The Gale of 1929 Read online

  Normally the lamp on the table next to her would give off warmth, light, and security, but Hannah didn’t know or feel any of those just now. She swallowed unexpectedly and realized she was weeping. Turning from the cheerless window, she crept back up the stairs again, taking the light with her.

  * * *

  Out on the roiling Atlantic Ocean, Charlie Rogers was thinking about his wife. It had been two days since they had last seen land, and Charlie knew that Hannah would know there was something terribly wrong. The small island boasted a wireless, one of just a few on the entire north side of Bonavista Bay, but even without that modern convenience she would sense his ordeal. He had long since stopped wondering how this was possible. He simply accepted it for his woman’s unique ability to know when he was in danger.

  Charlie had bought the Janie E. Blackwood barely one year ago. He had not bought the vessel lightly. Rogers was not an impulsive man. The schooner had being built in Port Union of Bonavista Bay in 1925 for the explicit use of the Labrador fishery. He knew most of the men who had built her, craftsmen all and well trusted to construct a schooner worthy of the wily Atlantic. The man who had bought her and given the schooner her name was a friend of his. John Blackwood of Safe Harbour, just north of Fair Island, and a fishing captain himself, would not sell a vessel that was less than seaworthy to anyone.

  Charlie doubted if the men who had constructed the schooner in Port Union had considered she would be put to such a test as she was now trying to weather. He had no regrets about his purchase. The Janie was bearing up under the most brutal of seas, most of which hammered her relentlessly. Stripped of her sails, her handlers for the most part were powerless to ease her burden.

  It was now late Saturday night and none of the men aboard had had enough sleep. How far they had drifted was merely a guess. The full extent of Charlie Rogers’s schooling had been when he was six years old and his father took him aboard a schooner and sailed to the Labrador. Unbelievably, that very first year the boy was given a quarter share of the catch. Now Charlie was the oldest man aboard the Janie, a veteran of many summer voyages on the Labrador. He was just thirty-six years old, already a seasoned schoonerman, an experienced freighter, a compassionate handler of men, and the best of fishermen. In the prime of life, he was as tough as the deck he now braced himself upon.

  Fred Hounsell stood at the helm just abaft of Charlie, who faced forward and clung to the port side cabin railing with both hands. The cabin was low enough for a man to look over. No one else was on deck. Fred had lashed himself to the wheel with a thick line of hemp around his midriff. Without the line the lurch and toss and twist of the schooner would dislodge him. There was also a danger of the spokes from a suddenly spun wheel left unattended for only a second, which could break a man’s arm. The wind bore scuds of snow, the noise of the storm raged above hissing seas, and the Janie groaned her discomfort. She was rigged with a lone jumbo sail set fastened to the foremast in lieu of the much bigger foresail.

  “What time do ’ee figure ’tis?” Fred asked during one of the brief lulls.

  The schooner yawed sideways. Fred brought her to heel with a jolt, staggering with the sudden strain on his arms. The ropes held him upright.

  “Nigh on twelve o’clock, I ’lows,” Charlie yelled.

  He fished inside his soaked waistband and found his watch. He yanked the watch free and it dangled at the end of its silver fob. Holding the watch close to his eyes, he tried to read the timepiece between glances at the foaming waves that kept coming.

  “’Tis jest pas’ twelve an—”

  “Look out, fer Crise sake! Look out! ’Ang on, by gawd, er yer done fer!” yelled Hounsell.

  But the warning came too late. A huge wave crashed down on the middle deck with a gunshot slap. Then it raced aft. Charlie was standing with only one hand holding the rail when the wave laid into him. For one horrifying moment, Charlie Rogers disappeared from Hounsell’s view.

  The skipper’s gone over the side!

