The Wake

by Linden MacIntyre

  Scientists in Halifax first calculated that the epicentre was somewhere in Labrador. Their initial guess was a mistake. The epicentre was, in fact, 165 miles south of Newfoundland’s Burin Peninsula, about 375 miles east of Halifax, and the actual seismic shifting was more than twelve miles below the ocean floor.

  At the time, there were no seismographs or tidal gauges in Newfoundland to create a scientific record of what had happened, just a multiplicity of human observations that would take days to coalesce into random snapshots of unimaginable destruction.

  3.

  THE town of St. Lawrence had 135 families, a population that was almost entirely dependent on the fishery like virtually everybody else on the south coast. The town’s main businesses, run by families named Farrell and Saint and Giovannini, were at the mercy of the sea and the international market for salt fish. These merchants were accustomed to the whims of weather and of traders in St. John’s, the United States, the Caribbean and Western Europe.

  But nothing in the remembered history of the south coast could have prepared the people of St. Lawrence and all the other vulnerable communities—from Burin in the east to Lamaline in the west—for the chain of catastrophes that would begin at approximately seven thirty on the evening of a perfect late-autumn day in 1929.

  The earthquake had been a dramatic but mercifully brief diversion—a perfect memory, a brush with disaster, but without apparent consequences.

  Adolph and Dinah Giovannini were relieved to find that the shaking land had left their business undamaged. At approximately seven thirty, they were standing just outside the shop when Dinah noticed that the water in the harbour, which had been rising rapidly, was now receding, dropping even faster. Soon she and Adolph could see the bottom. It was uncanny—staring at a place you knew about but thought of, like certain parts of the human body, as private, never to be publicly exposed. It was shocking.

  They were speechless for a moment. Then Dinah made what would turn out to be one of the most important declarations of her life: she urged Adolph to tell the fifteen men working inside the shop to immediately leave the flimsy structure, which was now hanging out over the edge of the naked shoreline. Everyone should head for higher ground. And quickly.

  And everybody did.

  IT was surprising that on November 18 and in the days immediately following this epic geological event, there was hardly any public reaction from the capital, St. John’s. In the city, people were startled and confused, but not terribly bothered by what seemed to be nothing more significant than a brief shudder.

  Eloise Morris, a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl, would remember clearly that she’d been waiting for a friend at five in the afternoon, near the gates of the college residence where she was living.7 A lamppost across the street from where she stood was swaying like a tree in a high wind, its lights switching violently.

  And then it was over. Eloise thought briefly of her family back in Collins Cove, near Burin, where her father was the United Church minister, but it would be days before she, or anybody else in St. John’s, heard details of how the earthquake had affected people on the south coast. It would be nearly a month before she got to see the consequences for herself.

  One immediate concern in the island capital was a rumour that there had been a serious accident at the iron ore mines on Bell Island, but that was quickly ruled out. Reports from Bell Island and Fogo indicated nothing out of the ordinary. Bay Roberts did report a break in a submarine cable somewhere between Newfoundland and New York, but this wasn’t considered serious—at least not immediately.

  From the south coast of the Burin Peninsula, there was no news at all. Perhaps the capital was unaware that communication with the area had been disrupted by a storm on the weekend before the earthquake. But given the reassuring news from other places on the island, nothing of significance was read into the silence from the south.

  For the moment, Newfoundlanders who were aware of the earthquake seemed grateful to have been spared yet another calamity in the island’s long history of grief: the great fires that ravaged St. John’s in 1846 and 1892; the lives lost on the sea and on the ice; the national catastrophe on July 1, 1916, at Beaumont-Hamel in France, with 233 young Newfoundlanders dead, 386 wounded and 91 missing, all in a single encounter. The First World War, still vivid in the psyche, had robbed this small, remote dominion of the lifeblood of a generation.

