“I learnt many things from the ‘panel’, but mainly that when we look back on a life that we think is over forever, one of the things we will regret is that we missed out on life’s opportunities,” said Dr. Wilfred Thomas Grenfell wrote in 1909, not long after it appeared that he would die a slow and painful death, in agony intensified by the harsh winds that tossed his little ice raft a few kilometres off the coast of Labrador, Canada, pushing him out to sea where certain death awaited him.
But he was not ready to give up without a fight, and it was a picturesque one, as was the life of this missionary who, back home in England, had finished his medical studies, entered Oxford and found himself bored to death. He was interested in medicine, but he was even more interested in a life in which he could help people and experience something that would get his blood pumping.
A keen footballer, tennis player and rower, he was physically too strong to be calmed by books alone, and began to look for something that could combine his profession, adventure and Christian outreach. He found a newly founded organisation, Mission to Deep Sea Fisherman, which provided medical help to fishermen in northern waters.
“When you set out to spread the Gospel to people who don’t want it, there’s only one way – do something they’re sure to understand,” he was advised before he set out on a journey that included spreading God’s Word. At the age of 24, on his first mission, he too quickly realised that just knowing medicine and the Bible would not be enough. He also learned about fishing and trading, and experienced first-hand the life of the garrison.
After a year, he returned home, but he did not last long in England. He soon landed on the inhospitable shores of Newfoundland and Labrador, in northeastern Canada. In those days, it was inhabited by around 25 000 indigenous people, who were struggling to survive with little medical help. Their struggle so shook him that he got the mission made permanent in London and got to work.
He was raising money, building hospitals and orphanages, building schools and getting involved in the local trade when he realised that fishermen were being fleeced. He opened shops and started a few businesses to help people to an easier life, often on his own so he wouldn’t waste time arguing with his betters.
To raise much-needed money for people most English people knew nothing about, he wrote regularly about his work, and on lectures in Canada and America he realised that they were far richer in generous millionaires than England. He got some of them on his side, having already won over the natives of Newfoundland and Labrador, and went on working with full enthusiasm.
Whenever he could, he was at St Anthony’s Hospital, which of course he built himself in Newfoundland, and he was there for Easter 1908 when he was told that his young patient was in danger of dying of gangrene. Surgery was necessary.
He immediately assembled his “team”, or eight extremely strong and resilient dogs, who have saved him from trouble many times before. They were “almost as precious to him as a child is to its mother”. He trusted them completely, but on that day, 21 April 1908, he decided to make their way to the unfortunate boy across the ice that covered the bay, rather than take the longer route along the soggy shore.
Since it was April and they could fall into the sea through a crevasse, he packed some spare clothes, snowshoes, a compass, an axe and a thick outer garment made of waxed canvas, then set off.
Fighting the ice blizzard
He arrived in the village the night before, spent the night and set off across the ice in the morning, despite the strong north-easterly winds that blew during the night. He did not see the fog or the rain, and he knew that the wind had softened the snow and ice, but he decided to walk the first 16 kilometres on ice and the next 50 kilometres on land.
He looked around. There were huge ice floes floating in the sea, and he easily navigated his way through them to an island about 5 kilometres from the mainland. In the second leg, he had to cover a dangerous 6 kilometres, where, among other things, he was threatened by rocks looking out to sea.
He looked at it and concluded that the ice was solid. It was true that the sea had broken it up a bit and the wind had pushed it back together again, but that didn’t seem like a big deal to him. And the first half kilometre was not. He had no problems, but then the wind suddenly picked up.
Dr Grenfell noticed with some discomfort that the ice slab on which he was standing with his dogs and snow sledge was in a kind of ice mush made of crushed ice. It was impossible to walk or swim on it.
He looked around for a more suitable ice slab to break through, but suddenly there was none. A strong wind blew them away. Now he could no longer go forward or back. He was now a prisoner of his own ice sheet, which was so small that it was only a matter of time before it broke up and sank.
“I couldn’t lose a moment,” he later described how he quickly stripped off his waterproofs, threw himself on all fours, clung to his snowmobile and shouted to the dogs to run for the shore. But after only a few metres in the icy shards, they refused to go any further. They froze, frightened, and that was enough for Dr Grenfell and his sledge to start sinking.
His brain flashed back to a memory: that winter, the boy’s father had died in similar circumstances, and now he would have to save his leg. When his dogs panicked in the ice, they wrapped their master in ropes. They all drowned together.
