The Gale of 1929 Read online

  Leaning against the sparse shelves of her larder, Hannah wept. She hadn’t thought of it before, so rapt with grief for her missing husband was her heart. What would she do without him? Where would she turn to raise her children? How would they fare? She knew she could depend on family and friends anywhere on this island and even the islands nearby. It was the island way to assist anyone in need. She and Charlie had gone to the aid of many such families, but she had never had a need for charity before.

  Three days later, on December 3, their fears were allayed. The Janie was safe and sailing toward Fair Island! She had been seen outside the town of Elliston, just south of Cape Bonavista. The happy news came clicking into the telegraph office on Fair Island. The St. John’s newspaper, the Daily News, had confirmed the sighting.

  But—cruelly— the sighting, and all of the reports that followed, were wrong! The Janie was not sailing for home. She was still lost at sea.

  Now the wives and families of everyone aboard the Janie were disconsolate. All hopes for their loved ones had been dashed by the dots and dashes of the machine in the post office. There was more. Days later young Ron, Skipper Charlie’s son, was lounging around the door of the post office hoping to bring a favourable word of his father’s schooner home to his anxious mother. But what he heard only caused them more grief and further distress. He had heard the clacking of the Morse code machine. He listened until it was still. Then he caught a few words from the men who were inside.

  “Derelict schooner . . . far out to sea . . . bare poles . . . Janie Blackwood.”

  The boy ran without stopping away from the post office that had given him the terrible news. Up the snowy path he went and he burst breathlessly into the warmth of his mother’s kitchen. He told her what he had heard, and Hannah, unable to bear the pain in private any longer, sat back in her well-used rocking chair with her children gathered around her and wept. The children had not seen their mother cry before.

  And below the comforting homes where humans gathered and worried and sometimes cried, the mother of all tears sounded upon the grieving land and gave no comfort at all.

  * * *

  Far away from the despairing family, Skipper Charlie’s schooner was, indeed, little more than a derelict. The vessel had suffered severe damage: her few remaining sails were mere tatters and hung in pitiful skeins from her stripped masts; pieces of sailcloth clung to the debris on the Janie’s deck, like bedsheets ripped from a windy clothesline. Several times during the past two weeks the valiant crew had beaten their way unerringly back toward the land. They were all tired and cold, soaked with icy water, and never really dry. They had all been tossed and beaten around the schooner. All of them had bruises on their weary bodies. Charlie Rogers was in constant pain.

  The Janie Blackwood could not take many more beatings. She was leaking badly and had sustained a list to port. Her pumps needed constant attending to, a boring, back-breaking, laborious task. Without adequate sails aloft her handlers could not give the vessel true direction. They were now at the mercy of a fickle, pitiless sea.

  On Thursday night, December 12, Charlie Rogers figured they were a little over 100 miles east of St. John’s. The sky was still the steel, sullen grey colour that it had been for days on end. As he looked at the snow falling all around him, Rogers couldn’t remember ever being warm. The spirits of all aboard the Janie Blackwood were ebbing.

  Then they saw, on the cresting swells and disappearing in the wallows, not one, but two sets of lights! Charlie glanced skyward. Their lantern attached to the gantline high above their heaving deck was burning. Would they be seen?

  A few days ago a steamer had hove into view a good distance away. Rogers had raised the Red Ensign, only to watch in disbelief as the ship sailed away until she was hull down. It was only after the ship had disappeared over the humped horizon that Skipper Charlie realized they had raised the flag in the upright position. To indicate distress aboard a ship at sea, the flag must be flown upside down. From that point on they kept the flag flying bottom up from the mainmast of the Janie Blackwood.

  * * *

  Without any of her crew knowing it, the Janie’s plight had not only been recognized but acted upon. A chain of modern communication was exercised and in that dark, furious night and an attempt to rescue them was begun!

