From the South Coast of Newfoundland comes a tale of tragedy most appalling, following the earthquake of Monday evening 18th. Owing to communications systems having been out of operation by the quake and storms, news of the tragedy was tardy in coming in, and the first intimation of the seriousness of the disaster was conveyed in a message to the Prime Minister from the captain of the S.S. Portia dated from Cape Race last Thursday, which read as follows: “Burin experienced very severe earth tremors 5:05 pm, tidal wave which swept everything waterfront, 16 dwelling houses with 9 lives mostly women and children gone, 4 bodies recovered. All communication of wire cut off. Report is that 18 lives were lost at Lord’s Cove and Lamaline.”
Nature showed no mercy to the people of the Burin Peninsula on the morning following the most harrowing event of their lives. November 19, 1929 dawned bitterly cold, and iciness seemed rooted deep in the earth. Soon snow fell, slowly at first and then thick and fast. Before long the villages of the peninsula were enveloped in a cold, cruel, blinding white. The wind howled like an angry husky dog at night, blowing the bodies of dead sheep into the waters of Lord’s Cove and Lamaline, and dashing teapots and broken dishes upon the rocks that hugged the shores of Burin and St. Lawrence. Pieces of lace curtain flew on the waves that the post-tsunami winds whipped up. If an airplane had been able to defy the winds and fly over the Burin Peninsula, its occupants would have seen clapboard floating like matchsticks and houses bobbing here and there, oddly, as if they were enjoying their sea-going excursion after decades of being anchored to land. Entire harbours were choked with the carcasses of cows, bulls, and goats, and with broken barns, wrecked fences, and dwellings cut in half by waves that had the sharpness of saws.
Meanwhile, wave-battered houses onshore sheltered greyfaced, hollow-eyed people who shivered at the sight of the snowflakes falling from the sky. These people were the homeless. Among their number were Patrick Rennie and his motherless sons of Lord’s Cove; David and Jessie Hipditch of Point au Gaul who had lost their three children; William and Carrie Brushett and their children of Kelly’s Cove; Vincent Kelly, who had lost his wife, Frances, and daughter, Dorothy, to the tidal wave; the widower, Joseph Cusack, of St. Lawrence; and numerous families in the severely stricken communities of Taylor’s Bay in the south and Port au Bras in the north.
Tragedy was general on the lower half of the Burin Peninsula following the tsunami. So was confusion. The Corner Brook Western Star was not unique as it laboured to determine the extent of the damage and loss of life. In the days immediately after the quake the Burin Peninsula was virtually cut off from the rest of the country and the world. In turn, Newfoundland itself was unable to communicate with the outside because of the tidal wave and the damage it wrought. The Bay Roberts Cable Station reported that cable lines between Newfoundland and New York were damaged and inoperable. The cable ships Lord Kelvin and Cyrus Field located the cable breaks 360 miles south of St. John’s. There were twenty-eight breaks in more than 212 oceanic cables near the epicentre of the quake. The French government had its own cables—three in total—and these, too, were broken. Fifty new miles of cable would be required to make the repairs at a cost of $400,000 in 1929 dollars. The French estimated that the repairs would take no less than two years.
Within the country, the main means of transportation was boat. Thus, sea travel and wireless would have to be relied upon to convey information about the effects of the tsunami in the towns and villages of the Burin Peninsula. One of those eager to get the message out was George Bartlett, owner of a large general store in the town of Burin. Bartlett’s store would go down in legend because of what happened to it on the night of November 18, 1929. The store was housed in a building fifty-five feet by thirty feet, anchored on a concrete foundation. There were no witnesses to the event, but Bartlett’s store had turned 180 degrees and travelled two hundred feet that strange night. Amazingly, the building was not destroyed; it landed in a neighbour’s yard, right up against their house, completely intact. Even more remarkable was the fact that not one item inside the store, including dishes, lamps, and inkwells, was broken or even disturbed.
Two days later, Bartlett took pen to paper to alert Newfoundland’s prime minister of the gravity of the situation facing his neighbours.
Burin North, Nov. 20, 1929
Right Hon. Sir Richard Squires K.C.M.G.,
Prime Minister
Dear Sir:-
This is to acquaint you of a terrible disaster that has overtaken Burin and adjacent settlements, and to appeal to you and your Cabinet to send help quickly. All the waterfront of Great Burin consisting of stores and stages were swept away with all fishing gear and provisions for the winter. Burin proper all the waterfront is damaged more or less I myself have lost considerably but of that I will not mention.
Port au Bras had been cleaned out nothing left standing except a few houses, there has been a loss of seven lives at that place. Foots Cove all waterfront gone with loss of three lives. Rock Harbour has been swept also, I hear also that St. Lawrence is swept clean but as the telegraph lines are down we cannot hear. The S.S. Daisy has gone there and no doubt you will get a full report from them. After the quake a tidal wave of about 15 feet swept this part of the coast and you know what that meant when all stores etc, are only built about five feet above high water line. The conditions are beyond describing as people lost all their coal provisions for the winter, the merchants are in practically the same state and one can hardly help the other. My own nerves are so shaken I can hardly write coherently or legibly as only a person that has gone through such an experience can understand it.
Organized relief should be undertaken as quickly as possible as the winter will soon be on us and hundreds of people have lost their all. As no doubt you will get a full report from Official Circles, you will be able to judge. My object in writing is to stress the urgency of immediate help to the stricken places. Some have no home or any means or getting anything to rebuild and have nothing only what they could catch from the water as they fled from their houses. I know the appeal will not be in vain.
Nineteen-year-old Isabel Gibbons was the telegraph operator in Marystown on the Burin Peninsula in November, 1929, when the waves came crashing into the shores. Isabel was carrying on a family tradition that included her uncle who had worked with Western Union in New York and her older sister, Elizabeth, who worked with the same company in Boston. Isabel came from St. Mary’s on the Avalon Peninsula in eastern Newfoundland, where her paternal grandmother was the first operator. In turn, Mrs. Gibbons passed on her skills to her son, Isabel’s father, who taught his daughters telegraphy, a valuable communication tool in those days. Mrs. Gibbons ran the telegraph office in her home. It was no surprise, then, that her four daughters became telegraph operators, too.
Isabel started work in Marystown, one of the most sheltered harbours on the Burin Peninsula, in 1927. She lived about a mile from the telegraph office, which she shared with Eddy Reddy, who served as the postmaster. They also had a messenger on staff, a young married woman. Isabel worked 9:00 to 6:00 from Monday to Saturday, and 9:00 to 10:00 and 4:00 to 5:00 on Sunday.
Mrs. Forsey, the operator from Grand Bank, was sending messages to St. John’s when the Marystown telegraph office pens and inkwells started to rattle on the evening of November 18, 1929.
“What’s wrong? What’s wrong?” Mrs. Forsey called over the wire.
Isabel stared at the shaking items on her desk. She was awestruck.
“I…I don’t know,” she answered her colleague in Grand Bank.
“What’s gone wrong?” Mrs. Forsey cried again. “Everything is rattling.”
“It’s rattling here, too,” Isabel said. As her voice faded away, the noise grew louder. Then the line snapped and she could hear Mrs. Forsey no more. The office was eerily quiet. Isabel removed her headset and spun around in her chair to face Eddy, who stood behind her, half a dozen envelopes in his hand. He was like a statue.
“The cable between Burin and Marystown is gone,” Isabel said calmly, though her heart raced in her chest. She looked down at her hands, shaking on the armrests of her chair. She thought of the others on the line, people she knew so well, although she had never met most of them: operators from Garnish, Fortune, Lamaline, St. Lawrence, Epworth, Burin, Baine Harbour. Everyday she heard everything they said on the lines. They took turns sending messages, each one more patient than the last.
Somehow Isabel could still get through to St. John’s. As she realized this, she also noticed that the rumbling and rattling had stopped. She checked the line to Grand Bank but found that it still wasn’t working. She would try to reach the capital, though. But then a cable between Terrenceville and Baine Harbour broke and she couldn’t reach St. John’s. She frowned and looked at Eddy who shrugged, his lips pressed together. Neither spoke. Isabel could not communicate with anyone, but she stayed at her post until closing time at 6:00 p.m.
That night she walked over to nearby Creston with a group of young women. Like Marystown, Creston was protected by Mortier Bay, which separated it from open waters. By now Isabel had heard incredible stories about waves as high as buildings in New York. The women stood at the waterline and watched floating sheds and skiffs ripped from their moorings. They knew that places like Kelly’s Cove and Port au Bras were more exposed to the sea and they worried about the damage that might have occurred there.
“I wonder if anyone died?” Isabel said.
“My dad said a score of people have died farther out the bay,” one of the young women answered her.
“That’s just rumour,” said another. “No one knows for sure. And people always exaggerate when the unexpected happens.”
Isabel returned to her office the next morning at nine o’clock sharp, rushing to her lines to check for signs of life. There was none and her shoulders slumped in despair. She shook her head at Eddy when he appeared at the door. He sighed in response. Between customers coming in to check on telegraphs and mail, Isabel and Eddy traded stories they had heard about houses swept out to sea and little girls drowned.
