Birdseye wanted to spare big game. He argued that though he found mountain sheep, elks, and brown, black, and grizzly bears infested with ticks, they did not have enough contact with humans to be considered significant carriers. One notable exception, true to the policies of the Biological Survey, was the coyote. “It is important that their numbers be reduced.”
He illustrated his points with his photography. The cover was graced with a shot of an apple tree killed by pocket gophers. Then there were the unappealing photos of “twenty-seven ground squirrels, chipmunks, and mice killed by 7 cents worth of poisoned grain.” There are carrots ruined by gophers, the washout of a ditch caused by gophers, and a photograph of his horse carrying two hundred animal traps.
Nature was to be put in the service of man, and nothing in it should be allowed to impair food production. Nowhere in this study was there a sense of preserving the natural order or the concept that removing so many species would narrow biodiversity and impair the entire ecosystem. If Birdseye was a self-taught biologist, he was not an ecology biologist—a biologist who studies ecosystems. The discipline existed in his day, but it was not as fashionable as it is today. Today the U.S. Biological Survey has become the Fish and Wildlife Service, which, though not without its controversies, is expected to protect and preserve nature.
In the winter of 1912 Birdseye was back in Washington. He did not return again to Montana. The spotted fever campaign continued without him and had its first fatality, Thomas McClintic of the U.S. Public Health Service. In all, fourteen people died in the fight against spotted fever between 1912 and 1977. With the discovery of antibiotics in the 1940s, a cure was found for spotted fever and the crisis seemed to be over, but then there was another serious outbreak in the 1970s. The early research that Birdseye participated in has led to solving riddles about other serious illnesses such as Legionnaires’ disease, Lyme disease, and Potomac horse fever. It led to the second-largest government laboratory in the United States being established in Hamilton, Montana, where, during World War II, studies on insect-borne diseases were to save the lives of soldiers throughout the Pacific.
If Birdseye had done nothing else, his fieldwork on spotted fever and ticks would have earned him a footnote in history as it did Willard King, who went on to distinguish himself in studying the mosquitoes in New Guinea that were plaguing World War II troops.
But Birdseye had a different destiny, though he had little idea of his future at the time. He only knew that the century was still young and so was he, and there were opportunities for other adventures. All his life Birdseye was restless—eager to move on to the next thing. In 1912 the next thing was Labrador, a sparsely populated frozen wilderness.
The coincidences of destiny are unpredictable things. Had Clarence Birdseye not been invited to spend six weeks along the Labrador coast on the hospital ship of the celebrated medical missionary Wilfred Grenfell in 1912, a brief and seemingly inconsequential chapter in Birdseye’s life, he might have remained a curious minor figure, and this biography would not have been written. Or maybe he would have done something else no one had ever thought of.
He was looking for adventure but also opportunity, and he hoped that perhaps Labrador would present an opportunity of some kind. He said good-bye again to Eleanor, the explorer’s daughter who understood his need to go, and he headed north.
Labrador at the time was a possession of Newfoundland, itself a dominion, with the same self-ruling status in the British Commonwealth as Canada. Like much of maritime Canada and New England—for that matter, like Gloucester, Massachusetts, which would later be Birdseye’s home—Labrador and Newfoundland’s first Europeans were fishermen in the seventeenth century, drawn by the huge profits to be made in Europe from the dried and salted codfish with which the American North Atlantic was teeming. Cod was another example, like the buffalo and the passenger pigeon, of the extraordinarily large populations of North American wildlife beyond anything Europeans had known.
But Europeans had also never known winter like Labrador had. Both its duration and its coldness were beyond their experience. Many Europeans thought the winter, even in New England, was so harsh as to make the region uninhabitable for year-round settlement—an odd assessment since there were indigenous people living there. But New England was far milder than Newfoundland and Labrador and soon had year-round settlements and even a year-round cod fishery. In Newfoundland and Labrador, on the other hand, the harbors freeze up in the winter, and fishing had to be discontinued. A few tough fishermen would survive the winter months there, and the rest would leave and return for the spring thaw.
If Newfoundland was a backwater frontier, Labrador was its wildest uncharted wilderness. In the early eighteenth century, when France still had a large presence in the American North Atlantic, a French map showed the Gulf of St. Lawrence and Newfoundland. It also charted with some accuracy portions of the Grand Banks, the shoals at sea where codfish were caught. At the top of the map was a barely shaped lump of land where Labrador is labeled “Pays des Esquimaux,” Eskimo country. Neither the French nor the British did much to establish themselves there.
Some fishermen did settle there, but Newfoundland and Labrador never developed the economy or the population of prosperous New England. This is why there was little interest in separating from England in 1776; in 1849, when Canada gained self-government; or even during the second half of the nineteenth century, when the Dominion of Canada gained territories and grew into a sizable country. Even when Newfoundland and Labrador did contemplate self-rule, it was as its own country and not part of Canada. To the people of Labrador, “Canady” seemed a very far-off and different place from these cold and rugged colonies. In 1907, Newfoundland gained dominion status, and Labrador went with it, making Labrador a kind of colony of Newfoundland without representation in its legislature. The two didn’t join Canada until 1949.
