The Gale of 1929 Read online

  Four of the ships had come close enough to see the Lloyd Jack’s distress signals. A Union Jack was flown bottom up and a bucket swung from her topmast crosstrees. Once, a trawler passed close enough for them to see a man on her deck, but no one came to their aid. The Lloyd Jack’s crew figured they must be foreign sailors who did not understood their signals. True, the “Jack” was recognized the world over, but from a distance on a stormy sea, many would not distinguish if it was hung on the mast upside down or right side up.

  Before daylight on December 19, the Lloyd Jack had clawed her way back close enough to land to see a distant, blinking light: a lighthouse for sure. Bishop dashed inside his cabin, grabbed his “lightbook,” and ran outside again. He pulled a watch from his pocket and, holding it by the fob, bent over the dim binnacle light. He watched as the light ahead of his schooner went out, then stared at his watch and counted the seconds until the light flicked into the darkness once more. The lighthouses were identified by their different flash times. He flipped the pages of the lightbook but could not find a match. He tried again, but still the distant signal would not match anything in his book. Bishop knew why. His book, like his charts, only showed the northeast coast of Newfoundland. He even had some for the coast of Labrador. But he had nothing to show him anything south of Cape Race. He was sailing toward the south coast of Newfoundland. He was sure of it.

  As daylight came and the flashing light faded, the land came up. It was not a coast any of the crew knew. Breakers showed everywhere. They could see houses but no safe passage. Without charts or knowledge of this part of the coast and not enough sail power to give him full rudder control, Bishop brought his schooner as near as he dared to the land. For the first time in weeks they were in relative calm waters. He had no intention of putting to sea again. After twenty days on a cruel sea—even with two Noahs aboard—he would not risk losing his schooner on a reef.

  He sent men ashore in a rowboat, and when they returned they brought with them a man who could guide them to safety. They were outside the port of Burin, on Newfoundland’s south coast. They were piloted to the Burin harbour and docked safely at the Holletts’ wharf. Their odyssey on the northern sea was over. For the most part they had fared well: the schooner had lost most of her sails; they had dumped their casks of oil to ensure their safety; the crew looked like bearded Vikings afoot on a strange land; they were almost done in with their wanderings; but they were far from beaten. The Lloyd Jack had survived the worst and longest storm on Newfoundland record.

  * * *

  The expectant crowd trudged once more over the frozen road leading toward the post office in Wesleyville. Though the calendar denied it, winter was already here. A bitter wind came seeking warm flesh. From the despairing crowd went one of their numbers to the office steps. He was reaching for the doorknob when it was pulled inward so violently he almost fell into the post office.

  “They’re alive! She’s safe! The Jack is safe! She’s tied up in Burin!”

  The good news burst from the postmaster, who held the doorknob in one hand and waved his free hand excitedly. The man was so pleased to be the bearer of good news he forgot to write the news on paper, as he usually did. The waiting family members of the Lloyd Jack changed from a silently milling crowd to a jubilant throng. They shouted with joy, with tears, with relief, and some with disbelief. Now, bearing the glad news, they made their way home with eager steps.

  One thoughtful woman walked to the schoolhouse and tapped loudly on the door. Inside, the schoolmaster raised his head in surprise and walked to the door at the back of the room. The heads of every student of different grades and ages followed him. He opened the door. The woman who stood there shouted the good news in a high-pitched, musical voice. The schoolmaster turned to eagerly relay the message to his students, but the lady burst past him and shouted afresh her wonderful tidings. The children, many of whom had family members aboard the Jack, shouted with glee. They jumped from their seats and waved their arms in delight.

  But in the back of that happy classroom, one young girl remained seated. She was crying. She was crying for joy because her father had come back from the sea. She was weeping with shame because she thought that he would not.

