I have had others refuse to help in really necessary work on Sunday.
One skipper would not get the Strathcona under way in answer to a
wireless appeal to come to a woman in danger of dying from hemorrhage
forty miles distant. When we prepared to start without him, he told me
that he would go, but that it would be at the price of his soul and we
would have to be responsible for that loss. We went all the same.
Our charts, such as they were, were subsequently accepted by the Royal
Geographical Society of England, who generously invited me to lecture
before them. They were later good enough to award me the Murchison
Prize in 1911. Much of the work was really due to Sir William, and as
much of it as I could put on him to the Sabbatarian "Iz."
In connection with the scientific work on the coast I well remember
the eclipse of October, 1905. All along the land it was perfectly
visible. A break in the clouds occurred at exactly the right moment:
one fisherman, to console the astronomers, said that he was very
sorry, but that he supposed it did not much matter, as there would be
another eclipse next week. The scientific explorer, who was devoting
his attention to the effect on the earth's magnetism, spent the time
of the eclipse in a dark cellar. Most wonderful magnetic disturbances
had been occurring almost every night, and the night before the event
a far from ordinary storm had upset his instruments, so that the
effect of the eclipse on the magnetic indicators was scarcely
distinguishable. He had just time after the thing was over to peep out
and see the light returning. He had watched his thermometer and found
that it fell three degrees during totality.
The year 1908 at the mill we had built a new large schooner in honour
of that devoted friend of Labrador, our secretary in Boston, and had
named the vessel for her, the Emma E. White. She fetched Lloyd's full
bounty for an A 1 ship. This was a feather in our caps, since she was
designed and built by one of our own men, who was no "scholard,"
having never learned to read or write. Will Hopkins can take an axe
and a few tools into the green woods in the fall, and sail down the
bay in a new schooner in the spring when the ice goes. To see him
steaming the planking in the open in his own improvised boxes on the
top of six feet of snow made me stand and take off my hat to him. He
is no good at speech-making; he does not own a dress-suit, and he
cannot dance a tango; but he is quite as useful a citizen as some who
can, and his type of education is one which endears him to all. He
gave me the great pleasure of having our friend come sailing into St.
Anthony in the middle of a fine day, seated on the bow of her
namesake, the beautiful and valuable product of his skill, just when
we were all ready on the wharf to "sketch them both off," as our
people call taking a photograph.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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