The Blue Wolf reviewed 1913

THE BLUE WOLF.

By W. Lacey Amy.

Toronto: The Musson Book Company.

Book Review from The Canadian Magazine, May 1913, column The Literary Table. Digitized by Doug Frizzle, September 2017.

IT is safe to say at the outset that “The Blue Wolf” will be popular, for it has plenty of action and colour, and contains many novel and dramatic situations. The story in brief is that of a young Torontonian who goes to Alberta to take a three months’ holiday at the ranch of an old college chum, one of a group of five who have had a lasting bond of friendship. Two of the five have already visited at the same ranch, and both have met with fatal accidents. It so happens that the rancher’s household contains, at the time of the arrival of the Torontonian, the rancher himself, his wife, his sister (Margaret) and one other of the five chums. The mistress of the household (Aggie by familiar name) was well known to the other members of the “quintuplets” in the East, and it appears that her husband has developed a deadly jealousy, so deadly indeed that it has driven him in the past to cause the death of the two chums who have visited at the ranch. Now his purpose seems to be to bring about the death of the other two. Margaret was a former sweetheart of the last of the chums to arrive on the scene. This last is familiarly known as “Count.” When they meet again at the ranch their old love for each other is revived, although the Count suspects that the girl is in love with a corporal of the North West Mounted Police. “The Blue Wolf” is a name given to a mysterious creature that emits terrific howls at night, and terrifies the whole neighbourhood in a certain section of the Cypress Hills. These howls, and several other terribly supernatural noises, cause much discomfort in the ranch household, and there is over all a suppressed air of mystery. The development of a feeling of impending fate is one of the best parts of the book, and that part, together with the character of the Count, are the chief features of the story. The character of the Count is indeed a novel venture, and Mr. Amy has succeeded in depicting a snob who goes to the West, and, notwithstanding his inherent tendency towards snobbery, displays at times some evidences of manliness, and he might with exceptional opportunities become a hero. His natural cowardice, however, is always apparent, and the author manages to keep this character’s weaknesses well to the front, notwithstanding evidences now and then of a wish to be tolerant. It forms a good instance of the rounding-out that the West can give to the Easterner who needs it. The leader of a sect called “The Dreamers,” and the corporal are principal characters of the story, and the leader’s appearances and disappearances at unexpected times add much to the mystery. There are many tense, even melodramatic, incidents, and one wonders that in the Canadian West to-day there could be discovered a locale that almost rivals Rider Haggard. One cannot help regretting that it does not present a pleasanter picture of life, a picture indeed more in keeping with what is usually encountered there; but the author’s purpose, no doubt, was to write a story that would hold the reader’s attention, and in that he has succeeded. Mr. Amy writes of the West from considerable first-hand knowledge. He lived for a time at Medicine Hat, and had opportunity to witness the operations and life of the ranchers in that part of the Dominion. Already he is well known to readers of The Canadian Magazine as a writer of descriptive articles, light sketches and short fiction, “The Blue Wolf” is his first novel.

The Life Savers

The Life Savers

Part II of the series ‘With Canadians at the Front’

By Lacey Amy

From The Canadian Magazine, October 1916.—

THE mission of mercy on the bat­tle-field is not the earliest stage of battle, but its importance is not lessened thereby. As the soldier cannot live without food, so a success­ful campaign does not permit him to die without the best of attention. The men who care for the wounded do not figure in the number of the enemy they kill, but in the number of friends they save. From those daring men who carry relief to the very cannon’s mouth, back to the skilled surgeons who give their brains and experience to great war hospitals, the worst of the horrors of war are eliminated by means of an organization that is as complete as the commissariat. The battle is won just as surely by the Red Cross brassard as by rifle and gun.

Through these unselfish, sacrificing men human life in the Great War be­comes an individual treasure, not a great mass to be preserved in the aggregate but neglected in the unit. Even to those who understand the tre­mendous system built up for the sol­dier’s care when he is stricken the fatal casualties are so few as to seem miraculous. Against every engine of destruction the world can devise, against every devilish development of the perverted German mind, the mil­lions of allied soldiers face trench life with as little danger of the final pay­ment as in some of the hazardous oc­cupations of civilian life.

The forces that surround him with a wall of protection that is a constant surprise to him are made up of organ­ization, medical efficiency, and per­sonal bravery. The organization rests in the hands of men who sit at desks far from the sound of the guns, their fingers nevertheless on every beating pulse of the service. Everywhere, from the trenches to the hospitals in England doctors work as they never thought to work, for wages they never expected to accept. But up at the front, where the shrapnel shrieks, where death and disaster lurk in every space, is another branch of the Red Cross that has been unsung too long.

Ask the wounded soldiers who saved their worst suffering, to whom they owe their lives, and the list will be headed by the stretcher-bearers, the fellow-soldiers who brave everything they brave without the satisfaction of taking revenge, who stand and await their call without any of the hysteria of battle or the hope of a safety-valve in some glorious rush. Theirs is the personal bravery branch of the great life-saving service. Beneath the jag­ged bursts of shell fire, in the face of rifle and machine-gun, where every enemy eye is focused for destruction, the stretcher-bearer, the wounded sol­dier’s friend, crouches at work.

Unarmed, save by the Red Cross brassard on his arm, outfitted only with a water bottle and a medical bag, he clings with his mate close to every bombarded trench, to every hideous crater, to every perilous mission. Where danger is lies his only sphere of duty. Right at the front, or in a small auxiliary trench where he will be out of the way of the fighting men, he awaits the call that is sure to come. There is nothing for him to do to take his mind from the perils, and always his work is with the horrors. Fatigue duty, which is often relief duty, is not permitted him, for he always must be ready. He sleeps fitfully, boots and medical bag on.

