Labrador Odyssey: The Journal and Photographs of Eliot Curwen on the Second Voyage of Wilfred Grenfell, 1893 (review)

The fabled Grenfell mission to the natives and deep-sea fishermen of Newfoundland and Labrador began in 1892 when the British-born and -educated physician Wilfred Grenfell spent three months exploring the coast, surveying the population, providing care, and contemplating the region’s need for medical missionaries. An evangelical Christian, Grenfell was sent as an agent of a new London charity, the nondenominational Mission to the Deep-Sea Fishermen (MDSF) supported by his teacher, the surgeon Frederick Treves (of appendectomy and “Elephant Man” fame). The following year, hospitals were established at Indian Harbour and Battle Harbour, Labrador. Other sites were developed, including Grenfell’s headquarters at St. Anthony on the great Northern Peninsula of Newfoundland, where a descendant institution bearing his name still operates. Grenfell soon broke with his funding agency to found his own mission, which became a worthy charity for Britons and Canadians. By the testimony of his writings and that of others, Grenfell was a hero; more recently, however, the motives, accomplishments, and legacy of Grenfell and like-minded evangelists have been revisited by novelists, filmmakers, and scholars of whom Rompkey is one.

The present volume is a handsome transcription of the diary of Dr. Eliot Curwen, who spent from May to late November 1893 in Newfoundland and Labrador during Grenfell’s second voyage. With nurses, Curwen was to help establish the new hospitals and provide both religious support and medical care from a roving base on board ship. His diary was sent home in installments to his family; together with his notebook and photographs, it has been carefully preserved by his descendants.

Curwen’s prose is disarming for its wonder and frustration: excited sightings of icebergs; amazement at the weather; satisfaction with well-attended prayer meetings; bewilderment at the reticent Newfoundland character; anxiety over the long journeys to the inland sick; happy encounters with the other Europeans and the natives who lived along the coast; and his constant refrain about the potential “to do much good.” The statistics tend to suggest that the mission was more successful in its religious endeavors than its medical: large numbers at church services contrast with the smaller numbers of patients, which rarely exceeded two hundred in a month.

Rompkey’s introduction and reference notes are concise and useful. The work is illustrated with Curwen’s remarkable photographs of the very people and dwellings described in his diary, and it is amplified by transcriptions of contemporaneous letters and reports by Grenfell and his associates to Treves and MDSF officials. Grenfell’s reports refer to medicine almost as a backdrop to his swashbuckling accounts of fishing, hunting, and navigation, while Curwen’s occasional remarks about the unreasonable drive of the energetic leader seem to support the revisionist school of thought. But, as the diary makes quite clear, caring for the inhabitants was exhausting and time-consuming. They may not have suffered from life-threatening diseases, but rather from grinding poverty, limited resources, and the brutal climate, which brought the devastations of isolation, exposure, starvation, suicide, and infanticide. These real problems provide a powerful explanation for the fund-raising zeal of Grenfell and the MDSF to improve life in Labrador.

Rompkey has brought a fascinating primary source to serve historians of Newfoundland, of medicine, and of evangelical movements—be they medical or religious.