The Wake

by Linden MacIntyre

  They were in no great hurry to enter the open cage—to be lowered down the shaft to the drifts, stopes, raises, piles of broken rock drilled and blasted by the night shift. The mine was waiting to be mucked out, to start the cycle once again. Muck. Drill. Blast. Repeat.

  So let it wait a few more minutes.

  The holdup was the daily consultation between Louis Etchegary, the mill manager, and Rennie Slaney, senior supervisor underground that day.1 The atmosphere was relaxed. Poynter was away in the States. His wife was dying, it was said. Or had already died—Donald Poynter wasn’t much for personal disclosures. But everybody knew about this burden, this private tragedy. She was a very nice lady, Mrs. Poynter, in the time she was around, living in the Giovannini boarding house. A shame she had to go away. But there was no doctor in St. Lawrence. No hospital. To get seriously sick or injured here is probably to die here. Poynter didn’t have much choice but to take her home to New Jersey, where she might have had a fighting chance.

  Maybe someday there would be such a blessing in St. Lawrence. A hospital. There was agitation for it. And there was sympathy. Just the month before, in January, the members of the dispute panel sent in by the government in St. John’s all agreed. It was shocking: no clinic, no doctor in a mining town.

  However, all sympathy aside, there was a war on—the response to everything, it seemed. Buckle down. Suck it up. Sacrifice for a greater cause. Men and women overseas, risking lives for liberty. Folks at home should count their blessings. Et cetera.

  There was a high arctic wind picking up again. The snow was drifting. The darkness was withdrawing. Mike Turpin was the first to see the apparition in the milky morning light.

  A stranger, coming out of nowhere.

  HIS name was Edward Bergeron. He was an American sailor. He was eighteen years old. He was wet, exhausted, freezing. He forced his body to keep moving.

  From a distance he had seen the twinkle, a faint glimmer often lost behind the veils of snow drifting on the lifeless landscape. It might have been a star, this tiny evanescent flicker, but for Bergeron it was a beacon, a sign of hope for him and several hundred of his shipmates, now stranded on the rocky southern coast of Newfoundland.2

  And then, the light appeared to be on top of an unfamiliar structure. Tall, skeletal, roughly A-shaped. It was like a star atop a Christmas tree. And below it, potentially the gift of life. Industrial buildings and, through open doorways, the shapes of people. And more small twinkling lights. And then, men staring at him. Hands paused in mid-air, cigarettes and conversations momentarily suspended.

  He might have known that they were miners. Perhaps not. He was barely out of boyhood. Maybe he’d seen pictures, but it didn’t matter who or what they were. They personified survival.

  The miners, dressed for underground in hard hats, oil pants and jackets, headlamps dangling casually around their necks, gathered around him. He was barely coherent. His clothes were frozen and he reeked of diesel fuel. He was, they quickly figured out, from a US Navy vessel that was hard aground and breaking up nearby. The Americans needed help. The situation was desperate.

  His ship was a naval destroyer, the USS Truxtun, named after the founder of the navy—and a name that would, for all future time, be intimately tied to St. Lawrence and her people. The Truxtun had a crew of 156 sailors, and many were already dead even before Bergeron had clawed his way ashore and up a hundred feet of an icy embankment in a place that was almost inaccessible—Chamber Cove, a mile to the west of the mine site.

  In Donald Poynter’s absence, Howard Farrell was acting manager. Louis Etchegary got him on the phone, explained the situation, told him he and Rennie Slaney had decided the mine should immediately suspend production for the day. Farrell agreed. There was more important work to do in Chamber Cove.

  Farrell then called Doc Smith at the Director mine. In an instant, Smith had ordered all the men working underground to report to the surface.

  IN recent months, there had been improvements at Iron Springs, and one of the new facilities at the workplace was a “dry,” a kind of locker room where miners changed into their invariably filthy work clothes before heading underground, or out of them before heading for their homes. There was also a new “mess house” or lunchroom, and this too became a rescue centre and a place of triage.