  The Janie listed to port under the weight of the tumbled water. A long grey comber with a seething top hoisted her starboard side high. Hounsell figured she would broach to. Then, like a drowning man who just would not go under, she rose again. The schooner shuddered from bow to stern under the deadly weight. Foaming rivers of water poured over her port bulwarks, releasing her to face yet another onslaught. And when she righted herself Fred saw his captain, on bended knees, still clinging to the cabin rail. Charlie’s face was contorted in pain. The water sluiced around him as he struggled to his feet. One of his arms was clasped around his torso. Hounsell realized Rogers was injured and started to untie himself from the helm. Rogers saw what he was about to do.

  “’Old the ’elm, Fred! Stand yer ground! I’m a’right!”

  “I t’ought you was gone fer sure, Skipper! What’s wrong wit’ ’ee?”

  “I—I t’ink I’ve broke one of me bloody ribs!”

  Charlie, in obvious misery, stepped closer to his helmsman. His watch was still dangling from its fob and he grabbed it again. The schooner fell free from the long grey wave that had tried to claim her, and when she floated deep into the trough and readied herself for the next attack, Rogers said, “’Tis past midnight. It’s me birthday!”

  It was Sunday morning, December 1, and Skipper Charlie Rogers had just turned thirty-seven.

  “Fine gif’ ya got, too. A broked rib!” mumbled Fred.

  * * *

  All around Fred Cutler men were screaming in agony. Men staggered and fell. Men were dying. Men were already dead. Bullets zipped and snapped through the air and ricocheted away with a frightening whine. The stench of cordite and spent black gunpowder filled the air. Cutler was running and dodging like a madman. Barbed wire fangs tore at his lower legs as he tried to get over the four terrible rolls of it. Pieces of clothing stayed on many of the barbs, some of them bloody. One man ahead of him had not gotten over the wire. He lay still, his tabard riddled with holes from which blood oozed. His eyes were open and he looked very young. Like a porpoise caught in a salmon net, Cutler thought.

  Shells burst somewhere ahead of him. He ran along the edges of huge shell craters in the earth. Most of them were still smoking. The sound of gunfire and cannons and yelling men was overpowering. He couldn’t understand any of the voices. Some of the shouts sounded foreign to him. He suddenly realized they were—he was hearing German voices!

  He felt a sharp, stinging vibration in his right heel, then he tripped and fell forward. It probably saved his life. He heard more than felt a ping in his helmet and the tin hat went flying off his head. He lay on the ground, his gun clutched under him. The bayonet attached to the barrel end protruded as if pointing him onward. He was in one of the shell holes, luckily without injury, and the battle raged above him. Rolling over without rising, he inspected the barrel of his gun. He figured it was jammed with mud after his fall.

  Keep yer bloody guns clean! his sergeant had yelled over and over again. His gun was still clean. He spider-crawled up to the edge of the hole. All around him was a scene of death and destruction. The field of no man’s land was strewn with bodies. More fell as he watched, all of them young Newfoundlanders. There didn’t appear to be any order to any of it, as though it was every man for himself. Cutler stood on shaking legs and, without orders, and running crippled because of his missing boot heel, he ran with the others.

  How could it be? Why wasn’t someone stopping the slaughter of innocent men? Surely this was not how it was supposed to be! Fred Cutler had never seen a shot fired in anger in his young life. The only time he had ever held a gun was to shoot seabirds or migrating seals. Another man ahead of him fell. Cutler recognized him. He was from Conception Bay. They had trained together. He was about to stop and give aid when he heard, “Go on! Go on! Keep goin’!” It was the fallen man, who was clutching his bloody thigh. Cutler ran on blindly, following hi
s Company.

  And then, suddenly, unexpectedly, wondrously, miraculously, it was over and he was still alive. The noise of battle tapered to a few distant pops of gunfire. Men started to stagger back to their lines, most of them helping wounded comrades. Some of them were dragging bodies showing no sign of life. Cutler collapsed on the ground and lay there on the broad of his back, unhurt, in disbelief. Someone nearby screamed in agony. Another scream sounded, high-pitched and very loud. Pitiful. Terrible. Cutler thought it sounded like a horse.