It is not even as if he were trained for his work. Somewhere available there is usually one with some medical training, but seldom has the stretcher-bearer time to apply more than what his common sense and growing experi­ence teach him. It is one of the pe­culiarities of military training that the Red Cross end of war is trained to a finish—in the things that don’t matter. Months and months of hard, dry drill are thrown about the careers of thousands of military doctors whose helping hands millions of wounded soldiers are longing for. And never for a moment will those doctors have use for one sentence of what they are driven into before they can apply their skill where it is needed. Many stretcher-bearers enter the front trenches without a knowledge of field dressings, although that is their entire work. But necessity and the very interest they must have in their duties to assume them are swift teachers. For the next war the wasted drilling and time may be eliminated for the train­ing that counts.

“Stretcher-bearers, on the double!” It is the cry the stretcher-bearer is always waiting for. It is always “on the double”. Also it is one of the pro­ducts of the moment of excitement that the report mentions many casual­ties, even though there be but one. To this excitement he alone dare not yield. Cooly, methodically, he cuts away the clothing from about the wound with a large pair of scissors carried for that purpose, decides in­stantly as to the necessity of an opiate, and completes the dressing with as little pain as possible.

Always he is in touch with the re­serve by telephone. If the casualties are few and slight he and his mate may attend to their conveyance to the dressing-stations at the rear, but usually a fatigue party is sent for­ward for that purpose. It is seldom that the communication trenches per­mit the transport of the wounded even on the backs of the bearers. In exceptional cases, however, the wounded are carried “out over” when darkness comes. In the dug-outs or beneath the firing-platform (the rais­ed platform beneath the parapet on which the soldiers stand to fire) they lie through the weary hours of day­light, dependent entirely upon the skill and attention of the stretcher-bearer.

In some battalions there are stand­ing orders that the stretcher-bearers must not go over the parapets save in the wake of an attack. The wound­ed must be brought in to them by their companions. But with or with­out orders the stretcher-bearer is everywhere with the wounded, even to the desperate chance of No Man’s Land, where no sane person ventures unwounded in daylight.

It is these bearers of comfort who bring in the stories of real grit. P. No. 13789, a stretcher-bearer of the 5th Battalion, tells of unflinching heroes who took their wounds almost as a matter of course. One, of the 7th, his right hand gone, the left shat­tered, lower jaw almost shot away, thirty wounds in his chest and as many in his legs, and two in his abdo­men, wrote his name for them on a parados of the trench. Nothing could be done to deaden his pain, for the condition of his jaw prevented his taking a pill, and the stretcher-bear­ers had lost their hypodermic. But all through the dressings he never winced. His two wrists he held up for the bandages, and as occasion re­quired he shifted his body in order to assist the work.

“Did he get over it?” I asked.

“Pooh!” replied P. “You couldn’t kill a fellow like that. He just would not give in.”

When heavy “strafing” is on, every wounded man who is able to walk must find his own way back to the dressing-stations. Only the incapaci­tated are carried out. And the man­ner in which they respond to the ap­peal to shift for themselves in order that their less fortunate fellows may be attended to is a record of self-sacri­fice and grim grit.

One day when the Germans let loose there was in one trench a casualty list of three hundred and sixty-five. It was impossible even to dress the slighter wounds, and everyone who could had to shift for himself. Of one who had been wounded from foot to chin every stitch of clothing had to be cut, and when they were finished with him the wounded man was swathed like a mummy. It was a ter­rible moment, with the trench blocked with casualties and an attack impend­ing. The call was given for every wounded soldier who could to make his way back through the communica­tion trenches. One of the first to stag­ger to his feet was the mummy, a stiff twist on his face, but grit to the last inch of him.

“I should worry,” he smiled, took three steps, and dropped dead.

Under excitement men tramp back to the dressing-stations with bullets in their legs, or crawl back with gap­ing wounds that would, under ordin­ary conditions, render them utterly helpless. Once when P. and his mate were struggling back over the open with a badly-wounded man, a shell whistled over their heads. P. felt the stretcher suddenly lighten behind him, and then a bounding figure sped past him. The wounded man, startled by the shell, had leaped from the stretcher as a method of progress too slow for the occasion. The last they saw of him he was still racing at top speed. They never learned what be­came of him.

On another occasion a shell burst in a room adjoining a dressing-station full of stretcher patients. Half the wounded got up and bolted. It was not that they had been “swinging the lead”, as the soldiers speak of decep­tion, but that a form of hysteria had put into them unnatural strength.

It is only in special cases that the open is risked for the conveyance of the wounded by daylight. The wounds may be of such a nature as to demand immediate attention beyond the skill of the stretcher-bearer, or one of those strange moments of insane bravado may drive hearer and patient to take the chance. Once a shell claimed two victims in P.’s trench, one with a had gash in his back, the other with wounds they could not fathom and severe nervous shock. It was a case of risking the open or depriving both men of every chance they had. The sergeant looked at P., and P. looked back.

“We’ll run ’em out over.” said P., whose leave was to start the next day.

“All right,” replied the sergeant. “If you’re game I am.”

It was put up to the wounded men.

“If you can keep still.” they told the shell-shock victim, “we’ll take you first,” The poor fellow realized his condition, but doubted his ability to hold himself under the heavy shelling. After a time he promised to try. But in the midst of the passage, with shells shrieking about them, he could not control himself. Twice he threw him­self from the stretcher. Twice they had to stop and force him back.

