Birdseye in those years developed a notable interest in playing poker, which is significant in a man who repeatedly claimed that the secret to his success was a willingness to gamble. His constant advice was “take chances.” He once said, “All human progress is the result of gambling—the first man to use a bow and arrow was gambling his life that it would work.” In Labrador he would write several pages at a time about poker games, often being facetious about the low stakes. “The stakes are enormous and a prospective player must be prepared to lose or double his patrimony in a single night. Buttons are chips. Each button costs one cent. The ante is two buttons. The record jackpot was $1.24. I am out 48 cents after four nights.” On another day, June 3, 1913, he laughingly reported to his journal, “In the evening we all 6 had a game of draw poker and after two hours playing I was 2 cents out.”
The writings also show that he was endlessly resourceful. He fashioned a berry harvester from a tin can and he repaired engines. Hunting, of course, had become his métier. But Birdseye also became a skilled fisherman, catching salmon and trout on the fly, jigging for cod, netting capelin.
In October 1912 he went goose hunting with Grenfell, also an avid sportsman, and Grenfell laughed at what a voracious hunter Bob was. Grenfell, who was constantly drawing, left an ink illustration in Bob’s journal of the bespectacled Birdseye stomping through the marsh with the shotgun stock held high, trying to club a fleeing bird. Some have attributed this drawing to Birdseye, since it was in his journal, but it bears Grenfell’s initials, WTG, and matches the style of the doctor’s other drawings. Another drawing is on a separate piece of paper, and attached is a design for a fictitious commemorative medal of Birdseye bringing a goose to the crew of the Strathcona, who receive it on bended knees.
He had also learned medical skills from assisting Grenfell. He described an operation where Grenfell removed a second thumb from a six-month-old child’s hand. “Miss Gilchrist held the kid and gave it chloroform, my aid was ‘invaluable’ in supporting the hand and the doctor wielded the carving knife … The doctor said, ‘here’s the thumb. Should we hold a funeral service or just chuck it into the fire?’ And he walked to the stove and chucked the meat in the fire—while the mother wore a rather sickly smile.”
Grenfell had enough confidence in his young friend that he left him with medicine, and apparently Birdseye did perform medical assistance for the locals during the winters. He recorded having treated some two dozen patients with complaints such as sore throats, toothaches, pain in the side, and hacking cough.
In his Labrador writing are some early signs of the inventor, the man who, faced with a problem, invents a device to solve it. One day in early 1915 he was at a house that had a tub, and he got to take a bath. He wrote that when he got back to New Jersey, he should invent a foldable rubber tub for traveling, though there is no trace of his ever having built it.
He learned everything he could about nature, about the habits and life cycles of mammals, birds, and fish. He knew that healthy salmon always swallowed capelin tail first as they swam them down, but “slinks,” skinny salmon that have already spawned and returned to the salt water, would swallow them headfirst. He no doubt had opened some salmon stomachs and examined the contents to reach this conclusion. He learned most everything about the life of the salmon, the capelin, and the trout in Labrador. He wrote down his observations on the breeding habits of seabirds. He had to explore and expound on these things, for they excited him. He couldn’t help himself. Once, after lecturing his family for pages about the different species of seals, their habits and coats and life cycles, he wrote, “Well, folks, this dissertation on seals is an accident, pure and simple. Honestly, I didn’t mean to do it.”
More than anything else he wrote about and appeared to think about food. He was virtually obsessed with the subject. Of course food was, as he frequently pointed out, a matter of survival. “Weather and Grub!” he once wrote. “Those are the two fundamental facts on which every other event hinges in this neck of the woods—or rather barrens.” Once, in thanking his family for a package of preserved and canned foods that had arrived after fourteen months in transit, he said that they would be “life savers—really, perhaps.”
In August 1912 he wrote down the following recipe:
Molasses Pie
For dinner today we had my first molasses pie—and it was really mighty good. It was between two crusts. No other flavoring than molasses was used but Mrs. Lewis says that boiling the molasses and adding a few spices improve the flavor of the pie.
