The Gale of 1929 Read online

  The schooner owners and fish merchants who handled all the bounties of the sea were frequently in need of house servants, always girls. And so it was that, in the spring of 1925, when the schooners from Newtown scurried down on the Labrador, Mary Sturge huddled teary-eyed and forlorn in the damp forecastle of one of them, wondering what her immediate future held.

  Her mother had hustled the young girl down the well-worn pathway and over the bridges that connected the many islets of this “Venice of the north,” as Newtown was called, toward the Barbour rooms just after dark the evening before. Mary could hear the yells from excited men before she reached the wharf that paralleled the shoreline of the Barbours’ premises. The ebb tide, which was needed to carry the schooner down the narrow tickle and out to the open sea, was already greedily sucking its dirtied waters away. The schooner master would not allow his readied vessel to miss the evening tide, especially not for a slip of a girl. Mary lagged behind, hoping the schooner would sail without her. A firm admonishment from her mother quickened her unwanted step, however, and they reached the wharf edge doused in lantern light. Two burly men were in the process of slipping the gangway even as the weak-kneed Mary scurried across and gingerly stepped down on the schooner’s deck.

  Surprisingly, the young girl experienced no symptoms at all of the dreaded seasickness on her trip north. It was her first time at sea aboard anything bigger than a trap skiff. With a dismal evening falling all around and a stoic following sea, with sails downed the girl’s unsteady conveyance bumped roughly against a smelly wharf in the inner Grey Island Harbour the next day. Mary Sturge was eleven years old.

  When she was summoned, the frightened girl climbed the forecastle steps and pushed her portmanteau out on the deck ahead of her. The worn bag, which was fastened with toggles, contained very little: one shift of work clothes, a single change of undergarments, and one dress with a bonnet to be worn on Sunday. She was told she would be expected to go to church. No one told her that her new employer was Catholic.

  A stranger of medium height, wearing a full-neck home-knit guernsey sweater, with a matching cap perched above a full head of dark, unruly hair, stood speaking to the schooner captain. He turned her way when she stepped slowly out on the deck.

  “So you’re Mary Sturge, are ye?” he commented with a deep, growly voice.

  And with a shaky “Y-yes I am, sir,” Mary Sturge spoke to her first Roman Catholic person.

  The Brothers family of the Grey Islands, for whom Mary worked all that summer, was a large one. Despite his rough voice, the head of the family, Clifford, as well as his wife, Dora, treated her fairly. She was seldom asked to go to their church and instead was asked to mind small children, whom Mrs. Brothers—who was pregnant again—seemed to keep producing. The couple of times Mary managed to get to church—it was a welcome change from the daily drudgery of housework—she enjoyed it. The various rituals led by a droning Catholic priest in a singsong voice seemed little different from her own Church of England customs. In a wooded nave on one side of the church was a white figurine of a serene girl with a bowed, shawl-covered head. The figure didn’t look any older than herself, the servant girl thought, and her name was Mary, too. It gave her comfort.

  Mary was scullery maid and housekeeper. She made bread and beds. She peeled, washed, and cooked vegetables. She pulled stinky chamber pots out from under featherbeds in which she wasn’t allowed to sleep. She emptied them into fetid slop pails and carried them to nondescript outhouses built over sea crevices, where she dumped their contents into the cleansing sea. She lugged daily, tea-coloured water from a deep well, two pails at a time, with the aid of a square wooden hoop framed around her burdened knees, until the wooden water gully in the porch was full. Beside the water barrel was a woodbox, which she was instructed to keep filled with firewood for the cooking stove in the kitchen.

  She hung wet clothes on rope lines and spread wet cod on lungered flakes of scented boughs. She cleaned floors and walls. She washed every dish in the house a thousand times. At dusk she fitted oil lamps and followed the yellow glow from the smallest one of them to a tiny, neat room without heat behind the stairs, where she slept alone. And before the grey of every dawning she sleepily crept behind the same lamplight toward a cold kitchen stove. And for all of this Mary was paid $7 a month.

  A few days after her twelfth birthday on September 28—which came and went unannounced—Mary sailed to her home in Newtown on one of the first well-laden schooners heading south from Labrador. The child of twelve years was already a seasoned worker—a woman. The little money she carried in the pocket of her jacket—she didn’t own a purse—she gave to her mother after she walked down the gangway at the Barbour premises.

  * * *

  Esther Humphries didn’t mind the water so much, but she hated boats, especially schooners. Well, at least she hated being aboard one. Just standing on the wharf looking at a schooner stirring on a calm sea and straining against its harbour lines made her stomach sick. She was sick now. She had never been so sick in her life, and she hadn’t thought it was possible to be so sick. Sick as a dog.

  Her entire body convulsed in another pitiful, retching heave, but from her salivating mouth came no vomit. There was nothing remaining in her digestive tract to come up. It had all been violently emitted days ago, yet her body refused to heal.