“If you don’t keep still,” they warn­ed him, “we’ll all be pushing the daisies.” But at the next shell his nerves gave way again. Forced to take heroic measures that might seem cruel to the uninitiated, but are some­times necessary for the safety of the sufferer, they finally reached the dress­ing-station.

Back in the trenches the other wait­ed. He could not stand to be touched, and they placed the stretcher beside him that he might shift himself onto it. But he could not lie down. All the way through that danger zone they trudged back to the dressing-station, the wounded man resting against P.’s back, a cigarette puffing furiously. And not a shell fell near them. To-day that man is back in the trenches getting even with the Hun with double fury.

At the moment of writing P. is in a convalescent home recovering from shell-shock and slight wounds, the re­sult of being buried by a shell, with many of his patients, fifteen feet be­neath the surface.

Sergeant W., of the 13th, has been buried six times, four within twenty-four hours during the big Canadian battle at Hooge in early June. And yet he has returned to the trenches apparently as fit as ever. He was through the terrible crater fighting before Ypres, and every minute of his work for the relief of his wounded companions was under heavy shelling.

While lying in one of the craters re­cently recovered, dressing the wound­ed, the Germans blew up the com­munication trench back to the line. In an adjoining crater a soldier lay groaning with a shattered leg. Ser­geant W. crawled over, dressed the wound, and with a companion carried the man through the open back to the protection of the trenches. Not a German fired on them. In this con­nection it is only fair to say that the stretcher-bearers, as a rule, speak well of the Germans. There have been glaring exceptions, but there is not the deliberate sniping of Red Cross workers we are sometimes led to be­lieve. With but one exception the stretcher-bearers to whom I have talk­ed have expressed their conviction that any seeming inhumanity in this respect has been under the stress of excitement. It must not, too, be taken for granted that even the Canadians are completely blameless. In the strain of action a soldier is scarcely accountable for every bullet he fires.

There are, of course, well authenti­cated instances of German brutality and callous disregard of the ordinary demands of humanity. I have been told of one instance when an ambul­ance rushed right across the rear of the front lines in broad daylight, tak­ing on its load of suffering, without a single shot being fired at it. An­other time an ambulance had just started back with its burden of wounded, during a lull in the fight­ing, when the Germans commenced shelling again, obviously of intention, with the ambulance as the mark. Two of the wounded were killed, together with the horses. The rest were hastily unloaded back into the trenches.

The seriousness of Sergeant W.’s work did not prevent his seeing some of the lighter incidents of warfare as coming within the range of the stret­cher-bearers. One of his friends had always insisted that, should he be wounded, he would bolt. One day a whizz-bang came over the parapet, in­to the parados, and a few small frag­ments slightly wounded him about the head. Instantly he put his hands to his head, shouted the familiar “stretcher-bearers, on the double,” and dashed off down the trench. Be­hind him chased a stretcher-bearer, a Scotsman, pleading in expressive Scots for him to stop, clinging grimly to a pipe and scattering bandages all along the way. W. could follow the course of the chase by the shouts of laughter that came back to him from all along the trench. Right to the section held by the British the fleeing soldier continued, but there he was stopped. Fifteen minutes later Sandy came triumphantly back, leading the bandaged soldier as if he were a Ger­man prisoner. He was taking no more chances on that special variety of re­lief work.

One of Sergeant W.’s experiences was to have a water-bottle shot from his shoulder. With the recklessness that so often comes to the soldier he was returning overland to the trenches through a fog, a bottle of water bal­anced on his shoulder. Suddenly the sun came out. W. felt a slight jar and heard a crash, and then the water flooded over him. There are cases of rum jars having suffered in the same way, but the lament was always louder.

#

Back of the stretcher-bearers come the ambulance men. At the dressing-stations, and from there back to the hospitals, they complete the work be­gun by their fellows in the front trenches. Their place is not so dan­gerous, their work not so arduous in some ways, but they are in closer touch with the more skilled part of the treatment of the wounded. Some­times, on ambulance duty, they are exposed to shelling, and not infre­quently the dressing-stations are un­der fire.

In the hospitals another body of men continue the care of the wounded. It is with no lack of appreciation of their necessity that the soldier thinks of the R.A.M.C. as the Rob All My Comrades branch. From dressing-station to the hospitals in England the wounded soldier has little chance to pull through with the smallest of the trophies and souvenirs he has so zealously collected in France.

But the hospital workers are not charged with neglect of duty, however free many of them may be with the common pelf of war. His life of grind is lightened with few bright spots, free many of them may be with the Queen’s Base Hospital, has been cut short by a physical breakdown from which he is slowly recovering, has seen the active service of the hospital unit in Egypt and France. Formerly an efficient attendant at the Asylum in Kingston, he enlisted with the supply force sent out to the Queen’s unit. In Egypt he faced flies and heat and dis­ease. With others he contracted dysentry, was brought to France when the unit was moved to that section of the front, and was given every possible attention in an effort to procure his intelligent service as soon as possible again. Not recovering so fast as they wished, he was shipped to England for the added care possible there. Now he is fighting his way back to health through a nervous collapse. When you feel cold water running off your chest hour after hour it is time to rest up against the strange delusions of war.

#

B., a well-known Toronto jockey and polo pony trainer, a member of the 58th, enlisted in September, 1915, as one of the comparatively few whose sympathies went out to the suffering horse. A horse to him was more than a dumb, unfeeling creature. Unfor­tunately he was one of the many who suffered from the red tape and dis­organization that is only too evident in some war departments.

