FROZEN NORTH

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXI, Issue 21763, 31 March 1934, Page 3 (Supplement)

FROZEN NORTH

HARDSHIPS FOR WOMEN A Yorkshire girl lay three days on a stretcher suffering from appendicitis while a dog team rushed her over the snow and ice to a town 150 miles away. She is better now, and wants to go back. The Yorkshire girl is Miss Florence Hirst, a farmer's daughter, of Treeton, Rotherham. She and four other white people have been working for four years as missionaries and teachers among the Eskimos and Red Indians at Shingle Point, 011 the North Canadian coast. The other four are Canadians. " 1 never want to return to civilisation," Miss Hirst said. "We were sent out from Toronto to open a mission post ' somewhere along the north coast.' We sailed down the Mackenzie ■ River in the only few weeks of summer that exist up there, and arrived at last at Shingle Point. The long winter soon came 011 us.

" We found a group of deserted huts which had once been used by the old Hudson Bay fur traders, and we turned these into homes and schoolrooms. On one side lay hundreds of miles of uninhabited, snow-covered land; 011 the other the frozen sea. One could almost feel the White Silence. Eskimos and Indians came from as far away as 1000 miles, bringing their children to our school. They pay us in furs when the season is good.

" Wolves and bears trouble us little. Several times my face was frozen when [ went outside during the winter, but 1 soon grew used to that. Yes, lam anxious to go back."