  Esther was lying in a narrow berth, covered with damp blankets, in the dingy forecastle of the tern schooner Neptune II somewhere on the high seas of the open Atlantic. All around her everything was in constant motion, which further sickened her sore stomach. The wooden walls that separated her from the sea were creaking and rising and falling without cease. The sound of roiling, wildly rushing water was everywhere. Above her head came the rustling, chafing sound of deck gear awash. Muffled shouts of men and the crash and rush of sea water surging across the schooner’s deck frightened her, but over it all came the terrible whine through the riggings, the relentless roar of a storm at sea. And she was afraid.

  She didn’t know if it was day or night. A lantern with a flaring bottom swung back and forth on its hook in the ceiling. It gave off a wan glow of light from its smoked chimney that did little to brighten the dingy cabin. The place was in disarray. Bedclothes lay bundled on berths or half hung out of them. The floor was flushed with water and smeared black with the countless tracks of heavy boots. A long table, triangle-shaped like the forward part of the forecastle, was filled with dirty, clinking dishes and cutlery, which kept sliding back and forth to the railed table edge with each roll and toss of the schooner. From the polished pawl post or spar—which was stepped beneath the dingy floor and dominated in the cabin’s middle before disappearing through the murky ceiling—were hung coats, woollen cuffs, and stockings.

  A small stove, too, was all but surrounded with the steaming clothes belonging to the men. Its dented funnel gave off periodic puffs of blue smoke as the flaws of wind baffled down its joints. It only added to the dismal pall of the cabin. The latest exhaust of coal smoke drifted throughout the angular yellow beams of light daring from the swinging lantern.

  Esther coughed. The overhead door above the cabin steps was yanked open with great force. Its three hinges squealed and light spewed into the cavern. Esther looked up and saw that it was daytime. A black-clad figure climbed backward down the steps accompanied by a stream of water that flushed ahead of him from step to step. The door was slammed shut again and before long the man reached the floor, ankle deep in cold sea water. Esther reached for her glasses.

  “’Ow’re you doin’, my love?” It was her husband, Peter.

  “Oh, I’m no worse, Pete, b’y, nor any better, I must confess. I don’t s’pose there is any land to be seen?” Her voice sounded hopeful.

  “No lan’, Ess, maid.”

  “Does Jobie Barbour know where we are?” Esther always called the skipper Jobie, as did the captain’s mother.

>   “Well . . . not fer sure, ’e don’t! Somewhur in the mid-Atlantic, he says. ’Ell, even I knows dat much! Fer the most part we’ve been beat like a pig before t’under.”

  Peter Humphries was the Neptune II’s bosun. He stepped closer to his wife’s bunk, leaned over, and said softly, “Merry Christmas, Ess!”

  “Merry Christmas? ’Tis not Christmas, is it, Pete?”

  “Well, ’tis Christmas Eve, maid, an’ dat was always the start of Christmastime fer us.”

  “My God, December 24! We’ve been adrift for nearly a month. When will we get to lan’, Pete?”

  “I wish I could tell ’ee, Ess, maid. Da skipper’s t’inkin’ of squarin’ away fer da coast of Englan’. Can you believe dat? Englan’! My gawd! Sher dat’s on da udder side of the world!”

  “I don’t care what side of the world ’tis on, Pete, b’y, jest as long as we find dry lan’.”

  Peter pulled a pair of warm mitts wafting with steam from above the bogie, hung up the soaked ones he pulled from his numbed hands, and prepared to climb outside again.

  “I ’ave to go topside again, my love.”

  “Merry Christmas, Pete, my love.” His wife’s voice, weak with sickness, followed him out of the shadows.

  Peter gave his wife a reassuring grin, walked briskly up the steps, and flung open the door. The miserly light penetrated the cabin gloom for a second and sea water trickled down the steps again. The unwanted roar of wind came to Esther’s ears once again. The door hinges squealed once more as it slammed shut, and she was alone in her misery again. She prayed to the Christ—whose birthday was upon them—for deliverance.

  * * *

  She had boarded the Neptune II at Barbour’s wharf in Barbour’s Tickle in Newtown, Bonavista Bay, during the early morning of November 7. The schooner’s master, Job Barbour, wasn’t pleased that she was going with them to St. John’s. He didn’t like women aboard his vessel. They were always trouble, he was heard to say. But because Esther’s husband, Peter Humphries, who was his bosun, had spoken for her, he had reluctantly agreed to her passage. Barbour considered Peter one of his best seamen. There were a few others who had obtained passage to the city, but they were all men and—as Job Barbour well knew—were quite capable of working for their passage while under sail.

  The local fishermen in the area had been alerted days before by a flag flown from the Barbour premises. It signalled the company was ready to load codfish for the trip to St. John’s. The Barbours paid $9.50 per quintal for the cured cod, free on board the belly of their schooner. Men wheeled and carried aboard the vessel 1,200 quintals from their own stores. The remainder came from their agents scattered throughout the area. With sixty barrels of rendered cod-liver oil lashed to her deck and 3,300 quintals of salt cod stowed safely below, the Neptune II sailed for St. John’s and to market.

  A steady north wind pushed her away from the land and followed her taffrail south. And before the Neptune II had cleared Cabot Island, just six miles from the motionless land, with all sails drawing and with a white, surly wake tracing behind her sloping stern, Esther Humphries was already seasick. It was merely a cruel harbinger of the lengthy seasickness in store for this gentle woman.