  Runners were dispatched to town to bring back men from the night shift and every woman available for what was soon to be a desperate situation at the mine. Loretta Walsh, Julia Skinner, Theresa Saint, Ethel Giovannini, Doris Turpin—all dropped whatever they were doing and were among the first to head for Iron Springs.3

  Lillian Loder’s husband, Leo, a miner, was already on his way to Chamber Cove when she decided she just had to be at Iron Springs with the other women. She was needed. She was seven months pregnant with her fifth child, but she set out anyway, on foot.4

  Nobody at the mine or in the town—not Lillian or Howard Farrell or even Edward Bergeron—could have known the extent of the challenges facing the people of St. Lawrence on that day. Just about a mile west of Chamber Cove, at Lawn Point, a larger US Navy vessel, a supply ship, was aground and it, too, was breaking up. On board the USS Pollux were 233 men and tons of military hardware, including bombs.

  A crew of miners began assembling what they were sure they’d need for the still-unimaginable task ahead of them. They knew Chamber Cove, with its towering cliffs, reaching nearly three hundred feet at Pinnacle Point, and they knew that they’d need rope. Lots of it. Kevin Pike, who was only eleven years old but working as an office boy, was assigned by his father, Tom Pike, the warehouse manager, to drag out every bit of rope that he could find and get it ready to be shipped to Iron Springs.5

  Mike Turpin, Celestine Edwards, Tom Beck and Fred Walsh, with young Bergeron leading the way, headed off towards the cove immediately. Rennie Slaney and Robert Turpin were close behind.

  Slaney would never forget a young sailor staggering towards them through the snow in bare feet. When Turpin removed his own socks to give to him, the sailor protested that “his buddies on the ship would need them worse before the day was gone.” It could not have occurred to the Newfoundlanders in those early moments that the arrival of these strangers from another country would fuse the issues foremost in their lives—war, industrial production, health, safety and survival.

  ED Bergeron had been among the first dozen sailors from the Truxtun to make it to the shore, a tiny strand of gravel beach at the foot of daunting cliffs.

  The vertical black walls were unapproachable. But there was one section to the east that was lower. You could see the top. Bergeron and another sailor, Edward Petterson, volunteered to attempt the climb after noticing what seemed to be a fence above them. Perhaps there was a farm nearby.

  Using knives to carve notches in the ice on the steep slope, they inched upwards, but when they finally reached the top, they found only a small shack nestled in a gully. They rested there. Petterson was exhausted. Bergeron felt fit enough to follow the fenceline to see where it would lead him. After what seemed like an endless struggle through the snow, he saw the light flickering atop the Iron Springs headframe.

  Back at the cove, there were by then nearly thirty men on the shore, but more than a hundred of his shipmates still clung to the crippled warship. The land was so close, and yet the wind and the crashing waves and the fuel oil now floating on the sea made it seem a world away.

  Fireman Ed McInerney, now stranded on the narrow beach, might have wondered if he was really better off than the men still back on board the Truxtun, bucking on the waves as the shattered warship slowly filled with water, pounded on the rocks. Behind him, the towering pinnacle, the black walls of the impossible cliffs.

  Along the shore, to where Chief Fireman Petterson had started climbing with their shipmate, young Seaman Bergeron, seemed an impossible distance to cover, and yet his only hope for survival. Already, the hands and feet that he would need for getting through this awful day were almost without feeling. He fo
rced himself to move.

  Onboard the ship, Ensign James Seamans, twenty-three, from Salem, Massachusetts, and his fellow officers were attempting to untangle the lifeline that had enabled the first group of sailors to get off safely. They’d already watched helplessly, when the lifeline failed, as young shipmates, desperately attempting to swim the short distance to land, had either drowned in the sludge of sea water and heavy fuel oil or been hurled against the rocks by the rising wind and waves.

  And now the lifeline was disabled, the wind howling once again and shifting south and west, to more directly pound the ship. Now it was every man for himself.

  THE wind was at gale force by the time Turpin, Edwards, Beck and Walsh arrived at Chamber Cove near mid-morning. The sailors who were still aboard the Truxtun, their numbers now conspicuously diminished, were being battered. The ship was obviously breaking up. Her stern was nearly gone. The miners calculated there were about a hundred men clinging to rails on the side of the listing, thrashing ship. Others were flailing in the water, which was now almost impossible to swim through.

