Clamming in Labrador

"The Boss & the Gang (College Students from U.S. College)"

Repeatedly, I asked Joe Souley, John Patey, and the other fishermen who worked at the time “on the Room” (mission) if there were no clams in the harbor. The bottom at low tide looked just right for long clams, but they always said, “No.” One day I took a bucket and spade and went up to the “top” of the harbor (a mile) and came back with some good-sized one. The mud was full of them. When I showed them to Joe, he blurted, “Skipper, them are no clams, they be Cocks and Hens.” “Don’t you ever eat them?” I asked. “Not if we can help it, all durin’ the Starvation Winter we had nothin’ else, and never ate ‘em since.” Our reasonably meager diet was often increased by clam bisque, clam-pie, and fried clams; soon other Mission folk followed and after a meal at our house, Joe and some other of the harbor folk followed suit—but gingerly. They had had enough.

They didn’t know that many other groups, Indians and settlers, have survived starvation winters by the same means as is attested by the great shell heaps long the coast from Maine to Florida.

Joe Souley was a great person. He could neither read nor write but he knew a lot about life and human nature. He has sailed the seven seas and could describe ports, like Liverpool, that I had seen so accurately that I trusted his description of those I had not seen. And year after when I saw Yokohama, and Fuji, it looked just as Joe said it ought to.

Joe had worked in a copper mine up the coast at Tilt Cove and knew how to use dynamite. He taught me how to blast, but he couldn’t temper drills. They would be too soft and not hold an edge, or too brittle and break. I had watched Andy Jagger in the blacksmith’s shop on the way home from school, blown the bellow fro him, broken his twist drills, and learned many things from him. I remembered that he heated things he wanted to temper to a “cherry-red” and then dipped them in oil. Just what color cherry-red was while in a forge fire memory didn’t say, but trail and error demonstrated that it could be done.

Great boulders stood in the way of our pipe lines and cellars and much blasting was indicated.

(After his first Cottage Hospital was under roof, the Doctor, so he told me, had thought of a cellar and got a miner to blast—the roof was damaged! So we did our blasting first.)

Joe would have me hold the drill, then with a giant sledge he would begin to strike while I turned the drill in the hole. Then brave man, he took his turn holding while I . . . swung the sledge, fortunately for him I never missed—my old grandfather coming to the rescue. (I am a great believer in atavism—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?)

--Jesse Halsey
1912

from "Down North" | c1941

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

from Down North

Reverend Jesse Halsey c1941

 

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 itbefore 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.

from "Down North"

Jesse Halsey on the Labrador "Esquimau" | c1932

I started to tell about the country and I wandered to here.

There are esquimau in Labrador. For two hundred years, the Moravian missionaries have lived among them; they are educated and Christian and support themselves from the fur and the fish, and from the fur the missions also derive their support. Strangely, the Moravians never had a full-fledged doctor on their staff. There are immigrant Indians in the interior, but most of the “Liveyeres” are descendents of English, Welsh, and Scotch fishermen who began to come there in the time of Queen Elizabeth and either stayed of choice or were wrecked on the shore. Many of their descendants show traces of Indian and Esquimau in their features and color. (Anyone who goes through a Labrador springtime with its glistering snow-reflected-sunshine will burn an Indian brick red—and some of us, I think have never quire washed it off or reabsorbed it.)

We brought a boy and girl to the States with us when we came home. They went to school on Long Island and came with us to Cincinnati. The girl studied to be a nurse and the last we heard was head nurse at Dartmouth College infirmary. The boy went back home after high school. Their name was Evans. “Heavens” some of their people said. Their father was our chief herder for the reindeer. Alice, the girl, had come to live with us in St. Anthony. One day, Mrs. Halsey had found her reading Browning—intelligently. It seems their great-grandfather had been wrecked in the Straits of Belle Isle sometime in the early nineteenth century. He was a Welchman [sic], own “home” (boat) and had had an education. He stayed on the shore, married and became, ultimately, the patriarch of a community made up largely of his numerous progeny. He had taught his children the things he knew, imported books, and this girl Alice had been more or less his pet in his old age, and he had given her a fine appreciation of English Literature.

This case is an exception, undoubtedly, but I always found in the night school that we conducted in our cottage that a fair number were quick to catch on and that most of the boys (especially the Esquimau halfbreeds) were born mechanics.

There was Wilson Jacques, for instance. Half Indian, I would guess. Will Hillis (a Cincinnati man) gave me the money to bring Wilson to Pratt Institute. It was my job to get him ready to enter. This was that first short summer that I spent on the shore; myself still a student. Well, after fifteen or sixteen hours of hard work plumbing, when Wilson would work with me and out work me, we started in to pole up math for entrance exams to Pratt. He had had common fractions, in one night he mastered decimals and in six weeks had cleaned up advanced arithmetic and advanced algebra and plane geometry and a little trigonometry (I forget which kind) and about that time my own knowledge was getting pretty thin; I was glad when September 20^th came. That winter he was doing Calculus and what-not at Pratt—but without my help. He had ability.

Again, take my friend, Joe Souley. He couldn’t read or write. But he was one of the wisest men I ever knew. He could quote Solomon and Ben Franklin with equal ease. He knew his Bible—and could stump me. He had sailed the seven seas and could describe Singapore or the Sachel Islands with accuracy (I suppose it was accurate because London and the few placed I knew about tallied with his description). I, a swelled-headed sophisticate with some graduate study, etc. learned a very salutary lesson—that wisdom and knowledge are quite different things, that information, and perspective and human interest and a host of other things, are not necessarily acquired in schools; and that illiteracy is not a synonym for ignorance. That was a salutary lesson for a young preacher, at least.