Dr Grenfell hastily pulled out a knife. He searched under the icy water for the harness ropes and cut them before they could kill him. He wrapped the one attached to Juniper, his strongest bitch, around his wrist. He hoped it would give him at least some support and bring him safely to his destination.
But wherever his gaze took him, there was not a single solid sheet of ice to be seen, until about 20 metres ahead he saw what looked like a large lump. He called to Juniper to swim over. She did, and he fought his way into the ice bath after her. He clung to her long tow rope like a life jacket as Brin tired of her harness and, with solid ground beneath her feet, successfully extricated herself from it.
Dr Grenfell was left stranded in the middle of an icy slush. He floated on the surface, dived under it and rose to the surface again. It’s over, he thought. He was not filled with fear, nor with dread of the uncertain, he just wondered if anyone would ever know his fate.
He was growing increasingly sluggish and the eternal darkness was at hand as it clung to the new tow rope. Other dogs swam up to him and he managed to catch one of them, the only problem was that he had to fight with his companions on the way to his destination. They pawed at his shoulders and pushed him under the ice, but he struggled on until he pulled himself to safety.
But the feeling of solid ground underfoot was deceptive. The slab wasn’t even icy, and it was so small that if the dogs and I had stayed on it, we would have all sunk together. Then, a good 20 metres ahead, he saw a new one. It seemed bigger, but how to get to it? There was ice shards all around, promising death.
Is death inevitable?
He pulled a knife from the harness of one of the dogs. When he was cutting the tow ropes underwater, he stuck it in there and now this knife is saving his life again. With it, he started to make a support rope, without which he could not get into the water. “If we had got there, we would have postponed, at least for a while, the death that already seemed imminent,” he later recalled what motivated him to push Brin into the water with the idea of breaking through to the ice.
But Brin, with a lifeline attached to her back, immediately returned to safety. He pushed her into the ice bath once more and once more she refused to go anywhere. I’m lost, Dr Grenfell thought again, until a bright flash dispelled the dark thoughts: ‘Jack!
He also had his bearer with him as a mascot, but in his nunnery he turned to him. He explained what he expected from him, then threw a ball towards the ice sheet. Jack understood him. Without hesitation, he jumped into the water, waded to the ice floe and lay down there on command. When the other dogs saw that he was safe, they went into the slush.
Dr Grenfell soon found himself in it too. He lost his waterproof coat, hat, gloves and other outer clothing early in his fight for survival. Now he was left with thigh-high loafers. He took them off and tied them to the backs of the dogs, pushed off as far as he could and threw himself as far as he could into the water.
He sank quickly, but his strength had not yet left him. He fought and won again, and then was rewarded with another disappointment. The ice sheet, which looked large from a distance, measured no more than about three metres by three and a half metres. When he looked at it more closely, he realised that it was not a piece of ice at all, but adhered and icy fragments of ice that would sooner or later break up under the weight of him and the dogs, if the slab had not sunk earlier.
Death seemed imminent again. They would have had to move on immediately to survive, but there was no new ice on the horizon and the wind had already blown them hundreds of metres from the shore. Although it was not clear water that separated him from it, but an ice floe that was impossible to swim on, he thought for a moment that he might try his luck in it.
He saw no other option. The chances of being spotted by a fisherman in the middle of winter seemed negligible. Even if he had, no one would have been able to get through to him in the weather. Well, in fact, he couldn’t make it to the shore either, but decided to stay on the platform, carried by the wind towards the rocky waters.
He was tempted to swim again when his icy raft hit a rock and got a little smaller. Now it was finally clear to him that death awaited him in the water. “There was nothing to do but hope for rescue.” But hope was weak. In winter, the locals had retreated from the bay to the interior of the province, where survival was easier.
“The chances of being seen were about one in a thousand, and even if I had been, I would probably have been mistaken for a piece of debris,” he later revealed, remaining at all times a hard realist without becoming despondent.
There was an icy wind and he was wearing next to nothing. What he was wearing was frostbitten. In the distance, he saw his well-stocked snow sled. He watched as it sank. “It was as if a friend had left and another thread of home and safety had been severed.”
He was getting further and further away from it with every gust of wind, which was quickly carrying him away from the shore. There was nothing he could do, and even after his icy raft, he hardly dared move, lest he sink. But evening was approaching and he knew that he would not survive the night in his shirt alone. It was true that he had taken turns undressing and drying his clothes in the wind before, but it was already an icy day, and the night would have been fatal.
