The S.S. North Voyageur, Which Made Many Labrador Cruises, Docked at Havre St Pierre
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CHAPTER 6 The s.s. North Voyageur, which made many Labrador cruises, docked at Havre St Pierre LABRADOR CRUISES, TRADE MISSIONS AND THE DEPRESSION Less than a decade after its founding, Clarke now had a fleet of five ships in main line service. The flagship, New Northland, cruised the Gulf of St Lawrence by summer and ran from Miami in the wintertime. The North Voyageur, Gaspesia and North Shore each offered their own distinctive summer cruise programs. And the Bras d'Or Bay Navigation Co's Sable I operated a scheduled passenger and cargo service to and from the North Shore. Meanwhile, the Depression that followed the stock market crash of October 1929 meant that industry in the Gulf of St Lawrence was stagnating. The bottom had already fallen out of the fisheries in 1926, but now business was languishing in general and showing no signs of an early recovery. Harder times were ahead. Changes in the Passenger Department In 1930, Clarke moved its Montreal passenger office from the Drummond Building to the newly opened Dominion Square Building, on the opposite corner of Peel and St Catherine Streets. The building was a $10 million project of Low, Leon & Burns, who owned Carling Breweries, and were also now using the coastal freighter Vedas to bootleg beer and whisky from Montreal to the United States. This ship was the ex-Shearwater that Clarke had once considered for its Gaspé service. That August, the Vedas was arrested by the Customs Preventive Service on Lake Erie with 15,000 cases of beer on board, allegedly bound for Winnipeg. She was fined $400 and released under bond, but arrested again two weeks later after returning to Lake Erie to unload more beer into small boats for America. This was a rather different life from the one that the Gaspesia was now leading, carrying cruise passengers to the Gulf. Coinciding with the move to the Dominion Square Building, Eric Wharton, the company's district passenger agent in New York was appointed to be Clarke's new general passenger agent in Montreal. Under Wharton, changes were about to follow. Instead of selling the New Northland "like an ocean liner" to Gaspé and Newfoundland, Clarke would begin developing more interesting themes and indeed destinations for its cruises. Wharton took over from Frank Stocking, now in his late fifties, who nevertheless moved with his Stocking Travel Agency into the Dominion Square Building. As well as representing Clarke since his appointment in 1926, Stocking had continued to run his own agency, selling tickets for the likes of the Great Lakes Transit Corporation, which operated Great Lakes cruises from Buffalo. For a few years, both Clarke and Stocking operated from Room 19, but with different telephone numbers. Eventually, however, Stocking Travel, while still selling Clarke cruises along with those of Canada Steamship Lines and Furness Withy, moved to another floor. The first sign of change came with the 1930 cruise brochure. Previously, a narrative had outlined the itinerary for each ships cruise in the front of the brochure, together with deck plans and fares, but the sailing dates and schedules had been listed in the back. Starting in 1930, however, the brochures were streamlined, with the information for each cruise - narrative, itinerary, fares, deck plan and schedules - all presented together for each ship. While the company's head office was in Quebec, its Montreal passenger office was becoming more important, with its local dock operation handling frequent sailings from Victoria Pier. Not far downstream, the dramatic new Montreal Harbour Bridge, which had been taking shape since 1925, opened on May 24, 1930. The "North Voyageur" To Cruise To Labrador The next sign of change came after the annual meeting with the women who formed the Montreal branch of the Grenfell Labrador Medical Mission. With the sub-heading "Cruise May Eventuate," "The Gazette" reported on two of the items discussed that concerned Clarke in its issue of February 14: - Members of the Junior League and the Royal Victoria College were very kind in their donations of discarded silk stockings which were sent to the Industrial School at St Anthony's for making hooked rugs. Following the suggestion of Dr Moret, the committee negotiated with the Clarke Steamship Co, with the result that the Labrador boats exhibited the handicraft work at a charge of 20 per cent on the sales. The Clarke Steamship Co may possibly run a Labrador cruise if the committee can arrange to provide enough passengers. The steamer North Voyageur would be used and touch the five chief ports where the hospitals are located. If one had read Dillon Wallace's "The Lure of