Another recipe was offered in November:
For dinner today we had partridge—spruce and white—pie. The five birds were placed in a roasting pan with a little water. Potatoes turnips and onions and boiled for a while on the top of the stove. The dish which had already been lined with pie crust then had two strips of crust put over the top and was baked done in the oven. Yum! Yum!
That first year, with typical Birdseye humor, he often referred to himself in the third person as Rube:
Fried Stewed Partridge
This is Rubes favorite camp dish and is certainly the best way to cook birds I’ve yet run across. He quarters the birds, fries them about half done with salt pork, and then half a pan of water, finishing the cooking with a dish over the top of the pan. This gives moist meat and a lot of delicious gravy to be used instead of butter. Some times he mixes up some flour and pork and stews it with the partridges.
He often mentioned in either his journal or his letters home what he ate for breakfast or dinner. A typical entry was “After an early breakfast of bread and tea and salt fish, we took Fred Brown and Uncle Tom aboard and went to Dove Brook.” Although Birdseye did not provide a great deal of information about himself, very few historical figures have offered so much on what they were eating.
On October 13, 1914, he sat down at his fox farm and began a letter to his family:
Well, folks, having just disposed of some toast and cocoa after a ten-mile ante breakfast walk from Cartwright in a roundabout way to Muddy Bay, I feel in good humor to inflict another chapter of this letter.
Some of his food descriptions were ecstatic. He wrote to his family:
Oh you poor half-starved city folks! Can you stretch your atrophied imaginations to see and smell that great big platter with three roasted ducklings lined all ’round with stuffed snipe, all browned to a turn?
And another time:
Today’s big event was the goose dinner! As I sat at this table all the morning writing the odor of roast goose wafted in to me and gave me such an appetite that I had to eat twice as much as any of the others to satisfy it, I wish some of you folks could have sat down to dinner with us today. There was a big brown roast goose, a dish each of boiled spuds and boiled turnips, and a big bowl of boiled cabbage leaves.
Laughing at himself, he wrote to his family on May 10, 1915, “Every page has to contain something about food. So here are the two items of principal interest today.” They were that he had “begged” a can of real butter from a neighbor and that he was able to get some fresh seal meat.
He often joked about his food obsession to his family. He once wrote toward the end of a very long letter, “Well! Well! I’ve taken time out for a mug-up of mince pie (honest, and mighty good too) and now feel equal to a few more sentences. Me thinks I can stand more of this than you folks can.”
And as was always his style, the more exotic the food, the more enthusiastically he received it. His palate, like his mind, was endlessly curious. He wrote to his parents that a porcupine he had eaten was “unexpectedly tender, in spite of the beasts age and sex.” He described as the “pièce de résistance” of “one of the most scrumptious meals I ever ate” a lynx that had marinated for an entire month in sherry and was then stewed and served with a sauce made from the marinade. He said he ate polar bear and professed a particular fondness for the front half of a skunk.
He loved seal meat, especially that of the ringed seal, which he correctly
identified as Phoca hispida, except for old males. He informed his family, “ ’orned Howl (horned-owl) for Sunday dinner—does that sound good? Well, it was good, no matter how it sounds.” He also ate beaver and a wide variety of birds, including hawks. He explained to his family that he was able to eat fresh meat every day by having “no fool prejudices” and eating “anything that tastes good.” He was so enthusiastic about these foods that he threatened to can some of them and bring them back to New Jersey “so you folks could sample them.”
He even studied local books to learn about food traditions and was very excited when a book at the Grenfell Mission explained the English origin of the Labradoreans’ tradition of eating pea soup on Saturday nights.