Life for life
There was only one way to protect himself from the cold: animal skins. Even though he was extremely attached to his dogs, he didn’t hesitate. He made a noose, threw it around the neck of the first dog, flipped it on its back and stabbed it straight in the heart. “I loved him like a friend – a wonderful dog – but we all couldn’t survive. In fact, at that moment I had no hope for any of us, but it seemed better to die fighting.”
Dr Grenfell was 43 years old. He was too cold, hungry and dehydrated, and his dog was young and strong. He had to keep the knife in his heart until he was completely dead, otherwise he would bleed and his blood would freeze on his fur. The skin would become hard and useless.
The tireless doctor managed to control the dog, but his fingers were frostbitten and he was so exhausted that the dog bit him hard on the leg. Then he suffered another bite, sacrificing two more dogs in the same way, trying to prevent either of them from letting out a sound and upsetting their companions.
They seemed not to notice the life-and-death struggle, and Dr Grenfell even envied his late dogs for a moment. Their fight for survival was over. If he was taken out to sea, he would repeat the exercise on himself, concluded the son of a priest who had committed suicide in a mental hospital when Wilfred was 20.
Nevertheless, it now seemed to him that a quick death was better than dying in rations. “I fully understood the Japanese view of harakiri”, he later explained the state of mind he was in before remembering that he had no time to talk about suicide because he had to skin the dogs.
He set to work, glancing here and there at the single light in the village where he had spent the night before. He wanted to light a fire to draw attention to himself with the smoke, but the matches were wet. He had no choice but to put down his work every five minutes, get up and wing his arms towards the shore, where the huts were arranged so that almost none of them looked out to sea. He did not believe that anyone would notice him, but he persisted, even though he had resigned himself to spending the night at sea.
The wind continued to blow relentlessly. He could have protected himself from it with a windbreak of snow, but he didn’t dare scrape it off the surface of the slab because it was already too thin. He had built it out of the carcasses of his three dogs. He piled one on top of the other and laid his new dog-skin rug on the floor. Now he could rest without getting wet.
But he had problems with his shoes. His feet were constantly wet, until he remembered reading about how the feet of the Sami or Laplanders stay dry when they hunt deer: they stuff grass in the shoe, push their foot in, surround it with grass on the other sides, and then tie the shoe, making a knot just below the knee.
Dr Grenfell decided to make his own “grass” out of flannel, which was used to line the inside of the carriages to make them more comfortable to wear. Although his fingers were more or less frostbitten, he successfully cut the fabric and managed to dismantle the rope into strips. He stuffed it all into the moccasins and tied them. He had cut the top off earlier to make a sort of jacket to protect him from the cold when he had lost all his warm clothes.
Now he was like a clown. Not long ago, he found a box of sports clothes he had worn at Oxford, but he felt he could wear them. So now he wore knee-length football shorts and a flannel shirt, and he put on red, yellow and black sports socks to protect him from the wind.
He thought it was ridiculous, but was later convinced that it was also because it was light in the water and dried quickly on land that he survived. In traditional missionary clothes he would surely have drowned, so he waited for midnight on an icy raft, doing his favourite task, cutting rope to fill his trousers and shirt.
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An unusual flag
It was true that he could not see what he was doing in the dark and that his fingers were almost numb and clumsy, but he persisted until he thought it was time to rest. He persuaded his biggest dog, Doc, to lie down. He spread the skin of one of the dogs he had skinned next to him and lay down on it, using the other two skins to protect his shoulders and head.
He was snuggled up to Doc and fast asleep when he was suddenly awakened by pain. The hand that had been holding the dog was warm, the other was frozen. The sun would warm it, he thought when he woke up, sure it was morning, but then realised from the position of the moon in the sky that it was only well past midnight.
He looked around as far as he could see. The wind was slowly but steadily blowing him out to sea. There, certain death awaited him. He could have prayed for a miracle, but somehow he felt he was not entitled to pray, even though on other occasions he had prayed with the fishermen for whatever they wanted.
Nevertheless, a miracle happened: the wind stopped blowing. But all around him was a mush of ice and the large, safe slab he suddenly saw about 25 metres ahead of him was out of reach. Or maybe not?
With a newly awakened survival instinct, in the middle of the night he began to think that he might be able to get through it after all. If he had, he would have killed the dogs he had left. He would have lasted two or three more days with their skins, eating their flesh and drinking their blood, as he had read that Dr Nansen had done.