  There came a thunderous sound of shelling again, this time directly over his head. The hammering of battle had started again and he knew he would not survive a second time. He lifted his head to see where the noise was coming from, but all around him was darkness. He was in a bunk in the forecastle of the schooner Janie E. Blackwood. He had been dreaming . . . or was he living a continuous nightmare? The noise of battle he had heard was the war waged on the tossing deck of the Janie, between a reckless sea and her handlers.

  * * *

  Fred Cutler was born on January 29, 1900. With the first Great War already two years old in 1916, he lied about his age and was enrolled into the First Newfoundland Regiment of the British Army. On July 1 of that same year he had crouched with hundreds of other Newfoundlanders along the soggy bottom and leaning against the muddy walls of a smelly wet ditch in Northern France. As is the way of Newfoundlanders to give things a knowing name, they had called the hand-dug ditch the St. John’s Road.

  It was eight thirty in the morning. He was wet and hungry and his feet were sore. He was also lousy. They all were. He had never seen a louse in his life before coming here. His mother would have been mortified to know her boy had lice in his thick hair. He scratched his head for the thousandth time, but it didn’t help. He ran his hand down over a scraggly beard that had just started to grow. He was proud of it. It made him look older. He would have to borrow a shaving kit. He looked along the line of men to the right and left of him. Most of them were unshaven. Or was it dirt? He wasn’t sure. He couldn’t remember when he had last had a good wash. Everyone was unusually quiet.

  Young Fred Cutler had no way of knowing it, but he was about to become part of a ferocious battle that would make history. It was the Battle of the Somme against the might of the German Army. It was to be the first day of the largest offensive of the Allied Army in the entire war.

  When Cutler stole furtive glances above the ditch and across the land they would soon be ordered to run across, he saw nothing but desolation. Stunted trees had been blasted and scorched and burnt and uprooted, looking like the remains of fire-ravaged tuckamore or the skeletal frames of distorted crunnicks.

  When the order to advance was given and Cutler climbed up out of the trench with the rest of his regiment, it was like suddenly facing an inescapable northeast blizzard that had come out of nowhere. He was sure he was going to die. He thought they all were. After a thirty minute slaughter of young defenceless men, it was over. The rest of the day was one of dragging corpses, mending the all too few wounded, and mourning the dead. Not until the next morning was the true extent of the killing revealed. Of a total of 778 men who had so valiantly plunged themselves up over the edge of the St. John’s Road, a mere sixty-eight had returned to answer the roll call on the morning of July 2. Amazingly, sixteen-year-old Fred Cutler was one of them.

  The battle in the Somme area of France would go on and on. The war would be fought for two more long years. When it was finally over, Young Cutler was still alive but he no longer felt young.

  Now, in the guttering light of a lone lantern, a twenty-nine-year-old Cutler wondered if he would survive another fierce battle that went on and on, this one under the relentless onslaught of the North Atlantic’s might.

  * * *

  The Janie had no sextant or any other means of navigation, aside from a magnetic compass housed in the binnacle. It pointed to the magnetic North Pole and not toward true north. True north is the direction in which the North Pole lies along our forever-moving planet’s rotational axis. Magnetic north is the direction toward which the north end of a compass needle points. The difference or declination between magnetic and true north could be as much as twenty-two degrees, or even more. Like most schoonermen, Rogers had the ability to navigate by dead reckoning, an age-old, tried and true method used as far back as the Moorish corsairs who ventured out into a world most had thought was flat.

  The few charts in the locker over Skipper Charlie’s bunk he knew more by rote than by actual reading. They only proved useful when sailing the near shores of the island of Newfoundland or along the coast of Labrador. Here, on the broad reaches of the open Atlantic, they were just paper—but the intrepid Charlie Rogers and his mate, John, had another use for the chart. Turning the chart over, they used the blank paper as a scale to determine their rate of drift and travel. They determined as best they could the point below the Avalon Peninsula of Newfoundland where they had gone adrift and marked it on their improvised chart. They had a taffrail log aboard. This solid brass, torpedo-shaped marine speedometer was twenty or so inches long. The back end of the log was fitted with arrow-like vanes and the tapered front end was swivel-attached by a line. In practice, three sealed gauges inside the conical front end of the log were set, the time of day was noted, and the log was thrown over the stern, or taffrail, where it turned like a struggling fish, all the while recording the vessel’s rate of speed. This was done by the captain and his mate whenever possible. This common method of determining distance travelled, along with recorded compass bearings, gave them a fair idea as to where they were in the vastness of the North Atlantic.