  But there were even greater, if less remembered, calamities. Canada’s deadliest natural disaster happened off the east coast of Newfoundland on September 12, 1775, when more than four thousand people lost their lives at sea and in coastal communities during a cyclone that has been ranked as the seventh-deadliest hurricane in recorded human history.8 A brief contemporary account of that event noted that “for some days after, in drawing the nets ashore, they [Newfoundlanders] often found twenty or thirty dead bodies in them; a most shocking spectacle.”9

  That epic disaster was overshadowed by other world events—notably the beginning of the American War of Independence and a storm that had obliterated much of North Carolina just days earlier.

  And now, late in 1929, there were other challenges to be concerned about. For most of Newfoundland, the earthquake on November 18 was, for at least a few days, little more than a distraction. As always, there was an immediate preoccupation with the imperatives of livelihood, and how it might be affected by larger and equally unmanageable external forces, such as global economics and the ever-looming peril of man-made catastrophes like war.

  The closing months of 1929 were dark with speculation about hard times to come. Bad things could happen in remote communities and hardly anyone outside would notice—or having noticed, care for long. Rural communities throughout Newfoundland, which was at the time a nominally independent country—just like Canada, Australia and the other members of the British Commonwealth—depended heavily on the sea for transportation, food and cash.

  On November 18, the people struggling to manage Newfoundland were, by bedtime, quickly moving on from a momentary interest in what had seemed to be a minor spasm somewhere deep in the bowels of the planet. The price of dried salt cod had fallen by half, and salt fish exports were in free fall. Relief rolls and dole payments were soaring. Starvation was a looming prospect for the vulnerable, the unlucky and the unwise.

  The world economy was falling down around them. Newfoundland, utterly dependent on markets in the United States, Europe and Asia, was facing a real existential crisis. The brief tremor might have been an omen, but in the absence of immediate consequences, the public and the establishment in St. John’s returned to worrying about the realities in front of them—the possible collapse of their economy and their democracy.

  ON the northern tip of Cape Breton Island, twelve-year-old Alice Donohue climbed into her chilly bed that night with the drama of the earthquake already buried under layers of more recent memories. Her father’s description of the tidal surge mingled with the trivia of other gossip from their community. Her most significant birthday to date was only weeks away. Christmas hovered just beyond. Special days.

  In Cape Breton and Halifax, and along the eastern Atlantic coastline as far south as the Carolinas, the brief disturbance of the late afternoon would be permanently etched in the collective memory. But for young Alice, the more immediate excitement of soon becoming a teenager was the greater impediment to sleep.

  She would turn thirteen on the fifteenth of December. That fact was paramount. But she could not have known that thirteen years later—an unimaginably long time to a twelve-year-old—she would begin her married life in St. Lawrence, Newfoundland, a community that, while she waited for the beginning of her dreams, was being devastated by a horrifying wall of water.

  Two

  The Wave

  4.

  BEFORE the distraction of the internet and television broadcasts, long before the infinity of social media amusement, there were cards. Sometimes the card games were community events with modest prizes for the pro
ficient and the lucky. Sometimes they were to raise money to improve a school, a church basement or a hall. More often, they were simple, spontaneous gatherings in kitchens where the only prize was the right to boast until the next occasion. Amid the loud commentary on strategy and the thudding of emphatic fists on kitchen tables, there would be news and gossip, fragments of old stories.

  In Kelly’s Cove, St. Lawrence, Lord’s Cove and Point au Gaul, card games were in progress in the early evening of November 18, after the supper dishes had been cleared away. It’s easy to imagine what would have dominated the conversations. An earthquake. Who was standing where; what would have been observed, spoken; how certain individuals reacted. Rosaries and Bibles had been deployed. Might the extraordinary moon have caused the astonishing trembling of their world that afternoon? Was it an omen of some kind? Would it influence approaching winter weather? Affect cod prices, which had been in worrisome decline?

