought of it.

  With what we now know about Clarence Birdseye, Miriam would seem the sibling with whom he had the most in common and not his businessmen brothers. Miriam was also fascinated by food and at the time was lecturing on nutrition, particularly about meat, at Cornell University. But it seems she only became closer to Clarence with the arrival of Eleanor. They were both college-educated women and by coincidence would both later write about gardening—Eleanor on wildflowers and Miriam on herbs with the writer Leonie de Sounin, with whom Miriam lived and gardened for many years.

  Then Bob and Eleanor were off to Labrador by the usual route—train to Boston, train to Maine, boat to Halifax, train to Sydney, boat to the tiny seaport of Port aux Basques, train across the rockbound, barely populated wild interior to St. John’s. It is the same route that is traveled today except that the train from Port aux Basques to St. John’s, which used to be called the Newfie Bullet, no longer runs, replaced by a usually empty highway.

  They had to wait two weeks at a hotel in St. John’s for the boat to Labrador. Compared with anything in Labrador, St. John’s was a big city, but in fact it was just a rugged fishing town, not even as big as Halifax. It dated back to before 1620, but its bustling waterfront had more of a sense of commerce than history. Once the harbors thawed, the town became a tower of Babel as ships came in with French-speaking Bretons, Portuguese, and all the other long-range fishermen of Europe who came to fish cod in the Grand Banks and put in to St. John’s for supplies and repairs. The harbor was packed with the fat-hulled, square-rigged barks of the European fisheries, the sleek fore-and-aft-rigged schooners that fished out of Gloucester and Nova Scotia, and newer engine-powered vessels hauling freight and passengers.

  In October they got to Labrador and started building a new house. Bob would name the house Wyndiecote, the old Long Island name that to him meant home. Birdseye wrote that he was spending all his time on this project. Perched on a ledge of rocks over Muddy Bay, it was a simple house, though luxurious by the standards of the shacks that most people in the area had for homes. Built by a local trapper, Charles Bird, it was set on a platform that was reached by way of a long stairway up the rocks. The large living room was surrounded by windows looking out on the sky, sea, and more distant woods. It was a one-story house with only three rooms, but solid. It still stands, though its location has been changed. Among its many owners have been the International Grenfell Organizatio
n and the Hudson’s Bay Company. It has been preserved not for its historic importance but because houses are scarce in Labrador, and you don’t throw away a solid one. The Birdeyes finally moved in on December 9, which happened to be Bob’s twenty-ninth birthday. He mentioned in his journal that it was his birthday, the only time in five years that he ever mentioned the occasion. Things were changing.

  From Newfoundland, Eleanor wrote to Bob’s mother that she was perturbed by the inefficiency of the people. “No one in any line of business thinks of starting the day’s work before nine,” she complained. She didn’t like the way the midday meal used up too much of the working day and thought that all of these bad work habits explained why they were still utterly dependent on England for all their goods, which, she added, made the local shopping “most unsatisfactory.”

  They hired a live-in maid, not uncommon at the time, back where they came from. Bob now took Sundays off, and they read and went for walks in snowshoes in –14-degree temperatures.

  For all her straitlaced sense of the right way to do things, Eleanor was ready for the adventure. She traveled with Bob on long journeys with a nine-dog sled, setting traps in subzero weather. Years later she liked to amuse her children with a story of the time she fell off the back of a komatik and Bob, up front managing the dog team, didn’t notice for about ten minutes, in which he covered about a mile. He looked back and saw no Eleanor. So he turned around and found her. She always laughed when she told the story, but there must have been a dark twenty minutes or more when she was abandoned in the Labrador winter with no snowshoes or provisions.

  Eleanor adapted quickly to life on the frontier. They did target practice together with .22 Colt revolvers, which they also used to shoot rabbits that were caught in their traps. At first, though she did well with targets, Eleanor could never hit the trapped rabbits. But in 1917, Birdseye wrote home that Eleanor could make a head shot at fifteen yards “ ’most every time,” which, given the size of a rabbit head and the accuracy of a handgun, was fairly good shooting.

  Eleanor gradually found her place with the Hammond and Birdseye Fur Company, doing paperwork and looking after foxes, which apparently they were still breeding, though they could export them only if they killed them. She also undertook to establish a darkroom in the new house so that they could develop the film and make prints from Bob’s photography.

  In May fox pups were born. The journal and apparently their lives became consumed with caring for one struggling pup. Bob writes in his journal when the pup gets his first teeth and when he has “a copious movement” due to the use of castor oil. Finally, on May 18, 1916, Birdseye reported that the pup died at 6:00 a.m. of acute indigestion.

  At the same time hundreds of thousands of Frenchmen and Germans were dying in a place in France called Verdun. But Bob and Eleanor would not hear about that until the harbor thawed in another month. Everyone in Labrador was eager for scarce news of the war. The dominion had given more than its share to the war effort. An entire Newfoundland regiment was slaughtered on the first day of the Battle of the Somme in 1916. Most war news trickled in as rumors. Typically, in a 1915 letter to his family, Birdseye commented that he had heard that “Belgium had wiped out a detachment of German soldiers. I certainly hope that is the case!”

  In the meantime they had foxes to worry about.

