The Wake

by Linden MacIntyre

  The most compelling stories are often those that come straight from the hearts and the personal experience of ordinary Newfoundlanders, as in Elliott Leyton’s powerful collection of personal narratives, Dying Hard: The Ravages of Industrial Carnage; Garry Cranford’s Not Too Long Ago, as well as his other collections of personal reminiscences by survivors of the 1929 earthquake and tsunami; and Rennie Slaney, for More Incredible Than Fiction: The True Story of the Indomitable Men and Women of St. Lawrence, Newfoundland, from the Time of Settlement to 1965, a personal memoir of work, life and death in the St. Lawrence mines.

  Rennie Slaney’s most dramatic contribution to the story was, of course, his brief, blunt presentation in February 1965 to a committee reviewing workers’ compensation legislation. When his words became public two years later, they stamped an indelible human character on what was, by then, a tragic narrative that would continue to play out for decades.

  Alan Ruffman, of Geomarine Associates Ltd., Halifax, has been tireless in his research and writing about the 1929 tsunami, its human consequences and what we must learn from it to prepare for the possibility of even worse marine disasters in the future. He has been generous in sharing his deep expertise and research. Dr. Allison Bent, of the Geological Survey of Canada, and a leading authority on earthquakes and in particular the Grand Banks quake of 1929, was generous and patient with her responses to questions that were usually naive and ill-informed.

  Joan Ritcey, now retired from her position as head of the Centre for Newfoundland Studies at Memorial University Libraries, offered crucial direction towards information sources, and without her guidance and support, the project would have foundered in its infancy. I’m also grateful for help I received from Colleen Quigley and Linda White, of Archives and Special Collections, Memorial University Libraries, and Glenda Dawe, who helped track down elusive information about Sir Percy Thompson.

  Larry Dohey, manager of collections and special projects at the provincial archives of Newfoundland and Labrador, and the archive staff, especially Charles Young, have been unfailingly helpful in navigating the vast storehouse of documents available at and through the Rooms in St. John’s.

  In St. Lawrence, Lisa Loder and the dedicated members of the local historical society accommodated frequent and often unannounced requests for access to their museum and archive. Lisa’s deep knowledge of local history and the legacy of her grandfather, Rennie Slaney, became vital to my understanding of the personal and cultural undercurrents that informed the mining tragedy. Lisa’s mother, Therese Slaney, offered vivid insights based on her personal connection with the story and her knowledge of the social, cultural and historical links between the south end of the Burin Peninsula and the French Islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon. I’m also grateful to Laurella Stacey and Paula Lambert for their knowledge of St. Lawrence history. Paula created shortcuts to archive documents that were crucial to the storytelling.

  Through Ellen Turpin of St. John’s, I think I got to know her indomitable mother, Priscilla, and to better understand the terrible reality of a family too soon deprived of a husband and a father and a friend—an experience that defined generations of families in and near St. Lawrence.

  Gus Etchegary of St. Lawrence and St. John’s has a unique position in the story as, probably, the last living human with a personal memory of all the events in this narrative—from the earthquake and tsunami, to the beginning of mining and its tragic consequences for his hometown, through the shipwrecks of February 1942, where he was a rescuer. He might attribute his robust health and longevity to the fact that he was able to avoid employment in the mines.

  I am particularly grateful to his nephew Thomas Poynter of Boston, the son of the former mine manager, Donald Poynter, for sharing memories of his father and his family, and making possible a more developed portrait of a man whose central role in the unfolding story has been too often controversial and sometimes poorly understood.

  Jim Gifford of HarperCollins Canada and Shaun Bradley, my agent, remembered long-ago anecdotes about my personal connection to a dramatic series of events in the history of Newfoundland and persuaded me to attempt this book. Noelle Zitzer and Janice Weaver provided crucial guidance in the final stages of the project.

  Carol Off provided sound advice and restorative encouragement throughout the process.

  Unavoidably, in a story so late in the telling, some of those who made the most meaningful contributions didn’t survive to see the final product. I came to regard Peter Quirke and Kevin Pike as friends, and when they died midway through what I viewed as a kind of collaboration, the sense of loss was accentuated by shock. They had survived so much so long, it was easy to forget that they, too, were mortal.

  I thank them both, in absentia.

  Notes

  EPIGRAPHS

  * * *

  Peter Neary, ed., White Tie and Decorations: Sir John and Lady Hope Simpson in Newfoundland, 1934–1936 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), p. 197.

