CHAPTER XIV.

THE SETTLERS OR LIVEYERES.

It seems hardly reasonable to write of the Labrador and to omit, as others have done, almost all mention of the white settlers, or _liveyeres_. Of those who dwell in the southerly portion of the peninsula I know very little, but I have come into contact with many whose homes lie beyond Hopedale, having lived in their houses, where I met with warm hospitality and kindness.

I do not think, whether north or south, that the settler is a very enterprising person. Upon the interior of the country he has set no mark, and almost all his energies are, perhaps naturally and rightly, directed towards providing in one week for the sustenance of the next. For all north of Hamilton Inlet this means the predatory life. The liveyere kills that he and his may live. Each year he slays his thousands and tens of thousands of fish, fur and seal. No crops grow upon his land, his only harvest is the harvest of the sea and of the wild. To him most of the arts of peace are a dead letter, he is the Spirit incarnate of utilitarian Destruction. As far as gaining his livelihood is concerned he follows the line of the Eskimo and Indian.

In the south the settlers are numerous, though many are poor, in hard times desperately so, clinging, in fact, upon the rim of starvation. Further north the six Moravian stations give them a base to fall back upon in seasons of sickness, or when, as may easily happen, resources run short. But in the south the poor liveyere faces a harsh prospect, and when it chances that the bread-winner dies, killed by some accident as often as not, or becomes maimed, the family, being, in a great many cases, entirely lacking in education, sink into thriftless and abject poverty. But to the credit of the Labrador be it spoken, that their claims upon their neighbours rarely lack response. To give an instance of which I am personally cognisant. The head of a poor family died in the south, and his sons and daughters sank deeper into wretchedness, not altogether because of laziness but partly because they had no knowledge of regular work, nor of how to procure by the most ordinary efforts that minimum of provision and comfort which in those parts represents the means of life.

A well-to-do settler from the north, seeing the straits of such a household, numbering some ten in all, took compassion upon these poor folk and carried off a son to act as his help; by degrees, under his fostering care, one followed another until the whole family were placed in favourable conditions, where they were taught work as well as the amenities of life, and even the old mother finally found her _métier_ in becoming the wife of a yet older settler! The family are, I believe, all now doing well.

It is true that all in that Arctic region are bound together in an offensive and defensive alliance against Nature, the antagonist that knows no pity and strikes each advantage blindly home. Life could be enormously softened by artificial aids, but few such are to be obtained in a country where the inhabitants are too poor and frequently too ignorant to push any claims for preferential treatment in the way of increased facilities for communication and so forth upon the wealthier Governments nearest at hand. More steamers now ply to the Labrador in the season of open water, but during winter even the south is cut off from the outer world for months at a time, except for a mail or two by dog-sledge. The four or five Marconi stations, also in the south, work only while the fishing fleets are on the coast; after that silence settles down with the snowfall. It is therefore little wonder that the population of the Labrador is not increasing. Yet the requirements of ordinary life are being multiplied everywhere, for the wave that is raised at the centres of civilisation spreads inevitably and dies in a ripple, though perhaps a very slight ripple, on the frontiers of the inhabited world.

But at present exceedingly few dollars find their way to the Labrador, and the struggle for existence is both bitter and long enduring. Indeed, description scarcely seems to touch the realities of occasional episodes in man’s war with Nature in these latitudes, but description may be bettered by the life history of a liveyere written round an assumed name.

Bill Bayman lives in a log house at the head of a fiord-like inlet. His dwelling, which is too raw and ill-shaped to be picturesque, squats on a long tongue of land. To the east of him lies salt water; to the west a river tumbles over its stony bed beside his very door. Bill is thirty-two years of age. When he was twenty he married a half-breed girl—white father, Eskimo mother. Here is the story of his marriage.

[Illustration: By _Komatik_ on land.]

[Illustration: By _Komatik_ over the sea-ice.]

One day Bill was walking through the woods behind his father’s house, when, rounding a clump of spruce, he came suddenly upon a black fox. By good fortune he happened to be hunting “partridges” (the local term for spruce and willow grouse) and had therefore with him his old sealing-gun, loaded with No. 4 shot. Surprised at the sudden apparition of a man, the fox stood for a startled second, and Bill “gave the gun to he.” The fox leaped into the air and fell quite dead. Bill rushed upon it, wild with excitement, and examined the skin. A glance told him that it was one of the prizes of the woods that had fallen to his lot. The pelt was a fine one and the charge of shot had not damaged it much; there was no tear in it as would, of course, have been the case had Bill been using a heavy rifle ball.

