The Wake

by Linden MacIntyre

  Carrie Brushett and her kids were also home alone in Kelly’s Cove. Like Vincent Kelly, Carrie’s husband was off in the bush, cutting firewood. Pearl Brushett was only five, but she would remember that it had been a difficult day. Her sister Lillian was suffering with an earache and they’d been sent to bed soon after supper, Lillian with a heated plate to place beneath her ear to ease the pain.10

  MARY Walsh of Lord’s Cove, a village just to the west of St. Lawrence, would normally have been in St. Pierre, where she’d spent previous winters helping out a family with small children. But she’d returned home in May to help her father, who was a fisherman and a widower. She was still at home on the afternoon of November 18.

  Later that evening, with the memory of the earthquake already fading, she had put on her coat to go visiting and was in the doorway of her home when she saw an extraordinary sight: where the harbour had been just moments earlier, there was only rock and seaweed.

  By then, word was spreading through the community and people were stepping outside to see what was causing the commotion. A small group had gathered on the road in front of Mary’s house. Her father, Jim Walsh, was there. Her neighbours, the Harnett brothers. Paddy Rennie, another neighbour from down the hill, closer to the cove, along with his two boys, Albert and Martin.

  The spectacle had interrupted a card game at the Harnetts’. Pat Rennie was a regular there, a feisty little Irishman who made a decent living, like almost everybody else in Lord’s Cove, as a fisherman. Pat had left home earlier in the evening, after the earth tremor and his supper. His wife, Sarah, had put two of the kids—four-year-old Margaret and Patrick Junior, who was seven—to bed. Nine-year-old Rita was lingering downstairs. The baby in the family, Bernard, one year and eight months old, was strapped into a high chair near the kitchen table while Sarah was busy at her sewing machine. It was a clear moonlit evening, and from where he stood, up near the Harnetts’ place, Pat could see his house just beyond Eastern Cove Pond, behind the beach where he would spread his fish on the rocks to cure in the summer sun.

  Mary Walsh would not forget the moment: neighbours standing around, watching, when suddenly the emptied cove was full again, and rising above it, a towering, curling wave, racing straight at Patrick Rennie’s home. She would remember his panic-stricken cry—“Look, there’s my house! My wife and my children are in it.”

  The raging sea picked up his house, tossed it around, then dropped it on the beach as it withdrew, grumbling, seemingly exhausted.

  And then the sea rose up before them once again. The wave was massive. “It was like it was coming out of the sky.”11

  TOM Pike was someone everybody knew in St. Lawrence. He was a veteran of the First World War and had lost an arm in the trenches of France. One of the small rewards for his service overseas was a partial livelihood as a customs collector and relieving officer, the man responsible for handing out the welfare chits to desperate people once a month—$1.84 per person per month, once their needs and means were proven. For many, the dole, pittance though it was, became the narrow margin between starvation and survival.12

  The needy came to Tom Pike from as far away as Lawn—an eight-mile walk—and on dole day, Tom’s wife, Agnes, and her household helper would bake multiple loaves of bread to hand out for sustenance on the weary walk back to distant homes. On the evening of November 18, she had bread in the oven while her husband engaged a group of neighbours in a friendly game of poker at the kitchen table.

  The house Tom and his family shared was at the end of Shingle Point, a narrow strip of land that jutted from the western shore towards the middle of the harbour. The house was in a vulnerable spot, but it had been built sturdily because of its exposure to offshore gales and tides.

  At about seven thirty, the poker game and the baking were interrupted by a townsman who arrived in a state of breathless panic. Something ominous was going on outside. Someone went out to check, then rushed back in—the tide was rising rapidly, he said. A tidal bore, almost like a wave, was surging down the harbour, straight towards Tom Pike’s house. Cards were dropped. There were three children in the Pikes’ house, little girls between the ages of one and twelve. Tom and his fellow card players grabbed the children and, with Agnes close behind them, ran across the open shingle strand for the safety of the meadows on the hill that rose above the town.