When Wilfred Grenfell was studying Labrador, he found an old map that said, “Labrador was discovered by the English. There is nothing in it of any value.” A visitor might easily have that impression, but for centuries Labrador and Newfoundland had been viewed by Europeans, who never went there but saw their countrymen earning fortunes on cod and furs, as sources of great wealth. But the people in Labrador who produced the salt cod and fox furs for Europe were pitifully poor, among the poorest people in all of the Americas.
Labrador had meat that could be shot and hides to be cured and salmon, halibut, herring, lobster, and, above all, cod to be caught and eaten in the summer. In March there were seals to be hunted. But anything else that was to be consumed, including fruits and vegetables and grains, had to be imported. Berries were the only local fruit, and the only Labrador-grown greens were the tops of turnips in the summer. The fishermen and fur trappers traded their products to large companies like the Hudson’s Bay Company in exchange for supplies and ended up in perpetual debt. Grenfell told the story of a man who, having failed in the local salmon run, wanted to row to cod grounds but had to trade his anchor for provisions in order to make the trip.
In 1912 there were about 250,000 people living in Labrador and Newfoundland. Most of them were fishermen in the more-southern island of Newfoundland. Population in Labrador was sparse with no large towns or cities. Most Labradoreans were variously fishermen huddled in the rocky coves along the coast; fur breeders, trappers, and traders; the indigenous Inuit, known to white people as Eskimo; or small groups of Montagnais Indians, who lived in the interior, descendants of the Algonquin, who had been pushed north.
There was little electricity and few roads, dogsleds were the only winter transportation except for hiking in snowshoes, and there was no telephone service. Most people made their own soap from boiling spruce ashes with seal fat. There were no doctors outside of two small hospitals too far for most people to get to, both built by Grenfell.
The few opportunities for medical attention in Labrador were provided by Wilfred Thomason Grenfell. Grenfell was born in 1865 in Parkgate, a coa
stal village in Cheshire by Liverpool Bay, across the Dee from the green hills of North Wales. His father was the headmaster of a boys’ school. Fishermen seined for salmon there, and Parkgate was famous for its mussels and its shrimp. Wilfred grew up talking to fishermen who liked his friendly manner and the way he so admired them. He was a sports fanatic who also loved sailing and the sea. He and his brother refitted an old fishing smack and would take to sea without navigation skills, or, as he put it in his autobiography, “without even the convention of caring where we were bound so long as the winds bore us cheerily along.”
A social conscience was valued in the Grenfell family, and they all learned about Wilfred’s great-grandfather who worked with William Wilberforce, leader of the British movement to abolish slavery.
In 1883, Wilfred began medical school in London. In 1885, the second-year medical student was returning from seeing a patient when, on a whim, he went into a tent where the famous American evangelist team of Dwight L. Moody and the strong-voiced gospel singer Ira Sankey, composer of numerous popular hymns, were appearing. Most everyone in Britain, especially young people, had heard of Moody and Sankey, and their revival meeting was something that everyone should see at least once, so Grenfell, who was ambivalent about religion, stepped in.
An unknown speaker was delivering a long, tedious prayer, and Grenfell was about to walk out when a heavyset, thick-bearded Moody said, “Let us sing a hymn while our brother finishes his prayer.” Grenfell thought this was a remarkably dexterous and gentle way of dismissing the boring speaker, and he was impressed by Moody’s finesse. He went to more meetings and was finally swept into the movement by a group of Moody followers known as the Cambridge Seven. These were star athletes, and there was no one whom Grenfell admired more than great athletes. Two of these young men played cricket for England. At one of their meetings Grenfell committed his life to Jesus Christ. Moody’s message fit Grenfell’s own cynical view of religion, that you could either be a hypocrite spouting religion or help people in keeping with the teachings of Jesus. Moody encouraged missionary work around the world, especially in China. That was why he was popular with the young men of England. What was a young man to do in Victorian England now that the empire was secured and there weren’t even that many wars anymore? You could go out as a missionary. Many did, Grenfell included.
In his autobiography, Grenfell wrote that Moody helped him to see “that under all the shams and externals of religion was a vital call in the world for things that I could do.” Years later he named one of his sled dogs Moody. Moody the dog would be drowned saving Grenfell’s life when he was trapped on an ice floe.
After receiving his medical degree, Grenfell joined the Royal National Mission to Deep Sea Fishermen, a group that tended to the needs of commercial fishermen in the North Sea. The North Sea fishermen of the time were being exploited by copers, floating entertainment centers providing alcohol and tobacco at exorbitant prices. (Sometimes fishermen lacking cash paid those high prices in fish.) Grenfell’s ship brought religion and medicine but also—it now seems odd for a doctor—provided fishermen with tobacco at cost to undersell the copers. Grenfell loved the North Sea fishermen for their camaraderie, their resourcefulness, their courage, and their lack of pretensions. And of course he was awed by their navigational skills. “At first,” he wrote, “it was a great surprise to me how these men knew where they were, for we never saw anything but sky and sea.”