The snow on the raft was too salty to drink. He finally ate and drank at 6am the previous day, when he set off. So far, he had overcome his hunger and thirst by chewing on the rubber belt he was wearing. To his surprise, the self-deception worked, but he could no longer lie to himself that he could reach the big iceberg in the distance.
Now he could only hope that the bay would freeze again, because his little raft would not survive another sunny day. But perhaps the inhabitants of Goose Cove, near where he was now, would notice him? With new hope, he lay down to rest.
Suddenly, he was woken from his sleep by the thought that he had to have a flag. He had thought of it before, but never before had the thought seemed so urgent. Unfortunately, he still had neither the pole nor the fabric, but he had an idea: in the middle of the darkness, he began to remove the paws of his dogs from their carcasses. They were now completely frozen and could be a pole to tie a shirt to, the only fabric he had at hand.
In the darkness, he could hardly see what he was doing, but it took him some time to separate the paws from the bodies, tie them with one of the tow ropes and cover the junctions with scraps of skin. “It was the heaviest and most crooked pole I have ever seen,” he later described it. But there was a pole, and it seemed that soon there would be no more abortion. The panel cracked and groaned in a way that made it illusory to expect it to see dawn, let alone a new sunset.
Dr Grenfell had nothing to lose. Hungry and thirsty for 24 hours, he took off his shirt in the middle of an icy morning and, “topless”, was surprised to realise that it was not as bad as he had feared it would be, although it is true that he was partially warmed by the dog skins he had thrown over himself so that the raw side was looking away from his body.
The first sun also helped, but unfortunately it softened the joints on the dog’s paws and the pole bent madly as it wobbled. But strange as it was, the flag was over a metre taller than him and now that was all that mattered.
Something glimmering on the horizon
During the night, the wind brought it back closer to the shore. It was still more than three kilometres away, but there was a village overlooking the sea. It should have been empty in winter, but twice he thought he saw a figure. Finally, he concluded that he had spotted a tree.
Then he thought he saw a ship. Something glittered on the horizon and disappeared into the water. It could have been oars, but it was just a shiny piece of ice. But he did not lose his will. He tirelessly flew his heavy flag, sitting down now and then to rest. Then Doc came up to him, kissed him on the cheek, trotted to the edge of the board and came back as if to say, “Why don’t you go too? Now it’s time to get started!”
The other dogs were also getting restless, and they were starving, and they would bite into the bodies of their companions. By midday, Dr Grenfell was convinced that he would do something similar. He would kill one of the dogs and drink its blood if he succeeded in killing one. The dogs were strong and he was no more, although he woke up in the morning strong and full of faith that he could survive another 24 hours, if only his abortion survived.
He laughed at himself and his situation. “I have to be honest and say that from the beginning to the end, not even a shadow of fear penetrated my brain, not even when I was fighting in the ice. Somehow none of it seemed unnatural.” He had been in danger at sea many times before, but never like now, when he was becoming increasingly sleepy and began to think about the separation of body and soul.
When he thought of dying, he had no regrets, except that he would leave his friends behind because he could not overcome the few kilometres of coarse ice and broken slush that separated him from the shore.
His slab, bloodstained and littered with bodies and rubbish, was even smaller now than the day before. New ice was forming under the carcasses of the dogs. Five live dogs stood next to it. He looked at them with a relish: “The appetite is strengthened even on a sheet of ice.”
Instead of fighting with dogs, he fought with circumstances. Three matches were still usable, he just needed to dry them out, so he started looking for a suitably thick layer of board on which to build a fire. Not that he was going to cook his lunch on it, he just wanted to create enough smoke with the fat of the animals to be noticed on the shore.
But just then he thought he saw a glimmer again, something like a paddle. It did not seem plausible, especially as it was not clear to him how anyone could have got through to him, and he did not see any smoke signals on the shore telling him to hang on because help was on the way.
So he convinced himself that an oar is not an oar and went back to work. But the next time he looked up, he saw the glitter again, only this time it was descending and rising, disappearing beneath the surface and reappearing above it.
He strained his eyes, even though he was half blind because of the snow. He could see nothing. Nevertheless, he flew the flag as high as he could. After a while he could make out the black stern of the hull. If the raft holds out for a few more hours, I will be saved, he told himself.
“With the strange perversity of the human mind, I first thought what trophies I could take with me,” he later wrote. He imagined his study decorated with a flagpole made of dog paws (which ended up being eaten by dogs) and showing off his weird leggings.
