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Once before in the Sir Donald we had tried to navigate the narrow run that cuts off the island on which Cape Chidley stands from the mainland of Labrador, but had missed the way among the many openings, and only noted from a hilltop the course we should have taken, by the boiling current which we saw below, whose vicious whirlpools like miniature maelstroms poured like a dashing torrent from Ungava Bay into the Atlantic.
The Moravian mission at Killenek, a station three days' travel to the northward, on Cape Chidley, has deflected some of the former trade from Nachvak and the Ramah station more of it, until but twenty-seven Eskimos now remain at Nachvak. Early on Monday morning not only our two Eskimos appeared, but the entire Eskimo population, even the women with babies in their hoods, to see us off.
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.
Those ice pans might have come from anywhere along the hundreds of miles between Anticosti and Cape Chidley. To these men, it was just the body of an old man, a stranger. Not much loss. He could not have lived many more years, anyhow. Probably no one would miss him. No need to trouble over it.
He was doubtless the better, and they were none the worse. Nowadays, it seems, we need more than a loincloth to protect our hyperaesthetic eyes from the Splendour of Nature. The Australians, afflicted by our modern nervous fussiness, could not leave Chidley alone.
While cruising near Cape Chidley, a schooner signalling with flag at half-mast attracted our attention. On going aboard we found a young man with the globe of one eye ruptured by a gun accident, in great pain, and in danger of losing the other eye sympathetically.
The Atlantic coast of Labrador is dangerous indeed, but there Nature has providentially distributed innumerable safe harbor retreats, and the tide is insignificant compared with that of Ungava Bay. "Nature exhausted her supply of harbors," some one has said, "before she rounded Cape Chidley, or she forgot Ungava entirely; and she just bunched the tide in here, too."
Although we went round Cape Chidley into Ungava Bay I could not regain his confidence sufficiently to go through the straits which I had myself sounded and surveyed. So we accomplished it in a small boat, getting good observations. Our best work, however, was done when His Excellency was content to be our guest.
The voice of the people began to be heard in the press; there were long debates in Parliament; the Premier sent to the Asylum to inquire on what grounds Chidley had been placed there, and the doctors, who really had no evil intent in the matter, though their mental equilibrium had been momentarily disturbed by this unique Chidley, honourably opened the Asylum doors, and Chidley has returned to preach the Gospel in George Street until new reasons can be puzzled out for harassing him, neurotic, without doubt, but now hall-marked sane.
The debates in 1643 and 1644 between the five Independent or Dissenting Brethren of the Westminster Assembly and the Presbyterian majority of the Assembly brought on a new stage of the Toleration controversy. A notion which might be scorned or ridiculed while it was lurking in Anabaptist conventicles, or ventilated by a she-Brownist like Mrs. Chidley, or by poor old Mr.
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