As he approached his thirties, Bob was a man who had not yet decided what to do with himself. He did not yet think of himself as an inventor. He certainly dreamed of being more than just a memorable character, though he wanted that as well, posing for a portrait in sealskins that bears a striking resemblance to a well-known photograph of Robert Peary. But on closer examination, inside the sealskin hood is not the solemn-faced admiral with the big mustache but a clean-shaven man with thick glasses and a huge smile, incapable of concealing how funny he thought he looked in the outfit.
Despite his truncated education, he thought of himself as a biologist. Perhaps that was why he continued to keep a field journal. But after his decision in 1912 that he did not want to be a theoretical scientist, he focused on commercial opportunities. Running out of money to finish college may have traumatized him. He came from a family that to an unusual extent for the nineteenth century believed in college education, even for the girls. All his life he found a variety of ways of referring to his lack of education, often talking about the things he didn’t know.
In Labrador he was still searching for his career, but he already seemed drawn to the idea of having numerous careers, something he took great pride in later. Toward the end of his life he liked to tell the story about a young man asking him if he had it to do over, would he choose the same occupation, and his answer was “Which occupation?”
In Labrador he was still very interested in photography. When he first arrived, after less than a week there, he shipped back his first six rolls of film. The locals loved to pose for pictures, which they called being sketched off, as in “Would you sketch off me?” Would you take my picture? His first year there he seemed to have had the idea of a book of photographs of Labrador. In July 1913, when in New York, he dropped off a proposal with photos at Scribner’s. He never commented on the response, but no book deal was forthcoming. On September 5, back in St. John’s, Newfoundland, Birdseye sold twenty-five prints to a publisher to be used in a picture book on Labrador. He sold the prints for $1 each and retained all future rights. Bob was always astute about his business agreements.
He also seemed interested in writing, which may have been influenced by Grenfell, who wrote and published engaging tales of the people he met in Labrador. Then, too, Birdseye’s father and his sister Miriam were regularly publishing books. In November 1913, Outing, a sportsmen’s magazine from New York, published an article by Birdseye titled “Camping in a Labrador Snow-Hole,” about an incident that had happened a year earlier. The style was not unlike that of his journals, regularly stopping to tell you what he ate. “We had a cup of tea and stewed seal meat at Tom Paliser’s house,” he explained in the first paragraph. Later in the day they made a pudding of rice and raisins. They were traveling by dogsled, and he had a hired driver. The next morning they had salt cod, bread and molasses, and tea for breakfast. He described how difficult it was to manage a dog team and to travel by sled and how they were trapped in a blizzard for three days with nothing to eat but raisins, prunes, rice, and the candy he always carried to give out to children. The experience nearly put an early end to Bob Birdseye, and in fact five of his dogs did not survive. The writing did not show much promise, nor was a flair for storytelling exhibited, and it did not even have the charm of a Grenfell story. But it was illustrated with his photographs, the admiral-in-sealskins portrait, and shots of his sled and dog team.
A month later Outing came out with his article titled “The Truth About Fox Farming.” This was more like the Birdseye who would be known in later years—everything you could imagine about fox farming, complete with his diagrams and of course a few photographs of his and other fox farms. His photography was without artifice, intended purely to document. It was amateurish, but at this time there were not many amateur photographers, so he was a pioneer.
While the fox piece seemed the type of writing for which Birdseye was most suited, he was still experimenting. And he was not afraid to try new things. In 1915, Outing published Bob’s first work of fiction, destined to be his only such work, “Hard Luck on the Labrador.” Birdseye still liked fiction and often read novels and detective stories along with nonfiction. This very short piece does not have a lot of story. A man in Labrador is out hunting seals. He misses one, then he hits another but only wounds it, and the seal escapes. The story is a first-person narrative written in an attempt at Labrador dialect that is barely readable: “So after we’d et our hard-bread and drinked our tea we started back home in d’ flat.” Yes, he didn’t forget to tell us what his character ate. He could also not resist being informative, so when the narrator gave local names for wildlife, Birdseye added the correct name in parentheses.
