With no further adventure than once coming to close quarters with an iceberg and escaping without serious damage, the Albert arrived in due time at St. John’s, and Grenfell was at once occupied in preparation for his summer’s work on The Labrador.  Materials with which to construct the Indian Harbor hospital were shipped north by steamer.  Supplies were taken aboard the Albert, and with Dr. Curwin and nurses Williams and Cawardine she sailed for Battle Harbor, where the building to be utilized as a hospital was already erected.

Then the launch Princess May, which had been landed from the Corean, was made ready for sea, and with an engineer and a cook as his crew and Dr. Bobardt as a companion, Dr. Grenfell as skipper put to sea in the tiny craft on July 7th.

There were many pessimistic prophets to see the Princess May off.  From skipper to cook not a man aboard her was familiar with the coast, or could recognize a single landmark or headland either on the Newfoundland coast or on The Labrador.

They were going into rugged, fog-clogged seas.  They might encounter an ice-pack, and the sea was always strewn with menacing icebergs.  True, they had charts, but the charts were most incomplete, and no Newfoundlander sails by them.

The Princess May, a mere cockle-shell, was too small, it was said, for the undertaking.  She was six years old and Grenfell had not given her a try-out.  The consensus of opinion among the wise old Newfoundland seamen who gathered on the wharf as she sailed was that Doctor Grenfell and his crew were much like the three wise men of Gotham who went to sea in a bowl.  Still, not a man of them but would have ventured forth upon the high seas in an ancient rotten old hull of a schooner.  They were acquainted with schooners and the coast, while the little launch Princess May was a new species of craft to them, and was manned by green hands.

“’Tis a dangerous voyage for green hands to be makin’,” said one, “and that small boat were never meant for the sea.”

“Aye, for green hands,” said another.  “They’ll never make un without mishap.”

“If they does, ‘twill be by the mercy o’ God.”

“And how’ll they make harbor, not knowin’ what to sail by?”

“That bit of a craft would never stand half a gale, and if she meets th’ ice she’ll crumple up like an eggshell.”

“And they’ll be havin’ some nasty weather, I says.  We’ll never hear o’ she again or any o’ them on board.”

“Unless by the mercy o’ God.”

Such were the remarks of those ashore as the Princess May steamed down the harbor and out through the narrow channel between the beetling cliffs, into the broad Atlantic.  Dr. Grenfell has confessed that he was not wholly without misgivings himself, and they seemed well founded when, at the end of the first five miles, the engineer reported: