The Wake

by Linden MacIntyre

  Robert’s wife, Bridget, and the baby, Mary Gertrude, were nowhere to be found. Their bodies were discovered in the inner pond, tangled in the kelp, nearly two weeks later, on December 1.

  The grief in Taylor’s Bay was far from over. One-month-old William Piercey would die from exposure that day in the house of Jacob Bonnell, his maternal grandfather.25 Amelia Alice Bonnell would never fully recover from the violence of the night; she died four years later, at the age of eight. Her brother Cyrus, who huddled with her through that long, cold, terrifying ordeal, died seventeen years later, when he was nineteen.

  Bertram and Elizabeth left Taylor’s Bay with their surviving daughter, Bessie. Bertram, according to family members, never fully recovered emotionally from the horror of losing the two little boys—of having saved them, only to see them swept away in the violence of a single moment that he would never cease to relive in his imagination. What if? What if I had not wrapped them in that quilt? If I had held them closer, tighter? What if I had waited inside? Turned this way outside? Or that way? An infinity of what-ifs to consume a miserable lifetime.

  8.

  AS Dinah Bonnell shivered in the darkness on a gentle slope above Taylor’s Bay, two couples from the community just west of there, Point au Gaul, were hurrying home from the Orange Hall in Lamaline to face their own family disaster.

  The social evening sponsored by the Ladies’ Orange Benevolent Association that had brought them to Lamaline had barely started when nature interrupted.26

  First the sea withdrew from the Lamaline harbour, leaving it suddenly—shockingly—dry, and then it came roaring back in three surges, destroying everything that stood before it as people watched aghast or scrambled to reach higher ground.

  Nan and Herb Hillier had brought pies and cakes, their contribution to the social gathering. Suddenly everyone was heading for the exit. Now there was but one thought in their minds: home. Herb grabbed an unclaimed cake as they were leaving—a treat for the waiting kids.

  The Hilliers and the Hepditches were at least a little reassured by the fact that as far as anybody knew, there had been no loss of life in Lamaline. It would later be confirmed that an elderly man, James Lockyer, who lived on Allan’s Island, just beyond the harbour entrance, had died of shock. But they didn’t know that yet.

  With their seven children in the care of grandparents and an uncle, all four parents felt they were in good hands.

  Just the same, it would be a long, hard journey home through coastal bogs and brooks where roads and bridges had been washed away or damaged. And maybe it was just one of those perceptions that form only in retrospect—it seemed that there was something driving Nan’s sister Jessie and her husband, David Hepditch, a primordial anxiety that spurred them onwards. They were walking quickly and in silence, and soon they were out of sight, lost in shadows looming in the silvery darkness of the moonlit night.

  And maybe they were praying silently that somehow their village had been spared—that this freak of nature had been visited exclusively on Lamaline. But it became obvious as they neared the village that the devastation had been even worse at Point au Gaul. For as far as they could see, the ocean was littered with wreckage. Boats and houses floating freely on the tide. Just outside the village, a man stopped them, urging them to go no farther. They ignored him. They met a woman who was moving slowly, oblivious and weeping.

  As they neared home, Herb’s brother Chesley rushed out to meet them, barely able to restrain his distress. “Where are the kids?” Nan asked, now nearing panic. Chesley told her that her kids were okay. He’d taken them to his and Herb’s parents’ house, which was farther up the hill. But Nan shouldn’t try to go there, he said, because there was a bridge washed out along the way. She should wait at her own place while Herb and Chesley went up the hill to fetch the children. She should wait inside and put the kettle on.

  As soon as Nan was in her house, Chesley broke the news to Herb. It was worse than either couple had imagined in their darkest fears. The sea had claimed Nan and Jessie’s mother. She was gone. The entire house was gone. And Jessie and David’s three small children. And young Irene Hillier, a daughter of Nan’s ailing sister, Jemimiah. Irene had been visiting her cousins and her grandmother. All gone.

