Nurse Cherry looked up at Dr. Mosdell and straightened her hair as best she could. “Oh no, I can’t go with you—I have work to do, sir,” she said weakly.
“Nurse Cherry…” Mosdell began.
“I’m sorry, sir,” Nurse Cherry interrupted. “I have to respectfully decline your kind offer.”
Two days later Dr. Mosdell dipped his pen in an inkwell and began a letter to the Honourable A. Barnes, the Colonial Secretary in St. John’s. He wrote:
On board Relief Ship Meigle Burin Nov. 25 the Florence Nightingale of the earthquake and tidal wave disaster on the Southwest coast is Nurse D. Cherry of the Nonia Centre at Lamaline. At every point the Meigle has called we have heard stirring tales of her courage and devotion to the interests of the survivors. Starting her work of mercy immediately after the occurrence of the catastrophe she has known no rest day or night since then and has been without assistance of any kind until the arrival on the coast of the Doctors and Nurses of our relief expedition.
It must have been almost superhuman effort for Nurse Cherry to make her way on foot all through the stricken area from Lamaline to Lawn a distance of twenty miles. Roads and bridges were swept away and she had to wade many of the streams en route. The weather was intensely cold with snow falling all the time. Her ministrations proved nothing less than providential to terror stricken and frightened women and children. She got through the District as quickly as possible sparing herself not at all and after rendering first aid in one settlement she moved on along until something had been done everywhere to help and to cheer the stricken.
Courage and devotion were required for the journey which was made right after the woeful destruction of the tidal wave with miles of desolation to be traversed at night and nobody just sure that the catastrophe would not be reenacted.
All day yesterday the Meigle sheltered at Lawn a Southeast storm with high seas and driving rain rendering communication with the shore almost impossible.
Toward evening the rain turned to sleet and there was nothing to do except wait until the dark and tempestuous night had passed. During a lull in the storm of the morning Nurse Cherry was taken onboard. She was almost in a state of collapse after her strenuous and self-sacrificing efforts. Despite her objections the expedition kept her with them and have taken her as far as Burin to enable her to recuperate. She returns to her District by the Argyle tomorrow…
PART THREE: AFTERMATH
17
APPALLING DISASTER ON SOUTH COAST
27 LIVES LOST AND 18 TOWNS AND VILLAGES SWEPT BY TIDAL WAVES FOLLOWING EATHQUAKE
PROPERTY LOSSES MAY EXCEED MILLION DOLLARS
From the South Coast of Newfoundland comes a tale of tragedy most appalling, following the earthquake of Monday evening 18th. Owing to communications systems having been out of operation by the quake and storms, news of the tragedy was tardy in coming in, and the first intimation of the seriousness of the disaster was conveyed in a message to the Prime Minister from the captain of the S.S. Portia dated from Cape Race last Thursday, which read as follows: “Burin experienced very severe earth tremors 5:05 pm, tidal wave which swept everything waterfront, 16 dwelling houses with 9 lives mostly women and children gone, 4 bodies recovered. All communication of wire cut off. Report is that 18 lives were lost at Lord’s Cove and Lamaline.”
The Western Star
Nature showed no mercy to the people of the Burin Peninsula on the morning following the most harrowing event of their lives. November 19, 1929 dawned bitterly cold, and iciness seemed rooted deep in the earth. Soon snow fell, slowly at first and then thick and fast. Before long the villages of the peninsula were enveloped in a cold, cruel, blinding white. The wind howled like an angry husky dog at night, blowing the bodies of dead sheep into the waters of Lord’s Cove and Lamaline, and dashing teapots and broken dishes upon the rocks that hugged the shores of Burin and St. Lawrence. Pieces of lace curtain flew on the waves that the post-tsunami winds whipped up. If an airplane had been able to defy the winds and fly over the Burin Peninsula, its occupants would have seen clapboard floating like matchsticks and houses bobbing here and there, oddly, as if they were enjoying their sea-going excursion after decades of being anchored to land. Entire harbours were choked with the carcasses of cows, bulls, and goats, and with broken barns, wrecked fences, and dwellings cut in half by waves that had the sharpness of saws.