In late June 1913, with great excitement, Birdseye went back for a visit to Montclair. He spent a lot of time with his brother Kellogg and some time with his father, who accompanied him to visit Hammond. Hammond seemed very pleased with Birdseye’s report and proposed forming a small company and even issuing stock. Birdseye would then draw a generous salary. Bob, for his part, neglected to mention that his entire Sandwich Bay operation, in a place aptly named Muddy Bay, had been obliterated by spring flooding. Hammond gave him money not only to buy supplies but also to buy a boat. Somewhere that summer between lunches with Kellogg, visits to Kellogg’s office, visits to his father’s office, meetings with Hammond and meetings with furriers, showing his photography book proposal to Scribner’s, and even a visit to Amherst, Bob probably managed to see Eleanor in Washington or New York. But he mentioned nothing of this in his journal, and by August 28 he was back in Newfoundland preparing for Labrador’s early winter.
The following summer of 1914 he visited home again. It seemed almost certain that summer that Europe was about to go to war. This had huge implications for Birdseye’s fox business since not only did he get his cash flow from British investors—possibly a Grenfell connection—but also the primary market for fox fur was Europe. He wrote in his journal, “Because of the war possibly causing some of the pledged English underscriptions to be withdrawn we might get into serious straights [sic], for want of capital.”
Birdseye scrambled in New York. He struggled to catch Hammond in between the young financier’s regular summer trips to Gloucester, and met with his father and brother Kellogg in Amherst, and met in New York with his brother Henry, who was also an investor in the company. He tried and failed to get the Hudson’s Bay Company to buy him out.
In any event he didn’t have much to sell. After two years in which he traveled, by his estimate, five thousand miles by dogsled gathering foxes, his business had been closed by the Newfoundland government, which finally banned the export of live foxes from Labrador and Newfoundland. This came at a time when the conventional wisdom was that the high-quality fur business was dying. American women seldom wore such furs. It was a European look, and Europe was about to be consumed with war. The principal fur centers, London and Leipzig, were both shutting down. The Hudson’s Bay Company and Revillon Frères stopped buying furs.
The fur market in New York was almost as dismal. Top-quality ermines were selling for fifteen cents each. But Bob saw opportunity. The United States, the one developed country that was not at war, was prospering. Surely this new prosperity would be reflected in fashionable women in furs, esp
ecially with pelts available for bargain prices. This was Birdseye’s kind of gamble. And there was one thing that could be seen over and over again at critical moments: Bob Birdseye was a great salesman. His obvious intelligence, his ability to articulate his ideas, and his contagious enthusiasm almost always carried him through. He convinced a New York furrier, who staked him to $8,000.
Back in Labrador he began killing his foxes, freezing them by packing them in snow, and sending them to be skinned. He also started buying quality pelts wherever he could find them for cut-rate prices. He traveled thousands of miles by dogsled once again, buying furs, offering low prices but in cash. The big fur buyers rarely offered cash, so he was able to make very good deals. Grenfell, who had long fought to get companies to pay cash to the locals, was able to raise capital for Birdseye also. On one trip, recorded on March 27, he had bought pelts of three red foxes, eight silver, sixty-one marten, five lynx, twelve mink, and forty-two weasels for $1,838. Most of the value was in the silver foxes. Labradoreans were selling their furs for historically low prices. He wrote of how he bought one top-quality silver fox that a year before would have been worth $4,000 for $375.
“The people were so hard up they had to sell their fur,” Birdseye wrote to his parents. “And they certainly were glad to have me buy it, for no one else was doing so.” In fact, the people were so hard up that soon he stopped his buying trips because they brought furs to sell to him. He wrote that they would take “any price I see fit to give.” He did express some remorse for exploiting poor and desperate people, even commenting on how badly dressed their children were with their leaky boots. But he assuaged his conscience, perhaps a little too easily, by pointing out that he was still paying “twice what the Hudson Bay Company is giving.” By the end of 1914 he had cornered the Labrador fur market and cleared $6,000 profit, a considerable sum at the time.
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