The Wake

by Linden MacIntyre

  The Newfoundlander had a dream, a vision of great wealth built upon an asset he had recently acquired—licences that permitted him to exploit mineral resources in an area the young New Yorker had never heard of. Those minerals were in the Burin Peninsula, beneath some remote fishing villages, one with the intriguing name of Lawn, and a neighbouring community with a name that, given the geography, would have been easier to remember—St. Lawrence. The St. John’s businessman planned to start a mining industry in St. Lawrence. He owned rights to dig up a mineral known as fluorspar, which was abundant there and an essential element in the making of everything that mattered in a modern economy—steel, aluminum, chemicals.

  It was providential, in a way—a kind of epic symmetry. The unfolding of the universe had left the earth’s crust unstable and human lives vulnerable to earthquakes and volcanoes, avalanches and tsunamis. But the same prehistoric mechanisms had also left a legacy of great wealth. And rocky Newfoundland was a beneficiary: vast quantities of iron ore, rich pockets of copper and, on the south coast, fluorspar.

  A geophysical calamity would create terrific hardship in Newfoundland. But now two businessmen, quite undaunted by the instability inherent in the universe, were speculating about the potential of geology—specifically, the fortuitous discovery of fluorspar—to enrich the lives of ordinary mortals, especially the two of them.

  The American was intrigued. Fluorspar? What the heck was that?

  But this meeting, given the prevailing international circumstances, was auspicious, at least for the American. It was a fluke that he was there at all—a minor business matter. And it was by chance that he had encountered the visionary Mr. Taylor.

  There is no evidence to suggest that the young New Yorker, whose name was Walter Seibert, was either superstitious or especially religious. But when, some months after the great financial crash of 1929, Taylor showed up at Seibert’s office in Manhattan, his finances and his dream by then in tatters, the accountant might have thought that this too was destiny in action. He listened sympathetically as Taylor elaborated on the sudden downturn in his prospects. And Walter was only too happy to help the unfortunate Newfoundlander by taking the precious asset off his hands for, it is reported, the modest sum of three hundred and fifty dollars.52

  On its face, this small transaction would signal the beginning of recovery, a promise of a new economic vitality in at least part of a region that had, since the men’s meeting in St. John’s, been devastated by a natural calamity. But there would be, as always, strings attached.

  Three

  Legacy of Chaos

  14.

  ST. LAWRENCE, NEWFOUNDLAND

  TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 19, 1929

  08:00 ( NST)

  FROM where he stood just outside his glebe house on that grim Tuesday morning, even Father Thorne, for all his deep faith and fortitude, would have been daunted by the sight that he now saw clearly in the watery light of the new day. The wistful southeast wind was already whistling, and there were large, soft snowflakes settling on Cape Chapeau Rouge at the harbour entry. Before the day was out, there would be another storm. He could feel it in his weary bones, feel the damp southeaster gusting on his face.

  The working part of what had been, the day before, a struggling but entirely viable community now lay shattered, scattered on the shore, littering the landwash at the head of the harbour, up to and well past the road to Little St. Lawrence.

  The church and rectory were safely up the hillside east of Great St. Lawrence harbour. Most of the houses in the community had been beyond the reach of the tsunami. But he could see where two homes had been, now empty spaces. It might have been much worse.

  The house where Tom Pike lived with his family, on the end of Shingle Point, had survived the full force of the sea. That Tom and Agnes and the little girls got out of there alive was miraculous. The water had inundated the first floor of the house. He could imagine the bread Agnes said she’d left baking in the oven. Sodden dough, the colour of death. Pike’s barn was gone. As was Adolph Giovannini’s fish store. Wharves and stages and the flakes where they laid fish out to dry in the summer sun—all shattered.

  Most of the homes were undamaged. Thankfully, there had been no loss of life in St. Lawrence. But the people were understandably afraid. Many refused Father Thorne’s encouragement to go home. They stayed with friends on the higher ground. Some slept in barns. Many didn’t sleep at all.

