We All Expected to Die

Spanish Influenza in Labrador, 1918-1919

Anne Budgell

• Publisher: ISER Books
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781894725545
• eBook ISBN: 9781894725569
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: Social Sciences

At the end of World War I, after four years of unimaginable man-made destruction, a swiftly killing virus travelled the planet. Up to one hundred million people perished in the most lethal pandemic in recorded history, the so-called "Spanish" influenza. More than half those who died were young adults aged between twenty and forty. Nowhere on earth was the flu more deadly than in isolated settlements on the far northeastern coast of North America.

In We All Expected to Die: Spanish Influenza in Labrador, 1918–1919, Anne Budgell reconstructs the horrific impact of the pandemic in hard-hit Labrador locations, such as the Inuit villages of Okak and Hebron where the mortality rate was 71%. Using the recollections of survivors, diaries kept at the time, Hudson's Bay Company journals, newspaper reports, and government documents, this powerful and uncompromising book tells the story of how the flu travelled to Labrador and wreaked havoc there. It examines how people dealt with the emergency, when all were sick and few were well enough to care for others, and how authorities elsewhere refused to provide assistance. The story We All Expected to Die reveals is both devastating and haunting. It is a story of great loss, but also of human endurance, heroism, and survival.

CHAPTER ONE

Labrador — Trackless,
Unknown, and Wild

The Crow and the Gull had a quarrel. The Crow was for the Eskimo, and the Gull was for the white man. Whichever won the fight, his side was to be the strongest. So they fought. The Gull won. That is why the white men are more numerous and stronger than the Eskimo.

—The Quarrel of the Crow and the Gull¹

The first people to record encounters with Indigenous people in Labrador were the Norse explorers, whose stories from a thousand years ago tell about their exploration of the forested place they called “Markland” and contact with people, perhaps Labrador Innu.² By the sixteenth century, the coast was frequented by Basque, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and British fishermen who had heard of the plentiful codfish: the prime fishing grounds would open when the ice moved offshore in late June, and close when it threatened to return in October. All these European whalers and fishermen encountered Inuit and Innu, whose ancestors had lived in coastal camps and settlements, north and south, and in the interior forests and “barren” lands for hundreds, even thousands, of years.³

Map 1. Labrador and Newfoundland

A hundred years ago, most Labrador inhabitants lived near the coast, some in villages, some in single homesteads or settlements of a scattering of houses, unevenly distributed over nine degrees of latitude, from L’Anse au Clair tucked in next to the border with Quebec in the south, to Killinek in the north, on an island at the tip of the Ungava Peninsula. North of Hamilton Inlet, six Moravian Mission “stations” were located in places where Inuit had lived, fished, and hunted for at least several hundred years: Makkovik, Hopedale, Nain, Okak, Hebron, and Killinek. People occupied numerous other seasonal camps and settlements in the bays and coves on the north coast.⁴ The Moravian Bishop, Albert Martin, noted that one-third of his congregation lived away from Hebron, including 10 families at Saglek Bay, four families at Old Ramah, and eight families at Napartok Bay.⁵ The people on the north coast were mainly Inuit, but there were some so-called “settler” families, mostly descendants of Newfoundland or English men and Inuit women. Settler families were more numerous in Nain, Hopedale, and especially Makkovik. In 1908, Martin counted 1,304 people under the Moravians’ care, from Killinek to Makkovik, three times more Inuit than settlers: “994 are Innuit, or pure Eskimoes, and 310 are Kablunângajut, or Half-breeds, and Kablunât, or pure Whites.”⁶

The north coast was the territory of Moravian missionaries, also called United Brethren or Unitas Fratrum, whose members claimed pre-Reformation origins, dating from 1457 in Germany.⁷ From their beginnings, the Moravians had a strong interest in establishing foreign missions and sent members all over the world. Before coming to Labrador in the late eighteenth century, some had lived among the Greenland Inuit and so were understood when they spoke Inuttitut in Labrador.⁸ The Moravians’ timing was opportune, for them and for the colonial authorities. Newfoundland fishermen and Inuit were clashing, sometimes violently, and Governor Hugh Palliser (1764−68) wanted the coast made safe for a commercial fishery.⁹ The Moravians lobbied for grants of land, and while initially there was resistance from the British government, in May 1769 an Order-in-Council was approved granting them the right to “occupy and possess, during His Majesty’s pleasure, one hundred thousand acres of land in such part of Esquimaux Bay, on the coast of Labrador, as they shall find most suitable for their purpose,” in exchange for converting and “civilizing” the Inuit and for keeping them occupied on the northern part of the coast.¹⁰ Historian James Hiller writes that as soon as the Moravians were established, “government interest in Labrador declined.”¹¹

Based on their experience in Greenland, Hiller notes that the Moravians “knew the best way to convert and civilize the native race was to contain him within a reservation whose sole focus was the mission station.”¹² They tightly controlled who lived around the stations — converts only — and tried to restrict visitors.¹³ A trading operation and store were established to keep the Inuit supplied with goods they otherwise would have had to travel south to obtain.¹⁴ It was a colonial situation, as Hiller notes, with each side dependent on the other and “the division between the missionary and the native made more distinct by the former’s assumption of cultural superiority.” Hiller concludes that in the early years of Moravian presence, “the patriarchal tendencies of the missionaries are readily understandable. Authoritarian attitudes were necessary to preserve the small convert groups, to compete against the angakut [shaman] and the southern traders.”¹⁵