But by 1890 the new steam-powered net trawlers were already causing overfishing in the North Sea, and the mission moved on to south Irish spring fishing and then to fishing off Scotland.
In 1892, Grenfell was sent to Newfoundland and Labrador to continue the work with fishermen. From the moment he first saw it, he was struck by this remote dominion. His crossing followed almost the exact same course as John Cabot’s 1497 voyage of discovery on a ship that, as he pointed out, was not much bigger than Cabot’s. He always remembered the excitement of first seeing the rocky cliff, the thousands of marine birds, whales cavorting in the sea, the whitecaps rolling into the coast, and huge shoals of fish everywhere, so thick that their wet black backs splashed on the surface of the water. He had never before seen so many fish, but what left the strongest impression on him was a man in a makeshift little boat who came alongside and asked if he was really a doctor.
The fisherman took Grenfell to a hovel made of sod, “compared with which the Irish cabins were palaces,” and showed him a man dying of pneumonia. Grenfell could not take him away on his hospital ship, because he was the family breadwinner and they could not afford to have him away during the few months in which they earned their living fishing before the harbors iced over. And so the man died. Grenfell realized that he had found the place where he was most needed.
Most of the fishermen had never seen a doctor. He wrote:
Deformities went untreated. The crippled and blind halted through life, victims of what “the blessed Lord saw best for them.” The torture of an ingrowing toe-nail, which could be relieved in a few minutes, had incapacitated one poor father for years. Tuberculosis and rickets carried on their evil work unchecked. Preventable poverty was the efficient handmaid of these two latter diseases.
The following year he built Labrador’s first hospital in Battle Harbour, a few dozen dark-roofed white buildings wedged between the frozen sea and the icebound cliffs on the Atlantic coast of southern Labrador, just north of the straits that led to the mouth of the St. Lawrence. Then he built a second—it was little more than cottages—farther up the coast at Indian Harbour. In 1894, he formed the Grenfell Medical Mission. In 1899, its new hospital ship, the coal-fired Strathcona I, was launched. It had two masts and could also burn wood if coal was not available. It was named for the man who gave the ship to the mission, Lord Strathcona, whose real name was Donald Alexander Smith. Smith’s place in Canadian history was established in 1885, when he symbolically united Canada by driving the final spike into the Canadian transcontinental railroad in the Rocky Mountains.
For Grenfell, as for Birdseye a few years later, Labrador offered the romance of adventure—an unexplored land where Stone Age relics could be easily found along with remnants of ancient whaling stations built by mysterious Basques. Grenfell wrote, “It is so near and yet so far, so large a section of the British Empire and yet so little known, and so romantic for its wild grandeur, and many fastnesses still untrodden by the foot of man!” This is what drew Birdseye as well.
Grenfell spent his winters, when Labrador ports were frozen and inaccessible, raising money in Britain and the United States. But in time he learned to love the Labrador winter, in the same way Birdseye would learn to love it: for its stark beauty, the thrill and fun of dogsledding, the simplicity of life without stores or crowds, and the warmth of the rare encounters with the few comrades spending the winter the same way. Grenfell wrote in Tales of the Labrador that because of the absence of stores “we are relieved of the constant suggestion that we need something.”
Starting in 1902 he spent every other winter in Labrador. Once spring came, he was back on his hospital ship bringing medical help, sailing the Labrador coast into its deep unknown fjords and islands, some of which had never been charted on a map. For a man who could never navigate, these were exciting voyages.
It was such a six-week tour that Birdseye joined in the spring of 1912 as the harbors thawed and became navigable again. It is not known how he learned that Grenfell was looking for someone, but he was immediately excited by this new opportunity in Labrador.
Grenfell at age forty-seven was considerably older than Howell had been in Montana when Birdseye drove him out as too old for the job. But the Englishman seems to have had a considerable impact on Birdseye. While Grenfell never mentioned Birdseye in his 1919 autobiography, Birdseye frequently referred to Grenfell in his journals.
The older, avuncular-looking Grenfell was Birdseye’s kind of man. He was a sportsman and hunter, inventive, always investigating problems and looking for solu
tions. Birdseye had a limited interest in religion. In Labrador he would forgo church services, even though all his neighbors were going, because with the difficulties of transportation they would use up most of his day, and he preferred “a peaceful day at home.” But he would devote a small portion of that day to reading a few chapters of the Gospels. When he worked on the Strathcona, when the mission went ashore on Sundays to hold services with the locals, Birdseye would often go along. His strongest impressions were of the fervent manner and big voices with which the locals sang.
Birdseye: The Adventures of a Curious Man Page 6