He was kept in Shorncliffe for months, not training, but doing odd jobs and acting as batsman to an of­ficer. Reaching France at last, he be­came ill of pneumonia and rheuma­tism, and finally reached the hospitals. With the approach of the time when cavalry might again be called into service, he was sent, upon recovery, back to France, where such men as he will be needed.

The development of official recog­nition of the horse as a combatant factor of war, with all the care of a special branch of the service, is a re­sult of this war, as are a score of other details never before suspected.

The next article of this series will describe the work of the bombers and snipers.

With The Cod Fishermen

With The Cod Fishermen

By Lacey Amy

From The Canadian Magazine, May 1915. Digitized by Doug Frizzle, Dec. 2015.

COD fishing is not what it used to be. The fishermen themselves will tell you that. The fish are not so plentiful, the grounds are more distant from the old convenient harbours, and there are other openings for the energy of the fishermen offering brighter lure. The result is a more or less discontented worker who is either actively looking for another occupation or lacks the ambition. Around Newfoundland and Labrador the uncertainty of the “run” is annually driving hundreds from the calling, and frequently (as this year) leaves hundreds more a charge to the Government. At the Magdalen Islands it has advanced little further than grumbling, for the fisherman knows that to change his occupation he must change his home, and that is the last resort. But along the south coast of Nova Scotia there is a different kind of fisherman, one who has kept pace with the times. Cod fishing there is an industry developed like transportation and surgery and peace organizations and the other outgrowths of later-day leisure and wealth.

And the fisherman himself is changing, especially where he has advanced his methods. That is the altered condition which appeals most to the nonfisherman. But it is still a special train of thought that runs in the cod fisherman’s mind; a unique style of life is his, a vivid independence, and an uncertain recklessness that cannot be fathomed by the uninitiated. Therefore, to-day or yesterday, he is interesting. A day with him is liberal entertainment.

In the introduction of the motor one finds the most startling evidence of the altered conditions. A deep-sea fisherman without sails would seem like a farmer without horses; and yet four out of five of the fishing-boats in some of the harbours of Nova Scotia use sails only when the engine balks. Half the waste time of cod fishing and most of the danger have been thus eliminated, and grounds formerly far beyond range are now the regular goal of the day. Where the Magdalen Island, the Labrador, and most of the Newfoundland fishermen trust to their deep brown sails to get them in touch with the cod or run them to shelter in a storm, the Nova Scotia fisherman starts a couple of hours later, arrives sooner, and negligently watches the heavens. Instead of starting soon after midnight, as must the Amherst Island fisherman, his Canso brother sleeps comfortably until daylight, and, independent of the wind, casts his trawls exactly when and where he desires. And at night supper awaits him at an hour as definite as the city man’s dinner.

Three hundred dollars of engine and a few gallons of gasoline have made fishing an industry, not a gamble. A few years hence it may be a profession.

But there is one characteristic which sticks to the fisherman—the careless indefiniteness of his morning’s mood. “What a difference in the morning” must have originated with a member of the crew awaiting his skipper on the wharf in the shivering mists of early morning. Patience is the primary requirement of dealings with the independent cod fisherman. He has always come and gone as he liked—save for the elements—and he always will. He has no set hours, no assured returns, no master. To-day a threatening storm forces him to idleness; to-morrow it catches him adrift and sends him home before the day is half over; and all next week a dog-fish raid on his fishing-grounds drives him to another quarter. No wonder he is unsettled!

During several summers amongst them it has been borne home to me that keeping an appointment with them is as tantalizing as the promises of a politician. At the Magdalens, two successive mornings I rose at one o’clock, on specific direction of the skipper, but was doomed to disappointment. Fear of a storm prevented the first day’s fishing, and the previous day’s idleness impelled a start at eleven p.m. for the second day’s work. I gave it up for a night’s sleep.

At Canso I fared worse in the way of waiting, but better in results. It required four almost sleepless nights to effect the reward of a day’s fishing. On Monday a seven o’clock appearance on the wharf, according to instructions the night before, brought the information that the boat had left two hours earlier. Tuesday was featured by a rainstorm only possible beside the ocean. On Wednesday morning by four o’clock I was on the wharf from which they were to pick me, and down the “tiddle” I could see the boat leisurely making ready. But five minutes’ absence for something I had forgotten furnished me with the maddening spectacle of a receding stern chugging out to sea. The next morning I took no chance. I closed my teeth and set the alarm for two a.m., closed my teeth and obeyed its message, closed them again and wandered forth on the deserted moonlit streets and down to the cold, damp wharf where the boat was tied. And I sat down on the edge of that boat for three hours, kicking my heels to keep warm, but a little proud that I had discovered a way of overcoming such an unreliable thing as a cod fisherman’s start for the fishing-grounds.

And those few hours on the deserted wharf in the brilliant moonlight will never be considered as wasted. All about lay the well-finished, trim boats of the Canso fishermen, models of grace and surprising cleanliness and order. In the moonlight the masts rose like a bare forest around me, gleaming here and there where the light struck them, and black elsewhere against the clear sky. Below it was all darkness, with edges of cabins, dories, tubs, ropes, creeping into sight as my eyes became accustomed to the gloom. Further down was the utterly black water.

I was alone. Not a sound came from the sleeping boats, although I knew that each had its sleeper—a hundred of them within sound of my voice. The water was as motionless as only tight-bound water can be—the silence that is the uncomfortable waiting and listening of a thing with life. The utter loneliness of the sleeping life was disturbing to a novice. My day seemed to have no start; everything was at a standstill.

