The Wake

by Linden MacIntyre

  33.

  THE surviving sailors would be gone from St. Lawrence by the next night, Thursday, February 19, but they’d not soon forget the place, nor would they be forgotten. A crisis generates a peculiar human chemistry, and it was clearly active at Iron Springs and in the town on that day in 1942. In just a few hours, bonds were formed to last a lifetime. Ensign Seamans and the Loder family; Ed McInerney and the Tobins; Lanier Phillips and everybody in the place.

  Lillian Loder met James Seamans at the mine site and was appalled at his condition. She helped stabilize him and then had him transported to her home, where she nursed him through the night. She was convinced that he’d never live to see another dawn. But he did. And when it was time to deliver him to the ship that would remove him and the other survivors to a hospital in Argentia, Lillian argued with the navy medics: the sailor wasn’t fit to leave her house. They insisted and placed him on a stretcher. Lillian Loder, seven months pregnant, put her coat and boots back on and walked beside the stretcher as they carried Seamans to the dock.

  McInerney’s feet were frozen, and Theresa and Robert Tobin spent the night reviving him, dealing with the excruciating pain as his body thawed. When he could move, they loaded him into a huge washtub to let him soak away the chills and aches and pains. Then they put him in a warm bed vacated by their children. He would leave the next day, but in those few hours, McInerney had become a member of the Tobin clan.14

  Lanier Phillips, the son of Georgia sharecroppers, had regained consciousness, naked, on a table in Violet Pike’s kitchen, being scrubbed by women who were white. His first thoughts were of lynching, or at least a whipping. Naked black man. Vulnerable white women. This was a horror story he’d seen and heard too many times before. He feigned unconsciousness until he realized the words that he was hearing were expressions of compassion mixed with curiosity. He was the first black human being these women had ever seen.15

  Before that day, life for Phillips was typical for an African American in the southern states. He’d learned early on to avoid white women, avert his eyes from the gaze of a white man and keep his mouth shut, even when the Ku Klux Klan burned down his school. Even the navy was segregated, and on board the Truxtun, where he was a mess attendant, he’d not been allowed to eat with his white shipmates. He took most meals standing up in the galley.

  He vowed that day to leave that life behind and soon applied, successfully, to become the US Navy’s first African American sonar technician. The navy had discouraged him from applying for the all-white trade, but he persisted. He would, in 1965, march with Martin Luther King Jr. in the campaign for equal voting rights. And he would become a frequent visitor to Newfoundland, where the people of St. Lawrence continue to commemorate the tragedy that touched both rescuer and survivor indelibly.16

  Doc Smith, in his private memoir, and with characteristic understatement, recalled the parting on the evening of February 19: “The men had quickly endeared themselves, and, particularly the injured, left heartbroken homes when they had to be moved.”17

  ON Friday, February 20, the recovery of bodies began; it would continue through the weekend. Almost every man in the place turned out to help. Thus began an almost daily procession to the St. Lawrence cemetery, not far from the original Black Duck mine site. The townspeople temporarily buried ninety victims there, until they could be returned in springtime to their home communities. Another forty-eight were taken to Argentia for burial.18 More than sixty of the victims of the Truxtun and Pollux tragedy had disappeared forever, like countless Newfoundlanders, into the vast Atlantic Ocean grave.

  IF THE survivors on USS Wilkes had been expecting sympathy and comfort when their ship limped into Argentia on the morning of February 19, they were in for disappointment. They tied up just after 4:00 a.m. The flag officer, Rear Admiral Arthur L. Bristol Jr., support force commander for the US Atlantic fleet, ordered the two senior officers on the Wilkes to have their reports on his desk by eight that morning. It was fairly obvious where this was heading.

  There would be a court of inquiry during the following weeks in Argentia. Seven officers from the Wilkes and the Pollux would face a court martial. The evidence would reveal lapses in competence, communication and decision-making.