Meanwhile, wave-battered houses onshore sheltered greyfaced, hollow-eyed people who shivered at the sight of the snowflakes falling from the sky. These people were the homeless. Among their number were Patrick Rennie and his motherless sons of Lord’s Cove; David and Jessie Hipditch of Point au Gaul who had lost their three children; William and Carrie Brushett and their children of Kelly’s Cove; Vincent Kelly, who had lost his wife, Frances, and daughter, Dorothy, to the tidal wave; the widower, Joseph Cusack, of St. Lawrence; and numerous families in the severely stricken communities of Taylor’s Bay in the south and Port au Bras in the north.
Tragedy was general on the lower half of the Burin Peninsula following the tsunami. So was confusion. The Corner Brook Western Star was not unique as it laboured to determine the extent of the damage and loss of life. In the days immediately after the quake the Burin Peninsula was virtually cut off from the rest of the country and the world. In turn, Newfoundland itself was unable to communicate with the outside because of the tidal wave and the damage it wrought. The Bay Roberts Cable Station reported that cable lines between Newfoundland and New York were damaged and inoperable. The cable ships Lord Kelvin and Cyrus Field located the cable breaks 360 miles south of St. John’s. There were twenty-eight breaks in more than 212 oceanic cables near the epicentre of the quake. The French government had its own cables—three in total—and these, too, were broken. Fifty new miles of cable would be required to make the repairs at a cost of $400,000 in 1929 dollars. The French estimated that the repairs would take no less than two years.
Within the country, the main means of transportation was boat. Thus, sea travel and wireless would have to be relied upon to convey information about the effects of the tsunami in the towns and villages of the Burin Peninsula. One of those eager to get the message out was George Bartlett, owner of a large general store in the town of Burin. Bartlett’s store would go down in legend because of what happened to it on the night of November 18, 1929. The store was housed in a building fifty-five feet by thirty feet, anchored on a concrete foundation. There were no witnesses to the event, but Bartlett’s store had turned 180 degrees and travelled two hundred feet that strange night. Amazingly, the building was not destroyed; it landed in a neighbour’s yard, right up against their house, completely intact. Even more remarkable was the fact that not one item inside the store, including dishes, lamps, and inkwells, was broken or even disturbed.
Two days later, Bartlett took pen to paper to alert Newfoundland’s prime minister of the gravity of the situation facing his neighbours.
Burin North, Nov. 20, 1929
Right Hon. Sir Richard Squires K.C.M.G.,
Prime Minister
Dear Sir:-
This is to acquaint you of a terrible disaster that has overtaken Burin and adjacent settlements, and to appeal to you and your Cabinet to send help quickly. All the waterfront of Great Burin consisting of stores and stages were swept away with all fishing gear and provisions for the winter. Burin proper all the waterfront is damaged more or less I myself have lost considerably but of that I will not mention.
Port au Bras had been cleaned out nothing left standing except a few houses, there has been a loss of seven lives at that place. Foots Cove all waterfront gone with loss of three lives. Rock Harbour has been swept also, I hear also that St. Lawrence is swept clean but as the telegraph lines are down we cannot hear. The S.S. Daisy has gone there and no doubt you will get a full report from them. After the quake a tidal wave of about 15 feet swept this part of the coast and you know what that meant when all stores etc, are only built about five feet above high water line
. The conditions are beyond describing as people lost all their coal provisions for the winter, the merchants are in practically the same state and one can hardly help the other. My own nerves are so shaken I can hardly write coherently or legibly as only a person that has gone through such an experience can understand it.
Organized relief should be undertaken as quickly as possible as the winter will soon be on us and hundreds of people have lost their all. As no doubt you will get a full report from Official Circles, you will be able to judge. My object in writing is to stress the urgency of immediate help to the stricken places. Some have no home or any means or getting anything to rebuild and have nothing only what they could catch from the water as they fled from their houses. I know the appeal will not be in vain.
