the good ship araguaya of the royal mail steam packet line was under commission during the war as a canadian hospital ship on the north atlantic. she and her sister ship the essequibo, with the llandovery castle and letitia, composed the fleet used to convey our wounded from the old land to canada. the letitia was wrecked in a fog on the rocks near halifax with no loss of lives. the llandovery castle was sunk by a submarine while returning empty to england. mostly all the ship's officers, m.o.'s, nurses, and crew were drowned or shot by the fiend who commanded the u-boat. the chaplain, capt. mcphail, was killed. by strange chance his body, with life-belt, was carried towards france and months afterwards was found on the beach and buried.
thank god all the german submarines were not run by such as sank the llandovery. i have a snapshot taken from the deck of the essequibo of a u-boat which stopped that ship, searched her thoroughly but courteously and then let her go unharmed.
i spent ten months as chaplain on the araguaya and a happy time it was. that was the "cushiest" job i have ever had. we were under cover all the time, had abundance of good food and luxuries for everyone, and every device that money could buy to entertain our patients on their nine-day trip across. besides, in my special work i had a flock which never strayed far from me. they couldn't!
practically all the staterooms had been taken out, only sufficient being left for m.o's, nurses, and ship's officers. this made fine, large, airy wards for the bed cases, fitted with swinging cots so that they did not feel the roll of the vessel. i had a comfortable room all to myself, for col. whidden and later col. murray were both very considerate of my comfort.
you will be interested to know that at the celebration of the completion of the kiel canal, the araguaya was loaned by the r.m.s.p. co. to the kaiser for use as his private yacht during the regatta, as a token of british goodwill. the suite of rooms our o.c. used had been the kaiser's, and mine was one of those that "little willie" had occupied!
the ship's officers and crew were all first-class seamen of heroic stuff. the majority of them had been through the dread experience of being torpedoed, some two or three times, and had seen many of their mates shot down or drowned. yet here they were from stoke-hold to pilot-house carrying on as cheerfully as ever.
capt. barrett, the skipper, a short, stout, ruddy-faced englishman sat at the head of the table, with our o.c. and officers to his right and his own officers to his left. many a merry meal we had together there. i can hear major shillington's steadying voice when he thought he saw trouble ahead in our arguments, gunn with the happy laugh, langham bringing us down to cold, hard facts, and the others good men all, with whom i companied those days. tell your choicest funny story and you'd hear capt. johnson's stage-whisper, "i kicked the slats out of my cradle the first time i heard that!" i often wore my tartan uniform for "old-time's" sake, and the cameron trousers always started the skipper bemoaning that now we'd have a stormy night since the padre had put on his "tempestuous pants." of course we frequently fought the question out around the table. i based my claim to wear highland garb, blow high or blow low, not only on my connection with the 43rd, but because i was a thorough-bred scot. i carried the war into the enemy's country by maintaining that it was wrong to let anyone wear it but those of scottish extraction. my own camerons were nearly all scots, this i know from careful official census taken in france. we had ten or fifteen per cent. who did not belong to "the elect," but they became fine fellows from being continually in such good company, and i find no fault with them for wearing the kilts. but the principle is wrong. suppose on the field of battle a fierce and haughty prussian surrendered to a kilted man whom he thought to be a scot, only to find on getting back to the corral that his captor was a peaceful doukhobor in kilts. what a humiliation and what cruelty! i actually met an officer in france belonging to a canadian kiltie battalion (not ours) who asked me the meaning of the words "dinna forget," the title of a book which lay before him on the table. i asked him what he thought it was. he said "i suppose the name of a girl, the heroine of the story, 'dinna' maybe a local way of spelling 'dinah,' and 'forget' is her surname. that's my guess." he was in full, scottish, regimental field-uniform when he spoke these words! i was dumb for a little before i could tell him what the words really meant. it is not the claim of superiority of race but simply a matter of honest practice. the tartan costume has become the recognized badge of scottish birth or ancestry. it is therefore perpetrating a fraud upon the public for a man of any other race to parade in this distinctively national garb.
it would fill too many pages even to outline the varied aspects of our life aboard the boat. matron shaw and her noble band of nurses should have a page to themselves. we carried about nine hundred patients each trip and after two days out, when they became able to hear "the return of the swallow" recited without getting pale around the gills, everything went along with a hum. there were lectures, concerts, movies, shovelboard and deck tennis tournaments, dozens of phonographs and all sorts of parlor games and books, and on sunday our religious services. the boys were all glad to be going home to canada and they were easily entertained.
