In 1929, Newfoundland was a self-governing Dominion, as were Canada, Australia, and other “white” countries within the British Empire. Newfoundland’s territory consisted of the seventh largest island in the world, positioned where the Labrador Sea meets the Gulf Stream in the Northwest Atlantic Ocean, and the vast continental land mass of Aboriginal Labrador. The island had been settled by Europeans from the British Isles, the Channel Islands, France, the Iberian Peninsula, and elsewhere for hundreds of years—despite an early British ban on settlement. Some of the settlers married indigenous Mi’kmaq, a few, the Beothuck, members of a small nation that disappeared due to exposure to unfamiliar diseases, loss of access to the seals and fish on the coast, and conflict with those who now encroached on their land.
The settlers and the nations of Europe who sent their fishing fleets were initially attracted by the richest cod fishery in the world. Those who snuck onto the island and dared to over-winter established hundreds of coastal villages where they fished every summer. During the harsh months of November through March they repaired to inland quarters which gave them access to wood and fur-bearing animals.
The island never industrialized in the manner of urbanized countries in Europe and North America; instead, raw materials have always been exported, as they are to this day. This has left Newfoundland relatively cash-poor and sparsely populated but also with fresh air and an enviable slower-paced way of life that persists even into the early twenty-first century.
In 1929, almost thirteen thousand people lived in the seventy-eight communities of the Burin Peninsula, a boot-shaped piece of land that hangs off Newfoundland’s South Coast. The peninsula juts out into the North Atlantic as if it is trying to reach the once cod-rich Grand Banks, which have been its life force. Fortune Bay is on one side of the peninsula; Placentia Bay, Newfoundland’s largest bay, on the other. For generations the people of the peninsula were engaged in the shore fishery, made up of small boats out of which they fished seasonally, or the Banks fishery, which consisted of schooners that went to the Grand Banks and other offshore locales. They traded their fish to merchants who supplied them with food staples and other goods and a frequently perennial debt burden; this was called the truck system. In turn, their fish went to markets in the West Indies, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Greece, and South America, delivered in Newfoundland schooners. Thus, some Burin Peninsula fishermen were among the most well travelled people in the world. They brought back oranges and bananas for their children, silk and satin for their wives, Jamaican rum for themselves, as well as rich stories to fire everyone’s imaginations.
At first, the 1929 October Bank Crash, which signalled the beginning of the Great Depression, seemed not to mean much to the rural people of the Burin Peninsula. Later, when fish prices dropped dramatically, its effects would become startlingly clear to them and to Newfoundlanders in general, as they would to people all over the western world.
Even now, though, the people of the Burin Peninsula remember 1929 for the tidal wave, the great tsunami caused by an underwater earthquake that struck their shores. The ruptures from the deep that night measured 7.2 on the Richter scale and caused the sea floor to move several yards. The subterranean quake forced waves across the ocean at speeds of more than eight hundred kilometres an hour. Most tsunamis develop in the Ring of Fire, the region that encircles the Pacific Ocean. Although tidal waves (as they are commonly but mistakenly called in this part of the world) are not unknown in Newfoundland, the island is obviously far away from the Ring of Fire. Thus, the tsunami that hit the Burin Peninsula came as a complete shock to the people who lived there. This book tells their story.