  The ship Cairmona had spotted them, and its crew had tried to communicate with the Janie by using Semaphore Flags. No one aboard the schooner knew how to send or even read the old method of communication between vessels at sea. The Cairmona was equipped with wireless. While the captain ordered bearings to stand by the stricken schooner, her wireless officer immediately contacted the Beothic, another ship that was in the area. However, the Beothic was wallowing in the same heavy seas and was too far away to be of immediate service. The distress call was picked up by yet another ship, one that was nearer. The SS Nova Scotia was outbound from the British Isles and sailing under heavy weather for the safety of the old St. John’s port. She was a modern vessel, barely three years old, more than 400 feet long and equipped with a state-of-the-art oil-fired steam engine capable of pushing her along at fourteen knots. The ship altered course for the Janie Blackwood.

  Captain Furneaux was well aware of the state of most of his passengers. They had had a hard go of it crossing the Atlantic. His passengers, fifteen of them in expensive first-class berths and eighty of them in much cheaper third-class, were suffering from seasickness. Another ship, the SS Anthrim, sailing on that terrible sea, was notified and it, too, veered toward the Janie.

  And so the tossing Atlantic stage was set. The players were assembled. And without rehearsal but with precise choreography, the two actors set out boldly from the trembling night curtain on a deadly, heaving stage to follow the lines that would save one of their own.

  And aboard the stricken Janie her skipper and crew knew their time of life or death was at hand. An attempt to rescue sailors from the deck of a heaving, out-of-control vessel is the most perilous of all manoeuvres. The Nova Scotia was more than four times longer than the Janie. Only a rub from her mighty steel sides in such a sea would rupture and capsize the Janie Blackwood. It would require skill, nerves of iron, and a precision born of experience to play the part successfully.

  The Anthrim’s captain held his ship to the windward of the schooner. This not only kept the bulk of the wind away from the Janie, but also broke some of the heaving swells that harassed the schooner. This positioning also gave a measure of shelter to the Nova Scotia’s lifeboat, which her captain had ordered over her tilted side. Jackstaves or rescue lines were thrown from the tossing lifeboat onto the washing deck of the schooner, where the men hanked them tightly to themselves. Before long they were hauled away from the deck of their schooner and into the safety of the lifeboat. The rescuers rowed to the massive, looming, heaving sides of the Nova Scotia, where rope ladders were lowered. Jackstaves were used again on some of the Janie’s crew, who were suffering from injuries. Finally, every man of the Janie Blackwood rose to safety aboard the SS Nova Scotia.

  Their ordeal on the furious sea was almost over. When Captain Furneaux learned that Charlie Rogers barely knew what the word “navigation” meant, much less its modern use, he questioned him as to where he thought he might be, as well as what course he figured he would need to steer for Newfoundland. Skipper Charlie answered without hesitation.

  “I’d say we’re jest a hundred or so miles east of the Notch, and if I was to do so, I’d set me course fer west and a bit nart’, sir.”

  “By my reckoning, Captain Rogers, you are less than ten miles from your estimation, and the course you suggest would take you to land somewhere between Cape St. Francis and Cape Spear. Probably to the entrance of St. John’s itself. Or, as you say, the Notch.”

  The helm was ordered over and the Nova Scotia came into the wind again, gathering way and making for land. The crew of the schooner were go
ing home. But for the master of the Janie Blackwood, the abandoned wastrel that had been his home for years was staying behind. Outside the warmth of the bridge, he stood with his hands on the painted iron rails and watched the feeble light from her once proud mast grow dull and duller still. Then, with one last, pitiful wink, as if searching for the master of her light, the Janie slid down over the slope of the sea and rose no more.

  7 George K.

  They laid my hand-hewn spine down in the chocks on the white frozen ground in the outport called Glovertown. My owner was the firm of George Knowling Ltd. It was the winter of the human year 1918. Glovertown was a place deep in the recess of Bonavista Bay, only accessible to the open sea by sailing along deep water in canyon-like fjords.

  With heavy steel mauls and broad wooden wedges my keel was hammered and jammed immovably tight on the frozen ground. Dark descended on the land. Tools were laid across my backbone and the black-clad figures trudged away, their feet crunching loud against the frozen snow with every weary step. The moonless night deepened. Stars glittered high above me. The cowardly frost stole along the ground, pierced through my single bone, and whitened my cradle, but I felt nothing. The new day came without warmth. The men who would mould and craft me returned.