When Isabel kept saying it’s just rumours at this point, Eddy said, “There was a time before telegraphs, Isabel, and we had to go by each other’s word then.” Then he stopped while Isabel bowed her head.
“We do know there was terrible loss of life in Port au Bras and that Vince Kelly’s wife and daughter are drowned,” he added.
Isabel’s face reddened.
“I’m sorry, Isabel,” he said. “It must be hard on you, being away from your own people at a time like this.”
The young woman nodded.
“I wish I knew what was going on,” she said quietly.
“That’s your way, being a telegraph operator,” Eddy said, his mouth turning up. “You’re a pro through and through!”
Isabel let out a small laugh through the fogginess that clogged her chest and throat.
She went into her office the next day and the day after, though the lines remained dormant and broken. She stayed until six o’clock every day, listening to the people of Marystown come in and tell what they had seen and heard since the waves had crashed upon the shores of the peninsula. The snowstorm of the nineteenth was followed by a calm on the twentieth, which seemed to offer some small promise that there was something other than chaos in the world.
But by the end of the third day, stories were starting to trickle in from as far away as Lord’s Cove and Taylor’s Bay. Could it really be true that a woman had lost all her children to the tidal wave? Was a toddler really saved after her mother and siblings had drowned? Isabel wondered and she reflected that her mother often told her there was much that only God could understand.
On the fourth day after the tsunami, a messenger arrived from the telegraph office in Epworth near Burin, asking for Isabel to come and assist them. Isabel’s eyes brightened at the request and her shoulders cast off a load of which she had not even been aware. It was, she realized, helplessness that had been dogging her. That afternoon, with an overnight bag in her hand, she boarded a small boat to travel to Epworth, sailing out through Mortier Bay, still littered with the odd piece of clapboard or broken stagehead. Isabel wrapped her wool scarf around her face as the boat travelled past the sheltered inlet of Little Bay, then the mouth of Beau Bois harbour and into the winter-like wind. The hollow faces of people made homeless by the tidal wave passed before her as Stepaside and Port au Bras drew near. She uttered a “Hail Mary” for them and tried to focus on the work ahead of her.
Almost unique in the region, the telegraph office at Epworth was capable of receiving and sending messages. In the days following the tidal wave, people from surrounding communities had poured into the Epworth office to communicate with friends and relatives in St. John’s and other parts of the country. The operator could not keep up with the volume of messages and was desperate for Isabel’s help.
As soon as she landed in Epworth, Isabel went straight to the office and to work. She barely had her coat off when the Epworth operator handed her a stack of messages. “Hello! Thanks!” the bulky woman said breathlessly, and quickly returned to her own pile of papers.
As she laboured in the gathering darkness, Isabel learned what the tidal wave had done to the people of Burin. She knew now they needed lumber for stores, stages, flakes, barrels, furniture, houses, boats—and coffins. They needed coal, clothes, boots, and food. They needed sympathy, consolation, answers. And they needed all these things in a great hurry. Her fingers tapped out their urgency, the flustered heat of her warm blood driving them. As the clock ticked midnight, she finished and fell back in her chair, letting what energy she had left drain out through her legs and feet. Inside Isabel’s chest was a black lump made up of the stories she had told through the language of dots and dashes. She took it to a strange bed with her that night in Epworth.
The next morning the local telegraph operator told Isabel the cable between Epworth and Burin had been repaired and that the Burin office could get messages to St. John’s. The woman thanked Isabel for her help and arranged her passage back to Marystown. When Isabel left, the black lump was still there.
The great gushes of water had reached the shores of the Burin Peninsula on a Monday night. With the telegraph cables broken and Isabel Gibbons and the other operators unable to communicate to sites beyond the afflicted communities, the rest of the world did not know the extent of the damage and pain wrought by the tsunami.
On Tuesday night thirty-eight-year-old Magistrate Malcolm Hollett wiped the sweat off his face as he composed yet another letter to Prime Minister Richard Anderson Squires in St. John’s. Hollett sat at a mahogany desk in his Burin parlour, feeling no comfort by the smell of century-old oak wall panels or the tray of tea and gingerbread a maid had left for him. He dipped his pen in the inkwell and began again.
The SS Daisy which was lying at the Government wharf at the time has been rendering every assistance since the affair happened. All Monday night they were searching among the houses which went out to sea, for the missing people. All day yesterday in a raging south east gale and heavy sea she was doing the impossible with regard to boats and schooners.
Hollett bit his bottom lip. There was no way to get the letter to St. John’s, at least not the last time he sent a messenger to the telegraph officer to check an hour ago. The darn lines were still down and suddenly travel by ship seemed slow. It felt like they were on their own, on the edge of the world, nay, the universe.
What an odd position for Newfoundland, a sea-going nation, whose men and ships regularly travelled to Iberia and the Caribbean.
Then his mind jarred back to the tidal wave. Hollett kept writing—he had to do something.
The officers and the crew deserve the greatest effort for the work they have done. Nearly every boat afloat of course was out of commission. I asked the Captain of the Daisy to go to St. Lawrence and Lamaline today and expect her here tonight. I fear there is great destruction between here and Lamaline. At present all communication is cut off but the operator Mr. Cox is making every effort to establish communication with outlying settlements and with St. John’s. I shall endeavour to get some data with regard to the losses and with regard to the distress. It is imperative that something be done at once to relieve the immediate wants of the people who have lost their all. I appeal to you, Sir, for some immediate Government assistance for the people. I shall form a Committee of some of the citizens here in a day or so. In the meantime I shall have to get food, clothing and coal to many families. I hope to send this to you by the Daisy to Argentia.
After signing the letter, Hollett set down his pen and stood up. He walked to the parlour doorway and called out to his wife Lucy, who was on her way upstairs with their baby. “Shall we send Peter back to the telegraph office to see if the lines are working? I’ve got to get a message to St. John’s.”
Although the cable lines were still not functioning, Hollett wrote again on Wednesday to the government in the capital. The Daisy had brought much sad news upon her return to Burin. This time Hollett reported the death of old Thomas Lockyer of Allan’s Island, who had been fatally crushed in the tidal wave. And he sadly recorded the death of Jessie and David Hipditch’s three children in Point au Gaul. He had already written of the deaths of Frances Kelly and her daughter, Dorothy, in Kelly’s Cove, and the near drowning of the elderly Inkpens from Stepaside.
Now the magistrate’s face was permanently the colour of a beet; it had turned that way after the Daisy’s Inspector Dee told him that fifteen of twenty-four families in Taylor’s Bay were homeless and that the harbour was a wasteland. Of the villages closer to his own home in Burin, he wrote to the prime minister, “William Moulton’s house is washed away. The family barely escaped with their lives… Corbin practically every bit of waterfront property with some dwellings gone.”
After some time alone in his parlour, Hollett made a bold suggestion to the prime minister:
In my opinion this affair is almost too big even for the Government and a general public subscription should be started immediately. It is impossible to describe this dire calamity which has come upon us. I respectfully suggest that an immediate investigation of the individual losses and destitution be made at once on the whole coast concerned. That a boat with provisions and coal be sent as soon as possible, and that a committee be appointed to handle its distribution.
On Thursday morning, three days after the tidal wave, telegraph operators in St. John’s reeled in shock when they received the news from the wireless operator on the SS Portia calling from Burin. The message was sent to Prime Minister Squires from Magistrate Malcolm Hollett.
SS “PORTIA”
Via Cape Race
Nov. 21, 1929
Sir R.A. Squires,
St. John’s.
Burin experienced very severe earth tremors 5.05 PM Eighteenth followed at 7.35 PM by an immense 15 feet tidal wave which swept away everything along waterfront sixteen dwelling houses with nine lives mostly women and children gone four bodies recovered all communications by wire cut off report is that 18 lives have been lost at Lord’s Cove and Lamaline S. S. “DAISY” rendering every assistance St. Lawrence also swept no lives lost destruction property terrible and many people left destitute and homeless doing all possible to relieve suffering “DAISY” now at Lamaline writing particulars.
(Sgd) Magistrate Hollett.
The telegraph operators had seen St. John’s harbour empty for a full ten minutes on Monday evening but that was all. It had been a strange sight—a once in a lifetime kind of thing, everyone said—but it had not been followed by anything like the monstrous waves to which the villages of Burin had been subjected. Instead, St. John’s harbour had slowly filled with sea water again until it regained its usual fullness. People had even laughed about it. But in the mercantile town of Burin and neighbouring villages, they learned, everything had been destroyed, and most sadly of all, women, men, and children had died. Up to Thursday, the twenty-first, the telegraph operators in the capital knew almost nothing of the tragedies farther south on the peninsula.
Sir Richard Squires, Newfoundland’s prime minister, got Hollett’s message just before noon. Straight as a flagpole, Squires stood in his office giving dictation. Although he was lean, his little round glasses made him look owlish and academic, though he was neither. He seemed, in fact, to sail from one ill-advised decision and scandal to another. His last term of office had ended under the cloud of corruption charges which were never proven and rumours continued to swirl about him. Anderson, as he was known to friends, also lacked the easy charm of his wife, Lady Helena Strong Squires. Although Helena was the first woman elected to the House of Assembly, she had initially opposed women’s suffrage. Now, as a member of the House, she had won many fans.
