One day in the late spring of 1907, I was riding to the
University on one of those (then) novel double-decker trams that ran in
Glasgow. (The paper, this very day as I write, shows a picture of two bombed
and gutted
standing inert on the car-track) when I noticed a meager item on an
inside page of an evening paper of how a mission doctor in Labrador had been
carried off shore on an ice flow and had lived to tell the story. That was the
first I ever heard of Grenfell. Two years later, I was on his staff—not as
preacher but as plumber.
It happened like this. He came to Princeton Seminary to
speak for a week at Chapel. Chapel was
a dreary performance held at the end of the afternoon with a handful present
and a cut and dried professorial performance in exegesis as diet. I seldom
went. But hearing that Grenfell was coming that day, I went and took several
other fellows along. The place was filled the second day; and before the week
was out the crowd jammed the largest hall on the University campus.
In one of his
talks he told the story of that ice pan experience (of which I had read on the
Glasgow bus), in another he intimated that students sometimes would “down” with
him in the summer to do odd jobs. I made an appointment at the house of the
professor where he was staying. “Yes,” he took students along to help; “What
was I going to be?” “A preacher!” “No, he didn’t need a preacher, they had too
many on the shore already. “Well,” I ventured, “What do you need?” “A plumber,”
he snapped back, “a plumber for our new hospital.” I signed up, then and there,
knowing that water runs down hill and inheriting from my practical builder-mason-grandfather,
a manual knack for doing things, and knowing how to solder and wipe a joint,
and a few other things, from a Yankee blacksmith who had a shop on the back
street where I used to stop in to blow the bellows and fuss around on the way
home from school.
In May (Divinity
Schools have a short term), I started out for Labrador. It took nearly a month
to get there, for it was a late season and the ice hugged the land so that
schooners and mail boats couldn’t get “down along” shore. When we reached St.
Anthony all set “to plumb” the hospital, I found that the hospital wasn’t even
built. The Chief was like that: ambition always running ahead of any possible
performance on the part of his helpers.
Not only was the
hospital unbuilt, not even a foundation was in, no excavating done either. So
after putting a new window in the log bunk house for light and air (terribly
dull tools they had and my new plumber’s kit didn’t fit the wood working job,
all their tools were dull except the axes; a Newfoundlander can build a ship
with his ax and after I had fussed for half a day with brace and bit (dull in
spite of my file) and key hold saw pecking at the logs, Old Skipper Joe Souley
came along and in ten minutes with his ax cut the hole in the side of the bunk
house where I installed my window.
There being no
one more capable available, I set about excavating for the new hospital cellar.
We struck solid rock. I knew nothing about blasting—except that one did it
before building. (The Doctor having finished his first hospital realizing that
it needed a cellar, undertook to blast one and blew off his roof.) Skipper Joe
(my friend of the ax) had worked in a mine; he knew how to blast! But he didn’t
know how to sharpen drills. Here my Yankee blacksmith came to my aid; (by quasi
proxy). I had watched him and had a dim notion of how it was done and after
considerable experimenting—just the right heat “cherry red” dipped at the right
moment in oil, the drill was just the right temper, not too hard to be brittle
and break under the sledge as it bit its way into the rock and not too soft—not
cutting at all but just further blunting itself.
I would hold the
drill; Joe would strike it with the big sledge, strike with an unerring
accuracy; when my turn came to strike and he to hold, like the brave man he
was, he held the drill while I swung the sledge, fortunately for him I never
missed—my old grandfather coming to the rescue. (I am a great believer in
ativism—or whatever it may be called. Cap’n Harry, my grandfather, was a skilled
mason (he built most of Greenwich Village in New York, over a hundred years
ago.) He once was known to have cut the center out of a millstone to convert it
into a well curb, cut it—on a bet—in thirty minutes. He knew how to swing a
maul; I’m sure he was there fifty years later, for my help. (What’s fifty years
among Yankees?)
When the holes
were drilled we began to blast. It was cold; dynamite will not explode when it
is “frozen.” Joe would build a fire in the forge and put me to blowing the
bellows, with a pail of water on the coals. When it began to boil he would pile
sticks of dynamite cob-house fashion on the pail there to “thaw.” “Let out a
reef, Skipper,” Joe would say. I would accelerate and the sparks would fly all
round the pail and all over the dynamite. “No harm, Skipper, she can’t bust
abroad without the cap.” When the sticks were sufficiently softened, Joe would
cut a length of fuse and fasten on a cap (detonator) to the end of the fuse.
The cap is a hollow tube an inch long made of soft, malleable copper. Joe would
take the thing between his teeth (he had two that met) and craunch the cap on
to the fuse. (When it became my turn (under his tutelage) I used the pliers (as
Dupont suggested). Not so Skipper Joe Souley—“Teeth’s quicker.” Then we would
insert the cap and fuse in a stick of dynamite, put it down in the drilled hole
in the rock on top of one, two, or three other sticks of dynamite and then with
a stick, tamp dirt into top of the hold. Then we’d pile a lot of logs on top
with a few lengths of old anchor chain to (hold her down), light the fuse and
run. At least I would run, Joe was too old, or too fat, or to lazy, or too
proud to run. He would amble along and maybe get behind the forge house before
the blast brought down its concomitant shower of small rocks and gravel.
It took all
summer to build the hospital cellar and frame up the hospital. In the fall, I
came back to Seminary in New York, bringing an esquimoux boy to Pratt Institute
in Brooklyn to learn lathe work and other things that I didn’t know much about.
Theology played second fiddle, I fear, that winter. I got hold of an old friend
who was a master plumber and heating engineer and learned to figure radiation,
etc., etc., ad infinitum (to use theological language). By the next spring I
had collected in Boston a schooner load of radiators, boilers, pipe fittings,
tools, tile, linoleum, and what-not enough to plumb and heat the new hospital
and the old hospital and several other hospitals and mission buildings at
various stations along the shore.
In May (this is
1910), I graduated as a Bachelor of Divinity, was married, and in June set out
for Labrador on a honeymoon.
There we stayed
three summers, two winters. There our two older boys were born. There I would
still be if I had been a doctor instead of a preacher. When the plumbing work
was done, I became business manager for the mission. When the expert accountant,
Price, Waterhouse recommended that the business office be put in St. John’s
Newfoundland, rather than on the field, I lost interest in the business job,
even though they had been interested in me. I had been buying thousands of
dollars worth of supplies of all kinds, running a big schooner on several
voyages back and forth as her skipper and how I ever kept out of jail with my
accounts, I don’t quite know (or off the rocks with the schooner). It always
puzzled me to make up a set of books that would balance and no wonder Price,
Waterhouse wanted an accountant and not a preacher.
--Reverend Jesse Halsey
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