Yours very truly,
(Sgd) George A. Bartlett.
18
Nineteen-year-old Isabel Gibbons was the telegraph operator in Marystown on the Burin Peninsula in November, 1929, when the waves came crashing into the shores. Isabel was carrying on a family tradition that included her uncle who had worked with Western Union in New York and her older sister, Elizabeth, who worked with the same company in Boston. Isabel came from St. Mary’s on the Avalon Peninsula in eastern Newfoundland, where her paternal grandmother was the first operator. In turn, Mrs. Gibbons passed on her skills to her son, Isabel’s father, who taught his daughters telegraphy, a valuable communication tool in those days. Mrs. Gibbons ran the telegraph office in her home. It was no surprise, then, that her four daughters became telegraph operators, too.
Isabel started work in Marystown, one of the most sheltered harbours on the Burin Peninsula, in 1927. She lived about a mile from the telegraph office, which she shared with Eddy Reddy, who served as the postmaster. They also had a messenger on staff, a young married woman. Isabel worked 9:00 to 6:00 from Monday to Saturday, and 9:00 to 10:00 and 4:00 to 5:00 on Sunday.
Mrs. Forsey, the operator from Grand Bank, was sending messages to St. John’s when the Marystown telegraph office pens and inkwells started to rattle on the evening of November 18, 1929.
“What’s wrong? What’s wrong?” Mrs. Forsey called over the wire.
Isabel stared at the shaking items on her desk. She was awestruck.
“I…I don’t know,” she answered her colleague in Grand Bank.
“What’s gone wrong?” Mrs. Forsey cried again. “Everything is rattling.”
“It’s rattling here, too,” Isabel said. As her voice faded away, the noise grew louder. Then the line snapped and she could hear Mrs. Forsey no more. The office was eerily quiet. Isabel removed her headset and spun around in her chair to face Eddy, who stood behind her, half a dozen envelopes in his hand. He was like a statue.
“The cable between Burin and Marystown is gone,” Isabel said calmly, though her heart raced in her chest. She looked down at her hands, shaking on the armrests of her chair. She thought of the others on the line, people she knew so well, although she had never met most of them: operators from Garnish, Fortune, Lamaline, St. Lawrence, Epworth, Burin, Baine Harbour. Everyday she heard everything they said on the lines. They took turns sending messages, each one more patient than the last.
Somehow Isabel could still get through to St. John’s. As she realized this, she also noticed that the rumbling and rattling had stopped. She checked the line to Grand Bank but found that it still wasn’t working. She would try to reach the capital, though. But then a cable between Terrenceville and Baine Harbour broke and she couldn’t reach St. John’s. She frowned and looked at Eddy who shrugged, his lips pressed together. Neither spoke. Isabel could not communicate with anyone, but she stayed at her post until closing time at 6:00 p.m.
That night she walked over to nearby Creston with a group of young women. Like Marystown, Creston was protected by Mortier Bay, which separated it from open waters. By now Isabel had heard incredible stories about waves as high as buildings in New York. The women stood at the waterline and watched floating sheds and skiffs ripped from their moorings. They knew that places like Kelly’s Cove and Port au Bras were more exposed to the sea and they worried about the damage that might have occurred there.
“I wonder if anyone died?” Isabel said.
“My dad said a score of people have died farther out the bay,” one of the young women answered her.
“That’s just rumour,” said another. “No one knows for sure. And people always exaggerate when the unexpected happens.”
Isabel returned to her office the next morning at nine o’clock sharp, rushing to her lines to check for signs of life. There was none and her shoulders slumped in despair. She shook her head at Eddy when he appeared at the door. He sighed in response. Between customers coming in to check on telegraphs and mail, Isabel and Eddy traded stories they had heard about houses swept out to sea and little girls drowned.
When Isabel kept saying it’s just rumours at this point, Eddy said, “There was a time before telegraphs, Isabel, and we had to go by each other’s word then.” Then he stopped while Isabel bowed her head.
