When two bad seasons come in succession,
starvation looms on the horizon.
Seasons when the ice held in, Skipper Tom could not set his cod trap.
When this happened he was as badly off as any of his neighbors. In a
season when there were no fish to catch, it goes without saying that
his trap brought him no harvest. Fishing and trapping is a gamble at
best, and Skipper Tom, like his neighbors, had to take his chance, and
sometimes lost. If he accumulated anything in the good seasons, he
used his accumulation to assist the needy ones when the bad seasons
came, and, in the end, though he kept out of debt, he could not get
ahead, try as he would.
The seasons of 1904 and 1905 were both poor seasons, and when, in the
fall of 1905, Doctor Grenfell's vessel anchored in Red Bay Harbor he
found that several of the seventeen families had packed their
belongings and were expectantly awaiting his arrival in the hope that
he would take them to some place where they might find better
opportunities. They were destitute and desperate.
There was nowhere to take them where their condition would be better.
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