A gloomy yawn was my first company, proceeding from a boat that, before the heartless introduction of its motor, had been the champion of the annual sailing races. Presently a spot of light revealed the outline of a cabin window, and immediately someone stumbled up on deck and sleepily shook himself, stretched, and growled at the cold. Then two or three little oval windows flashed into life, and yawns and growls sprang up all about me. A man clambered up the side of the wharf and stretched himself where there were no spars and ropes to interfere. He gave no sign that he saw the stranger within six feet of him, but proceeded to feel the mooring ropes, and disappeared below. It was not surliness—merely an intimation that I was not a part of his morning duties. Gradually others appeared, each retreating below after the preliminary stretch and careless reading of the sky. From the length of time between the appearance of the cabin light and the man on deck the scant amount of disrobing necessary for a night’s sleep could be accurately estimated.

Then, with every man below, two things happened almost simultaneously in all the boats. From tiny stovepipes protruding above the cabins drifted uncertain whiffs of smoke, and from the cabin entrances poured no uncertain language. If you have ever tried to light a fire in a cabin, beneath the shadow of overhanging wharves and buildings, you will understand the connection. Almost immediately the men began to reappear, thunderously, fluently, giving utterance to a variety of comment that agreed only in its general meaning. They fiddled with the pipe, swore, went below, swore, tumbled up on deck, swore—and swore between times. Those who light the fires of anchored fishing-boats know nothing of the dread effects of example; and I had no desire to enlighten them.

A cup of tea! That is the beginning of the fisherman’s day, and the end—and also the middle. The teapot is on the cabin stove before the boat is ten minutes awake, and it is there humming until the last member of the crew has gone. All day long it sings accepted invitation, and by the afternoon it offers a stimulant unrivalled by anything short of end-of-steel whiskey. I tried it—and it’ll do until I visit the fishermen again.

A member of my crew appeared, with the information that he had whistled beneath my window at the hotel until he was told of my departure, and through the next hour or so the others came straggling down. They did not apologize to each other, nor resent the expressive allusions to the damp disagreeableness of waiting on a wharf before daylight. To-morrow it would probably be their turn to wait and make comment. From all about us motors were chugging away, stopping to get swung into position, and then puffing steadily off into the distance. For hours little motorless boats had been swinging lifelessly along with flapping sails behind ridiculously small rowboats pulled by one man—and for hours more they would still be within sight. The patient seemingly profitless toil of a rower towing a big boat is almost pathetic—if you aren’t in the boat. To the luxurious occupant of a motored vessel it is ludicrous. But I was still on the wharf; I could see things in their proper proportions.

As we pulled out from the wharf in the hazy light of the rising sun, a long line of boats stretched before us right out to sea—big and little in an irregular line, the motor-driven skimming noisily past the sail-driven, and watched by envious eyes, the less powerful engines yielding in their turn to the greater. Right into the sun we aimed, a big globe of red rising from the ocean with the glare of coming beat—out past the Lunenburg “vessels” anchored in mid-harbour, around the lighthouse on the edge of the open. As we passed one helpless sail-boat we suddenly swung about and threw them a line, although it meant an hour’s delay in reaching the fishing-grounds six or eight miles out. The unselfishness of the fisherman is the quality that makes his life most worth living. Where all are so much at the mercy of the elements each strives to help the other.

And then our course began to be more up and down than along. It was not a rough day, they told me, but later they acknowledged that it was the record for that year’s roll. I have never been able to bring myself to the nicety of distinction that unhesitatingly separates roughness and roll. I have heard landlubbers do it as an excuse for seasickness. Sometimes we could see the boat we towed rushing down towards us, and sometimes it was out of sight behind a mountain of water that brought the uncomfortable conviction that only our rope was keeping it from hitting the bottom. I liked to keep that tow in sight, even if it threatened to drop on our deck. . . . And I had twelve hours of this ahead. I began to wonder if I had not rashly overestimated the pleasures of a day’s cod fishing.

In the meantime the crew—those who were not engaged with the towline and the tiller—were preparing for the fishing. We had taken aboard at the wharf a couple of boxes of herring for bait, the cost to be deducted from our day’s catch, and now these were being cut into small pieces. Later the bait was fastened to hooks on short lines attached more than a foot apart on a long, larger line. Net fishing was over, and the cod were being caught on trawls and handlines. The trawls had been carefully wound in tubs the night before, the hooks towards the centre, and baiting was done with a dexterity that looked positively dangerous, and the baited trawls thrown deftly in place in another tub.

We had come up with the fleet. In all directions boats of every size stood out against the dark water and bright sky, some casting hand-lines over the side, some lying idle while their dories pulled off with the trawls. Off on the port side a peculiar, uncanny wave broke and disappeared over one spot, broke and disappeared again. They told me a rock came close to the surface there, a constant menace to navigation. Away back when the French and English were tussling sporadically for Nova Scotia a French frigate struck there and sank; and many a ship since. It stood at one edge of the fishing-grounds, in about twenty-five fathoms of water, and the fishermen pursued their calling all about it.

Out past the fleet we twisted, and, beside the flashing buoy that marked the channel into the Straits of Canso, we dropped our dories. In each a fisherman took his tub of bait, and another of trawl and, standing recklessly in the stern, sculled with one hand while dropping two hundred feet of trawl with the other. And there we left them all day, running alongside only at noon. I tried hard not to picture their day on that sea in those tiny bobbing boats, with no protection from the blistering sun, and nothing to think of but the swell and their sins. I was in comparative comfort on fifty feet of deck that was at least flat and solid to the feel—and it was mighty little just then. One thing—it wasn’t far to the side of the dory.

