ON THE WIRELESS FRONTIER

Marlborough Express, Volume XLIII, Issue 307, 31 December 1909, Page 2

ON THE WIRELESS FRONTIER

A dozen men. link with the world a thousand miles of wilderness tip beyond the gateway of the St. Lawrence where the shreds of civilisation fray out against the barrier of the great North. They do it with a wireless key and the messages they receive and send pass over barren wastes where no man lives and land wires have never been strung.

A dozen there are who serve as operators; others of the repairing crew and the supplying, department come and go, but these dozen men are year after year held practically prisoners on the bald cliffs of Labrador and Newfoundland before the key of the wireless. They send through the- air the tales of ships that come and go, reports that may interest St. John's or Montreal shipping exchanges; relay from the one to the other the meagre commercial messages that must pass from dealer to fisherman; send down to the land telegraphs the occasional news of shipwrecks and soa sufferings that finds a way into the papers.' Between Indian Harbour,^ the northernmost wireless post on the Atlantic coast, and Cape Ray in Newfoundland, where the cable from the mainland of Nova Scotia conies out.of the sea> there are seven stations of the wireless. Each station is in the hands of two men, an operator and an engineer, who may also relieve a trick at the key in time of^ necessity. Just those two to keep intact, the line of communication between the world below and 55 north during the months that the seas are free of ice and ships are moving from one fiord to another along the granite coast. There i,s no part of the Atlantic coast that is so forbidding as that which' stretches from the' Quebec side of the; Gulf of St. Lawrence tip to the ice fields of Baffin Land. It is barren with the desolation of unclothed mother rock, pounded by the Arctic current that bears down from the Greenland shore and fringed the" year round either with solid fields of ice, as in the winter and early spring, or by icebergs broken from the pack "and carried down to melt in the warmer -waters below.

The folk that lxVe along this coast are the fishermen, M'hose only home for half th» year1 is the rank-smelling fo'castle or the hut by the side of the fish flakes ashore. Even this, sparse population is migratory; in the winter when the ice comes' all. of the trawlers put down to a home port in Newfoundland, and the number of hardy people who $tay out the months of silence along the Labrador coast is very small. A crag high above the spray, bald of any verdure and windswept; at its summit the spindle mast guyed in place by steel cables and somewhere in a? crevice of the rocks beneath a 10 by 12 hut; that is the wireless station at Battle Harbour, al Point Amour or Point Riche. They're all alike, each as lonely as its neighbour ; each a sentinel of dwindling civilisation standing against the Arctic wjhds and the solitude, of the northern places. In -~tlie; lower stiations the-jijvireless ma^ir'hai a companion lighthouse to keep him from utter desolation, but at the two upper stp,tiotis ther is not even the companionable shaft ..of the light to share the bleak headland where stand the masts. '■■"'■:•■"

At Indian Harbour two brothers keep the end of the wireless span open. Their names are Barrett. There is a very small settlement at Indian Harbour, huddled down in the crack of a fiord, above which the cliff that carries the station towers in almost inaccessible height. Here the wireless men pick up the first word from the fishermen and traders who round Cape Chudleigh from Hudson Bay on the homeward rovage. . Occasionally a Dominion Government ship which Has been nosing around the archipelago beyond Baffin Land puts into Indian Harbour, and once in ~ a blue moon an Arctic explorer with his ship slips into the narrow harbour with a tale to stir excitement. Just a little over a month ago the Barrett brothers heard from the lips of a survivor the grim tale of the wreck of the British whaler Snowdrop in Hudson Bay and the sufferings and death of all but one of her] crew in Baffin Land. They put the j story through the air, and it was relayed down to- civilisation. to find place,in the newspapers. ! At Battle Harbour Gordon Sprackling, a young Nova Scotian, is the Marconi operator, and Leonard Stephenson nis engineer. Compared with some of their fellows Sprackling i and Stephenson are fortunate in the P environment of a metropolis. Battle Harbour is quite a place. It i has fully thirty houses, and in the height of the cod season almost a hundred people live there. Then, too, there is Dr. Wilfred GrenfelPs permanent hospital, and during all the year either the head of the mission or some of his assistants are there to tend to the sick who have been picked up along the coast by Dr. Grenfell's ship, the Strathcona. But the wireless men are far from the madding crowd even at that. To reach the wireless station reqiiires a nice training in alpine climbing, a sure foot and an undisturbed sense of balance.

Back of the little shelf above the water's edge upon which the settle-

■ merit is built the cliff of pink granite rises'.'almost as steeply as the spire of a church for full three hundred feet. There is a. path that zigzags its way, up tie face of this cliff, crossing a gorge over a single wide board1 that is not even fixed at. the ends. Where the path comes suddenly to the summit the wind that normally swoops across the cliff face at twenty-five miles and often hoists to a forty-five mile gait threatens to whip the clothes off the adventurer's back or to pitch him into the sea below. Here in a cleft below the summit of the cliff is the wireless but, and in this hut less than two months ago events occurred which need recording. They should be recorded because they measure the stamina of the men who work # the wireless in. this cheerless country. j The polar ship Roosevelt worked her way into the narrow harbour one. sunny morning, and while, the town seethed with excitement Commander Peary climbed the crag to the wireless station to interview Sprackling. He told the operator that he wanted to send to the world below his account of the discovery of the North Pole. He believed that he could put it ou the land wire .at Chateau Baydown the coast, but the Avi reless men at Indian Harbour had told him that ihe Dominion Government.had abandoned that land wire since, last he had come down from the North* and he must use the wireless; Could the wireless do it? Sprackling said that it could. Then lie called the man at Belle Isle over the strait a hundred miles away.'and told him to pass the word along.the line that ithere was big work .ahfead. The word was^ passed down to tha ! office of the management in Ottawa, and with that word went the volunteer statement of each of the wireless operators that he would stick to his post until the.job was finished. After that Sprackling took the first consignment'Of Peary's copy-and began flashing it to the next station. From, that time until the end of the fifth day thereafter he worked, and the other operators at their desks down the coast/worked" as no wireless men have had to do- since Marconi learned how to harness the air with the electric spark, i > * PL" Sprackling's experience was the experience of all of them. He worked twenty hours out of every twentyfour for five days alone and unaided save for the.relief his engineer gave him while he was eating bis meals. Sprackling and all the others pounded tlie key ' during those five days, not knowing at what minute *the spark would fail because of the strain put upon the apparatus. At times .each of > them had to go back and repeat, correct and aniend what had already been sent. _ Those in the stations • below Sprackling had a double weight put on their nerves, for they had first to sit long hours with the receivers at their ears, straining to catch the code that came through the ail- > then to.close the receiving key and turn to the seiider,' to relay the passage to1 the station below. The way the material was handled gave the men a much-needed break from the terrific stress imposed uponl them, Sprackling, at- Battle Harbour> would send two, three or four thousand words, then stop. Each succeeding station below would receive, then Upward this amount, and not until it had ell been put upon the cables at Cape Ray would the next instalment be'launched. . ■.