Labrador has an Arctic climate in winter.  The extreme cold of the country is caused by the Arctic current washing its shores.  All winter the ocean is frozen as far as one can see.  In June, when the ice breaks away, the great Newfoundland fishing fleet of little schooners sails north to remain until the end of September catching cod, for here are the finest cod fishing grounds in the world.

In 1892 there were nearly twenty-five thousand Newfoundlanders on this fleet.  Doctor Grenfell’s mission was to aid and assist these deep sea fishermen.  In those days there was no doctor with the fleet and none on the whole coast, and any one taken seriously ill or badly injured usually died for lack of medical or surgical care.  Of course, Grenfell was also to help the people who lived on the coast, that is, the native inhabitants, who needed him.  This service he was giving free.

At this season there is more fog than sunshine in those northern latitudes.  It settles in a dense pall over the sea, adding to the dangers of navigation.  Now the fog was so thick that they could scarcely see the length of the vessel.  On the fourth day out the fog lifted for a brief time, and Cape Bauld the northeasterly point of Newfoundland Island, showed his grim old head, as if to bid them goodbye and to wish them good luck “down on The Labrador.”  Then they were again swallowed by the fog and plunged into the rough seas where the Straits of Belle Isle meet the wide ocean.

No more land was seen, as they ploughed northward through the fog, until August 4th.  This was a Thursday.  Like the lifting of a curtain on a stage the fog, all at once, melted away, to reveal a scene of marvellous though rugged beauty.  As though touched by a hand of magic, the atmosphere, for so many days dank and thick, suddenly became brilliantly clear and transparent, and the sun shone bright and warm.

Off the port bow lay The Labrador, the great silent peninsula of the north.  Doctor Grenfell turned to it with a thrill.  Here was the land he had come so far to see!  Here he would find the people to whom he was to devote his life work!

There before him lay her scattered islands, her grim and rocky headlands and beetling cliffs, and beyond the islands, rolling away into illimitable blue distances her seared hills and the vast unknown region of her interior, whose mysterious secrets she had kept locked within her heart through all time.  Back there, hidden from the world, were numberless lakes and rivers and mountains that no white man had ever seen.

[Illustration:  “SAILS NORTH TO REMAIN UNTIL THE END OF SUMMER CATCHING COD”]

The sea rose and fell in a lazy swell.  Not far away a school of whales were playing, now and again spouting geysers of water high into the air.  Shoals of caplin[A] gave silver flashes upon the surface of the sea where thousands of the little fish crowded one another to the surface of the water.  Countless birds and sea fowl hovered before the face of the cliffs and above the placid sea.