It looked to me as if we might be told to send out a line of wireless
waves to a patch of seals, bend up the ends of a few dashes and when the
seals had swallowed them the sailors would heave ho and pull them
aboard. But no, catching seals by wireless was not done in quite so
direct a fashion, as you will presently see.
We only made one stop after we left St. Johns and that was at
Cartwright, near the mouth of the Hamilton River, on the bleak coast of
Labrador. And wireless, let me say right here, has been a big factor in
changing life, such as it is, in this wild, forbidding country.
Labrador, you know, is a narrow strip of coastland along the edge of the
province of Quebec. It is from 10 to 50 miles wide, but a thousand miles
long, reaching from Belle Isle Strait which separates the lower end of
it from Newfoundland to Hudson Strait which lies within the Arctic
Circle.
The inhabitants live only on the coast and these are made up chiefly of
Eskimos in the north and Indians in the south, and all along and in
between are trappers, fishermen and _live yeres_. The trappers push into
the interior a little way to run their lines of traps and in the spring
of the year thousands of fishermen come up from Newfoundland to take the
cod-fish, which abound off the coast at this season of the year. If you
ask one of the poor, ignorant white inhabitants about himself he will
say that he _lives yere_, hence the nick-name of this fixed part of the
population. The condition of all these poor, simple folk has been much
improved by wireless.
For many years the mail-boat was the only steamer that made calls at all
the ports along the coast and she did this about every six months. If
any one wanted to get something from St. Johns he had to know it a long
way ahead of time and even when he was thoughtful enough to order it the
chances are that by the time it reached him he had forgotten he had
ordered it or had gotten over wanting it.
On the mail-boat there was a doctor and the inhabitants had to wait to
get sick until he came, or perhaps, it would be stating the case a
little more accurately to say that however ill they might be they had to
wait until he came before they could be treated. Anything might and
often did happen to his patients between calls. But all this has been
changed by wireless which now links up the towns along the coast with
Battle Harbor where the _Royal Deep Sea Mission_ has its hospital for
fishermen, and not only may supplies be ordered but, what is of far
greater importance, the sick may have their diseases diagnosed and
medicine prescribed though they are as far away as Maine, by the doctor
in charge and all in the twinkling of an electric wave.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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