Squires sank into his overstuffed leather chair as he listened to a messenger read him a telegram from Burin. He crossed his arms in front of his chest as if to ward off what he was hearing.
“My God, it’s winter,” he muttered. “It’s bloody cold out and the fishing’s over. And the dead…”
He stood up quickly. He wiped his brow and telephoned Clyde Lake, the Minister of Marine and Fisheries, to inform him of the disaster and to ask him to ready his officials for immediate assistance to the stricken region. Squires then directed the Deputy Minister of Marine and Fisheries, W.P. Rogerson, to contact the railway authorities to commission the SS Meigle as a relief ship. He directed his officials to organize a special meeting of Committee of Council, which was also attended by Clyde Lake and Dr. L.E. Keegan, Superintendent of the General Hospital.
Squires emerged from the meeting to send a telegram to Magistrate Hollett:
AS RESULT MESSAGES RECEIVED FROM YOU AND OTHERS THIS MORNING S.S. MEIGLE IS BEING DISPATCHED THIS EVENING WITH MINISTER MARINE AND FISHERIES DOCTORS MOSDELL CAMPBELL AND MURPHY AND MR. FUDGE TWO NURSES MEDICAL SUPPLIES AND PROVISIONS SO THAT WHOLE SITUATION MAY BE FULLY AND EFFECTIVELY HANDLED WITH GREATEST POSSIBLE DISPATCH STOP KINDLY KEEP ME FULLY ADVISED ALSO PLEASE NOTIFY OTHER STRICKEN SETTLEMENTS OF DISPATCH OF RELIEF SHIP.
After the meeting Squires’ bureaucrats drew up a list of provisions to be purchased and then had these rushed to the dock in St. John’s for shipment on the Meigle. Dr. Keegan prepared medical and nursing supplies, while Dr. Mosdell, Chairman of the Board of Health, arranged for doctors and nurses to join the ship to take care of the injured. At this point, the authorities in St. John’s could only guess at the scale of injuries and illness brought on by the tidal wave. They knew Magistrate Hollett was not given to exaggeration; there had to be more deaths south of Burin.
In St. John’s, everyone involved worked frantically, uttering prayers as they rushed from their offices to the Royal Stores, where they bought most of the goods, to the waterfront. By 8:30 p.m. the Meigle was loaded with personnel and provisions. The Meigle was built in Scotland in 1886 and weighed 835 tons. Originally called the Solway, she was more than 220 feet long. The Reid family, Newfoundland merchants, brought her to the island country in the winter of 1913 and named her after a place near their patriarch’s birthplace. They used her as a passenger and cargo vessel. Now, under the ginger-haired Captain Vince Dalton, she would be on a mission like no other.
The ship carried 2,688 four-pound sacks of flour; one hundred barrels of beef; one hundred barrels of pork; two thousand pounds of sugar; 1,020 pounds of tea; two hundred pounds of butter; and four hundred quarter-bags of hard tack. She also carried nails, window glass and putty for house repairs, but no lumber. Captain Vince Dalton, tall and quiet, and his ship pulled away from the finger piers in St. John’s harbour at 9:30 p.m. and disappeared beyond the Narrows a few minutes later.
By three-thirty the next afternoon, the Meigle was tied up at the wharf in Burin.
Not long after landing, Dr. Mosdell sent a cable to Dr. Barnes in St. John’s, describing the Meigle’s November 22 arrival:
Shores of Burin Beach strewed with wreckage of all sorts. Houses and stores floating waters of Harbour and dotted along beach partially or wholly submerged. Stages and wharves swept away in almost every Cove and Harbour. Destitution general wherever tidal wave did its work of destruction. Food fuel and clothing badly needed. Stores of food on ship sufficient meet present requirements. Medical and Nursing staff on ship now busy attending number of cases of severe injury and of shock consequent on sudden and tragic nature of disaster.
Hollett was at the front of the crowd that came out to meet the Meigle. He pumped Captain Dalton’s hand as the skipper jumped onto the wharf.
“Thank you for coming on such short notice,” he said, nodding. Then he spoke quickly. “These are the members of our local committee, representing the villages from Rock Harbour to Corbin. Mr. Cheeseman, from Port au Bras… Mr. Lefeuvre, from Bull’s Cove… Captain Foote, from Stepaside… Mr. Albert Grant, from Corbin… Reverend Miller… Reverend Hiscock… Reverend Morris…”
Dalton’s face registered surprise as he shook hands with each of the men.
“We had to be organized, Captain,” Hollett explained. “The tragedy is so great.”
Dalton nodded.
“We have twenty homeless families between here and Corbin, sir,” said Albert Grant loudly.
Oddly, Dalton found himself feeling guilty at this; he said nothing. Then his first mate stepped up and listed off the food and building supplies that the Meigle had brought.
“We’re very grateful and will convey this gratitude to Prime Minister Squires and his government,” Magistrate Hollett said. The scores of people that surrounded him remained quiet, and for the first time Dalton noticed the dark circles under their eyes. “I fear it will not be enough, though.”
“No?” Dalton said, realizing how inadequate he sounded. “My God, did you say there are twenty families homeless?”
“Indeed, I did, Captain,” Albert Grant spoke up again. “Indeed I did.”
Dalton caught the angry tone in the fisherman’s voice again.
“We don’t have anywhere near enough supplies to help them,” Dalton said as a thumping gathered steam in his chest.
“No, sir, we don’t,” the first mate echoed.
“We expected that,” said Hollett. “Food is more important now, it’s our first priority for this area. We’ve put the homeless families in with other families and that will have to do until other plans can be made.”
Dalton nodded slowly. Think, he told himself, think! Slowly he shifted himself out of his catatonia. The disaster was of greater proportions that Squires, Lake, and everyone in St. John’s realized, that much was sure. Other ships might have to join the Meigle. He thought of his blue-eyed wife, Cora, at home on Old Topsail Road in St. John’s; she’d probably be setting out the supper dishes now. Take one step at a time, she’d say.
“You said food is the first priority for this area, Magistrate Hollett,” Dalton began. “What are the other priorities?”
“Coal,” Hollett answered quickly. “Most families are in desperate need of it, so much of it was swept away, and here we are on the cusp of winter.”
“I can purchase coal for you on behalf of the Newfoundland government,” Dalton said. “When a ship comes into Burin with coal, let me know.”
“There’s one here now, sure,” someone called out from the crowd.
“There is indeed,” said Reverend Miller, a member of Hollet’s committee. “The Newcastle—perfect.”
“I can buy two hundred and fifty tons and your committee can distribute it,” said Dalton. “It’s not much but it’s a start.”
Hollett and his colleagues nodded. Dalton noticed that Hollett’s frown never went away.
“We appreciate that, Captain. Our other priority is that you get to the southern parts of the peninsula as fast as you can,” said the Magistrate. “We’ve heard that things are really bad in Taylor’s Bay and Point au Gaul. We’re very worried about those places. They’re on flat land and very exposed to the water.”
Hollett’s face was tight when he finished.
Dalton recalled the villages of which the magistrate spoke. Hollett was right; those little villages and others like them would indeed be particularly vulnerable to the tidal wave of November 18. He wondered what remained of them. He studied Hollett for a moment, seeing the intensity under the magistrate’s bushy eyebrows and hooded eyes. He knew the man was learned; Hollett had been Newfoundland’s Rhodes Scholar and studied at Oxford University. He was no coward either, Dalton reckoned, recalling that he had served in the Royal Newfoundland Regiment and been seriously wounded by shell-fire in France in 1916 before being invalided back to his home country. If Hollett said things were bad here and farther down the coast, then they probably were.
“We should take as many supplies as we can to those communities,” Dalton said. “But you’ll need some, too.”
“Take three-quarters of the food south of here,” Hollett said, meeting the eyes of his fellow committee members. “That’s where the need will be greatest.”
Besides some of the food, Captain Dalton and the Meigle left the Burin Committee with three of the physicians on board. Nurses from St. John’s accompanied each of the doctors.
Captain Dalton knew that it was impossible for a vessel of the Meigle’s size to land at Taylor’s Bay and other low lying places at night so he over-nighted in Burin. Early the next morning the Meigle left Burin, but as soon as Burin harbour faded into the distance, snow began falling. Very soon, winds blew out of the northeast, quickly encasing the Meigle in ice. The cold was jarring. The ship inched through the gelid waters of Placentia Bay, a little tub on an angry November sea that would not quit.
Finally, a full twenty-four hours later, the Meigle reached Point au Gaul. Captain Dalton stood on deck and surveyed the harbour. There was not a single wharf standing—nor were there any stages or flakes. The giant waves had destroyed a hundred out-buildings, taking their contents—gear, food, fuel—to the bottom of the sea, or pitching them in a meadow two hundred yards behind the village where they lay in ruins. Over forty boats had been swept away, most of them torn to smithereens.
It took all day but Dalton and his crew lowered food into the Meigle’s lifeboats and then landed them to a grateful populace. One of the Point au Gaul men collecting the food onshore was twenty-eight-year-old William Lockyer, a fisherman who had lost his motor dory, stage, and store to the tsunami. William and his wife, Rebecca, had got their three little daughters to safety as the first wave raced into the harbour.