  The water rose up again, cresting as a ten-foot wave, then spilling forward, breaking against the Pikes’ house, then surging past it towards, and then well past, the end of the harbour. The house was still firmly on its foundation as the sea withdrew, dragging with it boats, debris from shattered wharves and staging, fishing gear. The water retreated seawards—only to return, now littering the shoreline with the remnants of what, just minutes earlier, had been the livelihood for a community.

  And then Tom Pike could see his barn teetering as it floated down the harbour, and he could hear a furious racket coming from inside, the sound of battering. The door swung open and Pike’s little Newfoundland pony leapt into the swirling water, swam to shore, clambered out and galloped away. Three days later, he returned.

  IN Lord’s Cove, ten miles west of St. Lawrence, the first surge had carried Pat Rennie’s house off its foundation and dropped it on the beach, where it grounded. The second wave lifted it again, and this time dragged it seawards, into the middle of Eastern Cove Pond. All around it, the wreckage of wharves and staging, small buildings, one nearly upside down.13 And then the raging sea came back a third time, smashed against Pat Rennie’s house again, rose up to the second-storey windows and retreated. Finally.

  And then a ghastly silence. The evening was unnaturally serene again. A high, luminous moon. The air still. There would be stories from all along the coastline—stories and images permanently etched into the collective memories of the small communities that had, for these few horrifying minutes, been united by catastrophe. Stories from Burin, Collins Cove, Kelly’s Cove, Stepaside, Port au Bras, St. Lawrence. Stories from Lawn, Lord’s Cove, Taylor’s Bay, Point au Gaul, Lamaline. Stories from a dozen other smaller places, and the ten thousand people whose future had just washed away.

  There would be memories, undeniable even if imagined, of lamplight flickering in the upper windows of houses that were now afloat, still moving on the suddenly exhausted tide; images of the bays and harbours, drained and then filled up again with debris; exaggerated impressions of rogue waves up to eighty feet high, scouring flimsy man-made obstacles from their path. The flakes and stages smashed to kindling; the dories and the schooners tossed up on land or keeled over on the bottom of the bays; the homes, trustingly established near the workplace, now demolished. Winter food and fuel supplies, gone irretrievably.

  In Lord’s Cove, the deathly momentary silence would have felt like endless minutes. And then it was broken by a cry from the middle of the pond, from Patrick Rennie’s house. An awful sound to the ears of any adult—the appeal of a small child in distress.

  Jim Walsh and two Harnett brothers, Maurice and Clement, found an undamaged dory and launched it.14 They attached a rope between the dory and a capstan on the hillside. Having seen three massive waves already, they would have been foolish not to anticipate another. Jim Walsh had lit a candle and planted it in a link in a chain that was attached to the capstan. It was a holy candle with special meaning in the Walsh family—last lit beside his wife’s deathbed some years earlier.15 He would credit that act of faith with the fact that his property, home, fishing gear, capstan and dory had survived unscathed while so much other property was shattered and washed away.

  Walsh and the Harnetts persuaded Pat Rennie to stay behind with his two sons while they rowed out to his sunken house. Clem Harnett also stayed behind, by the capstan, in case of an emergency.

  Jim’s daughter, Mary (later in life, Mary McKenna), watched her father standing, nervous, at the bow of the little boat as it slowly approached the submerged Rennie home. The dory halted near an upstairs window, and Jim Walsh peered in. Then he
broke through the glass and climbed inside. And then climbed out, carrying a small bundle.

  The bundle was a child, Patrick Rennie’s four-year-old daughter, Margaret. She was drenched, barely conscious, covered in muck and seaweed. There was nobody else. The water was nearly up to the second floor. The little boy, Patrick, who should have been in bed, was nowhere to be seen.

  When day dawned on the nineteenth, Mary Walsh watched as the men towed the Rennie house back closer to the land. She watched the water pouring out. And the menfolk venturing inside.

  The toddler, Margaret, would know about that night only from the memories of others. She would survive into old age—she died in 2015—and throughout her life, she was sought out frequently by folklorists, historians and journalists and asked to repeat her story, even though she remembered almost nothing. There were many embellishments by other people, but for Margaret Rennie, particular details—the facts that really mattered to her, passed on by survivors—would remain consistent.

