Tsunami

8

As the awful day of November 18, 1929 ended, the people of Point au Gaul counted their dead. They began to wonder, too, how many had died in the neighbouring villages and towns along the coast. Many of them had friends and relatives in nearby Lamaline, where Nan and Herbert Hillier and Jessie and David Hipditch had journeyed for their aborted supper at the Loyal Orange Lodge. Mayhem had broken out when Lamaline harbour had emptied of water. Further panic had ensued when the harbour and the lower parts of the village itself had bulged with sea water, the result of a great crush of a wave and then another wave.

Lamaline first appeared in French maps in 1620 as Cap de la Meline. The French name La Maligne, directly translated as “evil” or “wicked,” likely refers to the difficulty of landing a boat in the harbour there because of the many shoals and the low-lying, flat, almost swampy land. In 1763 Captain Cook charted the South Coast of Newfoundland, looking for suitable sites for fishing settlements; one of those chosen was Lamaline.

Despite the early French connection, the first European settlers came from England and Ireland. Lamaline had a significant population by the early 1800s; in 1807, Reverend John Harries of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel baptized seventy-five souls, one-third of whom were adults and “many very old.” Harries was the first clergyman in Lamaline and the only one most of the livyers had ever seen.

Conflict with the French was ongoing. In 1827 the residents of Lamaline appealed to Newfoundland Governor Thomas Cochrane for help, claiming “the French constantly fish on our shore on Sundays (presumably the Newfoundlanders’ day of rest) with boats from sixty to a hundred in number—have taken our dry fish from the beach—have lately burned a boat belonging to one of us and stolen his wharf posts…” Their petition was successful in winning the sympathy of the governor. He immediately dispatched the British naval vessel HMS Manly to patrol the coast. The people of Lamaline sent Cochrane a gift of fish in thanks.

While they portrayed the French as their enemies in this instance, in reality the ties between the two groups were far more complicated than that. Lamaline fishermen sold caplin to the French in contravention of the law. Some tension arose when Captain Alexander Milne of HMS Crocodile discovered the illegal sales as well as considerable smuggling of liquor from St. Pierre to Newfoundland. The French tried to convince him with a taste test that the Newfoundland caplin tasted much better than their own—they failed. All hands breathed sighs of relief when Milne decided not to arrest anyone, but to issue warnings instead. The Loyal Orange Lodge, perched on a hill overlooking Lamaline, was at the centre of social life. Catholics of the town were welcome there, too—in small communities dominated by a harsh North Atlantic environment sectarianism was a luxury they could not indulge. As Jessie, David, Nan, and Herbert fled the hall, they left behind people as dumbfounded and fear-filled as they were. Most of the Lamaline people who had been in the hall left their dinners uneaten and rushed to their homes, heading straight to their children’s bedrooms. They plucked their children from sleep and scurried to higher ground with them.

Twenty-six-year-old Melinda Hillier held her three children close to her as her husband, Frederick, kept a watch on the ocean, waiting for the next wave. Melinda herself could not bear to look. Her ribs rocked as her heart pounded in her chest. Wilomena Emberley, the same age as Melinda, escaped with her brood of five. Like quite a few Lamaline men, Wilomena’s husband, Henry, was in Corner Brook, working on the giant mill and townsite under construction there. It was a great chance to put a few dollars in his pocket. But now, alone with the children, Wilomena ached for him as she watched the first wave batter their house. She knew from the whipping sound the wave made as it hit the dwelling that they wouldn’t sleep there that night and that repairing it would be a real job. As she pushed down her own sob, her youngest started to cry and Wilomena pulled the child to her breast. “Shhh,” she said. “It’ll be all over soon. You’re safe.” Then she bit her own lip so hard it bled.

Jane Hillier’s husband was also at Corner Brook. She had two boys, Fred and Cyril, who fished with their father now, and four younger children. Jane had been terror-struck to see the harbour run dry from her station outside the Hall with her friends and neighbours, who also stood mesmerized. Down below, her oldest sons rushed their younger siblings out of the house, realizing that it was dangerously near the beach and acting on instinct. As their toddler brother, Stanley, ambled out, Fred picked him up under his arm, despite the child’s protests, and pushed each of the other children from behind, trying to hurry them to higher ground. By now, Jane was running toward them.

“Go back up the hill, Mother!” Cyril called. “We’re coming!”

When they reached the top of the hill where Jane stood waiting, glassy-eyed, for her children, the first wave drove in and smashed their house to pieces. Jane let out a wail. When the wave hauled back, Fred saw the fence fall down, the family’s fishing store flow out with the sea, and their trawls and rope unfurl in the water. The cash their father was earning would come in handy, he thought. They would lose just about everything, he knew, including his quintal of Madeira fish. Jane was thinking of the twenty pounds of pork she had stored away and the coal that was meant to keep them warm the winter.

Not far away, on the grasses of the hill, young bride Gertrude Caines felt her face grow hot with tears. She was twenty-one and not long married to Leslie Caines, a thirty-year-old fisherman, who had grievously injured his hand. Leslie was no longer able to fish and Gertrude was wasting away with worry. They had five dollars a week from Public Charities but it was not enough and moreover, it was not what Leslie wanted and certainly not what she wanted. Gertrude spent the entire summer bent over the dark earth, coaxing potatoes, carrots, turnips, beets, and cabbage out of the soil. As the July fog hung, she spread caplin on her garden, having gathered the little fish from the beaches herself. As September approached, she went among her burgeoning crops in the dusk and prayed to the Blessed Virgin Mary. Now, on the night of November 18, 1929, Gertrude knew, all her vegetables were gone.

9

Two waves had reached into Point au Gaul on the bottom of the Burin Peninsula, swamping the village and taking the lives of Jessie and David’s three young children, Jessie’s mother, Lizzie, the two Walsh women, Thomas Hillier, and young Irene Hillier.

The men of Point au Gaul had recovered most of the bodies under brilliant moonlight the night of the tsunami but some were still missing the next day, including Irene Hillier and Mary Ann Walsh. That same strange night, a horse that had been swept out to sea swam back and walked onto dry land with no ill effects.

On November 19, 1929, the day after the tidal wave, a southeast wind came up. It churned the sea higher and higher, whipping up another panic in the village. The whitecaps brought wreckage back to the beach and right up to the remaining houses. The wind and waves also carried Mary Ann’s body to a small island on the other side of the neck of land on which her house had been situated.

The men and boys scoured the beaches of Point au Gaul but they could not find Irene’s body. Every family prayed that it would be delivered. Irene’s mother, Jemima, could not sleep; night after night she sat up at her bedroom window, listening to the waves and the wind. “It’s awfully cold for Irene out there,” she said repeatedly of her only daughter. Her husband, Joshua, who went to look for Irene at dawn every morning, tried to cajole his wife into bed but she would not rest. “I can’t sleep till she’s found,” Jemima said between her tears.

The bodies were all laid out in the hall, ironically built on high ground. Nan Hillier did not go to see her mother’s body. She did not see Jessie’s children either. “You’ll want to remember them as they are,” Herbert told her. “It’ll be too upsetting to see them any other way.” Besides, Nan was too busy tending to Jessie who still babbled and veered into hysteria.

Now homeless, David and Jessie moved in with Nan and Herbert. David’s dory was swept away, as was his stage and fishing gear. He would have to start his fishing enterprise from scratch. The Hipditches had lost most of their winter provisions as well, but that meant nothing, compared to the loss of their children.

The village held a joint funeral for Lizzie and her four grandchildren, including the missing Irene. But Jemima