  Neither the Pollux nor the Truxtun had radar, and the system on the Wilkes was obsolete and originally designed for navigation in the air, not at sea. This important detail—clearly a factor in the causes of the disaster—would not come up in the subsequent process of accountability.

  The court of inquiry heard that there had been a crucial moment, just after midnight on the eighteenth, when the navigator on the Pollux, Lieutenant William Grindley, urged his superior officer, Commander Turney, to change course. Grindley knew that the wind and unexpectedly strong currents had knocked them off course and they needed to adjust. Turney vetoed the idea. Their course had been established by navigation officers on the Wilkes, the leader in the little convoy, and there could be no change without permission from them. And given the storm outside and the inadequacy of their communications, permission wasn’t going to happen.19

  The later court martial would never hear of this exchange, and Grindley, in the final reckoning, faced the severest penalty of them all—discharge from the navy.

  Of the seven men charged, the five most senior officers, including Turney, faced disciplinary action, but it was all on paper, and given the men’s importance to the war effort, the tragedy made little or no difference to the trajectory of their careers.

  Grindley finished out the war as master in the merchant navy, a non-military shipping service that heroically maintained supply lines to Europe throughout the war. Lieutenant William Smyth, deck officer on the Wilkes on the morning of the eighteenth—and the man whose job it was to plot the course—was charged, but the charges, in civilian terms, were stayed. It soon became clear, however, that Smyth had been blackballed by the navy anyway. Although he retired in 1951 with the rank of commander, his work, after February 1942, had been buffeted by the disdain and disrespect of fellow officers. Nevertheless, in spite of obvious obstruction, he had a distinguished record before and after the disaster. A witness at the board of inquiry had, without prompting, praised Smyth as an exemplary officer. “I have never in my cruise since I left the academy seen him sit down on watch,” declared Ensign Henry Quekemeyer, “that is, in the chair that is provided for him while he was the officer of the deck.”

  It didn’t matter. Smyth would have been a natural for promotion to captain. But every effort, from that day forth, was blocked in Washington.

  In 1977, interviewed by the journalist and author Cassie Brown, Smyth speculated that he and Grindley were made scapegoats by a navy cabal known as the Green Bowlers—senior officers who had been classmates in the US Naval Academy and members of a secret society dedicated to looking out for one another as their careers advanced. The name Green Bowlers came, he said, from an initiation rite that involved drinking “a potion” from a green bowl.20

  IN time, the survivors who stayed in touch with the people of St. Lawrence would understand that almost everyone who turned out that day had a deep personal memory of disaster—of an undersea earthquake and a tsunami only thirteen years before; of lost relatives and friends; of a lost livelihood; and of a strange series of events leading to a mining operation and that providential light at Iron Springs.

  The survivors would, in time, get to know the community, the people, the history—and they would be astounded to discover that this little town, economically dependent on an industry that was dangerous and risky to the health of workers, didn’t even have a doctor, didn’t have a hospital; that the quality of public service on the south end of the Burin Peninsula hadn’t changed in the thirteen years since that same angry sea attacked the people living in forty Newfoundland communities, including St. Lawrence and Lawn.

  They would have been amazed to learn that the mine at Iron Springs was there because of an American financier with an over-large ambition
to become a wealthy mining magnate. That the financier was, like so many of them, from near New York. And that these same Newfoundlanders, in an astonishing gesture of faith in human nature, had helped to make it happen for him. And yet, little of the benefits came back to them.

  They would learn of Newfoundland’s long history of illness caused by isolation, poverty, harsh weather and a livelihood that, while strenuous and perilous, offered little more than a subsistence existence. That while the island was, in 1942, enjoying a period of war-related prosperity, it still lagged far behind the rest of North America in the availability and quality of essential services—like health care.

  They would conclude, collectively, that they could and should do something to correct at least that one shortcoming.