  For two weeks the schooner was pummelled with one endless storm, the likes of which no one had ever witnessed. She blew farther away from the land, sometimes to the south and sometimes to the east, and again and again the crew fought their way back toward the land they could never see. At times the captain figured they were as close as twenty miles from land. They could see birds, which they knew roosted upon the land at night, but without fail the incessant northerly flow of winter winds took them away again and again.

  They could not continue like this. Skipper Charlie still suffered silently from what he thought was a broken rib. Others had been thrown against bulwarks and masts and some of them had injuries. The wrists and necks of the crewmen were worn sore and the constant wearing of oilskins had chafed their flesh. They were always wet and seldom got completely dry. They kept a constant watch on deck from evening, through the dogwatch, and on into the morning watch. They ran out of food in the forecastle. There were stores of food lashed below the schooner’s deck, but due to the high seas that kept washing over her deck, they couldn’t get the hatch open to go below.

  “Chop a ’ole t’rough the after bulk’ead in the fo’c’sle!” Charlie ordered. “Get to the grub an’ take what’s needed!”

  The men immediately went to work on the bulkhead. The sound of their chopping came as dull thuds to the skipper on deck. He winced at the sound of the axes biting into his vessel.

  “Go below, John, an’ keep a good tally of the grub taken from ’er stores.”

  John nodded his agreement and made his way forward. He was not only Charlie’s mate but also co-owner of the Janie E. Blackwood. He kept a strict account of all her business transactions. Every pound of food taken from the schooner’s hold would be weighed and carefully recorded.

  The Janie had been battered beyond belief. She was stripped of all but a few tatters of her once proud sails. Like a dazed pugilist the little schooner rose again and again. And below her briny deck her weakening planks were leaking.

  When they left St. John’s harbour a seventeen-foot-long four-oared punt had been lashed bottom up on the Janie’s deck. They had also carried a trap skiff equipped with a five-horsepower make and break Atlantic engine, or one-lunger. The punt had been reduced to debris by the waves and had long since dis
appeared over the sides. The trap skiff, too, had been torn from its lashings and repeatedly slammed against the bulwarks. Though it was severely damaged and beyond repair, the men had retied it in an effort to save the valuable engine. Their barrels of fresh water had been bulged in; they were out of drinking water.

  Though none of the men could be considered drinkers, during the long, isolated winter months, especially when a time was held, a drop of ’shine would bolster the spirits. Aubrey Cutler was the one most knowledgeable in this area, and he set to work devising a method of producing fresh water. He never thought the simple process used to make alcohol would one day serve him in such good stead. While it is true that necessity is the mother of invention, using near-primitive tools like this on a small schooner somewhere on a storm-tossed Atlantic was pure genius.

  They removed the copper line running from the gas tank to the make and break engine and built a still! Amazingly, these simple men devised a method of making their own fresh water. They used the desalination process, whereby they heated salt water to the evaporation point. It was then allowed to cool, and the fresh water dripped down and the salt content was left behind.

  * * *

  Back on Fair Island the families of the Janie Blackwood were living through their own nightmare. It’s one thing to know what is happening, for then the human way is to deal with it, each in his own way. It has to be done. It’s quite a different thing altogether to wait daily for bad news that everyone knows is sure to come.

  Hannah remembered her husband’s birthday. Her children didn’t remember and she didn’t remind them. That Sunday morning she had entered her pantry to cut off a piece of salt pork to make scruncheons for the Sunday morning ritual of fish and brewis. There was only a small piece of pork left. Charlie was to bring a barrel of it in the Janie.