the Labrador Wild," published in 1906, one might have expected a cruise to Labrador not to be very popular. He described the coast as follows: - In all the earth there is no coast so barren, so desolate, so brutally inhospitable as the Labrador coast from Cape Charles, at the Strait of Belle Isle on the south, to Cape Chidley on the north. Along these eight hundred miles it is a constant succession of bare rocks scoured clean and smooth by the ice and storms of centuries, with not a green thing to be seen, save now and then a bunch of stunted shrubs that have found a foothold in some sheltered nook in the rocks, and perchance, on some distant hill, a glimpse of struggling spruce or fir trees. It is a fog-ridden, dangerous coast, with never a lighthouse or signal of any kind in its entire length to warn or guide the mariner. But the reports of Hudson's Bay Co fur traders, visits by Audubon and other ornithologists' reports in "The Auk," cross-country expeditions by explorers and the more recent activities of the International Grenfell Association had all begun to give Labrador a romantic mystique. And 21- year-old Nelson Rockefeller and his 19-year-old brother Laurance had just spent the summer of 1929 with the mission. So Clarke announced that it would offer something new in 1930 - a special "Grenfell Mission" cruise in the North Voyageur. A descriptive brochure outlined the new itinerary, scheduled for July 13 to 27. This voyage, the start of something that would set Clarke apart from others, was reported in "The Gazette" on March 11: - At last tourists are going to be given an opportunity to see for themselves the work which has been accomplished by Dr Grenfell and his assistants in the Labrador region. A cruise lasting a fortnight will take the outside world, which has been learning of the hospitals through the lectures of Dr Grenfell for many years, on an inspection tour of all the important centres of the Grenfell Labrador Medical Mission. Dr Grenfell himself planned to come to Montreal in his ship the Lord Strathcona last year, and those interested in his work here were keenly awaiting his arrival to see for themselves the floating hospital and library. The plans were not carried out and this summer instead there will be an opportunity for many to watch the vessel in operation on the lonely coast of Labrador. The s.s. North Voyageur, of the Clarke Steamship Company, is scheduled for this special cruise, and very great interest has been shown in this both in Canada and the United States. It will occupy a fortnight's time in the latter part of July, the route lying from Montreal to Quebec along the north shore of the Gulf, with stops at the vessel's regular ports of call as far as Natashquan, then on to the Canadian Labrador coast, with stops at Harrington, administrative headquarters of the Grenfell Mission, and at Mutton Bay, an important Grenfell station. The vessel will then proceed through the Straits of Belle Isle and up to Battle Harbour, on the Atlantic coast of Labrador; then to St Anthony, commercial centre of the Grenfell organization, on the north- east coast of Newfoundland. It will finally cruise down the west coast of Newfoundland to the usual terminus of its cruises, Corner Brook, in the Bay of Islands, and from there return to Montreal along its regular north shore route. The territory of Labrador had only been ceded to Newfoundland as recently as March 1, 1927, and had been much in the news because of the efforts of Dr Grenfell, an Englishman who had first arrived there in 1892. Known for his work among Labrador fishermen, he had built hospitals and nursing stations, established co-operative stores, agricultural centres, libraries, schools and orphanages, and made an annual cruise to these posts in his hospital ship. The "Lord Strathcona" mentioned in the article was actually called Strathcona II and was the third such ship. The first Strathcona, a vessel of 130 tons, had been donated by Lord Strathcona in 1899 to replace a smaller 75-foot steam launch called the Sir Donald, which he had donated in 1894. When the original Strathcona was wrecked in October 1922, he had the 85- ton Strathcona II built to replace her in 1925. Yet another vessel, the 82-ton motorship Maraval, had joined her in 1929 and would remain with the mission for many years. Grenfell was also the founder of the the King George V Seamens Institute, opened in St John's in 1912. In addition to hospital ships, Lord Strathcona had donated $1,000 a year to the Grenfell Mission during his lifetime. Born Donald Smith in Scotland, and coming to Canada in 1838, he had been engaged as a Hudson's Bay Co clerk, posted at first to Tadoussac. During the next thirty years he worked in Labrador, first at Mingan and then at Rigolet and North West River.