  DETAILS about the efforts of the people of St. Lawrence and Lawn passed up through the chain of military and political command with unusual swiftness. On February 24, six days after the shipwrecks, President Roosevelt drafted a personal telegram to “the people of St. Lawrence,” thanking them for their “courageous and magnificent work” and “the sacrifices you made in rescuing and caring for” the survivors of the disaster. The heroic action was “typical of the history of your proud seafaring community,” Roosevelt declared.21

  On February 26, Admiral Bristol, the senior naval officer in Newfoundland, wrote a detailed memorandum for the US secretary of the navy, Frank Knox, in which he profusely praised the Newfoundlanders, declaring that “without the prompt, efficient and tireless effort of these people, only a handful of our men would have been saved.”

  He continued: “Furthermore, of the number rescued, few would have recovered from the effects of the immersion and cold had it not been for the manner in which these people gave further assistance.

  “They took off their own clothes on the spot in order to clothe our men, and in addition brought from their houses all the articles of clothing which they could gather.”

  The rescuers, Bristol wrote, “had worked in some of the worst terrain that I have ever encountered.”22

  To make his point, he sent a map to the secretary—who might have already been familiar with the region. Frank Knox’s mother was from Charlottetown, PEI, and his father was born and raised, to age nine, in New Brunswick.

  “You will note that this is an isolated series of small communities connected by a single road. Their only communications with the rest of Newfoundland is by water. The people are a hardy race of English and Irish descent, quiet, dignified and reserved; also, hard to know and very sensitive. Almost without exception they are poor and with few possessions.”

  Admiral Bristol argued—hoping, he added, “that I am not being too sentimental”—for some lasting expression of gratitude from the United States. He was sure that there would, one day, be a memorial of some kind. But, he wrote, “I can’t help thinking how much better it would be if anything, which might eventually be done . . . took the form of something practical in the town of St. Lawrence.” He suggested a small, fully equipped hospital, in memory of the officers and men of the Pollux and the Truxtun.

  There is no available record of the response by the secretary of the navy. Admiral Bristol, who was only fifty-five years old, died suddenly of a heart attack on his flagship, the USS Prairie, in Argentia two months and one day after he wrote his memorandum. His generous proposal, however, would survive.

  MEN returning to their homes from Iron Springs, Chamber Cove or Lawn Point on February 19, hoping for a rest or at least a change of clothing, would have been surprised to find strangers in their beds, their meagre wardrobes and dressers emptied out, their wives sheepishly explaining that they’d given all their spare clothes away to the Americans who now had nothing.

  The miners understood. The men retrieved what their wives had overlooked—and some would one day admit that they had even borrowed underwear from the womenfolk until they were able to replace their own.

  For many years after February 1942, when families in St. Lawrence were facing poverty because of yet another tragedy, one yet to manifest itself, there would be annual deliveries of clothing, new and second-hand, from the survivors of the shipwreck.

  Leo and Lillian Loder named one of their thirteen children after Ensign James Seamans, who would, over the following years, send “barrels” of clothing to keep the family going in times of hardship. Leo Loder became ill and died at the age of fifty-four in 1958.23 His youngest son and namesake, Leo Loder Jr., was born three weeks after his father’s death.

  Ensign Seamans outlived his rescuer by forty years. He would visit St. Lawrence periodically, and he made a special trip in 1988 for a commemorative service at the local Catholic church.24 Lillian, by then, could walk only with difficulty. As they arrived at the church that day, she was in a wheelchair. Seamans was behind her, gently guiding the wheelchair through the crowd—reminding onlookers of an evening many years before when Lillian had walked beside him as he was carried on a stretcher to a waiting ship.25

  IN retrospect, 1942 was another major turning point for the community of St. Lawrence. It was a year in which the people would encounter many strangers in their town. It was a year in which the insemination of an idea would lead to a transformation in the quality of life there.

  Possibly in response to the suggestion by members of the trade dispute panel—that for all the resourcefulness and dedication of the existing workers, there was a need for outside mining expertise—the St. Lawrence mining operators now began to look outside for people with a broader, deeper background in the business. And so, in the spring of 1942, the corporation and Newfluor began recruiting hard-rock miners from Nova Scotia, men with experience in mines in other parts of Canada, to provide new leadership underground.