Dalton shook his head in sympathy as he looked at the harbour and William in one of the lifeboats with the Meigle’s crew, a sack of flour on each slim shoulder. He guessed, rightly, that the young man was pleased to have something useful to do after a week of loss.
“It’s three houses gone, Captain, sir,” William called up. “Three houses.”
“My God,” Dalton responded. “And how many dead?”
“Well, sir, we’ve done nothing but bury people here in Point au Gaul lately,” came the sombre reply. The Meigle crew members laid down their sacks of flour and balanced themselves in the lifeboat to listen.
“Miss Mary Ann Walsh and Mrs. Eliza Walsh, they lived together in a house that was over there,” William said, pointing. “They were washed away. We got their bodies, first one and then the other. And it was the funniest thing—we found a tin box full of money, completely dry mind you, next to Miss Mary Ann’s body. When the women laid it out for counting, it covered a double bed. They gave it to Miss Mary Ann’s church, as she would have wanted.”
“Who else died, son?” Dalton asked, his cheeks pink at the young man’s familiarity.
“Well, poor Thomas Hillier was killed, unaccountably so, really,” William answered.
“How’s that?” one of the crew asked shyly, letting his curiosity get the better of him.
“Well, for one thing, he wasn’t supposed to be home,” William explained. “He worked all over the country as a fish oil inspector and he only came home to celebrate his birthday, first time he ever did. It’s a funny thing, an odd thing.”
“The whole tidal wave is strange,” Dalton said.
“It is, sir,” William answered. “And very sad. But the saddest part of it is those that’s left behind. Lydia Hillier, Thomas’ widow, is expecting a baby any day now and she had two other young children, Caroline and little Benjamin, and she has no one to support her.”
Dalton’s face blanched at the thought. He looked at the clear sea water and his eye took in bread dough in pans sitting on the harbour bottom, as if that’s where they belonged.
William continued. “She was Thomas’ second wife and she lives with his two grown children, Harold and Georgina. Now I don’t know what’s to become of her. That was their family home, the Hilliers’—I suppose the older children can claim the house, Thomas’ grown children. They might—they aren’t too fond of Lydia, never took to her.”
Dalton silently thought of how complicated village life always was, though artists and poets might render it simple and romantic. His own visits to his father’s hometown on the Southern Shore had taught him this. Meanwhile, he wondered how many Lydias he would come across on this sad voyage.
“That’s three deaths so far, young man,” he said gently, trying to prod William on.
“Well, the worst of it is the Hilliers, not the same Hilliers as Thomas, a different family altogether,” Lockyer said. “Mrs. Lizzie Hillier had her four grandchildren with her. Irene was over for a quick visit, her mother, Jemima, said. But her daughter, Jessie Hipditch’s three were there for the night. Their house was just about there, right near the water.”
As William pointed and paused, Dalton and the men stared at the emptiness that now took the place of Lizzie Hillier’s house.
“And now they’re all gone,” William said simply. “David and Jessie Hipditch lost their three children. Poor Jessie is out of her mind with all of them gone. Her sister, Jemima, is not far behind her with the loss of her only daughter, Irene.”
“Who has lost their homes?” Dalton asked after a minute.
“David and Jessie, sir,” William answered. “On top of losing their children, they lost their home, too, though Jessie doesn’t even care about that. They’re staying with Jessie’s sister, Nan. And Henry Hillier, he’s Mrs. Lizzie’s husband—his house is gone. He’s staying with Nan, too. He doesn’t want to rebuild. He thinks he’s too old. He’s sixty-nine. He says his wife is dead and four of his grandchildren are dead. My father thinks he’s lost the will to live. And if you lose that, my father says, you’re finished.”
“Your father’s right, son,” Dalton said, stroking his chin, slowly, still surveying what remained of the Point au Gaul infrastructure. He couldn’t imagine how the people could rebuild in time for next year’s fishing season, not this close to winter, when they had enough to do to get enough wood to heat, repair, and rebuild their homes. In this part of the country they had to travel so far to get wood. He wondered when the tradition of going to winter quarters had died out here and why.
The people here had so much need of wood now, they would have to buy it. Most people didn’t have that kind of extra cash, however. Dalton had been all over the island. If Point au Gaul was like most outports, there’d be a few families with five hundred dollars or a thousand dollars in the bank or salted away in their kitchen somewhere, and another handful with a hundred dollars or two hundred dollars, but the majority would have very little or none at all, maybe twenty dollars here or there. Most of the time there wasn’t much call for money. Fish was the currency of their lives, not dollar notes. In any case, that, too, had been swept away by the big sea.
When William Lockyer and members of the Meigle crew returned in the lifeboat, Dalton walked across the deck to them.
“Lockyer,” he said. “Did you find their bodies?”
“Which bodies, Captain, sir?”
“Oh, the children, I mean, the children,” Dalton stammered. “Did you find their bodies?”
“We did, sir,” William answered. “We got Jessie’s three little ones that night and the women laid them out. But we didn’t get poor Irene for awhile. Her being missing was making Jemima’s grief all the more unbearable. We only got her body early yesterday morning. Her father, Joshua, found her washed up on the beach over there, just before you came in. He went searching every morning at dawn. He was determined to get her. Poor little thing, all beat up on the rocks like that and waterlogged. But the only thing missing was her left overshoe. She’s laid out up there now, though I think they got her covered, poor girl.”
Dalton stifled his retching. He said nothing. He tried to think of sharing a pot of tea with Cora in the breakfast room in their St. John’s home. He walked back and forth on deck as the men loaded the lifeboats with sugar, flour, and tea.
As they prepared to head into Point au Gaul again, he said, “William, you didn’t tell me about the third family made homeless.”
“Oh, it’s poor old John Walsh, Captain, sir,” William said. “He’s an old bachelor in ill health these days. All his gear and food is gone, too. He’s awfully upset. The women are trying to console him. Don’t know what he’ll do from now on…”
The young man’s voice faded away and Dalton’s sea green eyes fixed on a little house that stood with its back to the water. It’s a wonder the waves didn’t take that as a dare, he thought. He had spent his entire life on the water and had seen men swallowed by spume, crushed by sea ice, and numbed into statues by saltwater crystals. But never had he seen the Atlantic so cruel as the waves that had laced Point au Gaul that November night.
At Lamaline, Captain Dalton’s brow would finally have a chance to unfurrow a little. There, the members of the area committee sat down in the ship’s galley with the expedition personnel, all of whom were following the path taken by Nurse Cherry and the local men who escorted her. The members of the committee representing the strip of land from High Beach to Lord’s Cove introduced themselves quietly. They included C.C. Pittman, a Justice of the Peace and the committee’s chair, Father Sullivan, and Lewis Crews.
“You know about the tragedies that have visited Point au Gaul,” Pittman said slowly. “But no one has died here in Lamaline.”
“Thanks be to God,” Father Sullivan whispered.
Captain Dalton took a crumpled handkerchief from his jacket pocket and wiped the sweat off his forehead. He blinked rapidly.
“That’s not to say there isn’t a great deal of devastation,” Pittman continued. “Many stages have been damaged or swept away entirely. Dozens of trap skiffs are gone… it’s the same all along the coast, of course. And there’s even worse…”
“Yes,” said Father Sullivan, speaking with a firmer voice now. “Poor Mrs. Hipditch, Fred’s wife. She has no house anymore. It’s quite beyond repair, I can assure you of that. The family has six children—the two eldest boys have just started fishing with their father but Fred is away in Corner Brook working on the new mill there, I believe. Poor Mrs. Hipditch has lost their store, their Madeira fish, and some food as well. It’s a sad case.”
The priest lowered his grey head. Captain Dalton studied him.
“Jim Hooper, too,” Lewis Crews piped up. “Jim and Lucy, their house is all beaten up and their stage is, too. Jim is not even in good health.”
“Perhaps we can talk to some of these people and see what they think about their future,” Dr. Campbell suggested, taking a slim pen out of his breast pocket.
“Jim’s still over in St. Pierre,” Crews responded. “He hasn’t been able to get back yet.”
Campbell’s right eye widened.
“Oh, for goodness’ sake,” Fudge, the M.H.A., said. “People here go to St. Pierre for all sorts of reasons, not just to get a bottle of rum. Many of them even have family over there. There’s a long history of marriages between people here and the French.”
“There is no need for your rash reaction,” Campbell answered, turning to his government colleague. “I implied nothing sinister at all. I just wondered how Mr. Hooper could travel, given his ill health.”
There was a moment of silence before Dalton broke it.
“I’m governed by the weather, gentlemen,” he said. “We have to keep a close eye on it, this being late November. So I suggest we keep these meetings to the minimum time possible and do our business in as expedient a manner as possible. Our focus here has to be on assessing the need and getting supplies to the victims. We’ve got a fair bit of ground to cover yet.” Then he added with the slightest of tremors in his voice, “And I’m sure we want to do everything we can for these stricken people.”