  10 Jennie Florence

  When descends on the Atlantic

  The gigantic

  Storm-winds of the equinox

  Seaweed, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

  There is a place south beyond the reach of the cold North Atlantic waters where constant warm winds balm the seas. It is a place where cold-water fishes dare not enter, a place where warm-water fishes remain. For days on end the burning sun emerges out of a glassy sea and, sliding down again, over a murky, purple evening sky, hisses back into its nightly manger. The night comes without pausing for twilight and still the warmth stays upon the land. Hordes of stars bunch and glitter with imaginary figures.

  The sands at the edge of this warm ocean are hot enough to burn a man’s naked feet. Where the ocean-rubbed sandy beaches are defeated by arable soils, tall trees with great spreading green leaves grow. So dense is the growth it appears to spread in wild confusion. Bursts of yellow, pink, and red flowers dapple the greenery. Exotic fruits buckle the limb tips and fall ripened to the ground. But rising unseen above it all is the one common denominator: heat. Heat rises from the sylvan hills and sweltering misty valleys; it rises from the wide, sandy beaches and simmering cliffs. Heat is extracted out of the tepid freshwater streams and is drawn up from the humid sea. The gradual but constant evaporation of warm, moist air disrupts the atmosphere, and for all of this southern withdrawal, the north will pay the price.

  It begins as an undetected spiral that whirls into a cyclone of power. Feeding on the rising air, it swells and expands, sometimes for hundreds of miles wide. Now it is called a hurricane. To make matters worse, it spins from right to left. Landlubbers who don’t know better call it a counter-clockwise motion, but as every seaman knows, it is a contrary wind, one that is turning against the sun, a direction in which even a greenhorn sailor would not coil a line for fear of bringing bad luck to his vessel.

  The hurricanes race north unchecked, and in the year of 1929 they arrived unannounced. Reaching up over cold waters, its name changes again. It is now called a gale, and though nearing the island of Newfoundland it is still undetected. But to the people whose lives depended on a keen knowledge of the sea, there were signs of impending autumn storms. The people who lived on the northeast coast of the island called it “the liners.” They knew little of the autumn equinox, that time when the earth tilts on its axis so that the sun’s rays favour neither the north or south poles but centre on one place, the equator.

  These simple people who knew little of the science of such things knew of course about the sun crossing “the line.” What they did know from experience was that it was a time of change.

  The sea colours were suddenly different. The blues were deeper. The grey skies scowled under dark clouds. Black clouds came piling up over the horizon in menacing shapes. Sudden brief squalls hidden within vertical veils sneaked by and dumped torrential rains. After it had gone glassy, calm streaks dissected the ocean roads. For the fishermen it was the last days of good fishing. They had to fish farther from shore. The elusive cod had moved to the very edges of the offshore shoals. It was a time to be wary aboard a small boat when miles from the shore with a lone tattered sail. Squalls seemed to come from nowhere. They were sudden and fierce.

  The ocean currents had changed and now had no pattern. Riptides swirled and swung in frothy, mile-long circles and defied the strongest of winds. Rare sharks appeared, their curved fins suddenly breaking the surface, and sometimes were pulled up, tangled and drowned in cod nets. Grampuses, singly or in small schools, flashed and frolicked on the surface of the changing sea. It was like no other time of the year. The liners were “taking on.” Long after the sun had crossed the line, and though the li
ners—which had lasted longer than usual—portended something was coming, no major gales had yet hit the east coast of Newfoundland in the autumn of 1929.

  There had been a fault earthquake far to sea on the edge of the Grand Banks on November 18. A massive underwater landslide had occurred, and the subsequent power the earthquake had unleashed rose out of the ocean depths and sent its full fury landward. It was the talk of all the schoonermen. Still the gales of autumn had not come. But on the last day of November, by which time the liner warnings had largely gone unheeded, came the brutal Gale of ’29. It would never be forgotten.