  Dan Rory MacIntyre, letter to author, January 27, 1961.

  Isak Dinesen, interview, The New York Times, November 3, 1957.

  PROLOGUE

  * * *

  1.Allison L. Bent, “A Complex Double-Couple Source Mechanism for the Ms 7.2 1929 Grand Banks Earthquake,” Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America 85, no. 4 (August 1995): 1003–20.

  2.Allison L. Bent, email to author, October 18, 2017. She wrote, regarding a strike-slip earthquake, “An analogy to explain the slip would be that if you push on a heavy piece of furniture with the same force over a long period of time, it doesn’t move steadily but rather nothing happens for a while and then it moves a bit or a lot, and if you keep pushing it will happen again. The amount it moves and the time between movements [aren’t] necessarily constant, even though the forces acting on it are. This analogy applies to earthquakes in general and not just to strike-slip ones.”

  3.Bruce C. Heezen and William Maurice Ewing, “Turbidity Currents and Submarine Slumps, and the 1929 Grand Banks Earthquake,” American Journal of Science 250 (December 1952): 849–73.

  4.Isaac V. Fine, Alexander B. Rabinovich, Brian D. Bornheld, Richard Thomson and Evgueni A. Kulikov, “The Grand Banks Landslide-Generated Tsunami of November 18, 1929: Preliminary Analysis and Numerical Modeling,” Marine Geology 215 (February 28, 2005): 45–57.

  5.Fine et al., “Landslide-Generated Tsunami.”

  ONE: THE QUAKE

  * * *

  1.Therese Slaney, interviews with author, May 15 and December 5, 2017; and September 24, 2018.

  2.Augustine (Gus) Etchegary, interviews with author, October 24, 2016; December 6, 2017; and September 23, 2018.

  3.Alice Donohue MacIntyre (1916–2017), mother of author, interviewed at various times, 2015, 2016, 2017.

  4.Alan Ruffman and Violet Hann, “The Newfoundland Tsunami of November 18, 1929: An Examination of the Twenty-Eight Deaths of the ‘South Coast Disaster,’” Newfoundland and Labrador Studies 21, no. 1 (2006): 1719–26. The SS Nerissa was torpedoed by a German U-boat on the night of April 30, 1941, and sank within four minutes. Only 84 of the 290 passengers and crew, many of them Canadian servicemen on their way to war, survived.

  5.Garfield Fizzard, Master of His Craft: Captain Frank Thornhill (Grand Bank, NL: Grand Bank Heritage Society, 1988), pp. 33–34.

  6.Alan Ruffman, “The 1929 Earthquake and the Search for John MacLeod,” Cape Breton’s Magazine, no. 67 (August 1, 1994): 56.

  7.Garry Cranford, “Eloise Morris—Tidal Wave: My Experience,” Not Too Long Ago (St. John’s, NL: Seniors Resource Centre, 1999), p.129.

  8.Alan Ruffman, “The Multidisciplinary Rediscovery and Tracking of the Great Newfoundland and St. Pierre et Miquelon Hurricane of September 1775,” The Northern Mariner 6, no. 3 (July 1996): 11–23.

  9.The Annual Register: Or a View of the History, Politics, and Literature, for the Year 1775 (London: J. Dodsley, 1776), vol. 18, p. 157.

  TWO: THE WAVE

  * * *
<
br />   1.Vivian Wiseman, interviewed by Lynn Anne Marie Matte, “Oral Narratives of the 1929 Newfoundland Tidal Wave: Narrative Functions, Gender Roles and Commodification” (MA thesis, Memorial University of Newfoundland Folklore Archive, 2006).

  2.Ernest Cheeseman, “Letter from Burin, 1929,” Newfoundland Ancestor 8, no. 4 (Winter 1992): 147–48.

  3.Matte, “Oral Narratives,” p. 128.

  4.Cranford, “Louise (Emberley) Hollett: On Great Burin Island,” Not Too Long Ago.

  5.Gerald Jones, “The South Coast Disaster of 1929,” Newfoundland Quarterly 71, no. 2 (January 1975): 36.

  6.Cassie Brown, “Earthquake and Tidal Wave: The Hillier Story,” St. John’s Woman Magazine (May 1963).

  7.Alan Ruffman, Tsunami Runup Mapping as an Emergency Preparedness Tool: The 1929 Tsunami in St. Lawrence, Newfoundland, vol. 1 (Ottawa: Emergency Preparedness Canada, 1997).

  8.Cranford, “Louise Hollett,” Not Too Long Ago, p. 77.