  “They found Mom and the children downstairs. Mom was found in under the table. She was sewing at the table with the sewing machine. Patrick was upstairs in bed earlier. I suppose when he heard the noise he came downstairs. Poor Patrick, he was found in under the couch. Rita was around there somewhere, I suppose. The baby, Bernard, was tied in the high chair.”16

  Throughout the remainder of his life, her father, Patrick Rennie, seemed unable or unwilling to talk about that night. His surviving sons were similarly silent. Martin’s daughter, Sarah Brake, could not recall her father or her uncle Albert or her grandfather ever talking about that terrible event.17 She remembered Patrick Rennie as a wiry little man who worked hard and kept his memories inside. He was missing two fingers, but she had never heard an explanation for how he lost them—perhaps because, in the years that followed, missing fingers would be the least of his concerns.

  Patrick Rennie’s life, just a few years later, would take another turn into the unknown, and eventually into a dark place that eclipsed even the memories from the night of November 18, 1929.

  After that terrible night, he would abandon what had been his life from boyhood, the sustenance of family for generations. He would turn his back on the fishery, on the capricious ocean. And four years later, he would become a hard-rock miner in St. Lawrence.

  6.

  IT would be decades before the word that technically describes what happened on that night came into common local usage. Tsunami. For Newfoundlanders, through the years that followed, the simple phrase “tidal wave” was a more visual and comprehensible description of what they had experienced. In fact, the Japanese word now used to describe the phenomenon simply means “harbour wave,” which is basically what Newfoundlanders have been saying all along.

  Taylor’s Bay, just a few miles west of Lord’s Cove, was unusually vulnerable to the sea and offshore disturbances. It’s a marshy landscape, open to the North Atlantic and the relentless winds from the southeast. In November 1929, the coastal road through Taylor’s Bay passed over a ridge of sand and gravel that blocked the sea from a pond and a saltwater marsh where heather grew in abundance.

  The tsunami “wave” in Taylor’s Bay crested at nearly twenty-five feet, crashing on land with a momentum that drove it far beyond the shoreline and up a slope to a height at least forty feet above sea level, inundating almost every building in sight.18

  The community would never recover from the onslaught.

  ON the Burin Peninsula, the extraordinary waves surged down long narrow harbours, devastating everything before them. A slump near the epicentre of the earthquake had set the sea in motion—at first imperceptibly, in a long, broad swell travelling hundreds of miles an hour. But then, like any wave approaching shore, it lost momentum, fought the rising seabed, curled up, breaking forward and spilling towards the land; releasing incalculable energy in a devastating assault on any obstacle before it; running wildly until the energy exploded in a crashing surge against a wall of rock, or dissipated to exhaustion inland, far beyond the shoreline.19

  The human consequences of such a force are dictated by decisions people make: a considered choice of where and how to build a house, or instinctive responses when a house or life is threatened. In Lisbon, Portugal, in 1755, people terrified by wide crevices opening in the streets and squares of the city centre rushed towards the harbour, only to discover that it was dry. Boats sat stupidly on the harbour bottom amid the rocks and weeds and litter. And then the sea returned.

  Estimates of the death toll from that earthquake, the fires it caused and the tsunami that followed range between twenty thousand in Lisbon alone and eighty thousand throughout western Europe and Africa.20

  What if the tsunami of 1929 had swept towards Halifax or Boston or New York, and not a sparsely populated coastline? The consequences of human failures—wars, environmental hazards, plagues—can be avoided or mitigated by the better impulses of human nature. Creativity and common sense. But when nature inflicts a calamity, there can be no mitigation except in reaction. And among the most sensible and useful reactions is planning—for the next time.21

  The potential for destruction is now quantifiable. The 9.1 magnitude earthquake in the Indian Ocean, off the coast of Sumatra, on December 26, 2004, released the energy of twenty-three thousand atomic bombs, and the tsunami that followed killed an estimated 163,000 people.22

  What if the winter storm that struck the south coast of Newfoundland on November 19, 1929, had arrived a day earlier? Ten thousand people in the forty most vulnerable communities would have been sheltering in their homes.23 In bed early. Preoccupied with the challenges of staying warm and dry. Cocooned and careless. How many lives were spared by the providential occurrence of a calm, dry moonlit night, when people were on the move, socializing, busy at last-minute chores outside, alert?