  * * *

  Wilson Stoyles had seen all the symptoms of the liners. For the most part he considered it to be the talk of old men who frequented the wharves at every sailing. They came bent over on crippled joints, eager to give advice or hear the news of distant ports. Their rheumy eyes had been stung by endless exposure to salt waters and their gnarled arthritic hands burnt by countless many lines. Stoyles’s schooner, the Jennie Florence, hadn’t far to go, just north of St. John’s harbour to Cape St. Francis, across Conception Bay, where he would go through Baccalieu Tickle around Grates Cove Point and sail up Trinity Bay for home. Simple. He and his crew had done it many times. Here in the bowl of St. John’s harbour the evening was grey but seemed civil enough. The schooner Catherine B. was making ready for sail. She, too, was from Trinity Bay and was well-known to Stoyles. He and her skipper were friends. Nine other schooners were making sail on that evening as well. The nine were all from Bonavista Bay and had much farther north to go. He would have lots of company.

  Wilson Stoyles loved the Jennie Florence. Built in 1922, the sixty-two-foot-long schooner, barely seven years old, was in excellent condition. Her sails were of the same age, having never been replaced since her maiden voyage. Both the mainsail and foresail were neatly stitched and sewn in several places and the jib and jumbo were intact without any scars of mending. All of her sails had been deeply barked that spring, but now in late autumn their dark, earthy tan colours were fading, so that they now looked more of a dirty white than a deep brown.

  The Jennie was owned by James Stoyles, who, along with his two sons, Wilson and Ned Stoyles, and the men who would sail in her, had built the vessel in Hillview, Trinity Bay. They laid her keel in the autumn. Under their father’s direction the Stoyles boys cut from the hills around their home every timber and crooked knee, every plank and post required for her construction. The timbers were sawed by a local water wheel–powered sawmill. She was launched in the spring of 1922 and James named her after his two granddaughters: Jennie, who was Ned’s daughter; and Florence—though everyone called her Flossie—who was Wilson’s. And with James Stoyles as her skipper, the family-owned Jennie Florence made her maiden voyage to the coast of Labrador. By 1929 James’s son Wilson was skipper.

  * * *

  Like the other schooners, the Jennie Florence was loaded with winter provisions. These were destined for several of the small hamlets along the shores of Southwest Arm in Trinity Bay. The vessel had sailed carefully on reefed foresail and downed jib into St. John’s harbour five days before. She had swung on her hook in midstream for three days while her skipper bargained and finally arranged for his salt fish to be unloaded. Wilson had to settle for a lower price for his fish than did any of the others. Unlike the others, who had brought sun-dried codfish, he had sailed into the harbour with a bumper load of Labrador Tan.

  Labrador Tan was the name given to heavily salted fish that had not been washed or sun-cured, but sold as it was. This fish was considered “green,” and the price offered reflected the weight of the salt. The pleas of the skipper—who reasoned with the fish merchants that by this late date most of the salt had dissolved into pickle and had long since rendered into the schooner’s bilge—fell on deaf ears. He had to accept, for the schooner’s summer voyage, a price that was below the break-even figure. All the other schoonermen Stoyles had talked to had returned from the Labrador in late summer in time to cure their catch, thus fetching a better price.

  The Jennie Florence and her crew, like most of the Newfoundland schooners and crews, were considered by the people on the Labrador coast to be “floaters.” That is, they came to Labrador to fish only. They sailed back to the island of Newfoundland and home again as soon as their schooner had reaped the fish harvest of the Labrador coast. They stayed—or floated—aboard their schooner all summer and did not live ashore. Many schoonermen spent whole seasons fishing on the Labrador without setting foot on the land.

  The summer of 1929 had been a hard one for the crew of the Jennie Florence. To begin with, they had been late getting out of Trinity Bay. The past winter had been a severe one, with unusual cold spells followed by mild ones with heavy, wet snows. These were ideal conditions for making ice in the inland bays. By early June the inner reaches of Southwest Arm were still icebound, having frozen solid just before Christmas of 1928. It delayed their sailing by more than a week. It was enough, for when the Jennie Florence reached Labrador all of the best berths had already been taken. Even the one Stoyles had worked last year was already claimed. This was a first-come, first-take place. With only a few exceptions, the only way to claim a fishing berth, even a much-used one, was simply to be the first one on it.