Before the group dispersed, the South Coast Disaster Committee had commandeered all the stocks of coal available in Lamaline and Minister Lake had dispatched a ship from the town to North Sydney, Nova Scotia, Canada to get more coal for use in the villages of the southern Burin Peninsula. The committee also telegraphed an order of clothes to stores in the town of Fortune. A truck filled with dresses, coats, pants, and boots arrived in Lamaline that same afternoon. When the members of the local committee handed the new clothes out to families from High Beach to Lord’s Cove, frozen mouths broke into smiles for the first time since the great waves hit the shores that awful night. Little girls twirled on their toes, letting their new dresses blow full. Boys hitched up their new dungarees and nodded proudly. For the first time in days, the children of Allan’s Island and Point au Gaul began to feel like they wanted to put their coats on and go out to play.
But everything Captain Dalton feared about Taylor’s Bay turned out to be true. As the Meigle approached the harbour—quiet as a graveyard though it was midday—Dalton gripped the ship’s rail and drew his breath in. He made a grim count; only five of the original seventeen houses in Taylor’s Bay remained standing.
“Very worrying,” said Dr. Mosdell. “All those people crowded into those few houses, and they’re small houses at that. It’s a health menace to be sure. If one gets a serious sickness, it’ll spread like wildfire.”
Suddenly heads began emerging from windows and from the sides of buildings; they put Dalton in mind of snails coming out of their shells. How different it is from sailing into a port and everyone comes out to the wharf to meet you, he thought. These poor people almost look afraid. Once outside, they went no farther than their windows and doors; they stood there, waiting.
On Mosdell’s orders, the medical staff left the ship and dispersed to the five remaining houses, doctor’s kits in hand.
When Nurse Rendell from the Meigle reached Deborah and Sydney Woodland’s house, she entered and said, “I’m so sorry for what’s happened…” Then she stopped, looked around at the cluster of people in the Woodlands’ kitchen and continued, “But you seem in better shape that I expected.”
“Nurse Cherry’s been here,” came a little voice from a corner of the room. “And she told us what to do!”
Deborah smiled. “She did. And we were lucky. We lost no food and I’ve been sparing it along. You’ll want to tend to some people, though. They’re homeless and have no prospects at all for the winter.”
Deborah motioned toward a row of children who sat on a sunken daybed. The nurse nodded and turned in their direction. The girls and boys lazily swung their legs back and forth, the biggest child scuffing her bare feet on the floor.
“We’ll get shoes for her,” Nurse Rendell offered, smiling brightly.
“Their mothers are in the parlour,” Deborah said, in a quieter voice. “They say they don’t want to stay in Taylor’s Bay. They want to go to Fortune where they’ve got friends and family. They think they’ll be safer there.”
Suddenly Nurse Rendell felt someone behind her. She turned abruptly and saw a small woman with great black eyes in a face the colour of the moon.
“I’ll not stay in this harbour another winter,” she said firmly. “I can’t stand the thought of it.”
Nurse Rendell opened her mouth to speak but closed it again when she saw the firmness in the woman’s jaw.
That night three women and their youngest children slept on board the Meigle. The mothers had shaken Captain Dalton’s hand, pumping it, as they climbed onto the ship. Fudge, the M.H.A., had taken the Taylor’s Bay refugees under his wing; he’d see to it that they got clothing and boots once the Meigle arrived in Burin, he announced. Then he would travel west to Fortune Bay with them on the Glencoe.
Now, in the sharp night air, Captain Dalton stood at the wheel as the little party slept below, feeling safer than they had in well over a week. He laughed softly at the irony of how being on waves rather than land reassured and comforted them. He would tell Cora about this, he thought, and, next to the fire, they would have a grand discussion about the complexities of the human mind.
“She was reluctant to come, Captain,” Dr. Mosdell tut-tutted as he made his way onto the Meigle, tied up in St. Lawrence harbour after a snowy and windswept morning. “But I did manage to get her here.”
“Welcome on board the Meigle, Nurse Cherry,” Captain Dalton said formally, bowing his fair head to the slightly stooped woman following the doctor up the gangplank. He could see that beneath her cap, her brown hair was unkempt and her eyes were narrow in the manner of one who has recently awakened. He guessed that Mosdell had woken her. Doctors are odd beings, he thought.
“If anyone deserves a rest, it’s you, Nurse Cherry,” Dalton said firmly.
“I should have thought that if anyone deserves a rest, it would be you, Captain!” Nurse Cherry answered quickly.
Dalton drew back at the sharpness in her voice. He stepped back to let her pass.
“One of the nurses will show you to a cabin, Nurse Cherry,” he said. “We hope you’ll be most comfortable on board.”
Nurse Cherry stood erect and grimaced. She studied the deck and then the captain. “I don’t know who gave the orders to bring me on board,” she snapped. “But I had work to do, plenty of it, and I was interrupted in my tasks.”
“I beg your pardon, Ma’am,” Dr. Mosdell said, suppressing a smile. “You were, in fact, prone on a daybed when I found you.”
Nurse Cherry’s mouth opened wide but no sound emerged.
“I mean, Nurse Cherry,” the doctor continued. “Not that you were sleeping the days away or that you had neglected your duty in any way. I mean that you had travelled along the entire shore in the worst kind of weather and in so doing had worked yourself into a state of exhaustion, so much so that you had collapsed in the middle of the day in a stranger’s house.”
Nurse Cherry’s mouth still gaped open.
“Ma’am, Dr. Mosdell is only concerned about your health,” Captain Dalton interjected. “As we all are. As we have moved from one village to another, we have heard about your visits, made on horseback and on foot, and your work, done at all hours of the night and day. Do you not think it is time for a rest?”
“I am only tired, that’s all, not grief-stricken, like my patients. If I rest, what shall happen to these people?” Nurse Cherry said, her face the colour of a ripening tomato. “After all they have been through.”
“You are not alone now,” Dr. Mosdell answered. “We have a medical staff on board, physicians and nurses both. The people here are no longer entirely dependent on you. The burden is off you alone.”
Dalton waited for a look of relief to cross Nurse Cherry’s face but it did not come. Instead, her mouth remained hard and her chin, held defiantly high.
“Gentlemen,” she said finally. “I resent the way you took me out of that home, making the decision yourself and taking charge of me as if I am not in my right mind.”
Mosdell and Dalton exchanged quick glances.
“My responsibility as a doctor extends to you, too, Nurse Cherry,” Mosdell said quietly. “When I see a woman exerted beyond a point that is safe, I have to do something about it, as you know. I think now we ought not to spend more time discussing it. It is cold up here, don’t you think? Shall we have some tea down below?”
“I don’t think I want any tea right now,” Nurse Cherry answered.
“Come with me, Nurse Cherry,” Captain Dalton said. “I’ll find Nurse Rendell. She’ll show you what a comfortable bunk we’ve prepared for you.”
He breathed a low sigh when the Englishwoman followed him to the cabin. In the hallway he introduced her to Nurse Rendell and turned quickly on his heel when he had passed her over. Up top again, he met Mosdell.
“We’ll have her in Burin tomorrow,” he told the doctor. “And she can rest there a couple of days. I’ve arranged return passage for her on the Argyle.”
“Well!” laughed Dr. Mosdell. “She could certainly use the rest! She’s wound up as tight as a drum!”
Dalton thought of Cora and the kind words she unfailingly had for her elderly and frequently contrary aunts.
“She’s been through a lot,” he said ploddingly. “She’s tired and overwrought, poor woman.”
Before the Meigle pulled out of St. Lawrence, the expedition party met with the local committee and charged them with supervising relief measures as they had with their counterparts elsewhere. Meanwhile, Captain Dalton and his crew took account of the damage the tsunami had done to the town. The harbour was desolate; all the stores and stages on both its sides had been swept away. Little black lumps of coal floated in the harbour, like a torment to the cold people on shore. The winds blew dark ash off them. Cracked oars drifted in on the beach. Thwarts, broken in two, flopped onto the rocks, in a blunt offering. Women could only glance hard at these things and close their eyes. The men tried hard not to think of spring when the fish would start coming in. How would they catch it?
When news of the situation at St. Lawrence reached Magistrate Hollett in Burin, he telegraphed Prime Minister Squires in the capital. As Squires read of the devastation in St. Lawrence, the largest settlement in the area, he clutched his chin tight and sucked in his breath. His face grew white as he realized that every time a message came from the South Coast the picture was more grave than originally thought. Worries over the disaster invaded his every thought. Squires lay awake night after night, shifting helplessly in his bed, wondering if his government had sent enough supplies. How would his government pay for the rest? It was almost a month now since the stock market crashed and the meaning of that event was beginning to sink in. As the days went by, the administration in St. John’s still did not have a good fix on the death toll on the lower portion of the stricken peninsula. That would only come with a full report from the Meigle.
Still the dire messages from Burin kept coming. When Hollett visited St. Lawrence, soon after the Meigle left, he wrote to Squires: “The people are in a state of dire destitution. Immediate assistance is necessary.”
There was, though, no loss of life at St. Lawrence. The people had seen the waves coming and had headed for higher ground. Though rebuilding their town would be a long, hard task, men and women would sometimes cast their eyes to the sky and bless themselves, murmuring prayers of gratitude that no one had died that terrible night.