  The days lengthened and warmed some. To one end of my prepared and waiting spine they moulded my raking stem and secured it with a strong keelson and stemson. I was sixty-seven feet long. Then they designed and shaped my tilted stern. Now I had direction, for I had a fore and an aft. They fastened strong ribs or knees to my keel and interspersed them with axed timbers. They bored with twisted, hand-turning steel bits, and sometimes burned with heated rods circular holes through my rising frame. They spawled countless chips of wood with adze and wide-bladed axe and with rasping saw added falling sawdust to the growing residue of my construction.

  They cursed and laughed. They spat warm streams of steaming tobacco juice on my wooden flesh. The brown stains were my first hint of colour. The frozen bay at my stern carried laughing children and barking dogs. Men with bent backs hauled loaded sleds over its slippery surface. Labouring horses pulled timbers straight and crooked up over the baddycadders—rough shore ice formed by the freezing of every day’s tide. And still I was without feeling.

  The first strakes of planks that were to be fastened next to my naked keel on either side were prepared. Garbit planks, they called them. They were sculpted and sawed and chopped and the men carefully trimmed them both until they fit just right. They paid strict attention to these first of planks on which all of my others would lie. My exposed skeeg—the section of my keel that jutted under my stern—pointed like a finger to the frozen harbour. I was being wooded. I felt secure but inanimate. Then came the day when they fastened my sheer planks, the last wooden strakes on my hull, which would give me my lines. My one-of-a-kind distinctiveness.

  And then I knew something was wrong! They bent and clamped the shear plank on my starboard side. It defined my waist. My fore and aft. My shape. But when they hammered the shear stake on my port side I sensed a sudden weakness. The inner, unseen fibres of one of my forward ribs was weak. It was my fifth one and it did not hold the nails as it should. But my builders never noticed and my construction went on. The ice in the still harbour finally turned black with the spring heat and no one walked upon it any more.

  Two huge straight trees were brought to my side. They brought the smell of pine from the distant forest. They peeled the bark from them. It spewed the smell of them upon the spring-thawing ground. When the trees were stripped of their bark and showed white and naked, they were hoisted and rolled on my deck. And when they were carefully stepped against my spine, my two masts dominated high above my lone deck.

  Every seam in my sides was rammed tight with tarry oakum. My deck, too, was caulked and hot tar was poured into each seam and joint. Living quarters for my handlers was built in my forward. A sturdy wooden rudder was fastened to my skeeg below and my transom above. A birch helm to guide me was added. The name George K. was carefully scrolled with white paint on both my black bows and across my broad-angled transom.

  Then one morning in the murky dawn I heard the quiet waves lap gently against the landwash behind me. The ice had gone, and when the new light came, blue water waited for me. The ways under me and the ones behind me reaching into the water were smeared and greased with the oil from cod livers. It stank. It left calm streaks on the water. Crowds gathered around me. Men shouted. Heavy mauls were hoisted above muscled shoulders and when they came slamming down on the wedges that held me fast, I trembled all over. Again and again the hammers smote and drove the wedges tighter. I started to slide toward the quiet water. Then I slid suddenly seaward without stopping. My cradle slid with me. For a moment it felt like I would fall over. Men shouted again. Women cheered and children screamed. Barking dogs added to the din. Then, when my skeeg touched the cold, clear sea, I was born.

  The burgeoning, expectant life of the sea washed over my lower frame and permeated my land fibres. I left my wooden caul behind and swayed and yawed proudly amidst the cheers of men. A trembling sensation of belonging, of boundless freedom, filled my fibre; a sudden yearning to be away from the claiming land; a desire to adventure forth upon the endless sea. I was alive!