The first Moravian Mission station was at Nain, established in 1771. Other grants permitted the establishment of the stations at Okak in 1776 and Hopedale in 1782. Later, stations were established in Zoar, Ramah, Hebron, Makkovik, and Killinek.¹⁶ Churches, homes, stores, and warehouses for trade goods were built. In 1916, 10 ordained brethren, three unordained brethren, and 13 wives comprised the Moravian Mission adult population at six stations.¹⁷ Missionaries’ children were sent to boarding school in Germany at age eight and would not see their parents for years. It was not unusual for a mission couple to live in Labrador for decades.¹⁸

Once secure in their proprietary status, the Moravians undertook to substitute their religious beliefs for the traditional ones of the Inuit. Hiller says the Moravian form of Christianity “was a religion divorced from the local environment, preaching totally new concepts of wrong-doing and death, and demanding a radical change in traditional behavior.”¹⁹ The missionaries instituted “the speaking,” an interview “between Eskimo and missionary, in which the former was expected to describe the state of his faith and anything that was on his conscience — in effect an informal confession.” The information could be used for disciplinary purposes. Rule-breakers could be excluded from church events or even banished from the community.²⁰ Hiller explains that it was not surprising the Inuit were attracted to the mission “more by the European goods and services that were available there than by the Christian message.”²¹ No economic advantage accompanied conversion, as the store was open to all; however, when a “heathen” came to the store, the missionary had the opportunity to speak to that person “about the state of their souls.”²² Barnett Richling, in his examination of the relationship between Inuit and Moravians, suggests that religious conversion should be seen “as one aspect of the process whereby the Mission attempted to consolidate power over the north coast and to pursue an exclusive economic relationship with the Inuit.”²³

Moravians disapproved of Inuit music and games, but taught them to sing hymns for church services almost as soon as the mission stations were established. European musical instruments were introduced, and by the early nineteenth century, Inuit musicians playing violins, cellos, and wind instruments accompanied the choral singers.²⁴ In 1824, an organ was given to the mission in Nain and was much enjoyed. Many references, in letters and reports written by missionaries, describe the delight experienced by Inuit singers and musicians and their growing proficiency.²⁵ Helge Kleivan writes that the musicians were curtailed if the music veered away from “the mission cause” of the praise and glory of God.²⁶

The Moravians were firm believers in educating their flock, although Kleivan observes that “all instruction had a religious aim,” with “singing, scripture, learning hymns” on the schedule at school.²⁷ Hans Rollmann argues that “the liturgical and biblical nature of the Moravian religious worship and piety required literacy,” making education and literacy “perhaps the most important factors in the indigenization of the Moravian faith among the Labrador Inuit.” He says regular schooling began in Nain and Okak in 1780–81 and that throughout the nineteenth century, and until Okak closed, the school often had 80 to 90 pupils. The Moravians “gave the Labrador Inuit language a written form with a Roman alphabet.”²⁸ School was held in the winter, when more children were likely to be at the stations. At other times, they would be with their families, hunting or fishing.

Jenness agreed that “the education imparted by the Moravians was not profound,” as the missionaries “were not attempting to train their pupils for any environment save the one around them,” but the people were “truly literate,” a claim that could not then be made about residents of outport Newfoundland.²⁹ Instruction was in Inuttitut; English was not taught until the early part of the twentieth century and literacy declined when all instruction was done in English. More than a few Inuit could speak some German and English.³⁰

Trading operations were controlled by the mission’s commercial arm, the Society for the Furtherance of the Gospel Among the Heathen (SFG). It had exclusive rights to trade in the granted territory, and established stores at each station to trade with the Inuit and to keep the resident missionaries supplied, as “no missionary could live on blubber, oil, and fish.”³¹ The majority of Moravian brethren in Labrador were Germans, and trained in Germany,³² but the SFG had always been based in London, due to British laws that dictated trade with British colonies must be done by British ships.³³ The SFG business in Labrador was sufficient to have a ship dedicated to the trade. In 1918, the vessel was a wooden barque of 223 tons net, built in Dundee in 1876, strengthened for Arctic exploration, and originally named Lorna Doone.³⁴ The SFG purchased the ship in 1901, added a 60-horsepower engine, and changed the name to Harmony, the twelfth Moravian ship and the fifth to bear the name.³⁵ When not engaged in Newfoundland a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Maps
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Labrador — Trackless, Unknown, and Wild
• 2. “Our People Are Dying Out”
• 3. The War and the Flu
• 4. The Centre of Infection
• 5. Sandwich Bay and Lake Melville, Autumn 1918
• 6. “Let ’em Die”
• 7. The North Coast, Autumn 1918
• 8. Hundreds Dead in Labrador, Spring 1919
• 9. “In Some Mysterious Manner”
• 10. Aftermath
• Appendix A: “Let ’em Die” Again
• Appendix B: The Lists of the Dead
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright Page