In Burin, Captain Dalton saw that Nurse Cherry had an escort to take her to the home of the local Nonia nurse, where she could stay and rest for a couple of days before returning home to Lamaline. She smiled as she left the ship, to his relief.
“Thank you for kidnapping me, Captain,” she said.
Dalton smiled back, almost confident that she was joking.
The skipper’s first order of business here was to meet with Magistrate Hollett so the two men could bring each other up-todate on the aftermath of the tsunami. When everything was straightened away on the Meigle, Dalton walked to Hollett’s home with the magistrate who had come to the dock to greet him. The captain noted that Hollett hadn’t lost any of the worried look he wore when Dalton first met him the other day.
“My wife has hardly seen me in days,” Hollett said. “And Lucy is so patient.” The two men sat in Hollett’s dark parlour on overstuffed chairs sipping tea that needed warming. In the high-ceilinged quiet of the place, Dalton could almost forget the high dose of tragedy he’d witnessed in recent hours. But Hollett leaned forward, eagerly.
“One of the strange things,” he said, “is that men from the schooners reported no disturbance at sea. The first inkling they had of disaster came from the debris they saw floating past. And what a sight that was…very unexpected, indeed, as you would know more than me, Captain.”
“That’s the way these tsunamis work, sir,” Dalton responded. “It’s the land that gets the damage, not the sea. They’re not storms at sea, at all. If you’re close to shore, you’ll feel a swell, but that’s all. I’ve never experienced one, myself, and I wasn’t out that night. I was safe at home in St. John’s where we thought there was an explosion at the mines on Bell Island, due to the noise the great wave made. Later I heard that St. John’s harbour had emptied for a few minutes. Then I knew there’d been a tsunami, or tidal wave, most people call it. But I knew old fellows who’ve seen the devastation they cause in the Indian Ocean and places south. They wreck entire villages and towns—people sometimes move away rather than rebuild in some cases. Never heard them do much damage this far north, though.”
“Nor have I,” Hollett answered. Dalton noted that he was wide-eyed in the manner of someone who still didn’t believe what was happening.
“We ran out of drugs on board,” Dalton reported. “There were a lot of sick people. Mosdell and the others, the nurses, said there was a lot of call for drugs because so many people don’t have enough bedclothes and they’re living in overcrowded conditions, passing on illnesses to each other. Then the shock and grief made them more vulnerable to illness.”
“So what did you do?”
“We went to St. Pierre and got more supplies. We were in Lamaline, which isn’t far from the French islands, when we ran out. And we knew there were just no stocks left anywhere on the Burin Peninsula. I must say, the French medical people were so helpful. The French authorities, too—they readily offered their port facilities to us most generously.”
“And thank God St. Pierre and Miquelon weren’t affected by the tidal wave,” Hollett added. “So far from their own government in Paris.”
“We didn’t bring sufficient building supplies, either,” Dalton said. “So I ordered ten thousand feet of lumber through the Manager of the Railway to go there on the Argyle. On the Meigle we had roofing supplies, nails, and glass, and we gave all that away, though, as I say, it was not nearly enough for every community.”
As Hollett spoke of the wreckage in the immediate area, Dalton sank into the overstuffed leather chair. He fixed his eyes on the intensity on the magistrate’s face. These were Hollett’s people, he realized—his family, friends, and neighbours.
The Meigle departed Burin on November 27 and dispatched the members of the relief expedition at Argentia at nine o’clock in the morning, where they caught the train. They were in St. John’s a few hours later, rushing to the prime minister’s office.
Squires was almost silent as he listened to Mosdell’s account of the destruction the tidal wave had wrought.
“The property losses are heaviest at St. Lawrence,” the doctor said.
The prime minister nodded.
“It’s to be expected, I suppose,” Mosdell continued. “It being the largest town on the boot.”
“Hollett keeps writing me,” Squires said slowly. “About the loss of life in particular. It’s greater than first thought, I’ve learned.”
“Twenty-seven,” Campbell said. “That’s the most accurate figure. Almost all women and children.”
Squires walked slowly around his large desk. The only sound in the room was his assistant’s breathing.
From behind his desk, the prime minister seemed to return to himself.
“There may be a solution at hand—to the damage, I mean,” he announced. “A South Coast Disaster Committee, under the governor’s patronage, was formed at a public meeting two nights ago. I’m the honorary president and Horwood is acting as chair. Hollett suggested a public subscription. A good idea. But the people were ahead of him—as I knew they would be.” He smiled; his colleagues smiled back in recognition of Squires’ trademark expression.
“They’ve begun house to house collections all over the city,” he continued. “And benefit concerts are being arranged.”
Mosdell nodded.
“The Evening Telegram has opened a public subscription as well,” he added. “That family has got to get in on everything. Hmmph! Well, they’ve got ten thousand dollars together for us in just a few days. According to what Hollett says and what you tell me, we’ll need every cent. All these public donations take pressure off the government. We’ll need the help after the true impact of the New York stock market crash begins to be felt.”
The other men said nothing for a few minutes. Then Campbell spoke up. “I’m sure other towns in the country will open their hearts and pocketbooks as well,” he said.
“Oh indeed!” Squires responded enthusiastically. “They’ve set up a subcommittee on outport contact. I’ve been told to expect large contributions from Grand Falls and Corner Brook in particular, where the paper mills are located.”
As Minister of Marine and Fisheries, Lake’s thoughts drifted to the hundreds of fishing villages on the northeast and west coast. He knew they were filled with people who would want to help but, like their counterparts on the south coast, cash was not important in their lives—fish was their currency.
“Is there a way for people to give non-cash gifts?” he asked.
“Oh yes,” Squires said. “A Kinds Committee has been set up to receive food and clothing and these have begun pouring in already. Harveys Ltd. has donated warehouse space near the railway station where everything can be stored before it’s sent to the Burin Peninsula.”
Lake’s mind harkened back to the snow and wind that had slowed the Meigle’s voyage along the coast.
“What are the plans for getting donations to the South Coast?” he asked. “And distributing them?”
“Hollett has stepped up to the plate,” Squires answered confidently. “We’ve appointed him the committee’s agent. He’ll settle the claims in a just and expedient manner.”
“It’ll be a massive job,” Lake said gravely. “He’ll need every support.” The other members of the relief expedition nodded and murmured “yes.”
“It’s a great relief that almost no breadwinners were killed,” Squires said, looking out the window now.
“It is, sir,” Mosdell said. “But it is an extremely serious situation all the same because hundreds of fishermen are in no position to earn a living this coming fishing season.”
“Literally thousands of fishing outbuildings are destroyed, completely flattened,” Lake added. “It is no easy task to rebuild them, especially in winter and without easy access to lumber.”
“Quite a few of them are grief-stricken, too,” Campbell said. “Having lost relatives, wives even, to the tidal wave.”
Squires turned away from the window and nodded. For a moment, a white cast returned to his face. Then he said, “That may be so. But our people are tough and resourceful, especially those in the outports. And the committee will give them the means to rebuild. I have great faith that everything is in hand.”
He glanced around the ornate room.
“I thank you all, gentlemen, for the service you have rendered to our country as members of the relief expedition.”
Mosdell had been about to ask Squires about further assistance from the Newfoundland government, but the prime minister had already disappeared from his office and was dashing down the hallway.
Some of the tension in Magistrate Hollett’s shoulders was finally released when he received news that the South Coast Disaster Committee had been formed and had begun receiving public donations from all over the country. His heart leapt when he heard that money had begun to trickle in from the United States, Canada, and England as well. It was all badly needed, he knew, and he would make sure it would be put to good use.
One of the villages Hollett was most concerned about was Port au Bras, another peninsula community with French roots. Migratory fishermen from St. Malo, France, christened the village “port of arms,” which might have been an indication of the sporadic ethnic conflicts over cod that marked Newfoundland history. By the late 1700s, both English and French settlers had made Port au Bras their permanent home, living in a collection of houses that seemed to tumble onto the rocks and almost into the sea. By 1900, three hundred people lived in the village. Known for its skilled fishing captains and masters of foreign-going trading vessels, there was something of the invincible about Port au Bras.
That ended on the night of November 18, as Port au Bras native Ern Cheeseman wrote in a letter to his brother, Jack:
Monday evening at 5.20 we had an earth tremor, all the houses and the ground shook for about 5 minutes. This put everyone in a panic. Women screamed and prayed and we stood silent and scared but we were just trying and had finally succeeded in quieting the women when we had a tidal wave of the worst kind. Enormous waves twenty feet high swept into the harbour…
Charlie Clarke’s store went first, taking Henry Dibbon’s with it into the Pond, taking everything as it came with a thunderous roar. It swept around by Ambrose’s up to Jack Bennett’s out our way bringing all the stores and houses that stood in its way. Then all the boats went mad (and) came in.
The harbour was cleaned (by) the first wave. Then the second one came and brought it all in again. Such noise and scrunching you never heard.
By this time we had all fled to the hills, the highest places we could find. From there we watched the third wave come and go. You could hear the poor humans who were caught, screaming women and men praying out loud. Oh God, Jack, it was terrible…
Fifty-three-year-old Tom Fudge had been in his stores with his two sons, John and Job, when the ground began to tremble. John, just entering his twenties, laughed at the unexpected sensation. Job, at thirteen, blanched and looked to his father for words of comfort.
