The Wake

by Linden MacIntyre

  There had been a great deal of damage to shorefront property, but because of the depth of Burin harbour, the tsunami hadn’t crested and crashed the way it had, with devastating consequences, in most other places. And yet, even at the entrance to the harbour, the Meigle encountered what, in the days ahead, would become a drearily familiar sight. Entire buildings afloat. Crates and barrels and drifting storage buildings full of necessities that had recently been set aside for use in the winter, which was only days away. There were people picking through the ruins, and buildings being towed back into bays and anchored. On the shore, wreckage and destitution; from everyone they spoke to, stricken stories of survival, shocked accounts of human loss.

  Several of the hardest-hit communities were not far from Burin, and two of the most tragic were Kelly’s Cove and Port au Bras. In one of his earlier communications with St. John’s, Malcolm Hollett, the magistrate, had reported the stark details to the minister of justice:

  Seven dwelling houses in Port au Bras were carried to sea with a loss of seven lives.

  Four houses at Kelly’s Cove and Stepaside disappeared to sea in an instant with loss of two lives.

  None of the bodies yet recovered; there are many hair-breadth escapes and many people are suffering from shock and privation.39

  The particulars from the mouths of the survivors were more chilling, and the memories, even decades later, would confirm that in the aftermath of a human tragedy on any scale, numbers can never accurately capture the personal reality.

  WHEN she was living in a seniors’ home in St. John’s seven decades later, Pearl Brushett would still remember events vividly:

  The first wave took our house from Kelly’s Cove beach over to Bartlett’s Island. It grounded there . . . The first thing I remember after they [her mother and older sister] woke us up was looking out the window. All the flakes and all the stages were down in the harbour. The harbour was all debris. I remember that.

  Then the second wave came and took us back to the beach. Not exactly where [the house] came from but near. That’s when Mr. Ben Hollett and his wife, Beatrice, came down and got us out through the parlour window . . . Then we took off and went higher on the hill.40

  The next wave carried the house to sea. In her child’s memory, “the cat went crazy,” scrambled from the drifting house through a window “and swam to shore,” then promptly disappeared. A swimming cat? Or a parent’s comforting image after the event for a grieving little girl?

  THIRTEEN-year-old Marion Kelly, in Kelly’s Cove, was doing homework when she heard the roaring sea. She looked outside. Her little brother, Elroy, was three and a half years old. She grabbed his hand as she went out the door. They dashed around the house and climbed a fence. The water was already at their feet.

  As they climbed the fence, Marion looked back in time to see her house lifting off its foundation. Her mother, Frances, appeared in the yard. She hesitated. There was another daughter, Dorothy, who was ten. She wasn’t with them. Frances turned back.

  The house shuddered, then drifted off on the retreating wave, a burning lamp still visible through a window. Marion Kelly’s mother and sister were never seen again.

  There was a fourth child, a boy named Curt, but he’d been visiting an aunt and was safe. Marion’s father returned with the firewood a week later, unaware of what had happened while he was gone. He and his neighbours would search in vain for the bodies of his daughter and his wife, who was just forty-two years old.

  November 18, 1929, was the last day of Marion Kelly’s childhood. It would fall to her, from that day on, to run her father’s house and raise her younger brothers.

  AN elderly couple in Port au Bras, eighty-one-year-old Billy Allen and his wife, Louisa, eighty-two, were also caught inside their house when the tsunami lifted it and started dragging it away. Billy escaped with the help of a neighbour.41 Days later, a local boy, eleven-year-old Benjamin Abbott, found Louisa’s body floating in the wreckage underneath a wharf owned by a local fisherman.

  BILLY Allen’s neighbour, Thomas Fudge, watched, aghast, as his own house lifted off and sailed away on the retreating tide. Inside, his wife and three young daughters were screaming for help as he scrambled to launch a dory in an effort to catch up with them.42 The parish priest in Burin would, days later in St. John’s, describe the awful spectacle: the frantic fisherman had almost reached his drifting house but was blocked at the last minute by another floating building. And then there was another wave, and his house was gone.43

  The bodies of his wife, Jessie, and one daughter, nine-year-old Harriett, were found two days later, still in the house, now beached on the shore three miles away. Fifteen-year-old Gertie’s body would not turn up until the spring of 1930. Seven-year-old Anna was lost forever.44

  In the final report of the South Coast Disaster Committee, in the summer of 1931, there was a footnote that could only refer to Thomas Fudge and the terrible memories that must have haunted him in the days and nights and weeks—if not years—that followed. Among compensation payments, there were allotments for “unusual and pathetic circumstances,” including one to an unnamed man in the Burin district who had “lost his wife and three children in the disaster and as a result became badly depressed.”45 The relief committee had set aside $1,000 to “domicile” him but stipulated that the title to his new house would be assigned, in trust, to the Burin magistrate—the assumption being that for the foreseeable future, the individual could not be entrusted with the management of his own affairs.

  In the 1935 census for Port au Bras, Thomas Fudge, widower, was still in the community, living, presumably in his new house, with his teenage son—whose name was Job.