From the larger boat we tried to supplement the catch with hand-lines, the last resort of the cod fisherman. Only after netting and trawling are past does he rely upon the more laborious, slower method; and when it comes to hand-lines around Canso the end of the season is at hand. Catching cod in this manner is like trying to satisfy thirst from a pump-spout—an unprofitable task performed in the hardest way. About all we caught was blistering salt water and sunburn, and now and then a phlegmatic bit of fish that seemed glad to be at rest. No wonder a fisherman leaves hand-lines to the last, when the children are crying for bon-bons. Casting unsuccessfully all day for trout is hilarious revelry compared to cod fishing with a line.

Between acts the professional members of the crew drank tea. If Chinese commerce were bound up like Germany’s is now there would be a rush of fishermen to enlist and get the war over in a hurry. At noon we ran alongside the dories and received their catch; and I looked after the tiller while the others went below for stimulant. Seated on deck I tried to forget the all-pervading smell of cod. I couldn’t. Why must a fish smell so fishy? And then the dories dropped astern once more to their work.

Occasionally coasting vessels went by, turning around the light buoy into that great path of commerce, the Straits of Canso. A small steamboat cut across our stern headed for Canso, and a couple more passed along between Halifax and Gulf ports, all of them staggering helplessly in the swell. And then, a mile outside, something dark and ominous flashed by, the black smoke streaming furiously out behind so long as it was in sight. Twenty-five miles an hour—nothing less! So fast that a steady wave curled high above the bow, and the stern was out of sight beneath the water. It was a British cruiser going west in chase of reported German boats off the south coast. For war had been declared and the dogs let loose. With regulars and big guns protecting the cable stations in Canso, German cruisers sighted off every corner of the coast, and British cruisers searching them diligently, we felt as if we were the centre of hostilities.

All afternoon fishing boats were leaving the grounds disgusted, some with insufficient catch to pay for the bait, and none with a day’s pay. Our luck was a little better. But at sixty cents to two dollars a hundred pounds cleaned it required a large catch to make the day worth while. But the Canso fisherman does not do so badly. The crew with which I fished had made a thousand dollars in four days the year before, and the skipper had cleared $1,475 for the season. He was not complaining. But he followed the run of cod throughout the season, from Prince Edward Island to the “Western”—in fishing parlance, the western part of the south coast of Nova Scotia.

In at the wharves the boats were moored two and three deep, discharging their catch. The five members of the crew had their work definitely assigned. One pitchforked the cod from the hold to the deck, another passed them to the wharf, a third lifted them to the splitting tables, and the other two performed the expert work of splitting. It was a dirty mess to the novice—fish cleanings, tobacco juice, and odour. The livers and heads were saved, the former bringing forty cents a pail for cod liver oil, and the latter finding a market at the glue factory down the “tiddle. ” Later in the season a dog-fish factory on the outer islands would take even the bane of the fishing-grounds for manufacture into fertilizer. The byproducts of cod fishing are making up to some extent for the decrease in the cod.

His day’s work done usually some time before six, the cod fisherman is again the care-free, light-hearted workman who is satisfied that he has done his best. Be the catch good or bad, there is no sign of it when the day is done. Around the wharves he sits with his fellows, telling yarns of past records, banter running through it all, and the unoathlike oaths of a good-tempered people. For the stranger they have a bright welcome, and a willing information that is seldom unreliable. The future is not a worry to them, and the present bears lightly upon them. But the future is often serious. A man of no more than sixty sat totteringly on an upturned dory, hands twisted pitifully in to his body, head bent forward and down, vainly trying to light his pipe. Tremblingly he inquired what was good for rheumatism; he had no faith in the local doctors. Almost in the prime of his life he had been forced from the water, but each evening he faltered down to the wharves to see the catch come in and to tell of things that were in his day. A small boy took his pipe below and lit it with his own breath, and brought it back and pushed it between the old man’s lips. Next day they told me partial paralysis had come to him in the night, and the poor old fellow lay weeping to get out with the boats again, to feel the dash of the spray in his face, the tilt of the boat before the wind, the drag of the filled net. But his day was done.

The Floating Menace

Good fortune has favoured the search for snappy, unconventional travel sketches. W. Lacey Amy has written "St. John's: the Impossible Possible," "Quidi Vidi: Newfoundland's Show Fishing Village," "The Livoyeres: Labrador's Permanent People". These stories to appear later in our blog/drf

 The Floating Menace

The Icebergs of Labrador

By W. Lacey Amy   photos by the author/drf

From The Canadian Magazine, 1912, April.

This blog post is dedicated to Richard Brown, author of The Voyage of the Iceberg and a scientist at Bedford Institute of Oceanography, who died in 2010.

This story appeared the same month that the Titanic sank!/drf

Naturally we, the ten travellers on the Solway, starting on its thousand-mile run down the coast of Labrador, were watching eagerly for the first sign of icebergs. And when, after rounding Cape St. Francis, one of us caught a gleam of white on the far coast of gigantic Conception Bay he made no delay in informing the remaining nine of his find.

The captain was sitting with us in the stern, trying to answer a few of the questions hurled at him by ten passengers who had heard only of Labrador as a place for exploration or Dr. Grenfell’s administrations; and when the white spot in the distance was pointed out to him his face suddenly became serious.

“Huh!” was all he said at the moment, and that made it all the more serious.

Most of us knew that an iceberg was not a picnic ground, but we had no idea it was so serious as that.

“We’ll have to keep a good way outside of that fellow,” he added, when the silence had become hysterical among the women.

