All of the people, as we have seen, live on the seacoast, and not inland.  Only wandering Indians live in the interior.  Though Labrador is nearly as large as Alaska, there is no permanent dwelling in the whole interior.  It is a vast, trackless, uninhabited wilderness of stunted forests and wide, naked barrens.

The Liveyeres, as the natives, other than Indians and Eskimos, are called, have no other occupation than trapping and hunting in winter, and fishing in summer.  Their winter cabins are at the heads of deep bays, in the edge of the forest.  In the summer they move to their fishing places farther down the bays or on scattered, barren islands, where they live in rude huts or, sometimes, in tents.  They catch cod chiefly, but also, at the mouths of rivers, salmon and trout.  All the fish are salted, and, like the furs caught in winter, bartered to traders for tea and flour and pork and other necessities of life.

To make the acquaintance of these scattered people, along hundreds of miles of coast, was a big undertaking.  And then, too, there were the settlements in the north of Newfoundland, among whose people he was to work.  Doctor Grenfell, and his assistants were the only doctors that any of them could call upon.

And there were the fishermen of the fleet.  The twenty-five thousand or more men, women and children attached to the Newfoundland summer fisheries on The Labrador formed a temporary summer population.

He could not hope, of course, in the two or three months they were there, to get on intimate terms with all of them, but he was to meet as many as he could, and renew and increase both his acquaintances and his service of the year before.  With the Princess May to visit the sick folk ashore, and the hospital ship Albert, which was to serve, in a manner, as a sea ambulance to take serious cases to the new hospitals at Indian Harbor and Battle Harbor, Doctor Grenfell felt that he had made a good start.

As already suggested, this was an adventurous voyage.  Twice that summer the Princess May went aground on the rocks, and once the Albert was fastened on a reef.  Both vessels lost sections of their keels, but otherwise, due to good seamanship, escaped with minor injuries.

At every place the Doctor visited he made a record of the people.  After the names of the poorer and destitute ones was listed the things of which they were most in need.

In one poor little cabin the mother of a large family had, though ill, kept to her duties in and out of the house until she could stand on her feet no longer, and when Doctor Grenfell entered the cabin he found her lying helpless on a rough couch of boards, with scarce enough bed clothing to cover her.  Some half-clad children shivered behind a miserable broken stove, which radiated little heat but sent forth much smoke.  The haggard and worn out father was walking up and down the chill room with a wee mite of a baby in his arms, while it cried pitifully for food.  Like all the family the poor little thing was starving.