They catch cod
chiefly, but also, at the mouths of rivers, salmon and trout. All the
fish are salted, and, like the furs caught in winter, bartered to
traders for tea and flour and pork and other necessities of life.
To make the acquaintance of these scattered people, along hundreds of
miles of coast, was a big undertaking. And then, too, there were the
settlements in the north of Newfoundland, among whose people he was to
work. Doctor Grenfell, and his assistants were the only doctors that
any of them could call upon.
And there were the fishermen of the fleet. The twenty-five thousand or
more men, women and children attached to the Newfoundland summer
fisheries on The Labrador formed a temporary summer population.
He could not hope, of course, in the two or three months they were
there, to get on intimate terms with all of them, but he was to meet
as many as he could, and renew and increase both his acquaintances and
his service of the year before. With the _Princess May_ to visit the
sick folk ashore, and the hospital ship _Albert_, which was to serve,
in a manner, as a sea ambulance to take serious cases to the new
hospitals at Indian Harbor and Battle Harbor, Doctor Grenfell felt
that he had made a good start.
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