  FIFTY-EIGHT-year-old Mary Ann Bennett was a widow. Her late husband, a schooner captain, had, several years earlier, been lost at sea near St. John’s. Her brother, Henry Dibbon, ran a store down by the waterfront in Port au Bras, and when she realized what was happening, she rushed down to his store to make sure that he was safe—only to be caught up in the same wave that was carrying her brother and his business off to sea.

  Henry’s body would never be recovered. Mary Ann was found by searchers on November 20, beneath the government wharf in Port au Bras.

  THE Cheesemans were a prominent family of merchants in Port au Bras. On November 20, Ernest Cheeseman wrote an anguished letter to his older brother, Jack, in St. John’s. Jack was John T. Cheeseman, the former MHA for Burin. He was well known in the commingled worlds of politics and business in Newfoundland. Because his birthplace, Port au Bras, was still quite cut off from the rest of the world, his brother, known in the family simply as Ern, composed a letter to his influential sibling. “Dear Jack,” Ern wrote. “I hardly know how to begin but here is the gist of what happened Monday evening at five-twenty. We had an earth tremor . . .”46 He then described the “twenty-foot” waves that swept into the harbour a couple of hours later:

  You could hear the poor humans who were caught, screaming, women and men praying out loud. Oh God, Jack! It was terrible . . . Everyone is miserable, nervous wrecks and in need of help immediately. All people who had food for the winter lost it in their stores. We must have flour, sugar, tea, molasses, beef and pork immediately. The government will have to send relief as soon as possible. Everything we have is gone and we are ruined.

  Jack would undoubtedly have known all this before the letter from his brother reached him. In fact, there were five local members of the legislature on board the Meigle and heading towards Burin the night after Ern sat down to write. By late afternoon on the twenty-second, the Meigle was tied up at the Burin wharf, offloading even more supplies than Ern had asked for.

  On that grim Saturday, November 23, the assemblyman for Burin East, J.A. Winter, visited his constituents in Port au Bras. The weather had turned miserable again, with high winds and thick blowing snow. As he reported to the Daily News on November 27, 1929, survivors were picking through the debris on the shore “endeavoring to salve wreckage . . . [Fish] traps were
torn to shreds and floating in all directions . . . As yet the people do not seem able to realize their losses and are dazed and stunned.”

  By Monday, the storm had once again knocked out telephone and telegraph communications between the Burin Peninsula and the capital.

  11.

  COMPARED to Taylor’s Bay, Lord’s Cove, Point au Gaul, Port au Bras and Kelly’s Cove, the community of St. Lawrence got off easily. While many of the houses were flooded out, few were seriously damaged. There was no loss of life there. But the town was devastated just the same. Businesses destroyed. All the infrastructure that supported life—roads, wharves, bridges, fish-processing facilities, boats—was gone. Cecelia Fewer’s telegraph office was in the middle of the harbour, and she had narrowly escaped.

  Adolph and Dinah Giovannini and their fifteen fish processors had hardly left their shop when the tsunami tore it down and carried it away.

  People who lived closest to the shore had escaped to higher ground. Gus Etchegary and his sisters, hearing the commotion outside, headed out to investigate the cause of the excitement. They were afraid and, as panicked people often do, ran towards the danger. Their neighbours turned them back.

  And when the sea had settled down again, the bewildered people drifted towards the safest place they could think of—the church.

  Augustine Thorne was more than the parish priest for the Catholic population of St. Lawrence—he had a secular authority that few in any religious denomination would have questioned. And he took charge that night, leading prayers and organizing citizen committees for the hard work of recovery—a task he knew would have to start with the first light of the day.

  His equal in the aftermath of the disaster was a woman he would have known only from a distance and by reputation—but someone about whom he would probably hear more in the days that followed.

  Her name was Dorothy Cherry.

  TO COLONIAL SECRETARY—from H. M. (Harris) MOSDELL (MHA Burin West, Chairman, Newfoundland Board of Health)—Nov. 23

  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 . . .

  The weather was intensely cold with snow falling almost all the time. Her ministrations proved nothing less than providential to terror-stricken women and frightened women and children . . .

  All day yesterday the Meigle sheltered at Lawn. A southeast storm with high seas and driving rain rendering communication with the shore almost impossible. Towards evening, that rain turned to sleet and there was nothing to do except wait until the dark and tempestuous night had passed.

  During the lull in the storm of the morning Nurse Cherry was taken on board. She was found 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.

  (Sgd) Mosdell 47

  12.

  AND who was that heroic woman, Dorothy Cherry? Without a doubt, her “courage and devotion” helped save many lives. And yet beyond this factually brief testimonial, we know little of her efforts. In this, her destiny was not uncommon. That the death toll from such a natural catastrophe remained low, relative to what it might have been, was thanks to the bravery of countless people—those who survived and those who didn’t. The chaos of the event left most of them anonymous.