  Nan was boiling water for tea when her brother Thomas walked into her kitchen. Even before he spoke, his face would have told her everything she didn’t want to know. “Mother is gone,” he said simply. “Father’s house is gone.”

  He was, at that moment, too shaken to offer more than the grim basics. Whatever relief Nan had been feeling from the news that her kids were okay instantly evaporated. Her mother? Dead? And her sister’s children?

  And then Jessie and her husband burst into the kitchen. Where they had left their children, there was nothing now. The house and everybody in it. Gone. Jessie was hysterical—screaming for her babies. Earlier that day, she’d been nursing the youngest, Betty, who was only eight months old.

  In a matter of minutes, while she was absent, she and David had lost their home and their belongings, their three young children and her mother. Her father, Henry, had survived only because he’d been attending a meeting of the local temperance society when the tsunami struck and carried off his family and home.

  THERE was little time for grieving—at least not then. Even in the darkness, survivors were combing through the wreckage and the seaweed on the shore, searching for the missing. Searchers found three-year-old Henry Hepditch, in his pyjamas, at midnight. He was in a boat, clinging in his death grip to a corner of the engine cover.27 Nan and Jessie’s mother, Lizzie, and the remaining two missing Hepditch children were tangled in the seaweed and wreckage littering the beach.

  By the light of the following day, even the weather had turned malevolent. The temperature dropped and the southeast wind picked up, battering the village with wet snow. Survivors picked through the debris, searching for the missing and whatever personal belongings they might be able to retrieve.

  Eight days would pass before Josiah Hillier found the body of his and Jemimiah’s daughter Irene, who was ten years old, lying on the shore. By then, there were stories to last a lifetime and beyond—stories of other tragedies in the little village.

  Thomas Hillier, who would have turned forty-four on November 21, had been enjoying a card game with his neighbours when someone noticed the peculiarity outside—the harbour drained, its rocky bottom revealed, boats dangling at the wharf or lying on their sides among the rocks. Thomas dropped his cards and dashed to the wharf to save his boat. He was struggling to get it to a safe place when the tsunami struck, probably crushing him between the boat and wharf. He left a pregnant wife and four young children.28

  Judy and Basil Walsh lived next door to Basil’s mother, Mary Elizabeth, a widow who shared her house with her late husband’s elderly sister, eighty-year-old Mary Anne Walsh. Judy and Basil were newlyweds, having married in April that year. They heard the tsunami before they saw it, a sudden roaring sound coming from the sea.29 There was no wind, no apparent reason for the growing rumble, which made it all the more frightening. Basil went out to investigate while his wife rushed next door to be with the older women. The tsunami struck. Basil managed to escape its grasp, but a retreating wave carried off both Walsh houses.30

  Basil’s house floated away but remained intact, and he eventually towed the building back to shore—and relocated it farther inland. His mother’s house was wrecked. Searchers found Basil’s aunt, Mary Anne, on the shore at Point au Gaul just after ten that night. They carried her to the church hall, which had become a morgue. Basil found his mother on a distant beach three days later.

  Judy Walsh survived, but her daughter, Sheila, would graphically describe her mother’s condition to an interviewer many years later. When they found Judy, “she was naked, bruised and delirious.” In the days that followed, she lost her hair because of stress, the trauma of the deaths of loved ones and the near impossible struggle to put her own life back together. />
  Robert Hillier, who had helped recover the bodies of both Mary Anne Walsh and little Henry Hepditch, would observe, many years later, that it seemed to be a hopeful sign that though eight people perished in Point au Gaul that night, two new lives began the same tragic evening—a baby born just moments before the wave struck, and one just after.31

  9.

  THE urgency was real and personal. Each individual in the forty small communities directly affected by the waves faced the same grim necessity—recover. Live for those who still lived. But there was also the reality of grief. The communities were all extended families, and the families, spread out along sixty coastal miles, were all linked by blood and marriage and the common challenge of survival in a harsh and unforgiving place.