  9.Cranford, “Marion (Kelly) Moulton: Kelly’s Cove,” Not Too Long Ago, p. 137.

  10.Cranford, “Pearl (Brushett) Hatfield: Adrift in a House,” Not Too Long Ago, p. 70.

  11.Cranford, “Mary (Walsh) McKenna: Tidal Wave at Lord’s Cove,” Not Too Long Ago, p. 105

  12.Kevin Pike (son of Tom Pike), interviewed at various times, 2016, 2017.

  13.Cranford, “Mary (Walsh) McKenna,” Not Too Long Ago, p 108.

  14.There are contradictory accounts of the rescue of Margaret Rennie from the submerged house. Maura Hanrahan, in Tsunami: The Newfoundland Tidal Wave Disaster (St. John’s, NL: Flanker Press, 2006), named the rescuers as Jim Walsh, Herb Fitzpatrick and John Joe Fitzpatrick; Ruffman and Hann, “Newfoundland Tsunami,” said they were David Fitzpatrick, William Lambe and John Joe Fitzpatrick; Mary (Walsh) McKenna, who was twenty years old in November 1929, gave a detailed eyewitness account of the rescue in Garry Cranford, Our Lives (St. John’s, NL: Flanker Press, 2000), in which she identified her father, Jim Walsh, and a neighbour, Maurice Harnett, as the men who rowed out to the house and found Margaret Rennie in her upstairs crib. A third man, Clement Harnett, remained on shore with Patrick Rennie and his sons Martin and Albert, according to McKenna’s account.

  15.The 1921 census for Lord’s Cove records that Jim Walsh was a widower living with four unmarried daughters, including Mary.

  16.Cranford, Our Lives, p. 13.

  17.Sarah Brake, interview with author, February 17, 2017.

  18.The “wall of water” described by witnesses to the tsunami refers to amplitude, the maximum elevation of the “wave” above the normal ocean surface. The run-up height refers to the difference between the normal height of a high tide and the height reached during the strongest tsunami pulse. The maximum wave height/amplitude in 1929 is believed to have been at Taylor’s Bay (Alan Ruffman, correspondence with author, March 14, 2018), where there was a moving “wall of water” twenty-five feet high. Tsunami run-up heights, the “climb” up a rising shoreline, reached about forty-five feet in some places. Man-made structures built lower than that height above sea level would have been endangered. In the fishing villages of Newfoundland at the time, it was not unusual to build homes and other structures near the shore and almost at sea level.

  19.Alan Ruffman, “Atlantic Tsunamis: ‘Like a River Returning’” (illustrated lecture, Maritime Museum of the Atlantic, Halifax, NS, January 18, 2005). Also correspondence with author, March 2018.

  20.Ruffman, “Atlantic Tsunamis.”

  21.It’s relevant to quote directly from the last paragraph in Alan Ruffman’s study of the 1775 hurricane, which claimed an estimated four thousand lives in or near Newfoundland: “At one time, storm deaths occurred almost entirely at sea when a tempest overtook unsuspecting or ill-equipped vessels. Now such deaths are increasingly on the land, as more urban growth is located in low-lying coastal areas. The threat from catastrophic hurricanes and related storm surges is still real and indeed increasing as we urbanise our coastlines and build shore properties.” Ruffman, “Great Newfoundland and St. Pierre et Miquelon Hurricane.”

  22.U.S. Geological Survey, reported in National Geographic, December 27, 2004, https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/12/deadliest-tsunami-in-history.

  23.Estimate of the population and communities affected is according to the South Coast Disaster Committee, Report of the South Coast Disaster Committee (St. John’s, NL: Manning & Rabbitts, Printers, 1931).

  24.Ella Hillier, “The 1929 Tsunami: Through Dinah’s Eyes,” Downhome Magazine, November 7, 2011.

  25.Ruffman and Hann, “Newfoundland Tsunami,” p. 123.

  26.Brown, “Earthquake and Tidal Wave.”

  27.Robert C. Parsons, “A Wall of Water,” Newfoundland Lifestyle 11, no. 1 (Spring 1993): 13–15.

  28.Caroline Skinner-Hickman, “The Day My World Fell Apart, Or So I Thought,” Downhome Magazine 12, no. 7 (December 1999): 31. Caroline is the daughter of Thomas Hillier.

  29.Matte, “Oral Narratives.”

  30.Matte, “Oral Narratives.”