  It was certainly a year of transformation for Donald Poynter. The bride who had eagerly accompanied him to St. Lawrence in 1933 died after her long debilitating illness, in a sanatorium in New Jersey. He would, in time, begin another family, this time with a woman who had deep roots in the community.

  In 1947, he married Louis Etchegary’s daughter Florence.

  34.

  AFTER the adventures of February 1942, life quickly returned to “normal” in St. Lawrence. Rennie Slaney would remember August 19 as a bad day. It was the day he had to gather up what was left of Gus Haskell, transport his broken body to the surface at Iron Springs mine and lay out the remains on a table in the miners’ lunchroom.26

  There was nowhere else that was appropriate. There was no clinic or hospital. There was no doctor to certify that Gus was dead. There was a company nurse, but she was home sick that day.

  Of course, it was obvious to anybody who was there that the man was dead. But in most circumstances, the opinions of lay observers are insufficient. Death is a formality with legal protocols.

  For Rennie Slaney, this situation would have been a bit much—more than a little sickening. Same thing when Ed Stapleton was caught in an explosion at Black Duck in 1936. And when Peter Spearns was caught under a slab of loose rock in 1939. With Gus, it was doubtful that a doctor would have made much difference. But it would have been helpful if there had been a medical professional to take charge of the messy aftermath, or a more appropriate place to take a body.

  AUGUSTUS Haskell and Amos Beck had been working on a platform in the shaft—a kind of hatch that could be raised and lowered for the protection of men who were working farther down. A hinge was broken. The hatch was secured, during the repairs, by a cable attached to a skip—a large bucket that was used for hoisting ore to surface. The two men were kneeling on the hatch to fix the broken hinge when the skip jerked upwards. Amos Beck tumbled into the timbers and snagged there. But Haskell plunged to the bottom of the shaft, a distance of more than a hundred feet.27

  It was never determined why the bucket moved. The hoistman, in his control room on the surface, swore he’d heard a signal instructing him to lift the skip. Several men who were present when the accident occurred testified in the subsequent inquiry that no
body gave a signal, which would have involved a brief tug on a cord hanging near where the men were working. And in any case, nobody was close enough to the signal cord to be able to reach and yank it before the bucket suddenly and disastrously moved upwards.

  The investigating ranger, part of a law enforcement system created by the commission of government for small places like St. Lawrence, concluded that it would be impossible to establish with any certainty what had caused the accident. The hoistman, if he was to blame, was already devastated and would spend the rest of his days silently punishing himself for the needless death of a colleague. There was no need for pointing fingers.

  What was called for, however, was some direct commentary on a related issue.

  The investigating ranger noted, angrily, that when the senior underground supervisor that day, Rennie Slaney, brought the dead man to the surface, there was no ambulance. There was no first aid facility. There was no doctor. There was no hospital. There was a company nurse, but even if she had been present in the lunchroom, she would not have been qualified to record an official cause of death.

  Between 1933 and 1941, as the mining industry was beginning, there had been no doctor at all. In 1941, a doctor showed up and stayed for nine months. The next doctor arrived in 1943 and stayed a year. There was no ongoing presence until 1949.

  For all the deficiencies in the St. Lawrence mines, all the illnesses and injuries, fatalities were uncommon. There would have been a feeling of utter shock and impotence as the men of Iron Springs stood quietly around that table, staring at the corpse of someone they knew, someone they had grown up with, joked with just hours earlier as they crowded into the cage that lowered them down the shaft to begin the workday.

  It was probably merciful that Gus Haskell had died quickly. But even if he’d had a chance, there would have been no hope of saving him or easing his suffering. The ranger’s report on the fatality spoke for all of them. “When an operation of the nature and scale of the one now being carried on here, is going on,” he wrote, “it is, in my opinion, nothing less than criminal to be without competent medical aid.”28