  For the following six years my forefoot led me over waves that rolled endlessly by. I sailed below high, rugged crags tufted with bunches of bracken, where great ernes soared on summer winds. On such days the smell of the sylvan land of which I was made stayed with me until I sailed hull down over the slope of the blue sea. I scudded before brisk winds, my hold filled with the smelly, heavy salted cod. I rested on calm bays in the warm darkness of summer nights and I tacked home in the teeth of autumn gales. Always we searched the seas for the codfishes. Each season, just before the pondlike harbour of Glovertown froze solid, I was anchored safely in midstream. The residue and stench of countless fresh and salted codfish were never really cleaned from my bilge, but when the winter’s cold penetrated into my wooded bones, the smell faded away. And in all that time my only worry was my fifth rib. It was steadily weakening.

  Then one cold winter’s day, while I lay imprisoned within the harbour ice, money was exchanged between my captain and another man who stood on my motionless deck. It was the human year of 1924. And when Frank Green took a firm hold on the worn, polished spokes of my helm, I knew that although I had been captained and skippered before, this man would truly be my master. I also knew that, with his hand still on my weathered helm, one of us would die!

  And when the brisk spring winds brought warmth to the inner bays, he took me sailing over the sea and I floated easy with downed sails, from the edge of the sea roads, through the dangerous straits, and edged my prow into the safe haven called Greenspond.

  * * *

  Frank had descended from generations of the Green family. His surname and that of the Pond family were believed to have been the origin of this small seaward isle’s name. Fifteenth-century English merchants had no intention of letting their indentured and conscripted sailors have any part of the wealth of this New-founde-lande, but men who want freedom will forever seek a way to find it. Many of the enslaved fishermen stole skiffs and rowed far into the inner bays. There they hid until the cold westerly autumn winds bore the leaving fish merchants’ ships down over the lip of the sea. Then they cautiously returned. They built tilts and spent harsh winters in little more than hovels. But they were free men. One of these men was Frank Green’s ancestor.

  It was this fierce lust for independence and for a free way of life handed down to him by his determined forebears that took him to war. Frank Green loved adventure, and during the terrible four-year struggle of the First World War, he would find more than his share of it. The man also seemed to live a charmed life. He joined the Royal Naval Reserves, that reach of the British military that found its way even to an isolated outpost of the Empire like “Pond Island.” It was 19
14. The Archduke of Austria, Ferdinand, along with his good wife, had been assassinated. Their deaths caused the burbling cauldron of dissention to boil over, and war spewed out.

  Ill-prepared and with little training, and wearing blue puttees on the calves of his legs—which he didn’t like—Frank Green, still in his teenage years, found himself crammed into a crowded, stinking troopship with 1,076 other young Newfoundlanders. They anchored in the Dardanelles off the coast of Gallipoli on September 19, 1915.

  The lands around the Dardanelles had been a battleground before there was paper to record it, when sages scrawled events upon scrolls of vellum. Land-hungry armies under the emperor Caesar had fought and won their way up from the land of Egypt, across the plains of Syria, and into the stronghold of the Ottoman Empire at Turkey. Years after the Roman Empire fell into the hands of other warmongers, self-righteous Christians from the north of Europe came plundering across this land scarred with battle. It would take the Christian armies years to finally fight their way into the Holy Lands of the Middle East. There they fought to claim the land on which “the Christ” had walked—along with as many of the golden relics as they could carry—from “the infidel.” But throughout the ages, all of the warriors had first to fight their way across the narrow reaches of water that separated Europe from Asia—the Dardanelles and the Bosporus.

  And now modern warriors had come again to do battle on this ancient land. And again the ancient waters were the reason for the ensuing battle. It is said that the waters that separate the Black Sea from the Mediterranean Sea are kept warm with the blood of warriors.

  Russia, England’s ally during the First World War, wanted an ice-free port as well as sea access to its southern borders in the Black Sea. This was only possible by sailing through the Bosporus at the southern entrance of the Black Sea, into the Sea of Marmara and through the Dardanelle straits into the Aegean. From there ships could enter the Middle Sea and, sailing its length westward, finally set forth on the open sea roads of the mighty Atlantic.