“We do know there was terrible loss of life in Port au Bras and that Vince Kelly’s wife and daughter are drowned,” he added.
Isabel’s face reddened.
“I’m sorry, Isabel,” he said. “It must be hard on you, being away from your own people at a time like this.”
The young woman nodded.
“I wish I knew what was going on,” she said quietly.
“That’s your way, being a telegraph operator,” Eddy said, his mouth turning up. “You’re a pro through and through!”
Isabel let out a small laugh through the fogginess that clogged her chest and throat.
She went into her office the next day and the day after, though the lines remained dormant and broken. She stayed until six o’clock every day, listening to the people of Marystown come in and tell what they had seen and heard since the waves had crashed upon the shores of the peninsula. The snowstorm of the nineteenth was followed by a calm on the twentieth, which seemed to offer some small promise that there was something other than chaos in the world.
But by the end of the third day, stories were starting to trickle in from as far away as Lord’s Cove and Taylor’s Bay. Could it really be true that a woman had lost all her children to the tidal wave? Was a toddler really saved after her mother and siblings had drowned? Isabel wondered and she reflected that her mother often told her there was much that only God could understand.
On the fourth day after the tsunami, a messenger arrived from the telegraph office in Epworth near Burin, asking for Isabel to come and assist them. Isabel’s eyes brightened at the request and her shoulders cast off a load of which she had not even been aware. It was, she realized, helplessness that had been dogging her. That afternoon, with an overnight bag in her hand, she boarded a small boat to travel to Epworth, sailing out through Mortier Bay, still littered with the odd piece of clapboard or broken stagehead. Isabel wrapped her wool scarf around her face as the boat travelled past the sheltered inlet of Little Bay, then the mouth of Beau Bois harbour and into the winter-like wind. The hollow faces of people made homeless by the tidal wave passed before her as Stepaside and Port au Bras drew near. She uttered a “Hail Mary” for them and tried to focus on the work ahead of her.
Almost unique in the region, the telegraph office at Epworth was capable of receiving and sending messages. In the days following the tidal wave, people from surrounding communities had poured into the Epworth office to communicate with friends and relatives in St. John’s and other parts of the country. The operator could not keep up with the volume of messages and was desperate for Isabel’s help.
As soon as she landed in Epworth, Isabel went straight to the office and to work. She barely had her coat off when the Epworth operator handed her a stack of messages. “Hello! Thanks!” the bulky woman said breathlessly, and quickly returned to her own pile of papers.
As she laboured in the gathering darkness, Isabel learned what the tidal wave ha
d done to the people of Burin. She knew now they needed lumber for stores, stages, flakes, barrels, furniture, houses, boats—and coffins. They needed coal, clothes, boots, and food. They needed sympathy, consolation, answers. And they needed all these things in a great hurry. Her fingers tapped out their urgency, the flustered heat of her warm blood driving them. As the clock ticked midnight, she finished and fell back in her chair, letting what energy she had left drain out through her legs and feet. Inside Isabel’s chest was a black lump made up of the stories she had told through the language of dots and dashes. She took it to a strange bed with her that night in Epworth.
The next morning the local telegraph operator told Isabel the cable between Epworth and Burin had been repaired and that the Burin office could get messages to St. John’s. The woman thanked Isabel for her help and arranged her passage back to Marystown. When Isabel left, the black lump was still there.
19
The great gushes of water had reached the shores of the Burin Peninsula on a Monday night. With the telegraph cables broken and Isabel Gibbons and the other operators unable to communicate to sites beyond the afflicted communities, the rest of the world did not know the extent of the damage and pain wrought by the tsunami.
On Tuesday night thirty-eight-year-old Magistrate Malcolm Hollett wiped the sweat off his face as he composed yet another letter to Prime Minister Richard Anderson Squires in St. John’s. Hollett sat at a mahogany desk in his Burin parlour, feeling no comfort by the smell of century-old oak wall panels or the tray of tea and gingerbread a maid had left for him. He dipped his pen in the inkwell and began again.
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