Uncle Dan's Amazing 24th Birthday

The family tree research part of our Newfoundland trip is a few weeks past how, but here in sight of Belle Isle and its notorious strait, one member of my family is in my mind.

Belle Isle in the distance

I never met "Uncle Dan" Butler, as he died long before I was born. He was my great-grandmother's brother, and the first one of his family to move to BC from Newfoundland in 1888  (they had all joined him by 1891). When my great-grandmother died, Dan and his wife adopted my grandmother, age 3, to help look after them in their old age. Granny had other ideas, but that is another story.

Dan and Louisa Butler with my Grandmother Emma McCoskrie

As a young man in Newfoundland, Dan was a capable seaman, and worked on all sorts of boats for fishing, sealing, or surveying - whatever work he could get. His family were all ships' captains, and he rose to that rank as well.

But the one voyage that is top of mind right now is one he took in 1886, as he was turning 24. He wrote about this adventure, on the survey ship Alert (curiously the ship that BC's Alert Bay was named after), in his retirement years living in Victoria. 

He describes sitting atop the masthead, and back then this is what he would have been standing on most likely. Imagine all those hours in the freezing, windy, open Atlantic standing in a barrel! 

What an amazing 24th birthday that must have been, high atop a sailing ship's mast, charged with picking a safe way through the ice, in 24 hour daylight, up and over the top of Labrador and into Hudson's Bay in order to survey a land never surveyed before. 

Going out to the pub with friends seems pretty lame in comparison.

part of Uncle Dan's article
published in the Victoria BC newspaper of the day
 in the early 1940s