  Bergeron and Petterson had dragged a long rope to the top of the cliff. Turpin found it. Walsh, Beck and Edwards quickly rappelled down and into the pounding surf to begin dragging men, dead and alive, onto the narrow beach.

  The manager at Alcan’s Director mine, Doc Smith, had by then joined the rescuers and would, four days later, describe the scene that they’d encountered at the Truxtun: “The aft end sunk immediately and the forward end was awash. A hundred men were clinging to the greasy overturned hulk, but they had no lifeline around them and the seas were breaking over the ship in heavy solid waves. This group of clinging doomed men was the most awful spectacle of that day of tragedy.”6

  Eventually, Smith wrote, “a huge wave breaking across washed half the men away in one surge . . . toward the Pinnacle cliffs. Almost none of those swimming men reached safety and no help for them from the shore was possible . . . By one o’clock only a dozen men were alive on the hulk and almost none of the men in the water had any life left, though workers [from the mine] were still bringing them to the cliffs.”

  Gus Etchegary, who was then nineteen, arrived at the scene with his older brother, Theo, and his father, Louis. Soon they, too, were on the beach, Louis and Theo wading out towards the struggling sailors. Louis instructed Gus to stay ashore, stay dry and light a fire. A sailor from the Truxtun helped him. His name was William Butterworth and he was in a desperate condition. Gus forced him to his feet, made him walk around the fire. Keep moving. But it was all too late for the young American, who slipped away as Gus implored him to hang on.7

  A young signalman, Clifford Parkerson, refused to leave the beach as long as he could communicate, using flags, with the men still on board the Truxtun. Even after the signals from on board the ship had stopped, Parkerson refused to leave. He walked in circles around the fire until he collapsed and started shaking violently.

  Gus Etchegary and the others attempted to revive him, but he died after uttering a single word: “Mother.”8

  ENSIGN Seamans saw the fire. He hesitated. He had watched many of his shipmates vanish as they struggled through the sludge of heavy oil and sea water. And then he was among them—a wave crashing over the ship snatched him from the rail he’d been desperately clinging to. Now he had no choice—swim or sink.

  Sick from swallowing oil-fouled water, desperately tired, hopelessly disoriented, he swam slowly, deliberately, trying to preserve his strength. Then he was picked up by another surge and could suddenly feel his feet touch bottom—but almost simultaneously, the relentless pull of the undertow dragged him back. And then, miraculous, unexpected help—strong hands grasping, one of the St. Lawrence rescuers had him, held him, hauled him up onto the little gravel beach, where others wrapped rope around him and yet others, unseen, far above him, began to hoist him upwards.9

  THE miners from St. Lawrence were now hauling nearly helpless survivors up from the shore on ropes; if a sailor was too weak to help himself, his rescuer would strap the man to his back for the painful journey to the top. The miners would carry the rescued sailors to the abandoned shack, first discovered by Bergeron and Petterson, to be revived, and then load them onto horse-drawn sleds for a rough ride through the snow to the triage station at the mine.

  Ensign James Otis Seamans, a Harvard graduate just a few months out of the US Naval Academy, was one of only three of the Truxtun’s eleven officers who would survive that day. There were persistent rumours afterwards that the senior officer on board, Lieutenant Commander Ralph Hickox, shot himself when he realized that his ship was lost.10

  THE women of St. Lawrence were waiting for the rescued sailors, cleaning and clothing and restoring the injured and the frozen with soup and tea and coffee before they could be transferred to town and hot baths and beds warmed by heated stones in the homes of the same people who had saved them from the sea.

  The entire town became an extended rescue station, and one of the survivors, an African American named Lanier Phillips, from Georgia—who said that he had never before in his life experienced an act of kindness from a white person—would later declare that the generosity of the people in St. Lawrence permanently transformed his feelings for mankind and for himself. “We are creatures of what we’re taught and the people of St. Lawrence, Newfoundland, taught me that I was a human being,” he later told an interviewer.11

  Mid-afternoon, the St. Lawrence men lowered a dory down to the shore from Pinnacle Point. Five rescuers went down with the dory, and after a struggle to save the last twelve sailors clinging to the Truxtun, they managed to get only two of them ashore before their own boat was smashed to pieces against the rocks. These were the last two survivors of the Truxtun crew, and it took two hours to get them and their five rescuers up the cliffs to safety.