  The priest might have briefly wondered about the neighbouring communities. Lawn. Lord’s Cove. It would have been hard to imagine that people in those places were worse off, and it would be a while before he knew the terrible reality. The death. Almost every home in Taylor’s Bay destroyed.

  For now, he had enough to think about, right in front of him.

  It had been a long night. Even as the first wave was retreating, people came straggling up the hill for the sanctuary of the church, the glebe, the convent. They had arrived, white-faced, some nearly overwhelmed by panic because a spouse or child had gone missing in the confusion. They came to him carrying those who couldn’t walk, the elderly and sick. They came to him for the reassurance he could offer, his connection with a power that was greater than the sea, and certainly more merciful. Many of them would be reluctant to go home.

  He was a reassuring figure, Father Augustine Thorne. A holy man, but also manly. Stocky. Strongly built and—as he demonstrated from time to time on the soccer pitch—fit as any of the local football fanatics. It was one of the delights he discovered in St. Lawrence when he’d arrived six years earlier. The passion for sports. And for education—nurtured by the nuns who had run an admirable school here since 1871.

  He was now forty years old. Who knew what lay ahead of him? But he could happily spend the remainder of his priesthood here, among these worthy people. They were, in his opinion, a cut above the average for the island’s baymen, thanks to the school and the steely character nurtured by athletic excellence.

  Like many clergymen of many denominations in small, isolated places, Father Thorne projected an authority that ran well beyond the symbolism of the collar and a powerful institution, but it saddled him with responsibilities that he might have felt woefully unqualified to handle. And he knew that he was now staring at another one, perhaps a greater challenge than he would ever face again. Rebuilding a community’s economy from scratch. He would meet the challenge because he knew his people better than they knew themselves, and he knew that he could mobilize and motivate them.

  But on this morning, so full of menace from the weather, so soon after the catastrophe, they were coping with the shock of what had happened to them. He would give them time, at least the morning, while he was busy taking stock of what they would have to do to get through and beyond this crisis.

  AS THE day progressed, the storm intensified. But he was able to persuade the people who had moved in with relatives and friends to go back to their homes, to begin the cleanup. The wave had interrupted normal household routines. Supper dishes left on tables. The smaller children snatched from beds. Cards dropped where they’d been dealt. The vandal sea rampaging through kitchens and parlours left filth behind with all the shock and wreckage. In the aftermath of fear, it would be easy to succumb to anger, bitterness. Or worse, the numbness of defeat. But there was no time for that. No time for weakness. It was time to face the mess, restart the clocks.

  Father Thorne was able to convince his people that in the litter strewn along the shoreline, there was material to be salvaged, lumber to be used to restore the wharves and the stages and the fishing stores, and if for no other useful purpose, to be reduced to firewood for the hard winter days ahead. Fuel supplies had washed away along with winter food—the salted fish and beef, molasses, sugar, flour. All the essentials for their self-sufficiency. Tons of fish, stored for later shipment, later income. All gone.

  Among the immediate requirements was communication with the world beyond the harbour, Burin and St. John’s, even nearby places to the west
. The waves had knocked out the telegraph. He could now see Cecelia Fewer’s office squatting lugubriously in the middle of the harbour. Lines and poles were down.

  ON the evening of the nineteenth, Father Thorne summoned the townsfolk of St. Lawrence to a meeting and gave a rousing speech about resilience, about the power of faith, not just in the Almighty but in themselves. By the next day, according to the Daily News, he had teams of St. Lawrence men at work, starting to recover and rebuild.

  Miss Fewer and the postmistress, Mrs. Sylvia Fudge, had managed to climb through an upstairs window in the floating telegraph office and salvage the equipment they’d need to restore communications. Quite amazing people, these St. Lawrence women. Strong men raised the poles, restrung the wires. And within a few days, they got the word out. They were in deep trouble. By then, they would have heard about the other places. They were beginning to get the full measure of the calamity. The death and scale of the destruction along the shore, from Burin all the way to Lamaline. The awful news from other places would have come—after they’d recovered from the shock—as reassurance that they were not alone. Ten thousand people in at least forty nearby communities like theirs were now at risk of an added peril—the relentless and inevitable winter. St. John’s couldn’t help but notice. The world would notice.