  Testimonials about reactions to the earthquake, recounted from memory over the subsequent years, are woven from common threads of recollection: dishes clattering on shelves and smashing on floors; pots rattling on stoves; frightening sounds from cupboards and closets, or from upstairs, like “people jumping in their sock-feet.”1 Some people wept. Many prayed. One frightened mother, sprinkling what she thought was holy water on the head of her child, realized that in her panic, she’d grabbed cod liver oil.

  Ernest Cheeseman of Port au Bras, near Burin, in a letter he wrote two days later to his brother Jack, who was living in St. John’s, described “women screaming and praying” while “men stood silent and scared.”2

  Mary Anne Counsel was learning to spin wool and was making what she thought was great progress. But late that afternoon, she was having difficulty. The wheel seemed to have grown sluggish, stubborn, even perverse, breaking and entangling the strands of new-spun yarn. Frustrated, she swore aloud. “I wished the devil would take the [spinning] wheel.”3 The words were hardly out when “the big trembling came and the house was shivering, the dishes were dancing, the glasses rattling and I was frightened to death. I thought the devil was coming for the wheel.”

  And then the shimmering moonlight, the eerie calm, once the spasm had passed.

  FOR about two hours, the coastal people on the Burin Peninsula would have been relieved. People who had felt the earth tremble that evening would resume the routines of an ordinary day, grateful that at least one potential disaster had given them a pass.

  But the jiggle that had lasted just twenty-seven seconds, plus or minus, was only the beginning of a greater and more catastrophic drama. A hundred miles away from where they sat or worked or chatted over cards, a submarine monster had been disturbed, had begun a rampage, was already causing havoc on the ocean bottom and was now surging in its epic fury towards their shores.

  The people out on the end of the Burin Peninsula and the nearby French islands, those closest to the earthquake’s epicentre, would in time tell a story unlike the other anecdotes of momentary curiosity, of swinging lampposts in the city. It would be a different story altogether, an account of an event more harrowing than that experienced by most people on the eastern Atlantic seaboard that afternoon and evening, or ever in their lifetimes.

  But it would take a while to get the story out. Intercontinental communication had been severely compromised. Nature had conspired to cut off the south coast. There were hardly any road links between the fifty-two communities on the peninsula, so in addition to being virtually isolated from the rest of the world, they were isolated from each other.

  5.

  ON Great Burin Island, twenty-three-year-old Louise Emberley was looking forward to a special treat at suppertime—her mother had been baking apple dumplings and the house was full of the aroma. There was a sudden noise. It seemed to be coming from the stove. And they realized everything was shaking.4

  The drama was quickly over, but the questions lingered, so after supper, Louise walked along the shore, over a flimsy gangway made from planks, across the little wharves and working platforms, called stages and flakes, then up a hill to the telegraph office to see what she could learn.

  There were already people there. Helen Darby, the telegraph operator for Great Burin Island, was also the local source for news. She made notes about events unfolding in the world in a “news book” and left it out for other islanders to read. For those who were illiterate or preferred to listen, she’d read her news reports aloud.

  There was a small crowd, including an Englishman named Sidney Hussey, who kept the lighthouse. He was familiar with earthquakes, and he commented that from what he knew about them, when the epicentre of an earthquake was below the ocean floor, the event was usually followed by a tidal wave. It was an interesting observation, but the quake had happened nearly two hours earlier and the sea was calm and flat, a full moon rising over it, casting a reflection that resembled fire. Surely nothing bad could come from such serenity.

  GEORGE Bartlett, a prominent Burin merchant and member of the Newfoundland House of Assembly, was in his office when he experienced what he later recalled as “a tremendous roar and vibration.”5 Customers in his general store rushed out into the street, but then sheepishly returned when it seemed to have been a passing shudder and a lot of noise.

  Later that evening, people in Burin would remember and remark upon the fullness of the moon, the reflection of moon and stars on an unusually placid sea. As one would later ruefully observe, “There was no indication of the wrath to come.”