It certainly was disappointing that a tiny spot of white ice six or seven miles distant should be considered such a terrible thing. Personally, I had expected to see towering pinnacles of gleaming white, and this non-scenic thing was not worth mentioning. In fact, I remembered having seen a picture or two of icebergs off St. John’s, Newfoundland, and this did not seem to fit in with them. I looked again at the captain—I had known him merely long enough to be suspicious—but his eyes were as serious as his tone. Fortunately, the mail-clerk was within sight, and around his mouth I recognised the flickerings of an embryo smile. And just then the smile passed broadly into the captain’s face.

“Yes, that’s an iceberg, all right,” he laughed, “a cupful. It’s what we call a growler. About two days from now I’ll be able to show you a real iceberg.”

And he did. We were content to wait, since there was scenery enough along the east coast of Newfoundland to make winter decoration unnecessary. But all the way down to the Straits of Belle Isle growlers showed up here and there, and occasionally farther out at the sea the sun would flash from a real iceberg that had lost much of its size on its travels southward.

In the straits themselves, where the trans-Atlantic passenger on the St. Lawrence route frequently comes within sight of small bergs, there was no trace of ice, except close in on the shore, where stranded chunks were slowly melting in the sun. But once we had passed the Isle, that for which we had been eagerly looking forward began to till the ocean spaces with a persistence that was almost unnecessary for the gratification of our expectations. Stranded off the north side of the island were no fewer than seven of varying sizes, all of them giants to us at that time, but mere refrigerator pieces to our later experiences. All that afternoon, a Sunday, our course was governed to some extent by the icebergs around us, the captain running the steamer as near as he dared, or swerving a little to keep a respectful distance.

Just before sundown, as we were looking forward to our first stop on the coast of Labrador, a long, low, peculiarly straight-topped iceberg that had been within sight for hours was approached closely enough to give us some idea of the size to which these floating menaces attain north of the track of navigation. It was remarkably like in shape to the chunk the iceman leaves at the door for you or the sun, but instead of twenty pounds in size this piece was something like three-quarters of a mile long, a third of that in width, and it towered straight up sixty feet. So far as we could see it was level on top, and the only reliefs to the upright sides were the grooves and grottoes of light shadow where a piece had broken off and left a dent in the surface. All season this berg had remained stranded in the same spot, rapidly diminishing in size by pieces that covered the water for a mile around. In June it had been more than two miles long by a halfmile wide—ice enough in sight in one cake to supply Canada for a few summers.

What its real size must have been could be judged roughly from the accepted theory that but one-eighth of an iceberg appears above the water, and from the fact that it was stranded in the ocean a couple of miles from the shore, where the depth had never been fathomed. In its regular course the steamer ran more than a mile inside, but for the benefit of my camera the captain veered towards it as far as he considered safe. On our return trip, more than a week later, we could see through the moonlight that it had broken into three huge bergs, all still stranded.

Frequently the harbour near which it lay—Battle Harbour—has been closed for weeks at a time by icebergs which come up from the north and run aground on the ocean bottom. And the dozens of little bights and tickles along the Labrador coast are constantly menaced by a similar disregard for the rules of navigation. At one calling place we found that a growler had wandered in during the night and the fishermen were then working to release a fishing schooner that was within when the chilly visitor arrived. By good luck it had stranded to one side of the channel, and they had hopes of being able to work their way out. The one relief in an event of this kind is that the iceberg that can approach a harbour so closely before stranding is of such comparatively small size that the sun will complete its destruction before many weeks.

There is nothing in man’s world so imposing or so grand as an iceberg, and the Almighty has yet to create that which gives a more overpowering sense of relentless power, of greatness, and of brilliance and grandeur. I saw icebergs—hundreds of them—under all conditions—in the bright sun and under the dark clouds of a threatening storm, in the moon’s cold rays and dimly through the shadow of night—but every one of them, from the small growler of mimic shape to the flashing towers of the huge berg floating undisturbedly to its southern death, roused first of all an awe that did not lessen one degree with the growing appreciation of the beauty of the thing. Always before one is the thought that seven or eight times as much as that which is in sight lies beneath the blue-green water, extending down and down to unknown depths and out and out until the captains of the steamers breath freely only when they are miles away. Miles inside of where some of them strike the bottom the largest vessels afloat could pass at full speed without a thought of shoals. In the wildest seas and strongest winds they sail undisturbed on their course; there could be no sea-sickness on an iceberg for its roots are fathoms below the wave disturbance.

The largest steamship would smash itself to pieces in a collision as surely as if it struck the rocky shore, and the iceberg might sail on and on without a tremor. But, again, that huge cliff of seemingly solid ice might be as delicately balanced to unusual disturbance as a watch spring. The whistle of a steamer sometimes breaks off chunks of ice that would bury the vessel without a falter. Sometimes a boat is forced to take the chance of a passage between a berg and an island. At such times the captain may be aware of the condition of the ice and rush through at full speed. And the motion of the propellor through the water will tear apart pieces that may rattle down on the boat as it passes, but the large breaks will come more slowly, and by that time the passage is made. It is dangerous work and seldom demanded.

In the bright sunlight there is a colour-play about an iceberg that defies description and the camera. The chunk of ice to which we are accustomed is lifeless, or at best a blue-white; but around an iceberg gleaming in the sun is an aureola of green and blue and white, gold and silver, light and shadow. Streaks of all these run up and down and across, according to the slant of the sun and the hardness of the layer in view. In the direct sunlight the glare is unbearable, but down below may be a depth of shadow that makes it hard to believe in its natural colour. And every tone and colour is as cold as steel. Under the brilliant moon that lights Labrador the iceberg gleams and glitters, magnificent, but fearsome. A dark night is the terror of navigation, and the captain who would move in the open ocean off the coast of Labrador at such a time is inviting destruction.