  And they would have been comforted and reassured by the prompt attention of important people from outside—politicians and senior civil servants; doctors and nurses, comforting the sick and injured; the steamship Meigle, replenishing supplies. Newspapers in St. John’s telling their stories—second-hand, of course, but preferable to not at all, which was often how city people reacted to distress in smaller places.

  The drama of the immediate relief effort would understandably have generated expectations. Their needs were long term, with emotional and physical aftershocks that would require attention well into the future. It would have been hard to imagine, in November 1929, that the attention they were getting would be transient.

  Living in the reality of destruction, it is difficult to see the drama from the point of view of an outsider, even the most highly motivated visitor. How could such dramatic spectacles, so deeply etched in local memory, ever fade from the mind of anyone who had seen them, even briefly? How could such indelible impressions so soon be overwhelmed by the imperatives of fresh events, by new demands on limited reserves of empathy and money among strangers?

  This, within a few months, would be the greater challenge facing the people of St. Lawrence and the entire south end of the peninsula. When it came to the hard work of long-term recovery from the catastrophe, they were on their own.

  15.

  FATHER Thorne would have been among the first to learn of the young visitor from New York in the summer of 1931. Not much of importance could ever happen in St. Lawrence without the knowledge and approval of the priest. The visitor had a vaguely German name. Seibert. Walter Seibert. Undoubtedly a Protestant.

  And so, while there is no formal record of an encounter, future circumstances would indicate that Father Thorne, whose opinions mattered definitively in the town and far beyond, was an early advocate for Walter Seibert’s plan. A mining venture. Mining fluorspar, a mineral so ubiquitous it practically defined St. Lawrence—its brilliant outcroppings catching sunlight in unexpected places. A mineral now in great demand, even in the midst of a depression, by industrialists near and far. In exchange for the right to exploit this resource, the young American was offering another commodity, something priceless, something in short supply no matter where one looked for it in Newfoundland in 1931: optimism.

  At this early stage, the particulars, the nitty-gritty business details, didn’t really matter. Aubrey Farrell, young and shrewd, from a solid family and a devout parishioner, had nothing but compliments for Mr. Seibert after he went back to New York. Young Aubrey was enthusiastically buying into his proposal, putting credibility and money on the line.

  That was good enough for Father Thorne, and Father Thorne’s benediction was good enough for Aubrey Farrell—and eventually everybody else in and near St. Lawrence.

  And yet—even for a priest, an educated man who viewed temporal hardship through a long spiritual lens—there would have been a nagging wariness, a hint of scepticism. There might have been a whiff of fishiness about Mr. Seibert and his project, which local cynics were already calling his “fluorspar empire.”

  Seibert was young, not yet thirty, too young to have acquired the experience and wisdom to justify the kind of trust he asked for, the confidence he projected. The confidence, perhaps, in a worst-case scenario, of a shyster.

  Oh, well. As they say, beggars can’t be choosers. Any port in a storm. Etc.

  He was good-looking, this Walter chap. He was slick. Articulate. He was fun to be around. They say he was the life of the party, even played a piano passably. He was, at first blush, a typical well-heeled American. He was, above all, persuasive.

  Between July and December in 1931, six local prospectors employed by Seibert wandered the barrens, evaluating the resource and locating new deposits of fluorspar at Iron Springs, Hare’s Ears, Lord and Lady Gulch—for no remuneration.1 It seemed that Mr. Seibert, while he projected a confident prosperity, was actually strapped for funds. But wasn’t everyone in these chaotic days? It was a temporary situation, surely. And in the short term, it wouldn’t cost the local people much to help him get a start. They had no money, but they had time, a far more precious asset.