  NAN Hillier, who lived in the tiny community of Point au Gaul, on the southern tip of the Burin, twenty miles west of St. Lawrence, spent most of November 18 baking pies and cakes. The Ladies’ Orange Benevolent Association was holding a meeting and tea that evening in Lamaline, three miles away. She and her husband, Herbert, along with her sister Jessie Hepditch and Jessie’s husband, David, planned to attend. Nan had committed to providing sweets for the occasion.6

  The sisters had children—Nan had four, Jessie three—and the babysitting had all been arranged. Their parents, Henry and Lizzie Hillier (almost everybody in the place was named Hillier), would take care of the Hepditch kids. Herbert Hillier’s brother Chesley, who lived with him and Nan, would take care of their four.

  There was a third Hillier sister in Point au Gaul—Jemimiah. She was married to Josiah Hillier, and she had also planned to attend the meeting, but she was feeling unwell that day and the three-mile walk would have been more than she could manage.

  At around four thirty, Nan and Herbert set off on foot for Lamaline. Jessie and David Hepditch would follow a bit later. It was a challenging walk. Although the landscape between the two communities was relatively flat—Point au Gaul occupies a kind of basin on low land, face on to the sea—the journey to the nearby town over what was essentially a cart track was rugged at the best of times.

  Nan and Herb were about halfway to their destination when the earth began to tremble beneath their feet. They stopped and steadied each other. Telegraph wires were vibrating above them, creating an eerie musical hum. Ice in ditches crackled. Herbert hesitated. He’d been in the war, had travelled widely. He was familiar with earth tremors, and this is what he told his wife to reassure her. It was nothing. They kept on going. There was yet another Hillier sister, Rachael Bonnell, who lived in Lamaline, and they stopped at her place for a visit on the way to the Orange Hall. She decided to attend the social with them.

  AT the Orange Hall, people were abuzz, sharing their reactions to the memorable happening. Nobody could recall such a sensation—the earth suddenly in motion, shaking up their houses, the contents of cupboards tumbling. Strange noises from places that were usually silent.

  In Lamaline, as in many of the communities along the southern shore, people of deep religious conviction sensed foreboding in the strange incident—perhaps the end of time. Herbert Hillier, however, was assuring people he spoke with that the event was over, the danger past.

  Just before seven thirty, as the buzz a
bout the earthquake was beginning to subside, someone noticed an event more mystifying than the trembling of the earth: the water in Lamaline harbour was slowly draining away, and it continued doing so until the rocky seabed lay before them, utterly exposed.

  At home in Point au Gaul, people were staring at the same bizarre spectacle—the dry harbour bottom. There had been about twenty horses grazing on a point of land near the entrance to the harbour when the earth shuddered earlier that afternoon. Startled, the horses raised their heads and looked around, then ambled inland and up a gradually sloping hillside. Now they were huddled there, as if waiting, as if they had anticipated this new strangeness.

  Douglas Hillier was equally surprised to see a herd of sheep nervously milling around in his neighbour’s yard. “They knew something was happening.”7

  In Great Burin at that moment, Louise Emberley was among a small crowd of men, including the prescient lighthouse keeper, Sidney Hussey, staring at the harbour, suddenly drained of water, Mr. Darby’s dory at the wharf now high and dry. They started moving up to higher ground.8

  MARION Kelly lived in Kelly’s Cove, about twelve miles east of St. Lawrence (as the crow flies—there was no road then). She was thirteen years old and at a neighbour’s house, helping an elderly woman write a letter to relatives in Boston. The letter was only partly written when the house began to shake. Marion was confused and frightened, excused herself and went home.9

  Everything seemed normal there. She ate her supper with her mother, Frances Kelly; two brothers, Curt and Elroy; and her sister, Dorothy. Her dad, Vincent, like a number of the local men, was away from home, cutting firewood for the winter fuel supply. After supper was finished and the dishes put away, Marion sat down at the kitchen table to do her homework.