Page:Adrift on an Ice-Pan (1909).djvu/29

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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

help, by cruising among the fleets on the fishing-grounds, and the organization of the Deep Sea Mission; when this work was done, “when the fight had gone out of it,” Dr. Grenfell looked for another field, for yet another need, and found it on that barren and inhospitable coast the Labrador, whose only harvest field is the sea.

Six hundred miles of almost barren rock with outlying uncharted ledges, worn smooth by ice, else still more vessels would have been found wreckage there; a scant, constant population of hardy fishermen and their families, pious and God-fearing, most of them, but largely at the mercy of the local traders, who took their pay in fish for the bare necessities of living, with a large account

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