  Wilson Stoyles had to move three times that summer in search of fish, and each time they tacked farther north than he had planned. Stoyles was a patient man, but as the summer days shortened and his schooner had barely wetted her salt, his patience was further tested. He knew there was a limited time when codfish could be caught by the use of the trap and it was fast running away from him.

  North they went, across Groswater Bay to Indian Harbour and Smokey, both well-known for their rich fishing grounds, and again all the berths were taken. They sailed north again and rounded Cape Harrison. After veering to the northwest of that northern cape, as far as Advalik Islands, they found the cod. But long before the Jennie’s hold was full, the time for trapping fish was gone.

  Now they had no other choice but to handline. With lead jigger and baited lines, the schooner crew refused to give up. It was back-breaking work. Before the cold dawn they fished the Labrador sea, pulling the glistening cod out of the northern waters. On into the lantern-lit night the men cleaned and salted away their day’s catch. Fortunately the cod seemed to come without end and the men pulled the fish from relatively shallow waters. Despite their late start, so plentiful were the fish that, by the time they finally loaded the hold of the Jennie Florence, the cod was still coming to their hooks. It was one of the best times the crew of the Jennie had spent down on the Labrador. As one of the crew, a churchgoer, said, “The Man above kep’ the bes’ fer las’.” And everyone agreed with him.

  To take full advantage of this manna from the sea, the skipper of the Jennie Florence started salting fish in makeshift pounds on her deck. The cod was stacked and carefully stowed into every available space below deck, until only a few inches of space between the fish layers and the deck ceiling remained. This area was always hard to work. There was room enough here for many more quintals of fish, but the narrow space was difficult to store or salt the fish properly. The men would have to fling the salt sideways to cover the fish.

  The huge volume of salt-covered fish below the deck created its own heat, and without the right amount of salt cover it would rot and turn maggoty. Just a few maggoty fish could contaminate many quintals more. The men knew that the thousands of pounds of fish would settle and compress and shrink as the salt brine cured it.

  They fished daily and stored their catch on the schooner’s deck. At night, and when it rained, they covered it with heavy sailcloth. Finally their salt was wetted and the schooner was loaded. Wilson would not take the chance of sailing home with fish stored on deck. Men jumped below with nails fastened to the ends of long poles and the salted fish was thrown down to them. Using the poles with the nails on the ends, they hooked the fish a
nd pushed it into the small remaining spaces. The hold of the schooner was so full, the last of the fish was placed below by men stooped over on the deck. They fastened the hold hatches, and on a morning tide with light winds the Jennie Florence sailed south for home.

  They were late, it was the middle of October, and the load of fish delayed them even more. The Jennie Florence was so deeply laden she wallowed in even the smallest of swells and water sluiced across her settled deck. She could only sail in light winds and moderate seas and the time for such luxury was quickly closing on the wild coast of Labrador.

  They crossed the Strait of Belle Isle on a day with a light west wind coming up out of the Gulf of St. Lawrence bearing on her starboard quarter. There were days when she couldn’t sail south because of winds. They simply stayed in whichever port was closest and waited. They rarely sailed at night.

  And so it was that in that fall of 1929 the Jennie Florence sailed into her home port of Hillview, Trinity Bay, too late to sun-cure one of her biggest catches. The decision was made to sell it as Labrador Tan. It would fetch a lower price, but there was no other alternative. They sailed for the St. John’s markets, and when her holds were emptied and her fish culled and tallied, her skipper was handed a receipt for 1,025 quintals of fish. He had expected 1,200.

  Before her provisions could be loaded aboard, the Jennie Florence had to be cleaned. If they were at home in Hillview they would use the clean bark of the white birch to line their vessel, but there were no stands of birch, or any other trees, anywhere near St. John’s. The men spent hours drawing sea water up over her sides with buckets and throwing it down in the hold, where it flushed the residue of her recent catch down into her bilge. All of the water thrown in had to be just as laboriously pumped out by hand. Pieces of cod flesh, black skeins of cod skin, yellowy salt brine, and salt crystals mixed with the sea water poured out over her sides and fell with a gushing sound into the polluted harbour.