  31.Parsons, “Wall of Water.” This article quotes Robert Hillier, whose mother survived the tsunami because “she was safe at a neighbour’s house on higher land, where she tended a woman in childbirth.”

  32.Michael Staveley, review of Tsunami: The Newfoundland Tidal Wave Disaster, by Maura Hanrahan, Newfoundland and Labrador Studies 21, no. 2 (2006): 413. Professor Staveley writes: “The property damage of roughly $1 million does not readily register in the inflated fiscal measures of the early 21st century—until we realize that, in 1929, the total GNP of Newfoundland was, at a rough guesstimate, about $30 million, and colonial public revenues were in the region of $10 million.” In 1931–32, Newfoundland’s total revenues were $7.9 million, against total expenditures of $11.9 million—of which $1.1 million went to “able-bodied relief” and $4.7 million to interest on debt.

  33.Ruffman and Hann, “Newfoundland Tsunami.”

  34.Ruffman and Hann, “Newfoundland Tsunami.”

  35.Patrick O’Flaherty, Lost Country: The Rise and Fall of Newfoundland, 1843–1933 (St. John’s, NL: Long Beach Press, 2005), pp. 297–98.

  36.Jones, “South Coast Disaster.”

  37.Ruffman and Hann, “Newfoundland Tsunami.”

  38.“Voyage of the Relief Ship Meigle to Scene of Tidal Wave Disaster, Lamaline to Rock Harbour, Districts Burin East and West,” unpublished report, November 28, 1929, Centre for Newfoundland Studies (hereafter CNS), Memorial University of Newfoundland, St. John’s, NL (hereafter MUN).

  39.Daily News (St. John’s), November 22, 1929.

  40.Cranford, “Pearl (Brushett) Hatfield: Adrift in a House,” Not Too Long Ago, p. 70.

  41.Interview with Capt. Chesley Abbott, “Tsunami, 1929: The Silence of the Sea” (Burin, NL: Burin Heritage House, 2005), www.virtualmuseum.ca.

  42.Abbott, “Silence of the Sea.”

  43.Father James Anthony Miller, interviewed in St. John’s by a reporter from the Evening Telegram, said: “At Port au Bras, a fisherman saw his house being swept away. He tried to save his wife and family but was blocked by another floating house. He was helpless as his imprisoned family whirled into darkness. His home was pulled out to sea faster than a boat could steam.” Evening Telegram (St. John’s), November 24, 1929.

  44.Ruffman and Hann, “Newfoundland Tsunami.”

  45.Jones, “South Coast Disaster.”

  46.Cheeseman, “Letter from Burin, 1929.”

  47.Daily News (St. John’s), November 27, 1929. NONIA was the Newfoundland Outport Nursing and Industrial Association, a charitable venture that was largely financed from sales of crafts and knitted goods made by rural women.

  48.Cranford, “Eloise Morris: My Experience,” Not Too Long Ago, p. 130.

  49.Cranford, “Eloise Morris,” p. 130.

  50.Eloise Morris was one of the many hundreds of Newfoundlanders who departed the island after 1929. She spent most of her adult life teaching in a private school in Rhode Island. After she retired, she ret
urned to Newfoundland and lived in Burin, where she died in 1999. She’s remembered in the community as a quiet single woman who loved music and wrote poetry.

  51.Matte, “Oral Narratives.”

  52.Wendy Martin, Once upon a Mine: Story of Pre-Confederation Mines on the Island of Newfoundland (Montreal: Canadian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy, 1983), pp. 66–73.

  THREE: LEGACY OF CHAOS

  * * *

  1.Dr. W.S. Smith, unpublished notes on the history of fluorspar mining in St. Lawrence, Newfoundland (eventually expanded to “Fluorspar at St. Lawrence”), 1957, GSB #001L/14/0016, Geological Survey Branch, Department of Mineral Resources, St. John’s, NL.

  2.Smith, “Fluorspar at St. Lawrence.”

  3.John R. Martin, The Fluorspar Mines of Newfoundland: Their History and the Epidemic of Radiation Lung Cancer (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2012).

  4.O’Flaherty, Lost Country, p. 379.

  5.O’Flaherty, Lost Country, p. 379.

  6.Jones, “South Coast Disaster,” pp. 35–40.

  7.Alan Ruffman has argued in various writings that the failure of the fishery in Newfoundland after the tsunami was probably a coincidental phenomenon. There continues, however, to be a strong anecdotal link that attributes the collapse of the cod fishery at least in part to the earthquake and tsunami.