The good ship Araguaya of the Royal Mail Steam Packet Line was under commission during the war as a Canadian hospital ship on the North Atlantic. She and her sister ship the Essequibo, with the Llandovery Castle and Letitia, composed the fleet used to convey our wounded from the old land to Canada. The Letitia was wrecked in a fog on the rocks near Halifax with no loss of lives. The Llandovery Castle was sunk by a submarine while returning empty to England. Mostly all the ship's officers, M.O.'s, nurses, and crew were drowned or shot by the fiend who commanded the U-boat. The chaplain, Capt. McPhail, was killed. By strange chance his body, with life-belt, was carried towards France and months afterwards was found on the beach and buried.
Thank God all the German submarines were not run by such as sank the Llandovery. I have a snapshot taken from the deck of the Essequibo of a U-boat which stopped that ship, searched her thoroughly but courteously and then let her go unharmed.
I spent ten months as chaplain on the Araguaya and a happy time it was. That was the "cushiest" job I have ever had. We were under cover all the time, had abundance of good food and luxuries for everyone, and every device that money could buy to entertain our patients on their nine-day trip across. Besides, in my special work I had a flock which never strayed far from me. They couldn't!
Practically all the staterooms had been taken out, only sufficient being left for M.O's, nurses, and ship's officers. This made fine, large, airy wards for the bed cases, fitted with swinging cots so that they did not feel the roll of the vessel. I had a comfortable room all to myself, for Col. Whidden and later Col. Murray were both very considerate of my comfort.
You will be interested to know that at the celebration of the completion of the Kiel Canal, the Araguaya was loaned by the R.M.S.P. Co. to the Kaiser for use as his private yacht during the regatta, as a token of British goodwill. The suite of rooms our O.C. used had been the Kaiser's, and mine was one of those that "Little Willie" had occupied!
The ship's officers and crew were all first-class seamen of heroic stuff. The majority of them had been through the dread experience of being torpedoed, some two or three times, and had seen many of their mates shot down or drowned. Yet here they were from stoke-hold to pilot-house carrying on as cheerfully as ever.
Capt. Barrett, the skipper, a short, stout, ruddy-faced Englishman sat at the head of the table, with our O.C. and officers to his right and his own officers to his left. Many a merry meal we had together there. I can hear Major Shillington's steadying voice when he thought he saw trouble ahead in our arguments, Gunn with the happy laugh, Langham bringing us down to cold, hard facts, and the others good men all, with whom I companied those days. Tell your choicest funny story and you'd hear Capt. Johnson's stage-whisper, "I kicked the slats out of my cradle the first time I heard that!" I often wore my tartan uniform for "old-time's" sake, and the Cameron trousers always started the skipper bemoaning that now we'd have a stormy night since the padre had put on his "tempestuous pants." Of course we frequently fought the question out around the table. I based my claim to wear Highland garb, blow high or blow low, not only on my connection with the 43rd, but because I was a thorough-bred Scot. I carried the war into the enemy's country by maintaining that it was wrong to let anyone wear it but those of Scottish extraction. My own Camerons were nearly all Scots, this I know from careful official census taken in France. We had ten or fifteen per cent. who did not belong to "the elect," but they became fine fellows from being continually in such good company, and I find no fault with them for wearing the kilts. But the principle is wrong. Suppose on the field of battle a fierce and haughty Prussian surrendered to a kilted man whom he thought to be a Scot, only to find on getting back to the corral that his captor was a peaceful Doukhobor in kilts. What a humiliation and what cruelty! I actually met an officer in France belonging to a Canadian Kiltie battalion (not ours) who asked me the meaning of the words "Dinna Forget," the title of a book which lay before him on the table. I asked him what he thought it was. He said "I suppose the name of a girl, the heroine of the story, 'Dinna' maybe a local way of spelling 'Dinah,' and 'Forget' is her surname. That's my guess." He was in full, Scottish, regimental field-uniform when he spoke these words! I was dumb for a little before I could tell him what the words really meant. It is not the claim of superiority of race but simply a matter of honest practice. The tartan costume has become the recognized badge of Scottish birth or ancestry. It is therefore perpetrating a fraud upon the public for a man of any other race to parade in this distinctively national garb.
It would fill too many pages even to outline the varied aspects of our life aboard the boat. Matron Shaw and her noble band of nurses should have a page to themselves. We carried about nine hundred patients each trip and after two days out, when they became able to hear "The Return of the Swallow" recited without getting pale around the gills, everything went along with a hum. There were lectures, concerts, movies, shovelboard and deck tennis tournaments, dozens of phonographs and all sorts of parlor games and books, and on Sunday our religious services. The boys were all glad to be going home to Canada and they were easily entertained.
The great event was, of course, our first sight of land and then the disembarkation. The later trips we unloaded at Portland, Maine, and I cannot recollect having seen a more magnificent demonstration of public good-will than was given us by those Yankees. The first time we put in there, while the boat was still twenty feet away from the dock the thousands of people on the wharf commenced to cheer and the bands to play, and we were bombarded with candies, cigars, cigarettes and fruit. Much of it fell into the water. When we tied up a score of committees came aboard and almost submerged us under endless quantities of oranges, apples, bananas, grapes, dough-nuts, cake, sandwiches, ice-cream, tea, coffee and soft drinks, and expensive candies and everything else that we could eat or drink, that the law would allow, in superabundance. They took our hundreds of letters and many telegrams and sent them without costing us a penny. The latest newspapers, bouquets, of choice flowers for everyone, concert parties, and indeed everything good that kind hearts could think of was showered upon us. I remember a western bed-patient asked me if I thought they would get him a plug of a special brand of chewing tobacco. He hadn't been able to buy it in four years overseas and it was his favorite. "Sure thing," one of them said and in half-an-hour two men came aboard lugging along enough of that tobacco to stock a small store! I cannot go further into details. Enough to say that every trip it was the same, except that their hospitality became more systematized. Probably fifteen thousand wounded Canadian soldiers passed through Portland on their way home, and I know they will find it hard to forget the free-handed, warm-hearted welcome they got in that city. This memory will surely be a leaven working towards the maintenance and development of peace and good-will between Canada and the United States.
But I must tell my story of the North. One trip Major Dick Shillington persuaded me to give them a Klondike evening. We gathered down below in "H" Mess and there I told something of the life-story of my old friend of by-gone days, a trail-blazer and prospector, Duncan McLeod.
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When first I met Duncan McLeod, "Cassiar Mac" he was commonly called, he and his partner, John Donaldson, both old men, were working far up a tributary of Gold Bottom Creek which had not yet been fully prospected. Each liked to have his own house and do his own cooking, and so they lived within a few yards of each other in the creek bottom at the foot of the mountain summit that rose between them and Indian River. My trail over to the other creeks passed across their ground, and when we became friends I seldom failed to arrange my fortnightly trip over the divide so as to reach their place about dusk. I would have supper with one or the other and stay the night.
McLeod was an old-country Scot, Donaldson born of Scottish parents in Glengarry county, Ontario. I am not using their real names, but they were real men. One of them, Donaldson, is still living in the wilds of the Yukon, still prospecting. He was the first white man the Teslin Indians had seen and known. They looked upon him as their "Hi-yu-tyee," a sort of super-chief, during the years he lived near them. He had been just and kind with them, and his consequent influence saved occasional serious friction between the Indians and whites from becoming murder or massacre.
After supper we would all three gather in one of the cabins and I would hear good talk until far towards midnight. Then there would be a pause and McLeod would say, "Well, Mr. Pringle, I think it is............