Tsunami

when he saw John. Not long after John and Ern reached the high ground, the second wave bombed its way into Port au Bras. It was even louder than the first. Now the hill was filled with the sound of mournful praying and cries of anguish and grief. The sobs of the Fudge brothers came full force now. They knew they had lost their sisters and their parents and were all alone in the world. Ern Cheeseman and their uncles and aunts made a ring around them in a vain effort to shield them from the pain they would feel for a lifetime.

The people of Port au Bras barely noticed the third wave, which tossed clapboard, barrels, and the remains of battered boats about the harbour. Turnips, heads of cabbage, and pieces of salt meat floated on the water. Ern Cheeseman wrote:

Everybody 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… Everything we have is gone and we are ruined…everything is dismal and breaks one’s heart to look at the harbour and then think of what it was like fifteen minutes before this terrible calamity.

Most worrying was the loss of boats and the damage to those that survived the tsunami. A schooner was damaged to the tune of one thousand dollars and its two large banking dories—which four fishermen worked from—swept away. A twenty-two-ton western boat needed repairs that would also cost a thousand dollars.

Eighteen-year-old Francis Bennett was in severe shock, long after the villagers emerged from the hill. His fifty-eight-year-old mother, Mary Ann, died in the tidal wave, as did his fifty-year-old uncle, Henry Dibbon. The young entrepreneur’s business was also completely destroyed. Francis believed in getting an early start in life; still a teenager, he was already married and a successful trader. Gone were his flakes, stages, trap skiff, banking dory, a thousand feet of lumber, a staysail, 145 yards of ducksail, ten oil casks, Fairbanks weights, and weighing beams and weights—losses worth $1,500.00. Though a young man, Francis was overwhelmed at the thought of starting all over again from nothing, especially in the face of his grief.

Yet, like many around Burin, Port au Bras was a prosperous village. John Bennett, who owned the damaged western boat, had $280 in the bank. John Dibbon, who was also without shelter and whose brother Henry had died, had two thousand dollars in the bank. George and Elizabeth Bennett, whose house had shifted four feet, breaking their two chimneys, had thirty-five dollars cash on them as well as $1,500 in a savings account. Not everyone was well off, though; fifty-four-year-old Ellen Brenton cried over the twenty gallons of berries she’d picked and the sea had stolen from her.

The waves weren’t long gone when they began to find the bodies. In Ern Cheeseman’s words, “No human had a chance in such raging roaring seas.” Within two days, the body of eighty-four-yearold Louisa Allen, a native of Oderin, was found tucked under one of the remaining houses. A fisherman in Path End, two miles away, came across the bodies of Jessie Fudge and two of her daughters, Harriet May and little Hannah. That of fifteen-year-old Gertie was still missing. Mary Ann Bennett’s body was discovered under what was left of the government wharf.

As darkness grew thick on the night of November 18, the people of Port au Bras gradually became sure that there would be no more waves. Finally, with midnight close at hand, they crept down the hill and back to the houses that were still left. Their shoulders were slumped and they walked hesitantly, their eyes not leaving the moonlit sea.

The brothers, John and Job Fudge, moved slowly with their arms around each other. As they reached the bottom of the hill, near where their family store and house had so recently stood, they saw a hunched figure sitting on the ground. As they got closer, they heard a low moan. Although they had never heard it before, something in the sound sparked a deep recognition and they strode toward the figure.

“My God, it’s Dad!” John cried, stooping down to look into his father’s haggard face.

“Dad!” Job cried, falling to his knees and hugging his father.

Tom burst into tears and let out loud sobs.

“I saw them in the window!” he cried. “I couldn’t get to them…”

The boys began crying again.

“They just went by on that wave,” Tom continued, gulping air between sobs. “I followed the house. But I couldn’t do anything.”

“Oh Daddy,” Job cried. He crawled into his father’s lap, picturing his mother and sisters desperate for rescue as they were swept out to sea. He knew he would never see them again.

Tom’s brother and his wife, Mary, had caught up to the little group.

“Thank God you’re alive!” Mary said. “We thought you were gone, too.”

“It’s a miracle you weren’t,” her husband said. “Staying on the low ground like that.”

Mary elbowed him in the ribs. “He had to try to get Jessie and the girls,” she said.

Tom began to moan again, but this time he pulled his sons close to him. Their relatives and neighbours stood around them in the cool November night.

“Come home with us, Tom,” Sam Green said.

“Or with us, Tom,” Bridget Hardstone said.

“You’re welcome at our place, too, Tom,” Sarah Hynes said.

“For as long as you like.”

24

Magistrate Malcolm Hollett was determined to fully document every single case from Mortier Bay in the north to the villages of the boot around to Fortune Bay on the other side of the peninsula. The town of Fortune had survived the tsunami virtually untouched, but forty-three-year-old widower Edgar Hillier had seen his house ripped off its foundation and thrown onto a high rock; in addition, the home’s porch and an annex had been destroyed. Hillier was in poor health, was going blind, and had three children who depended on him.

On the other side of the peninsula in Mortier near Marystown, the waves washed John and Bridget Antle’s house off its foundation. It would have to be taken down and rebuilt… Hollett nearly cracked his pen as he spread the words across the page. Then he glanced at a map; Mortier was just the beginning.

In mid-December Hollett called a meeting of the Rock Harbour-Corbin Committee. He had made several trips down the coast and was fair bursting to talk of what he had seen. Although he was now the agent for the South Coast Disaster Committee, the magistrate wanted to show his closest neighbours that he had not forgotten them.

As snowdrifts piled up outside Hollett’s Burin house, three men walked up the path. Merchant Frank LeFeuvre came from Bull’s Cove. He was followed by Albert Grant of Corbin and Captain William Foote who came from Stepaside.

As the men settled into the parlour and were served tea by Hollett’s quiet little maid, the magistrate read his draft report on the district south of Burin.

The men nodded solemnly and Albert Grant spoke up.

“Make sure you mention that Joshua Mayo’s house is gone,” he offered. “His and Sophia’s. The first wave ripped the house off its foundation and broke away the porch. It tore great holes in the roof, too. Now there’s a big tribe of them homeless.”

Hollett picked up his pen and raised his bushy eyebrows.

“There’s the Mayo children,” Grant continued. “Morgan, Irene, and Daisy, and there’s the four Moulton orphans who live with them, Annie and Tryphena, and the boys, little William and Bert. They lost all their food and Josh’s Hubbard engine is badly damaged, too.”

“Sounds like a very sad case,” Hollett said grimly.

“It is,” Grant nodded. “Those orphans have been through enough already and now this. I believe the family is