  November 19 was too soon for grasping the totality of loss, the larger picture. The death toll. The sum of damages and material destruction. It was too soon to take such information in. And even for those who wondered what had happened outside the narrow scope of what they could see and feel after the disaster, when so many were now homeless and hungry, soon to be lashed by snow and the moaning southeast wind and the stinging spittle from the ocean, there was no way of getting news from other places in the same predicament. Not right away.

  And even if they could, the “big picture”—twenty-seven dead, hundreds suffering and traumatized, $1 million in damage (a massive economic blow in 1929)—would have missed the even greater reality of what had happened, and what would happen in the coming years and decades.32

  THE tsunami crashed against Newfoundland’s south coast at about seven thirty on a calm, dry moonlit Monday evening. It would be nearly noon on Thursday before anybody beyond the isolated world of the Burin heard about its impact there.

  The Burin Peninsula had been cut off days before the earthquake by a storm that brought down the single telegraph wire linking the Burin communities to St. John’s. There was no road between Burin and St. Lawrence, and the links between villages as far west as Lamaline were little more than trails and cart tracks.

  There had been three coastal steamers tied up at the wharf in Burin on Monday afternoon and evening, but two lacked wireless radios, and the third, the customs cutter Daisy, had a wireless but nobody on board at the time with the expertise to use it.33 It’s likely that stormy weather the following days prevented the Daisy and the two other vessels from venturing towards Argentia, across Placentia Bay, or even all the way to St. John’s, to spread word of the disaster. And even before the storm arrived, the crews had other priorities, trying to retrieve what had been washed away, saving people trapped in houses that were now afloat, salvaging what could be recovered from the destruction.

  Early on Thursday, November 21, an unsuspecting Captain Wes Kean of the coastal vessel Portia rounded the point leading into Burin channel on a routine visit to the town. It would take him a while to absorb the spectacle before him—a floating field of buildings, many still intact, and debris for as far as he could see.

  10.

  IN St. John’s, just before noon on Thursday, Sir Richard A. Squires, prime minister of the Dominion of Newfoundland, had probably forgotten the momentary distractions of the geological disturbances on Monday afternoon and evening.

  He had bigger issues on his mind. Newfoundland’s economy was almost completely dependent on fish exports. The island was getting ferocious and successful competition from Norway and Iceland in European fish markets. One of the country’s most lucrative markets, the United States, seemed to be going through some turmoil in the stock market—three gut-wrenching drops in stock prices on Wall Street in the preceding month. Pessimistic analysts were warning there was worse to come.

  The ever-imperious Dominions Office of the British government in London had been obsessing over and would continue to complain about the island’s finances—the potential damage to the credit of all the dominions in the Commonwealth caused by a default in this one. It was as if none of the dominions had been broke before. What about nearly bankrupt Australia? And wasn’t the mother country herself up to her eyeballs in debt? It was as if the British didn’t understand that this island was a country, just like all the others in the empire, at least the way Richard Squires saw things. It was as if the Commonwealth had forgotten that this small dominion had raised a regiment for the recent war, and that it had cost Newfoundlanders dearly in both blood and treasure—costs that continued to weaken a fragile economy.

  Squires could actually find some comfort in the various political pressures he was under from outsiders. Never mind the agitation in Ottawa and London—it reassured him that the United Kingdom and Canada would view it as not in their own best interests to let him sink beneath the considerable burden of debt the country had amassed through no fault of its own. He could take shelter among the vagaries of the world economy. And the world would have to understand what he was up against at home: primitive infrastructure; an economy grossly dependent on a single staple; a small, scattered, unsophisticated populace.

  The barriers to progress and prosperity were numerous. Corruption? It was a word that kept cropping up in editorials and political polemics, but it was, in his opinion, a red herring, a perennial distraction in the ongoing drama that informed the politics of Newfoundland, where today’s ally was tomorrow’s deadly foe, as implacable and chilly as the summer fog. The last thing Squires needed was bad news. But as that Thursday morning crept on, bad news was on the way.

