p. 13 | But Men Are Hungry by Sir Wilfred Grenfell

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · May 20, 1913

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 40, No. 20.

But Men Are Hungry

By Sir Wilfred Grenfell

I SAT in the house of a sailor last fall. It was a very bad inshore fishery, for some reason. This man was an old sailor; he had not had the privilege of a Sunday-school, he had not had the opportunities of the regular service, he knew no philosophy, he could barely read and write. Years ago he migrated—after a roving sea life—to the Labrador coast, and had settled down there because he could choose a place where fur was plentiful and the fish near at hand. A family had grown up with him; he had become known as a hospitable man; his house is on the path on which the komatiks travel in winter; and when a man is poor in Labrador, and starving, he has to travel somewhere to get help. The custom here was to go by the komatik trail and stop off at this man’s house; he had enlarged his cabin twice, in order that comers to and fro might not be disappointed.

He is a gray-headed old man. His wife has died, and all the children are gone but one. Last winter, with the lack of wage-earning capacity, the poorer people on the coast had eaten him out, as they say. The Hudson Bay agent of the district told me that one week-end that man had twenty-seven poor folk halting over Sunday at his house. It is my habit to help the old man out by giving him wood to cut for the fires of my hospital steamer. When I went to his home this fall there was only thirty dollars coming to him; the fishery was bad; he had had no other way of earning anything. I told him what there was coming to him, thirty dollars, and that it would give him so many barrels of flour, so much molasses, and some little fats; that is, sufficient so that they would be able to live—he and his son. I said to him, “What are you going to do this winter? You know the condition of the poor people; you had better move up the bay and get out of the komatik track.” That was so that visitors could not come to his house.

“No,” he answered, “I can not do that while I am alive.”

“But,” I said, “what will you do? You will starve if you feed others, because you haven’t more than enough for yourselves.”

The old man went to a sailor’s box and dug out all the usual things that fill an old chest like that, and produced a pencil-box; he pried off the cover and picked out a lot of oakum, and then picked out twelve five-dollar bills.

“What are these?” I asked.

“My money saved against old age.”

“What are you going to do with it?”

His answer was, “I want you to spend it in the same way—on flour and molasses.”

“Is that all you have got?” said I.

“Yes,” was the reply.

I told him he had better keep it in the box, and move up the bay. But he replied, “I may not need it next year (he is seventy-three), and I should not like to meet my Maker and feel that men were hungry and I had not used it.”

We read about hospitality, and some men say, “What is the good of Christianity, anyhow? Where, in all the philosophy of nature, where, in all the struggle for the survival of the fittest, comes in a force that will teach men, yes, teach us who talk about the Christ, lessons of that kind? Jesus Christ’s gospel is still to-day the power of God unto salvation.—Sir Wilfred Grenfell, in “Sunday School Times.”