“You’re not scared, are you, Job?” John teased.
Before Tom could answer, his wife, Jessie, appeared at the door, followed by the couple’s three daughters, Gertie, fifteen, Harriet, eleven, and Hannah, only nine. The two youngest girls held hands and Tom noticed that Hannah was walking on her tiptoes as if to protect herself from the rumbling of the earth.
“What’s going on, Tom?” Jessie asked urgently.
“I don’t really know,” her husband answered. “It must be some kind of earthquake, though they’re not generally known in Newfoundland. Usually they happen in warmer parts.”
“God save us!” said Jessie.
He looked at his daughters and then at white-faced Job.
“It won’t last long,” he said. “And it won’t be a powerful one like they have in the West Indies. Don’t fret now.”
Little Hannah looked up from under her chestnut curls and smiled at him. Tom winked at her. As the tremor died away, Jessie shooed her girls back to the house. Tom watched their long skirts swish as his wife and daughters went inside.
Not long afterwards, a wall of seawater rushed into the Fudges’ garden and pulled the family’s house away with it. Tom was still working in the nearby store with his sons. Oddly, the smell of kelp and salt filled Tom’s nostrils before he heard the roar of the wave. The smell jolted him and he jumped to the doorway to see rushing grey water where his house had been. He let out a deep cry and froze. Then he shouted at John and Job, “Get to high ground! Move! Quick!”
The boys ran from the store toward the hills, joining their panicked neighbours. At one point John turned around and called, “Come on, Dad!”
But he could no longer see his father.
From the high land, Ern Cheeseman and dozens of other people saw Tom Fudge’s store swallowed by the tail end of the wave. They could hear the screams of women and children trapped in houses borne on the tidal wave, Jessie Fudge and her three daughters, among them. In short order, the first wave had torn eleven houses from the ground. It drove Bill and Mary Clarke’s twostorey, eight room house into Path End, a neighbouring inlet, where it would have to be towed down. It destroyed the house of Gus and Jessie Abbott and their six children and that of their kin, John and Annie Abbott, and their seven children. It swept away the house of eighty-one-year-old pensioner William Allen. Tom Fudge’s brother Job, after whom his younger son had been named, was in poor health; now his house was gone. John Dibbon, who lived alone, was homeless. So was sixty-seven-year-old Mary Dibbon, who was widowed by the tsunami. The house Thomas Brenton was building for his new wife, Alice, was engulfed by the tidal wave. Four of the Cheeseman households lost their homes to the violent water that night: those of fifty-five-year-old widower Thomas; twenty-three-year-old bachelor Joseph; and married couple, Jeremiah and Harriet, both fifty-seven.
As the first wave emptied the harbour, Ern Cheeseman and the others tried to follow what was happening, though their eyes could scarcely comprehend it. They tried to count the houses that were hauled up, and then to figure out who was on the high ground and who wasn’t. Ern saw young Job Fudge shivering on the hill not far away. Though he was well-dressed for a November evening, Ern realized the boy must be in shock. He approached young Job.
“Where’s the rest of your family, Job?” he asked gently.
“John is near the bottom of the hill trying to find Dad,” Job answered, his eyes staring at the dot below that represented his brother.
“And where did you last see your father?” Ern persisted quietly.
“Our house is gone and Dad’s gone to get it,” Job said. “Mommy and Gertie and Harriet and Hannah are in it. Dad’s gone to rescue them.”
“Take my jacket, Job,” Ern said, laying his coat over the boy’s shoulders. “It’s getting a little chilly.”
Ern leaned back on a boulder that emerged from the earth and buried his face in his hands. There wasn’t a single store left in the harbour. The houses were all out to sea now. He couldn’t see Tom Fudge from where he sat. He could hardly see Job’s older brother. His helplessness was in danger of congealing into red hot anger unless he did something with it.
He rose again.
“Job, you stay right here,” he said. “Don’t move. Promise me that. I’m going to get your brother.”
Ern bolted down the hill until he reached John.
“Come up to the high ground with me,” he ordered the young man. “Your little brother needs you.”
“I’ve got to find Dad,” John protested. “Mother and the girls are swept away.”
“I know,” Ern said. “I’m sorry. But that wave is going to come in again—look at how empty the harbour is. And it might take you with it if you stay here. At this point you seem to be all Job has.”
John froze. “But my Dad… I… I…”
“Come with me,” Ern said, quietly but firmly.
John looked at the sea, then turned to follow his neighbour.
“We’ve got to hurry,” Ern added.
On top of the hill, Job’s shivering seemed to have subsided a little. The boy collapsed into his brother’s arms when he saw John. Not long after John and Ern reached the high ground, the second wave bombed its way into Port au Bras. It was even louder than the first. Now the hill was filled with the sound of mournful praying and cries of anguish and grief. The sobs of the Fudge brothers came full force now. They knew they had lost their sisters and their parents and were all alone in the world. Ern Cheeseman and their uncles and aunts made a ring around them in a vain effort to shield them from the pain they would feel for a lifetime.
The people of Port au Bras barely noticed the third wave, which tossed clapboard, barrels, and the remains of battered boats about the harbour. Turnips, heads of cabbage, and pieces of salt meat floated on the water. Ern Cheeseman wrote:
Everybody is miserable, nervous wrecks and in need of help immediately. All people who had food for the winter lost it in their stores. We must have flour, sugar, tea, molasses, beef, and pork immediately… Everything we have is gone and we are ruined…everything is dismal and breaks one’s heart to look at the harbour and then think of what it was like fifteen minutes before this terrible calamity.
Most worrying was the loss of boats and the damage to those that survived the tsunami. A schooner was damaged to the tune of one thousand dollars and its two large banking dories—which four fishermen worked from—swept away. A twenty-two-ton western boat needed repairs that would also cost a thousand dollars.
Eighteen-year-old Francis Bennett was in severe shock, long after the villagers emerged from the hill. His fifty-eight-year-old mother, Mary Ann, died in the tidal wave, as did his fifty-year-old uncle, Henry Dibbon. The young entrepreneur’s business was also completely destroyed. Francis believed in getting an early start in life; still a teenager, he was already married and a successful trader. Gone were his flakes, stages, trap skiff, banking dory, a thousand feet of lumber, a staysail, 145 yards of ducksail, ten oil casks, Fairbanks weights, and weighing beams and weights—losses worth $1,500.00. Though a young man, Francis was overwhelmed at the thought of starting all over again from nothing, especially in the face of his grief.
Yet, like many around Burin, Port au Bras was a prosperous village. John Bennett, who owned the damaged western boat, had $280 in the bank. John Dibbon, who was also without shelter and whose brother Henry had died, had two thousand dollars in the bank. George and Elizabeth Bennett, whose house had shifted four feet, breaking their two chimneys, had thirty-five dollars cash on them as well as $1,500 in a savings account. Not everyone was well off, though; fifty-four-year-old Ellen Brenton cried over the twenty gallons of berries she’d picked and the sea had stolen from her.
The waves weren’t long gone when they began to find the bodies. In Ern Cheeseman’s words, “No human had a chance in such raging roaring seas.” Within two days, the body of eighty-four-yearold Louisa Allen, a native of Oderin, was found tucked under one of the remaining houses. A fisherman in Path End, two miles away, came across the bodies of Jessie Fudge and two of her daughters, Harriet May and little Hannah. That of fifteen-year-old Gertie was still missing. Mary Ann Bennett’s body was discovered under what was left of the government wharf.
As darkness grew thick on the night of November 18, the people of Port au Bras gradually became sure that there would be no more waves. Finally, with midnight close at hand, they crept down the hill and back to the houses that were still left. Their shoulders were slumped and they walked hesitantly, their eyes not leaving the moonlit sea.
The brothers, John and Job Fudge, moved slowly with their arms around each other. As they reached the bottom of the hill, near where their family store and house had so recently stood, they saw a hunched figure sitting on the ground. As they got closer, they heard a low moan. Although they had never heard it before, something in the sound sparked a deep recognition and they strode toward the figure.
“My God, it’s Dad!” John cried, stooping down to look into his father’s haggard face.
“Dad!” Job cried, falling to his knees and hugging his father.
Tom burst into tears and let out loud sobs.
“I saw them in the window!” he cried. “I couldn’t get to them…”
The boys began crying again.
“They just went by on that wave,” Tom continued, gulping air between sobs. “I followed the house. But I couldn’t do anything.”
“Oh Daddy,” Job cried. He crawled into his father’s lap, picturing his mother and sisters desperate for rescue as they were swept out to sea. He knew he would never see them again.
Tom’s brother and his wife, Mary, had caught up to the little group.
“Thank God you’re alive!” Mary said. “We thought you were gone, too.”
“It’s a miracle you weren’t,” her husband said. “Staying on the low ground like that.”
Mary elbowed him in the ribs. “He had to try to get Jessie and the girls,” she said.
Tom began to moan again, but this time he pulled his sons close to him. Their relatives and neighbours stood around them in the cool November night.
“Come home with us, Tom,” Sam Green said.