  Of the 156 seamen on board the Truxtun, only 46 survived.

  LIONEL Saint, one of the first of the rescuers at Chamber Cove, had seen what seemed to be a heavy oil slick coming from the west. He realized it couldn’t have been from the Truxtun—its leaking fuel was moving east away from the wreck, towards the shore. He guessed that there must be another wreck, and that it wasn’t far away. His guessing was more prescient than he realized.

  The Truxtun had been one of two destroyers escorting the supply ship USS Pollux from Maine to the new American naval base in Argentia, Newfoundland. All three ships had run aground along a two-mile stretch of reef-studded coastline between the communities of Lawn and St. Lawrence because of a navigation error and the storm. The second destroyer, the USS Wilkes, had jettisoned fuel and, after hours of manoeuvring, had freed herself with minor damage to her hull. She was now lurking near the Pollux, but unable to get close enough to help.

  Lionel Saint pursued his hunch by walking west along the cliffs, and it was near noon when he came across a group of survivors from the Pollux at Lawn Point, just above where their ship was wedged between two massive rocks. The Pollux broke in two at midships just before noon, and even from the clifftops, it was clear that there was pandemonium on board.

  Fearing that the ship was going to sink, about sixty sailors leapt into the sea. Almost all were instantly lost.

  One of the men in the small group of sailors that Lionel Saint had encountered at the top of the cliff, William Derosa, was near death. The options available to the other men were grim—stay and die alongside Derosa or try to make it to Iron Springs.

  As Lionel Saint and the Americans were making their life-and-death decision, word had just reached the community of Lawn, a few miles to the west, that there was a ship in trouble on the shore. It was a nearly impossible journey, but eight men from Lawn decided they had no choice but to make the effort.

  BY the time the Lawn men reached the Pollux, more than a hundred sailors had come ashore, thanks to a lifeline and one surviving lifeboat. Officers on the USS Wilkes, which was still hovering nearby, could now see people moving at the base of the cliffs and, according to a detailed r
ecord kept by a crewman, decided there was nothing to be achieved by waiting there. They left for Argentia at 3:40 that afternoon.

  They had no idea what they were leaving behind.

  One of the Pollux crewmen, Henry Strauss, would later describe what he had been certain were the final moments of his life, standing on a slippery ledge just above the thrashing sea, at the bottom of an almost vertical precipice: “The tide was coming in. Guys started getting picked off one by one.” It was late afternoon and the sun was going down rapidly. “All of a sudden, out of the blackness, we heard a voice saying, ‘Is anybody there?’ The next thing I knew these guys were being hauled up the cliff.”12

  The rescuers from Lawn had arrived and set to work. By eight that evening, they’d been joined by another crew from St. Lawrence and by navy personnel from Argentia, who had arrived in St. Lawrence by floatplane that afternoon.

  The rescue of the sailors and the struggle to keep them from dying of shock and exposure would last all night. Near midnight, the last man came up the rope—the Pollux captain, Commander Hugh W. Turney.

  THE scene at Iron Springs mine, as the survivors from the Truxtun and the Pollux arrived throughout the day and all that night, was vividly described in Doc Smith’s unpublished account of the rescue operation. He praised the local women for bringing half-dead sailors back to life. “Many were in bad shape from frostbite; all were famished; all were soaking wet and smeared with filthy crude oil,” he wrote. “Soup was heated and coffee was made by the bucketfuls. Blankets were found both from the ships and from the homes in St. Lawrence and all private homes were stripped of clothing. Hot water brought the frost from the men’s feet but with painful results.”13

  A total of 203 American sailors perished in the course of that long and bitter day. But 186 survived, by the strength of their own stamina, an inexhaustible will to live—and the heroic generosity of strangers.