  7.

  IN Taylor’s Bay, between Lord’s Cove and Point au Gaul, Dinah Bonnell was still wearing the pretty rose-coloured dress she’d put on that morning to visit her sisters in Lamaline.24 According to the 1921 census for Taylor’s Bay, there were eighty-two people living there. There were forty-four named Hillier and twenty-three Bonnells. In all, there were seventeen houses in the community.

  Dinah would survive for many years, and her memories were vivid and consistent with other, more perfunctory accounts of what happened to her family.

  She was sixteen, the youngest daughter among ten kids in the family of Cyrus and Mary Ellen Bonnell. She lived at home with her parents. Her fifteen-year-old brother, John, and an older brother, Bertram, and his wife, Elizabeth, were living in the same house. Bertram and Elizabeth also had three young children of their own—Bessie, who was eight, three-year-old John, and Clayton, only seven months.

  The earthquake that afternoon had been frightening, but by seven the community was peaceful and the momentary panic had passed. Then, at about seven thirty, they heard “a terrible roaring noise” outside, and as it was registering inside, an uncle dashed in shouting, “Run!” Dinah looked out and saw what she later described as “a huge, white, foaming wall . . . bearing down.”

  She ran, joining a growing crowd of men, women and children, sheep, cattle, horses—all desperately trying to outrun the wave. Her mother, Mary Ellen, was still in the house. Her movements were slow and painful because of arthritis, so she told Dinah’s brother John to go on without her. He was barely out the door when the first wave crashed against the house.

  Mary Ellen made it through the door, but only to be picked up and swept away by the retreating surge. She disappeared in a growing debris field of wood from shattered houses, sheds, dories, stages. Bertram and Elizabeth were still inside the now-disintegrating house trying to save their three kids. Elizabeth had shoved eight-year-old Bessie out the door behind her husband’s teenaged brother and they had fled. Now, with the rest of the frantic crowd, the two children scrambled for a place beyond the grasp of the first wave, which had already swept up the bay, over the coastal road, through the pond and int
o the distant marshland.

  Bertram, meanwhile, dashed upstairs, grabbed his sons, John and Clayton, wrapped them in a quilt, and raced back downstairs and out—into the grasp of yet another wave, which knocked him down and swept the boys away.

  A similar horrifying scene had been unfolding in the house next door, where Bertram’s brother Robert was living with his wife, Bridget, and their four children. Robert made it out with his son Gilbert. Bridget shooed two of the kids—Cyrus, who was two, and four-year-old Amelia Alice—into what she thought would be a safe place, a little alcove behind the stove. Then she ran upstairs to save her baby, Mary Gertrude, who was one year old. Bridget was rushing down the stairs when the second wave struck. She and the infant vanished.

  Miraculously, Amelia Alice and Cyrus survived the night where their mother had left them, deeply traumatized but still alive.

  Dinah could have known none of this as she huddled among her neighbours on a low hillside, watching as the sea calmed down. In the moonlight for as far as they could see, it was an ocean of wreckage. The beach was littered with the bodies of animals caught in the tsunami because they had been confused, terrified or slow. Of the seventeen homes in Taylor’s Bay, only five were left. Among the few buildings that survived, the little one-room school was still intact. The townspeople ventured off the barren hillside and took refuge there. Someone gathered fuel and lit a fire.

  The dawn would reveal the measure of Dinah’s loss. Her father’s house was gone. It seemed likely that her mother had gone with it, but Mary Ellen emerged, wet, half-frozen, in the daylight. She’d survived the night clinging to the wreckage of the local wharf.

  Dinah’s brother Bertram and his wife, Elizabeth, were numbed by the loss of their two little boys. It would haunt them for the rest of their lives. Eventually, the body of Clayton was found underneath a barrel, among turnips that had been stored for the winter, in Jacob Bonnell’s kitchen. Survivors would search in vain for the body of his brother.