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

In 1892, after receiving complaints about working conditions in the Labrador fishery, the London-based Mission to Deep Sea Fishermen sent an expedition led by Wilfred Grenfell to distribute food and clothing to residents of the Labrador coast and to treat sick and disabled fishermen. This expedition unofficially marked the beginning of what would become known as the Grenfell Mission. Eliot Curwen, a young medical doctor, joined Grenfell on the second Labrador voyage. His journal and photographs provide a record of the expedition and of social conditions in Newfoundland and Labrador a century ago. A religious, well-educated Victorian, Curwen takes us into the heart of the colonial society he encountered, revealing the pervasive sectarianism, the tawdry political world of St John’s, the rudimentary conditions aboard the fishing schooners, and the poverty of the Labrador livyers , and the permanent White settlers who had intermarried with the Inuit.