the great event was, of course, our first sight of land and then the disembarkation. the later trips we unloaded at portland, maine, and i cannot recollect having seen a more magnificent demonstration of public good-will than was given us by those yankees. the first time we put in there, while the boat was still twenty feet away from the dock the thousands of people on the wharf commenced to cheer and the bands to play, and we were bombarded with candies, cigars, cigarettes and fruit. much of it fell into the water. when we tied up a score of committees came aboard and almost submerged us under endless quantities of oranges, apples, bananas, grapes, dough-nuts, cake, sandwiches, ice-cream, tea, coffee and soft drinks, and expensive candies and everything else that we could eat or drink, that the law would allow, in superabundance. they took our hundreds of letters and many telegrams and sent them without costing us a penny. the latest newspapers, bouquets, of choice flowers for everyone, concert parties, and indeed everything good that kind hearts could think of was showered upon us. i remember a western bed-patient asked me if i thought they would get him a plug of a special brand of chewing tobacco. he hadn't been able to buy it in four years overseas and it was his favorite. "sure thing," one of them said and in half-an-hour two men came aboard lugging along enough of that tobacco to stock a small store! i cannot go further into details. enough to say that every trip it was the same, except that their hospitality became more systematized. probably fifteen thousand wounded canadian soldiers passed through portland on their way home, and i know they will find it hard to forget the free-handed, warm-hearted welcome they got in that city. this memory will surely be a leaven working towards the maintenance and development of peace and good-will between canada and the united states.
but i must tell my story of the north. one trip major dick shillington persuaded me to give them a klondike evening. we gathered down below in "h" mess and there i told something of the life-story of my old friend of by-gone days, a trail-blazer and prospector, duncan mcleod.
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when first i met duncan mcleod, "cassiar mac" he was commonly called, he and his partner, john donaldson, both old men, were working far up a tributary of gold bottom creek which had not yet been fully prospected. each liked to have his own house and do his own cooking, and so they lived within a few yards of each other in the creek bottom at the foot of the mountain summit that rose between them and indian river. my trail over to the other creeks passed across their ground, and when we became friends i seldom failed to arrange my fortnightly trip over the divide so as to reach their place about dusk. i would have supper with one or the other and stay the night.
mcleod was an old-country scot, donaldson born of scottish parents in glengarry county, ontario. i am not using their real names, but they were real men. one of them, donaldson, is still living in the wilds of the yukon, still prospecting. he was the first white man the teslin indians had seen and known. they looked upon him as their "hi-yu-tyee," a sort of super-chief, during the years he lived near them. he had been just and kind with them, and his consequent influence saved occasional serious friction between the indians and whites from becoming murder or massacre.
after supper we would all three gather in one of the cabins and i would hear good talk until far towards midnight. then there would be a pause and mcleod would say, "well, mr. pringle, i think it is time we were getting ready for our beds." i knew what he meant. "yes, it is," i would reply. the bible would be handed me, i would read a chapter and we would kneel in prayer to god. then to our bunks for a good sleep and early away in the morning for me to make the twenty-five miles over the heights to gold run before dark.
what great talks those were i used to hear. i was only a boy then, and these old men had seen so much of the wild free life of the west of long ago days. what stirring adventures they had had! they came west before the railways by way of the american prairies, and, lured by gold discoveries, had entered the mountains, and then following the prospector's will-o-the-wisp, the better luck that lies "just over the divide," they had gone farther and farther north. they had met and become partners in the caribou camp, and had been together nearly forty years, in the cassiar, on the stewart, at forty-mile and now the klondike.
donaldson had a wonderful native power of description. when story-telling he would pace slowly back and forth in the shadow beyond the dim candle-light and picture with quiet, resonant voice scenes and events of the past. how vivid it seemed to me! how the soul of the young man thrilled as he listened! often there was a yearning at my heart when under his spell to lay aside my mission and go out into the farthest wilds, seeking adventure and living the free, fascinating life they had lived. how i wish i had written down these stories as they were told to me. but maybe they wouldn't have "written," for much of the interest lay in the personality of the story-teller.
mcleod's part was usually to help with dates or names when donaldson's memory failed to recall them, but often he too would spin a yarn, and when he did there was always in its telling a gentleness, i can think of no better word, that gave a charm often missing in donaldson's rougher style.
they were both big men physically, but mcleod had been magnificent. he was now nearly eighty years old and broken with rheumatism, but in the giant frame and noble face and head crowned with its snow-white hair i saw my ideal of what a great highland chieftain might have been in the brave days of old.
donaldson told me one night, while his partner was making a batch of bread in his own cabin, what he knew of mcleod's history. "i have never known a man," he said, "that would measure up to my partner. none of us want our record searched too closely but it wouldn't make any difference to him. nothing, nobody, seemed to have any power to make mac do anything crooked or dirty. whisky, gambling, bad women—he passed them up without apparent effort. very strange too, even the few good women we have met in these camps never won anything from him but wholesome admiration. he had only to say the word and he could have had any one of them, but he didn't seem to care that way. what his experience had been before we met i do not know, he has never spoken much about it to anyone. but he and i have lived together as partners for nearly half a century, through the crazy, wicked days of all these gold camps, and mac never did anything that he would be ashamed to tell his own mother."