He was no longer interested in the fire, now he just wanted to remain visible. He waved the flag until it was as clear as day: they know where it is. His rescuers waved back as if possessed and shouted as they approached him, “Stay calm! Stay on the platform where you are!”
Dr Grenfell later smiled at their concern that he might try to swim up to them in hysterical joy. They had not experienced how icy a winter sea bath is if you have no dry clothes to change into, he said, and he had experienced it twice, so it did not occur to him to jump into the water for joy. But he wasn’t euphoric at all: “It seemed as natural to me that I would be rescued as it had seemed inevitable half an hour earlier that I would be lost.”
In the end, he was calmer than the five who came to get him. “When the man leaned over the edge of the boat towards my ice raft and clasped my hands in his, he didn’t say a word. I could see the strong emotion on his face. He struggled to control them, but tears rolled down his face against his will.”
There were tears in the eyes of the other men in the boat. “There was no reason to be ashamed of them. They were not a sign of sentimentality, but proof of the deepest and purest emotion the human heart is capable of feeling…: joy at selfless help.”
The men shook hands, Dr Grenfell drank a cup of hot tea that had been brought for him in a thermos, and after collecting his dogs, they headed home. A couple of times they had to climb onto larger ice floes to clear them with the oars and make a passage for the boat. A couple of times they had to drag him onto a slab and carry him across. A third time, they struggled to get through the crushed ice and hoped for the best.
All for one, one for all
When he finally came up for air, Dr Grenfell just asked how the hell he had been spotted. It turned out that he had been followed since the previous evening, when he had been spotted from the cliffs by four men who had gone to fetch the seal, which had been stowed away in the snow as if in a freezer.
One of them thought the ice floe passing by Hare Island was strange, but all the four of them rushed to the village and carried the news that they had seen a living creature on it. It was too incredible to be believed, but the owner of the only binoculars in the area immediately got up from his dinner and rushed to the cliffs.
He confirmed beyond a shadow of a doubt that he could see a man on a piece of ice, waving every so often towards the shore, and he knew beyond a shadow of a doubt who that man was. He knew him, but he could do nothing for him. The sea was too rough and the sun too low on the horizon for anyone to dare to sail out into the night.
The helpless locals could only watch him with their eyes. They set up checkpoints all along the coast and, like Dr Grenfell, spent the night. “We couldn’t sleep,” one fisherman later recalled. At dawn, no one asked anyone if they would risk their life to try to save his, even though they all knew the danger they were getting into.
Only two years before, a fisherman and his three sons had been on a similar rescue mission. No one returned, neither the stranger at sea nor the rescuers. Nevertheless, the five men have now come together without hesitation. “He would have done it for us too, and he did,” one of them explained later.
They equipped their boat with food, drink and clothing in case they were trapped at sea for a week and set off into the unknown. “We knew it would be hard. We knew we might not come back, but it didn’t matter.”
On the way to their doctor, large ice floes almost crushed their boat several times. Sometimes they had to carry it. At other times, it seemed they would remain prisoners of the ice crush. They persevered, even though “I myself did not believe that we would find the doctor alive”.
They watched for signs of life and spotted them 20 minutes before they reached it. “It didn’t appear to be him. He looked old and his face had a strange colour.” After a long silence, Dr Grenfell “apologised for getting us into such trouble and we had to go and get him”. They were just happy to have found him and landed safely on shore.
No one held back a tear then. A man who had risked his life to save theirs was quickly dressed, warmed with hot tea and transported to hospital. “He looks so old,” they agreed, and now he felt old too. In the warmth, the frostbite started to hurt and he could no longer walk.
He soon made a full recovery and so did his dogs. He put a memorial plaque to Moody, Watch and Spy because they lost their lives to save his. The boy he had set out to save was operated on in hospital and his leg was saved. He sent watches and binoculars to his rescuers as a thank you, and he became even more determined to raise money for them.
He met Anne MacClanahan at a lecture in the winter of 1909 and, at the age of 44, they decided to marry. Even though the couple had three children, he did not relax a bit. So it is not surprising that he set up his own, the Grenfell Mission, for which, with his almost star-like visibility, he found the money quite easily.
He remained President of his organisation until 1936, when he had to resign due to his rapidly failing health, but still had enough energy for cricket. He was still playing in October 1940, when he suffered his last stroke.