The young man drew his knife and carefully skinned the fox and carried off the pelt to his father’s house, and a week later sold it for $150. Of this sum he owed $65 for traps and $30 more went in part payment of his father’s debt for a gill-net bought the previous year. He therefore found himself in possession of $55, not in cash but in credit on the trader’s books. Bill was now face to face with his future.

Two alternative courses presented themselves. On the one hand a further purchase of traps; on the other hand, the alternative took the form of Susan Merrigill, Old Man Merrigill’s daughter. Naturally it was Susan, a brown-faced, almond-eyed person, that prevailed. Four days later the couple were married, and the first months of the married state were passed in Father Bayman’s house, while Bill was building his shanty at the bay head. As soon as it was ready, they moved in.

Now skip twelve years and look again at the position of Mr. and Mrs. W. Bayman. Nine children have been born under the poor roof, that is none the stronger for the winters that have beaten upon it. Six of the children survive. The eldest is eleven. He can cut wood, catch fish and generally earn his share of flour and molasses by helping his father. It happens that Bill is one of the few liveyeres who do not go to the cod-fishing in the summer; instead he catches salmon and trout from the stream that flows past his threshold. These he smokes and sells. Susan, his wife, adds to the family resources by making boots from the skins of seals which Bill shoots in the bay. These boots are worth $1.50 a pair, and they may be said to form, to a certain extent, the currency of the Labrador coast. I can myself answer for their excellence, having worn them season after season when hunting in Newfoundland and elsewhere.

During the cold months, Bill lays a round of traps which he visits at fairly regular intervals, and this pretty well sums up his whole means of making a livelihood. It can well be imagined that with so many mouths to feed, Bill has not been able to lay by for bad seasons. As a matter of fact for all those twelve years, he, his wife and children have been too often near to actual starvation. Four times after a bad season only the trader’s advances, Dr. Grenfell’s aid and the efforts of the Moravian missionaries have kept life in the little hut by the river mouth. Bill is in debt to the trader some hundreds of dollars; he is rather apt to forget that the trader has been his friend in other evil times, and the old hope of his early married days—that he would light upon a second small fortune like that of the black fox skin—has been turned sour, partly because he has so long waited for it, but more so because of the knowledge that should a thing occur, not he but the store at which he trades will reap the benefit.

Once indeed in the period of years, his star appeared to rise again, for after the birth of his second child he cleared $400 by fur. On the strength of this windfall he bought, in partnership with his brother, nets for use in the sea. Hardly had the nets been set, however, when a violent storm destroyed and carried them away. Bill returned to his shanty from the open water, a broken man. He makes no fresh efforts, his one fall with fortune has cowed him, the single evidence of his short prosperity which remains is a gramophone, a belonging to which Bill and his wife have clung. Its tinny music beguiles the long winter evenings, and in some intranslatable way preserves to its owner some memory of his few bright days.

And Bill is a good fellow, hard-working, honest and God-fearing, only the gamble that makes up his life has not gone well for him. Indeed, it can seldom issue on the winning side for the Labrador coast-dweller, since Nature always holds the bank.

Now let us take another type with whom things have prospered. Henry Salt is forty years old. His first wife died fifteen years ago, and lies buried under the bluff at Hopedale. She died at mid-winter in child-bed, and it was months later before they could break the frost-bound ground and lay her to rest. In course of time Henry married again—a dour, angular, but thoroughly good woman, to whom much of his prosperity may be traced. Yet life has been hard for Henry too, and the continual struggle has perhaps dulled his memory, but he has never forgotten his eighteen-year-old wife. Henry was once as poor as Bill, but he staked his all on one throw and won. In the spring of what turned out to be a good fishing season, he invested in a bultow, or long line, with over one thousand hooks on it, took in two share-men, and then from July to October he worked savagely, unremittingly. He made good money and re-invested it in husky dogs, in traps, in gill-nets. Every winter he has a wide circle of traps, nearly eighty miles round, which he tries to visit at least once a fortnight. This, thanks to his excellent dog team, he is able to do. In a good year Henry on one occasion made as much as £250, a sum that is riches, indeed, on the Labrador.

Yet for all the toil of the past years, Henry Salt knows that the wolf waits not so very far from his door. He has his good years and his bad years, and the one set against the other give about a level result, but he realises that one unlucky sequence of small disasters would cripple his resources. The best he can hope for when he dies is that his widow and children will have enough left to enable them to carry on the battle of life at not too great a disadvantage.