a fine tribute. perhaps under the circumstances the finest thing that could be said of any man, for you cannot imagine the thousand almost irresistible temptations that were part of the daily life of the stampeders in those northern camps. enough for me to say that many men of really good character back east, where they were unconsciously propped up by influences of family, church, and community, failed miserably to keep their footing when they came to the far north where all these supports were absent and temptation was everywhere. i do not judge them. god only knows the fight they had before they surrendered. so it was an arresting event to meet a man who had seen it all and whose partner of forty years told me he had lived clean.
i often wondered what mcleod's story was. i had known him for three years before i ventured to ask him details about his home in scotland, and why he left it to come so far away. i knew he had been reared in a village south of edinburgh, in a good home with good parents, and much else he had told me, but there had always been a reticence that made you certain there was something else held back.
one winter night when we were alone in his cabin, he opened his heart to me. he was an old-fashioned scot. i was his "minister" and he knew me well. besides he was coming to the end of the trail, and he needed a confidant.
he said his story was hardly worth while bothering me with, i knew most of it, but what he could never tell anyone was about the lassie he had loved and lost. he had fallen in love with the brown eyes and winsome face of margaret campbell, a neighbour's daughter. they had gone to the same school, had taken their first communion together, and had both sung in the village church choir. when he revealed his love to her she told him she had guessed his secret and had lang syne given her heart to him. they were betrothed and very happy. but margaret took ill in the fall and died before the new year. early in the year he sailed from leith for canada, hoping that new scenes would soften his grief. as the years passed he kept moving west and then north. he grew to like the free life of the prospector and had not cared to leave the mountains and the trails.
time had healed the wound but his love for the sweetheart of his youth was just as true and tender as ever. from a hidden niche at the head of his bed he took down a small box, brought it to the table near the candle and unlocked it. he showed me his simple treasures. his rough, calloused hands trembled as he lifted them carefully from the box. there was a small photo so faded i could barely see the face on it. "you'll see she was very beautiful," he said, for he saw with the clear vision of loving memory what was not for my younger but duller eyes to discern. there was her gold locket with a wisp of brown hair in it. "she left me this," he said, "when she died." last, there was an old letter, stained and worn, the only love-letter she had ever written him, for he had only once been far enough or long enough away to need letters. he had spent a week in glasgow after they became engaged and she had written to him. this was all.
somehow i felt as if i were on sacred ground, that the curtain had been drawn from before a holy place, and i was looking upon something more beautiful than i had ever seen before. as the old man put the box away his eyes were shining "with a light that never was on sea or land." mine were moist, and for a little i couldn't trust my voice to speak as i thought of the life-time of unswerving fealty to his dead lassie. such long, lonely years they must have been!
we did not say much more that night but the words we spoke were full of understanding and reverence. when it grew late and he handed me the bible i hesitated in choosing a chapter, but not for long. the comfort and rejoicing of the twenty-third psalm were all we wanted.
one morning, not long afterwards, donaldson came into my cabin on hunker creek in evident distress. mcleod hadn't come out as usual to his work that morning, and he had gone to see what was wrong and found him in his bunk hardly able to speak. he had taken "a stroke." a neighbouring miner watched by the sick man while donaldson hitched up his dogs and raced to dawson for medical aid. donaldson went off down the trail and i hurried up the gulch to my old friend. he lingered for two or three days. the doctor could do nothing for him but to ease his last moments.
i stayed near him until the end came. when he tried to speak his utterance was indistinct and what few words i could make out showed that his mind was wandering. sometimes he was on the trail or in the camp, but oftenest he was home again in the far away land he loved, and in boyhood days among folk we did not know save one, known only to me, whose name was continually on his lips.
he had a lucid interval just before he died and for a minute or two he thought and spoke clearly. i told him that death was near. was there anything that we could do for him? "not very much," he said, "i want donaldson to have all i own. he's been a good partner. bury my box with me. i'm not afraid to go now. it's just another prospecting trip to an unknown land and i have a great guide. he won't forsake an old prospector. he was one himself, i'm thinking, when he came seeking us. he will keep a firm grip of me now that the trail is growing dark. i'm not afraid."
these were his last words, and as he slipped away, we, who were gathered in the dimly-lighted little cabin, felt somehow that the guide he spoke of was right at hand. he would surely keep "a firm grip" of the old miner on his last prospecting trip, even if strange storms were blowing, and it was black dark when they crossed the great divide. it would come morning too in that land when night was past, and when the new day dawned i know he would soon find the one whom he had "loved long since and lost awhile."
