Henry Gordon

This cultured Englishman as the St John's Free Press called Henry Gordon, worked through the great influenza epidemic that swept Labrador at the end of the Great War, as it swept most of the world. Henry Gordon cut firewood for the sick, carried water, dug graves in the frozen earth, read the offices of the dead.  The Free Press was glad to speak well of him and his little book A Winter in Labrador 1918-1919. 

The early hours of the 1919 New Year’s Day in Labrador found the Reverend Henry Gordon making a simple breakfast by candlelight. He was anxious to go on to his own home in Cartwright but must see to two more burials, two that he dreaded.   He said in his diary that he was miserably cold in those early hours and so went on ahead for a time while the others collected the dogs.

At about 7:30 Gordon and his party reached Cape Porcupine and the little shack that had seen so much misery. Herbert Earl had been dead two months and his daughter six weeks. Father and daughter lay side by side in the same bunk, as they died.

The burial party spread an old sail on the floor of the shack with the intention of wrapping Herbert Earl in it, as a shroud.   They found, however, that father and daughter were bound by the ice, the one to the other, so they wrapped the sail around both and buried them in one grave, dug in a sawdust pit because the ground was frozen.

When Henry Gordon at last reached his home, he found snow in his living room.