The settlers, when they fish for cod, are mostly hook-and-line men, and their catches are comparatively small. In a good season, when the fish are plentiful, they can make a living and have a little over for simple luxuries that in most parts of the world would be called the barest necessities of life. Besides the activities I have described there are certain families of settlers, especially in the north, who are celebrated for their good dog-teams, and they make a certain amount each year by hiring them out to the few travellers who desire to move north or south, and for other purposes of communication, such as the carrying of the mails.

[Illustration: Christmas at Nain.]

[Illustration: Settler Boys at Play.]

The population of settlers becomes fewer and fewer as the northern limit is approached. The reasons are obvious, the greater harshness of the climate, the lack of timber, and the remoteness from the world. In the long fiords or bays, as they are called, which intersect the coast, not too far from the Moravian Brethren’s stations, one may here and there find families who spend the greater part of their lives in those lonely surroundings. At the head of such a bay stands a comfortable house, inhabited by an elderly settler, whose sons and daughters have married and have built houses of their own on either side of the bay right down to the sea. During the winter when the Moravian missionary pays his annual visit, he receives the most cordial welcome at these and similar outlying homes.

Most of the liveyeres possess two houses, one for winter residence, and one a summer fishing station, the former occupying a more sheltered position than the latter, which is always close upon the sea. Some prefer to pass the winter in the settlements, but, as I have explained elsewhere, all can have educational advantages for their children by reason of the energy and kindness of the Missions. The influence of the Moravians can be very clearly traced upon the lives of the white people in their neighbourhood; the elders are a superior self-respecting community, and the younger people, well-mannered and intelligent, are only too frequently tempted to go south to fill situations where the pay is better than anything to be found in the north; but this has the unfortunate effect of denuding that part of the coast which most needs educated people of the benefits that their residence there should bestow.

The people living in the lonely outports of Newfoundland have a sufficiently severe winter to undergo, and as communities they live well away on the edge of things. But when they go to the Labrador, it is not uncommon to hear them commiserate the whites who dwell there. “They lives,” said one to me, “in the snow and see nar a person in the year unless he be a deer.”

Some of the Labrador settlers give sex to all the ordinary objects of daily life. “Where’s your rifle?” you say. “I left he along side the camp fire,” is the answer. Or a man will indicate the kettle. “Put he on to boil”; or may be of the wind, he will say, “He’s come away right across from George’s River.” This trick often gives colour to the North-land conversation, and, to the imaginative, to the North-land view of life. But it may be I am generalising from the few individuals with whom I am well acquainted.

Not without pathos are the echoes of our British child-stories; the fairy and the giant take strange shape on the Labrador. The literary taste of the truly wild man trends, of course, towards force and simplicity; the things that touch his sense of the ludicrous nearly always mean disaster or sorrow to the protagonist. On the other side of his nature, he is curiously sentimental and equally curiously callous. I remember once reading Kipling’s poem of “The Truce of the Bear,” to a Newfoundlander, who could neither read nor write, but who was a splendid woodsman and a fellow of strong intelligence. I imagined the poem would appeal to him who had himself killed bears in his time.

“Nearer he tottered and nearer, with paws like hands that pray— From brow to jaw that steel-shod paw, it ripped my face away!

Sudden, silent, and savage, searing as flame the blow— Faceless I fell before his feet, fifty summers ago. I heard him grunt and chuckle—I heard him pass to his den, He left me blind to the darkened years and the little mercy of men.”

and so on to the end. When that came, I waited to hear my primitive critic’s verdict. He was silent. I asked him what he thought of it. He laughed. “The old bear clawed he to rights; didn’t he?” was his remark.

The same man was delighted with a very rough rendering of the story of King Æolus and the winds. “They must have been wunnerful scared when they got their knives to the bull’s hide.” He cried and chuckled over the description for days. To such men the simple and elemental qualities of Homer and Virgil come home every time.

I think in spite of its obvious harshness, the Labrador life does call into action a certain vein of rough imagery if not of actual poetry. “What is it like in the interior?” I asked a settler. “There’s trees and this brook”—we were fishing a river at the time—“he grows little till he finishes himself altogether. Then there’s rocks and a sandy ridge. I s’pose there’s Indians and deer back o’ that, and back o’ that again a man might go on walking ahead till he died o’ old age.” A rough man’s picture, but surely not an unimaginative one.

Again speaking of an aged man, he said, “He is that old, he’s turned white with living in the snow, and he has a wunnerful great beard on him, so big it blows out on each side of he when he faces up wind.”