  Once the harbors thawed, they went back to New York. Eleanor was more than six months pregnant, but this was the earliest they could leave. Her pregnancy had not taken up nearly the space in the journal that the fox pup had. Once in New York, Birdseye simply noted, “Shortly after breakfast E and I went to Dr. Stern’s office and made arrangements. I gave him carte blanche in making hospital and all other necessary arrangements.” That taken care of, Bob tried to work on business in New York. After numerous attempts to meet with Hammond, who seemed always to be in Gloucester, Birdseye was informed, “Mr. Hammond is no longer interested in Hammond and Birdseye.” Bob’s father tried to set him up with other prospective investors, and apparently something worked because he went back to Labrador, where he awaited the return of Eleanor and their new baby.

  On September 6, 1916, their son Kellogg was born, and Eleanor returned to Labrador with the five-week-old baby. The ship she was to sail on never arrived in Newfoundland because a German U-boat had sunk it. Finally, she managed to get on the last boat for Labrador before ice shut the ports for the winter. The ship even sailed through a storm to arrive in Labrador before it iced up. To raise a baby in a subarctic wilderness, with the closest medical facility, Grenfell’s hospital, 250 miles away by dogsled in Battle Harbour, seemed a risky decision. But Eleanor and Bob were not troubled by it. Years later the family would say, “But what if Kellogg got sick?” and Eleanor would smile softly, shrug, and say, “But he never did.”

  To the biographer the first obvious change now that Birdseye was a father was that he stopped writing. He dropped his journals altogether and wrote far less to his family. The family would still hear from him whenever there was a mail ship, but the packets were much lighter. This suggests that one motive for the writing, which was mostly done at night, had been to stave off loneliness. He urged his parents to keep writing back “the same number of good letters that you always sent me when I was a poor forlorn bachelor.” Though he was always understated, it was clear how much Bob enjoyed having Eleanor with him. He described her as “the only genuine Washingtonian north of the forty-nine.” Eleanor began writing to the Birdseyes too, addressing them as Mother Bee and Father Bee, a habit their daughters-in-law picked up for addressing Eleanor and Bob.

  Typical of Birdseye, he did not worry a great deal about the proximity of a hospital, but he was concerned that Kellogg, whom he always referred to when writing to his family as “Sonny,” ate well. Ringing in his ears was Grenfell’s constant admonition to the people of Labrador that poor diet was causing widespread anemia, dyspepsia, beriberi, and scurvy. Fruits and vegetables had to be brought back from trips to Newfoundland. Livestock for meat or milk could not be kept, because the dogs would kill them, and they had to keep the dogs. Sled dogs, the only means of transportation, were not optional. Birdseye thought a lot about preservation because of the long winters he had to provision for. These are two recipes from his journals:

  Dried Trout

  Trout are slit up the back letting them stand overnight in a little salt, washing out the brine next morning. And partially drying them in the sun. By smoking them as are salmon, trout can be kept all winter.

  Dried Capelin

  Spread out on bare rocks, roofs, and flakes, everywhere are capelin drying. They are simply left overnight in their own juice (½ gal salt to 1 lb fish) raised out next morning. And tossed on the handiest surface to dry. They are used either for white folks or dogs during the winter.

  He also had to learn how to preserve food to feed the foxes. He used partly dried capelin that he barreled with one-sixth their bulk in seal oil and found that this formula preserved the fish so that they would keep a very long time and made good fox food. Birdseye estimated that with this feed it cost him between $5 and $6 to feed a pair of foxes for a year. This was a considerable improvement over the Prince Edward Island breeders, who spent about $50 a year feeding each pair of foxes.

  Fish was the cheapest and most plentiful food. One of the summer tasks was to preserve salted fish. In the winter fish was frozen by a technique called snow packing in which food was buried in a barrel of snow and left outdoors. Since the temperature was below freezing all winter, it remained frozen until unpacked for use.

  Birdseye asked himself many questions about food and survival in the subarctic. Why, he wondered, did people in Labrador eat lean food in the summer but a tremendous amount of fat in the winter? The ultimate winter survival dish was something he called bruise, which is sometimes known as brewis, a combination of dried and salted food mixed with a tremendous amount of fat. Usually it was salt cod, hardtack, flour, and water, baked hard and mixed with cubed salt pork, and t
hen boiled and served like a hash with huge globs of melted pork fat. Bowls of melted fat were often served on the table to spoon onto food. Birdseye laughed when he heard a host say, “Have some more grease on your bruise,” but everyone then took a few spoonfuls. It was a Sunday morning breakfast favorite. He remembered that people also ate a great deal of grease in the Southwest, where it was hot in the summer. They would open a can of corn and eat it with pork fat.

  Birdseye reflected on such phenomena. He asked his parents in a letter why people in hot and cold climates eat more fat than those living in a temperate zone. But it may not have been related to temperature. It might have been that people living in wildernesses use a lot of energy in their lives, and since food is hard to come by, fat is sometimes both filling and available.

  The constant diet of grease and preserved and conserved food gave him a longing for food that tasted fresh. “Good lord,” he once wrote to his family, “how fine gull gravy tastes when one hadn’t had anything fresh for a long time.” It was not only Birdseye. He told his parents that whenever someone encountered other people in Labrador, the first thing asked was whether they had seen any fresh food where they came from. He often described the excitement and relish with which neighbors would gather and sit down for a meal because they had gotten some fresh food. When he bought foxes, he always tried also to buy beavers, lynx, marten, otters—whatever he could get. He wanted them with the fur intact so that he could stuff them and sell them as specimens. But he also wanted to eat the fresh meat. Everyone in Labrador was craving fresh food in the winter. Although Birdseye loved irony, he was being absolutely serious when he referred to a meal with fresh food as “Today’s big event.”