The shapes assumed by the icebergs form as interesting a study as the colours. Very seldom do they take on the regular form of the one near Battle Harbour; that was something of a freak in icebergdom. Sometimes they project from the water in one broad angle, and occasionally their tops are quite rounded; but for the most part they rise in peaks and corners, irregular and jagged. Many resemble nothing more than steepled churches, while the whole animal kingdom can be made out of others. One big fellow we passed was like a lion. Its rounded head rose eighty or ninety feet from the water. Underneath a part of it a channel had been worn through large enough for a steamer; it appeared to be standing on the water. At one point another had stranded close against the shore cliffs, throwing up a peak that towered far above the lofty rocks of the coast. It looked like some animal looking over into the interior.

The rivers that rush down from many of them make a very pretty sight. Up there, it is thought the sun melts the ice into a lake, and as this eats its way to the edge it falls over into the ocean in a cascade that varies from a rainbow spray to a small river, breaking in abruptly on the green and blue of the coloured sides.

But the grandest sight of all is the iceberg breaking and turning as the balance is disturbed. Sometimes a mighty piece will break away, and the berg will lose its balance. As it sinks to the opposite side a piece there will become detached, and the berg will swing back. This may continue until there are a half-dozen bergs where there had been but one. Frequently the falling away of a pieee will turn the entire berg over. With its balance gone, that which was above water will sink and be replaced by that which was scores of feet below. At such times there is danger to the boat that is within sight, for apart from the rising of the ice that has been beneath the water perhaps hundreds of feet distant, there is a wave sent up that would swamp a liner if it were too close.

It is told that on a steamer running down the coast of Newfoundland a party of American tourists importuned so hard of the captain to run close to an iceberg that he consented. against his better judgment. When not far away the revolving of the propellors, or fate, broke the berg into several pieces. Instantly the part below the water commenced to rise, and from unseen depths it gradually raised the steamer. One of the tourists turned to the captain with the query:

“What will we do now, captain?”

“Get down on your knees and say your prayers,” was the answer.

But the wave that had been raised by the falling pieces swept down on the boat and slid it into the water, thereby saving the vessel and all aboard.

I was fortunate enough to witness the falling to pieces of one of the largest of the bergs we had seen on our trip. On the way down the coast we had passed a monster in the night, but returning the captain warned me to be on deck in a few minutes as we were approaching a part of the coast where a great iceberg had been stranded all summer. With camera prepared, I was standing on the bridge anxious to see this berg, which even the captain considered worth special attention. Far in front it towered, white against the dark cliffs, tall and stately, poking up a pinnacle higher than the tallest cliff. We had approached to within a mile of it when suddenly the top appeared to shift. I thought it was something wrong with my eyes, until a new peak came into view, and then I held my breath while the captain and I looked on in silence. With apparent slowness the entire top slid down and disappeared into the water in a mighty commotion. A wave splashed above the highest peak, sixty feet or more, and with its fall the berg split into many pieces. For a few seconds there was nothing above the water but the tumbling waves. Then gradually a new shape rose and poked its head out for thirty feet, and seconds afterwards the parts that had broken off reappeared on the surface, after a downward flight into unfathomed waters. When we reached the remnants there were four or five bergs, and all around the water was white with broken fragments that rubbed and grated against the steamer’s side as we passed slowly through. I had seen that which few travellers, even to Labrador, are favoured with.

The mail steamer of the Reid-Newfoundland Company has never met with an accident from an iceberg; one learns to trust Captain Parsons with the utmost faith. There is no fear that he will take chances. For forty-five years he has sailed the coast of Labrador, thirty of them in charge of the mail boat. But in his sailor days he had his experiences. At one time the boat on which he served crashed into an iceberg and crushed in its bows above water. At another time he was thrown from his bunk by the boat glancing from one of the dangers on a moonlight night. Fishing schooners, during the spring trip to Labrador, not infrequently are lost, and sorrowing friends know that somewhere at the bottom of the ocean lies a crushed boat that had no chance with the relentless iceberg.

In the spring these bergs sometimes reach as far south as St. John’s, Newfoundland, in enormous size, and at times the narrow entrance to that harbour has been blocked for weeks. Not long ago two small boys had rowed out in a boat to see a berg at close range. The berg selected that time to break in two. The wave sent up by the splash and the rolling over of the berg rushed into the harbour and broke many boats from their moorings. After the commotion had subsided a search was made for the boys, but without result. Next day a fisherman outside the Narrows heard voices calling and located them far up the side of Signal Point, the cliff guarding the entrance to the harbour. It was necessary to lower a man from the top of the cliff by a rope, and there he found boys and boat resting on a ledge far above the water, having been miraculously thrown there by the tremendous wave. It is part of the story that their mothers did not thrash them for running away.

The icebergs make up, perhaps, the most interesting sight of the Labrador trip. They are unfriendly, to be sure, but their magnificence of colour and size and shape, their stately, unyielding journey southward, gradually breaking up in the sun’s rays and strewing the sea for miles around with growlers and fragments, are much too worthy of sight to allow one to yield to whatever dangers they may threaten. A field of icebergs in the daylight brings little peril to the Labrador tourist in midsummer, and the play of sun and shadow on pinnacle and hollow is something unimitated and unequalled by any other sight in the world.