  His first official word came via the wireless from the coastal steamer Portia. Captain Kean hadn’t taken long to realize that he was a first outside witness to the aftermath of a disaster. He would quickly transmit an urgent note from the magistrate in Burin, Malcolm Hollett, under the alarming subject line “Earthquake Calamity on South Coast.” Before Squires finished reading it, he was reaching for his telephone. Almost simultaneously, the telegraph wires and phones in the south coast communities, down for days, were back up and humming.34

  The superintendent of postal telegraphs, George J. Veitch, received a similar message from his Burin operator. Two justices of the peace in Lamaline were soon elaborating for the media on the human tragedy in nearby Point au Gaul, Taylor’s Bay and Lord’s Cove, offering sketchy details of what had happened to Mrs. Lizzie Hillier and her four grandchildren, the Bonnell family, and Sarah Rennie and her three children.

  Sir Richard Squires was a paradox of contradictions. He preached austerity but indulged an appetite for style and luxury. At a time when people with steady jobs could live on $600 a year, his lifestyle cost an estimated $15,000,35 a sum well beyond his salary, not to mention his personal resources. He was a fierce Orangeman who cultivated strategic political alliances with Catholics; a social drinker who supported Prohibition; an opponent of women’s suffrage whose wife, Helena (who also opposed the suffrage movement), would become the first elected female in the parliament of Newfoundland. He was a staunch Methodist with the appearance and confidence and eloquence of a preacher—he seemed the embodiment of personal integrity. And yet he was prosecuted for corruption (income tax evasion) and was the subject of a royal commission that upheld charges he had taken kickbacks and misappropriated public funds, including money meant for veterans of the First World War.

  It was like water off a Cape Ann hat. Even after proven charges of personal corruption, he easily won his second term as prime minister of Newfoundland in the general election of 1928.

  Whatever the contradictions in his character, Sir Richard would demonstrate, on November 21, 1929, perhaps his greatest strength in politics: decisiveness. It might have been sparked by self-confidence—his dramatic win, against the odds, in the recent general election. Or it could have been just another manifestation of his well-known eagerness for spending public money. Whatever the reason, Squires moved quickly over the noon hour.

  By early afternoon, he had created an emergency committee of senior politicians and bureaucrats. By mid-afternoon, there was a ship at dockside in St. John’s taking on relief supplies
for the stricken communities of the south coast. By nine thirty that evening, the SS Meigle was sailing through the Narrows, bound for Burin.

  Along with the relief committee, the Meigle carried five elected politicians, a cadre of doctors and nurses, and an impressive load of supplies to meet any human need: nearly nineteen tons of flour; a ton each of sugar and butter; half a ton of tea; one hundred barrels each of beef and pork; four hundred bags of hard bread; and nails, window glass and putty.36

  Among the doctors and nurses, politicians and crew on the Meigle, there were no members of the news media. The newspapers had asked to put a journalist on board but were perfunctorily refused. “It would be inexpedient,” was the brief response to an official request from the St. John’s Evening Telegram.

  BY Friday—even without a single professional correspondent on the scene of the disaster—the media were accurately reporting that the death toll from the tsunami stood at twenty-seven. Amelia Alice Bonnell from Taylor’s Bay would become the twenty-eighth victim,37 after a lingering four-year illness caused by the trauma of cowering with her little brother in a battered house as her mother and baby sister were swept away.

  Based on interim reports by officials on board the Meigle and interviews with people who’d travelled to St. John’s from the afflicted area, property damage was being estimated by the weekend at $1 million ($14.5 million in 2018 dollars). It was a staggering amount in the context of the time and circumstances of the small, hand-built communities in a sparsely populated, debt-warped island country.

  AS THE Meigle carefully approached the Burin waterfront at three thirty on the afternoon of November 22, the politicians, bureaucrats and doctors aboard thought they had a fairly clear idea from the local magistrate of what they should expect.38 If anything, he’d understated things.