  We know from sparse official records that Nurse Cherry worked herself almost to death, struggling through the worst of the devastation, from Lamaline to Lawn, on horseback and on foot. We know something of what she encountered because the medical team on board the Meigle kept a rough account of what they found in the days after she had passed through the blizzards and the wreckage and the suffering. Had there been journalists on board the Meigle, or had reporters independently made their own way to the place, we’d probably know more particulars about the human drama, including Dorothy Cherry’s powerful story. She’d have become one of the great human-interest stories in the larger narrative.

  What we do know is that she came to Newfoundland from England, and that seventeen years after the tsunami, the list of Newfoundlanders named to the Order of the British Empire included “Dorothy Cherry, a district nurse.”

  But Dorothy Cherry’s story, like the catastrophe itself, would fade into the relative anonymity of local anecdote, soon to be overwhelmed by another wave—a gathering tsunami of politics and economics and scandal that was about to wash across the island. Nurse Cherry, whoever she was and whoever she became, would, like the small communities she served, slip back into an obscurity that would hide more suffering in the years to come.

  SIXTEEN-year-old Eloise Morris was at school in St. John’s, studying music, among her other courses, when she felt the trembling of the earthquake and saw the streetlight swaying, swinging wildly.48 Like most people in the city, she didn’t hear news of the consequent tsunami for days.

  Her father’s parsonage, back in Collins Cove, was on high ground and so had escaped the brunt of the devastation. But like many others on the south coast, Eloise would soon discover that there were other costs, other damages that might not be revealed for quite some time.

  She left St. John’s on the coastal steamer Portia on December 15, bound for Burin. It was after dark when she arrived. The mail boat was waiting to take her across the harbour to Collins Cove.49 The men were quiet as they rowed, but when they neared the wharf below the parsonage, the boat crunched against the gravel bottom, still a short distance from dry land. One man grabbed the mailbag and her suitcase and climbed out into the water. The second man picked her up as if she were a child and carried her to shore. The wharf at Collins Cove, like all the other man-made structures on the waterfront, was gone.

  She’d been looking forward to the holidays, the festivities, the Christmas break, when her family and the church would be at the centre of merriment and celebration. But it was different this year. It would be a sparse and quiet holiday—but most distressing for Eloise was the change she found in her father. He’d grown old. He was exhausted and depressed. It was clear that the stress of the preceding month had aged him immeasurably. Survivors in the communities along the south coast of the peninsula were struggling with the same condition, a malady both physical and psychological that would permanently compromise their lives.

  For Reverend William J. Morris, his status as a community leader and source of spiritual reassurance would have made the burden seem unbearable. He was obviously ill that Christmas, and it was confirmed soon afterwards that his heart had begun to fail him. He would linger for nine more years and die at the age of sixty-four.50

  DEATH is the usual metric for the severity of disaster. But the true measure of a tragedy lies in how its impact will disfigure the emotions and the lives of the survivors. There were twenty-seven dead, but there were thousands who were still alive and facing an overwhelming challenge—recovering from exhaustion, injury, grief and related illnesses. Rebuilding lives when there was nothing left to work with. These people made their living from the sea, but the sea had turned against them savagely, smashed their boats, swept away their nets and traps, their stages, storage shacks and homes.

  In the aftermath of the devastation, John Cusick, from St. Lawrence, surveyed the wreckage on the shore. He would soon discover that there were unseen, lasting consequences well beyond the shore. The fishery was gone indefinitely. He had no choice but to move on. Start again, somewhere else. His wife, Nora, was pregnant with their first child. They moved to St. Pierre, and John started a new career—rum-running, serving the unquenchable demand for alcohol whereve
r it was being thwarted by the law. For him and many like him, the only relevant authority in 1930 was the imperative of need.

  John Cusick would never cease to be a Newfoundlander, but he and his family (with the exception of one daughter) would call St. Pierre home for the remainder of their lives.

  THE survivors had to continue living. But the sea, for centuries a benefactor, would soon grow sullen and barren, and many would abandon it for different occupations in other places, including nearby St. Pierre, which had somehow escaped the devastation that befell the people of the Burin.

  There are no formal records that document a migration from the Burin Peninsula to the French islands after the tsunami. But it might be significant that during a period in which the population of St. Pierre mostly shrank, available statistics show a 7 percent bump between 1926 and 1931.

  Much later in life, Gus Etchegary would still remember mournful scenes of people packing up and leaving. In an interview in 2006, he was wistful about the events of 1929 and 1930, and the hard times that followed. “It brought about an enormous change in the economic life of those people and they wound up, a lot of them, leaving, having to leave, to take jobs in New York, Boston, fishing out of Lunenburg, out of Nova Scotia or out of other places in Newfoundland.”51

  In time, these migrants would count themselves among the lucky.

  13.

  SOMEWHERE in the city of St. John’s, sometime in 1929—just before the Western capitalist economies began to crumble and a tsunami wiped out entire communities on Newfoundland’s south coast—a local businessman named William Taylor was bragging to a visitor, a twenty-seven-year-old accountant from New York.