Labrador Odyssey: The Journal and Photographs of Eliot Curwen on the Second Voyage of Wilfred Grenfell, 1893

Melvin Baker is an archivist and historian at Memorial University of
Newfoundland, and the co-editor of Dictionary of Newfoundland and
Labrador Biography.

Eliot Curwen was an English physician who, in 1893, accompanied Sir
Wilfred Grenfell of the English Mission to Deep Sea Fishermen (MDSF) to
Labrador to dispense both medicine and the gospel to the fishermen from
the Island of Newfoundland who traveled to coastal Labrador each summer
to fish for cod. This book presents the journal Curwen wrote for family
members back in England.

Rompkey’s introduction to the book provides a good overview of
Newfoundland and Labrador society in the early 1890s, while his
extensive annotated notes to the journal amplify and explain people and
events Curwen encountered on his travels from St. John’s to northern
coastal Labrador. Interwoven into the journal are letters and reports
sent by Grenfell and Curwen to the MDSF. Also included is a superb
collection of the photographs that Curwen took of Labrador’s people
and their homes.

Labrador Odyssey contains a wealth of information on the social,
economic, and medical conditions in late–19th-century Labrador. An
amateur archeologist, Curwen took a special interest in the culture of
the Inuit he met in northern Labrador. He described one Inuit tradition
as follows: “High on the hills is the grave, certainly of an ancient
warrior. Like all the Eskimo graves, it is open, the body being simply
laid out on the bare rock, and a tomb of loose stones being built over
it. Inside you see the whitened bones still in place, the skull face
upwards, as if watching and waiting for a resurrection morning.”

This book offers an incisive portrait of Newfoundland and Labrador in
the 1890s, while revealing simultaneously the worldview of the outside
experts who traveled there to “do good” among the local population.