  In 1932, Walter Seibert paid a second visit to St. Lawrence, and this time he was candid. He was having trouble raising capital. This would have come as no great surprise, the money situation being what it was. But he had succeeded in scrounging $2,000 to buy some second-hand equipment that he’d located in Cape Breton. He would bring it in on a boat. He hoped the local men would volunteer to help him drag it from the dock to a location half a mile northeast of town, where he planned to launch his mining project. It would allow these idled fishermen to make a start at something else, something new and modern. Something with a future.2

  And so they did.

  He had a contract with people who were prepared to buy a first consignment—two thousand tons of metallurgical-grade fluorspar, to be delivered by the spring of 1934, paid for on approval by their chemists. It would be a shoestring start, to be sure. But desperate times called for ingenuity and sacrifice. They’d be starting on the Black Duck vein.

  Black Duck. The local people shrugged. They knew Black Duck. It was in the woods, out behind the graveyard. People had been prospecting around Black Duck for decades. This was encouraging. A beginning. They understood the elusiveness of money.

  BY the spring of 1933, Seibert had installed a full-time manager, another American named Dr. Warren Smith. He was a friendly, approachable geologist, smart and likeable, and almost immediately he was known far and wide as Doc.

  And before long, Seibert’s man, Doc Smith, had twenty more St. Lawrence men working for him.3 It was back-breaking labour, using picks and shovels and two dilapidated jackhammers to dig up rock, using wheelbarrows to carry it away for rudimentary processing and grading. That nobody was getting paid in money—just chits to take to Farrell’s store for groceries—would probably have raised eyebrows in a more materialistic populace, but this technicality didn’t seem to bother anybody in St. Lawrence.

  Father Thorne and Aubrey Farrell, and thus almost everyone in town, had suspended judgement, suppressed their scepticism. Rennie Slaney would have typified the local attitude. He and his brother, Arcule, had pretty well given up on the fishery. The goddamned fish were gone. Ever since the tidal wave. Rennie had a growing family. He was among the first to sign on to the Seibert project. Arcule signed on not long after his younger brother.

  What other options did they have? Ever since the tidal wave, the fishing was a waste of time. The majority of people in the town were on the dole. To turn down a job—even if there was no immediate compensation, just a vague promise that they’d be paid at some
future date—would have jeopardized their entitlement to even minuscule relief.

  Pat Rennie, originally from Lord’s Cove, was now living in Little St. Lawrence, down the road a mile or two from the Black Duck site. Most people by then would have heard of Pat Rennie’s tragedy the night of the tidal wave. Wife. Three kids. All gone. But he had a new wife now, Lucy Clarke. The Clarkes were one of the founding families in the area. He and Lucy had started a new family. And Pat Rennie was, with Rennie Slaney, among the first to sign on for the effort to make Seibert’s “fluorspar empire” a reality.

  Odd as the arrangement with Walter Seibert was, the people of St. Lawrence, though isolated from St. John’s, might have taken certain fundamental things for granted. They might have assumed that they had the protection of laws and regulations to prevent unacceptable exploitation. They might have assumed that there were safeguards enforced by government officials—that people higher up the chain of public responsibility would be looking out for them.

  There was a dominion government in St. John’s. Surely there were laws. Surely, haywire as the dominion political establishment seemed to be, the politicians and bureaucrats were good for that—for enforcing rules, for oversight.

  In that assumption, they were all mistaken.

  The mining project would, in the beginning, feed on the desperation of a shattered people who were living in communities willing to suspend basic human rights as part of a unique, and in many ways naive, investment in their future. Their investment would eventually transform a small part of the Newfoundland economy and introduce a tenuous prosperity, but at a human cost that would eclipse the memory of what the people of the Burin lost on November 18, 1929.

  They could not have known or understood, in 1932 or in 1933, that the real peril of the undertaking in St. Lawrence, when all was said and done, would arise from the reality that for many years, there would be no protective agency to look after them, no collectivity, union or bureaucracy that mattered to their working lives.