“Or with us, Tom,” Bridget Hardstone said.
“You’re welcome at our place, too, Tom,” Sarah Hynes said.
“For as long as you like.”
Magistrate Malcolm Hollett was determined to fully document every single case from Mortier Bay in the north to the villages of the boot around to Fortune Bay on the other side of the peninsula. The town of Fortune had survived the tsunami virtually untouched, but forty-three-year-old widower Edgar Hillier had seen his house ripped off its foundation and thrown onto a high rock; in addition, the home’s porch and an annex had been destroyed. Hillier was in poor health, was going blind, and had three children who depended on him.
On the other side of the peninsula in Mortier near Marystown, the waves washed John and Bridget Antle’s house off its foundation. It would have to be taken down and rebuilt… Hollett nearly cracked his pen as he spread the words across the page. Then he glanced at a map; Mortier was just the beginning.
In mid-December Hollett called a meeting of the Rock Harbour-Corbin Committee. He had made several trips down the coast and was fair bursting to talk of what he had seen. Although he was now the agent for the South Coast Disaster Committee, the magistrate wanted to show his closest neighbours that he had not forgotten them.
As snowdrifts piled up outside Hollett’s Burin house, three men walked up the path. Merchant Frank LeFeuvre came from Bull’s Cove. He was followed by Albert Grant of Corbin and Captain William Foote who came from Stepaside.
As the men settled into the parlour and were served tea by Hollett’s quiet little maid, the magistrate read his draft report on the district south of Burin.
The men nodded solemnly and Albert Grant spoke up.
“Make sure you mention that Joshua Mayo’s house is gone,” he offered. “His and Sophia’s. The first wave ripped the house off its foundation and broke away the porch. It tore great holes in the roof, too. Now there’s a big tribe of them homeless.”
Hollett picked up his pen and raised his bushy eyebrows.
“There’s the Mayo children,” Grant continued. “Morgan, Irene, and Daisy, and there’s the four Moulton orphans who live with them, Annie and Tryphena, and the boys, little William and Bert. They lost all their food and Josh’s Hubbard engine is badly damaged, too.”
“Sounds like a very sad case,” Hollett said grimly.
“It is,” Grant nodded. “Those orphans have been through enough already and now this. I believe the family is all split up because there are too many of them to be housed together. It must be hard on those poor children.”
After a minute, Hollett turned his attention to merchant Frank LeFeuvre.
“How did you make out in the tidal wave, Frank? Have you had a chance to assess everything yet?” he asked.
“Well, it was the business that was hurt,” LeFeuvre answered. “Not our home, thanks be to God. But LeFeuvre’s Trading Company took a hit—I’d put the damage at about twenty-one hundred dollars. It’s substantial for us.”
Hollett looked dour. “You’ll need to be back in business for the fishing season,” he said. “The fishermen will need that as much as you do. This brings me to my next topic. There’s been a generous response to our tragedy from all over the country and beyond. We very much need and appreciate all the help we can get. But now Christmas is coming and the New Year will follow. People’s attention will turn from the tidal wave. Besides, human nature being what it is, November 18 will fade from memory soon enough—as good as people are. We have to do something about this.”
He stopped and did a slow turn about the parlour as the men considered his words.
“We still need help,” Albert Grant said. “There’s so much to be done yet.”
Hollett continued. “Yes. So I propose a trip to St. John’s after Christmas to remind the government and the people of the city of our tragedy and the conditions we are still facing. I think that you three gentlemen should accompany me.”
Grant drew back, his eyes wide. LeFeuvre spoke up, “A capital idea, so to speak. A kind of speaking tour of the city.”
“It’s certainly needed,” said Captain Foote. “I don’t know if we’re the right men to go, but you’re on the right track.”
“You might want to bring representatives from farther south, where there’s even worse damage and grief,” Grant said.
Hollett’s face brightened. “Quite right!” he said. “Thank you for your support, gentlemen. We shall agree in principle to the idea and begin planning, then?”
He smiled at their nods.
On January 15, 1930 Magistrate Malcolm Hollett and fisherman Albert Grant sat in the editorial offices of The Daily News on Duckworth Street in St. John’s. Hollett’s heavy-lidded eyes bored into the editors and stenographers as he listed off the devastation that the tidal wave had wrought: thirty-two houses destroyed; twenty-seven others badly damaged; 144 large dories and one hundred small dories wrecked; and twenty-seven trap boats smashed to pieces. The men around the table gasped as Hollett spoke. This was the first time they had heard the numbers in such blunt form.
“Our people have also lost much of their fishing gear,” Hollett said, speaking slowly. “Gone are forty-seven thousand cotton lines, a hundred and eight herring nets, ninety-four cod nets, thirty caplin seines, and three hundred and fifty six anchors.”
“That is a great deal of gear,” a burly, grey-haired man mused.
“It represents the livelihood of many men like Mr. Grant here,” Hollett said. “And some of the wealth of the country, as you can appreciate.”
“Rope,” Grant said. “We lost over forty thousand fathoms of rope of all sizes.”
“Yes,” said Hollett. “Keep in mind, gentlemen, that while we are most grateful for everything that has been done for us, the government is only taking care of public property. That is, government wharves will be rebuilt at public expense but family flakes and wharves will not. Our immediate requirements are for timber and sticks for wharves, flakes, and stages. We’ve received three carloads from Highland, on the west coast of the island, landed by steamer, and we were so pleased to get it. But, sadly, we need more. I’ve prepared a list of our needs.”
He handed a crisp piece of paper to eager hands. It read:
190,000 sticks for flakes
20,000 flake beams
10,000 wharf beams
13,000 flake longers
54,000 two inch planks
“We would be so grateful if your newspaper could publish this list,” he added. “It is difficult to distribute the goods we are receiving because so many places are without a wharf or landing stage—Lamaline, Point au Gaul, Taylor’s Bay. There’s only one private wharf at St. Lawrence. But efforts must be made regardless.”
Hollett noted the silence of the editors and how they stared at him. He continued.
“I cannot emphasize how important it is to get the fishermen outfitted for spring. The people of the South Coast are fishermen firstly and lastly and they need to be put in the same position they were in before the disaster.”
Albert Grant nodded. “Yes, we are fishermen. We want to fish.”
That day, the men of Taylor’s Bay put the finishing touches on Charles and Selina Hillier’s house, which had sustained fifty dollars worth of damage in the tidal wave, leaving it open on one side and exposed to the winter elements. Through the South Coast Disaster Committee, fifty thousand feet of lumber had been accumulated. A substantial portion of this had been brought to Taylor’s Bay, a priority as per the instructions of the medical staff who had visited on the Meigle.
After one of Charles’s neighbours hammered in the last nail, he said, “That’s it! She’s done and ready for you to move back into.”
Charles smiled and rubbed his hands in the January cold. He still had a lot of work to do—he had lost his three small boats, stage, and wharf—but this was a start. He looked across the meadow to see Selina and their children, Thomas, Bertram, Junior, Harold, and Freeman, the baby in her arms—his five fine boys. Before the tidal wave, Selina used to talk about wanting a girl; everyday she would tease him about it. Since November 18, she hadn’t mentioned the idea.
Behind her was Robert Bonnell, still ashen-faced from the loss of his wife and child to the waves. His three children came after him. The Bonnells would stay with Charles and Selina until the men of the village could build them a new house.
When the group reached the Hillier house, Selina turned to Robert and said, “This is your home now for as long as you like.”
Charles put his arm around his friend’s shoulder. Robert nodded and crossed the threshold, his little ones trailing after him. Charles and Selina looked at each other. “Poor Robert. I’m so glad we have each other,” she said, giving her husband’s hand a squeeze. Then she looked into his eyes and smiled shyly.
“Maybe we’ll have that girl one day,” she said.
That night in Point au Gaul, David Hipditch lay straight as a board in bed, staring at the plastered ceiling as he usually did until sleep finally overtook him in the wee hours just before dawn. The house— not his own, which was at the bottom of the sea somewhere—was full of people, but there seemed to be some kind of cotton gauze between him and everyone else. All his energy went into keeping it well hidden and showing appreciation for the kindness his in-laws, Nan and her family, were showering on him and Jessie. The faces of his and Jessie’s drowned children never left him: Thomas’ grin; Henry’s dancing eyes; little Elizabeth’s chubby cheeks. He cursed himself for the thousandth time for not being there to save them from the cruel water. He wished he could talk to Jessie but, though she lay at his side every night, her grief bathed her and there was no room for him in it. Since that awful night, she had barely registered his presence. As he did every night, David tried to pray.
Then he suddenly felt something warm at his shoulder—it was Jessie’s face rubbing against him. He turned and looked into her face. She was staring at him, her great brown eyes meeting his. He reached for her long hair and stroked it slowly. She continued to look at him.
“Jessie,” he whispered slowly. “I miss them.”
Then he cried quietly and she wrapped her arms around him and held him.
“Tell me you love me, Jessie,” he pleaded.
“Oh, David,” Jessie said. “I love you. I miss my babies, but I love you.”
“I need you,” David said.
“I’m sorry,” his wife answered. “I need you, too.”
David pulled Jessie close and they fell into a deep sleep in each other’s arms.