  Seasoned sailors, who sometimes develop the illness after prolonged stormy conditions, declare that it is far worse than being drunk-sick, a self-inflicted state some of them find themselves in while in port after months on a “dry” sea. This dreaded bane of all who go to sea for the first time is a motion sickness always accompanied with nausea and, in extreme cases, vertigo. The real cause is the human brain, which receives conflicting signals from its unsteady environment. While the eyes show a world that is still, the equilibrium senses located in the ear canals send messages of a moving environment. This discordance causes the mind to send the whole body an alarm signal to stop all normal activities, in particular the most complex one of them all: the digestive system.

  Esther Humphries couldn’t describe the medical reasons why she was seasick. She just wished it would go away. It had been a pall over her for days. At times she had been violently sick. She had never spent so much time in bed in her life. Her stomach would not keep food down. She survived on hot tea and little else, and now even that meagre substance was reduced to a half-cup a day. They were short of fresh water and Job Barbour had ordered rationing.

  She was the only woman in what was clearly a man’s world. It was bad enough for her to be sick and to be tended to by a man, but luckily it was her husband. What caused the woman almost as much distress as the illness itself was heaving the contents of her tormented stomach into a bucket tied to the floor beside her berth. But even this wasn’t the worst of it. Into the same bucket she had to pass her bodily waste. Peter had rigged a heavy blanket on a line to the beams above. It provided a measure of privacy, but on a fiercely working schooner in a driven storm, with shouting men coming and going without announcement, it only added to her woes. She had always been a shy woman, especially around men. Each time her bowels bunched and strained, Esther cringed against the need, fighting with her body until release could no longer be denied. With tears in her eyes she climbed dizzily out of her bunk, pulled the blanket across, used the bucket, and stumbled back under the damp blankets again. Esther was glad she was old enough to be past her time of monthly menses. The further embarrassment of such a thing would have been unbearable.

  The pulled blanket was the sign for her husband that the bucket needed emptying. Pete would take the bucket on deck, rinse it in sea water, and return it to the cabin floor where it was again fastened with a rope. With the exception of her heavy winter coat and boots she lay in the bunk fully clothed. She knew she had lost weight. Her dress hung limp on her frame. There were times when she was so cold she shivered beneath the heavy quilts, and other times, spasms of fever caused her to fling the blankets aside and gasp the foul air of the shrouded forecastle.

  She was born Esther Carter on the island of Greenspond, just south of Newtown, in the year 1885. There wasn’t a day in her life when she wasn’t aware of the sea. It was always there just beyond the doorstep where she grew. It sounded by summer days and winter nights upon the polished island coastline. It stretched infinitely out over the edge of her vision. It waited and beckoned. It nourished and sustained and sometimes claimed without mercy.

  Strangely enough, Esther wasn’t afraid of the sea at all. Her childhood memories as well as her adult reminiscences were frequented by many sea tragedies. Men had died in raging storms just like the one she was now living through. Men in pursuit of their living on the ocean had simply slipped beneath the sea, sometimes on calm, blue summer days, and had never surfaced again. Entire ships had sailed away and never returned to the land again. Seal hunters had died on the frozen, rumpled breast of the hibernating spring ice. Staunch seamen who walked with bent backs away from the freshly covered graves of one of their kind simply boarded waiting skiffs and went back to sea. It was the calm, stalwart acceptance that kept them all going on and on. It was the only way to live at the edge of an unforgiving ocean.

  * * *

  From above Esther’s head came the thud of many boots. It was as if the entire deck crew were running. The schooner was in the throes of a lurch that kept repeating itself over and over again. Several of the men were seated at the forecastle table and talking in monosyllables. The schooner’s rise and inevitable fall were met with crashes of displaced, watery noises directly beside her spinning head. It seemed to Esther that this time the few inches of wooden planks that separated her from the ocean of turmoil would surely give way.

  The forecastle door slammed open. The roar of the storm outside enveloped the cabin. Esther huddled deeper into her blankets in dread. The feet of water-soaked men appeared to her view again and again. Torrents of water accompanied the men down over the steps and sloshed in miniature waves on the floor.

  Some of the water re
ached as high as Esther’s berth, soaking her blankets in its clinging, icy grip. She screamed in fear. The door was forced shut and the room was suddenly crowded with noisy men all talking at once. Some of them cursed. Esther thought they were sinking and that all the crew had abandoned the schooner to its fate.

  She was assured by her husband that they were not sinking, but they were all told by Captain Barbour that they were, indeed, at the mercy of the winds. No man could survive up on the deck of the Neptune II in such a rage of wind. Their wheelhouse and lifeboat had been washed away. They would have to wait it out—and pray for their deliverance. It was December 8 and the Neptune II had been adrift for nine days, and Esther Humphries wished she could relive not only the morning of November 7 when she had first boarded the Neptune II in Newtown, but especially the last three minutes of the evening of November 29.

  * * *

  Mary Sturge watched with mixed feelings as the Neptune II prepared to sail from Newtown on the morning of November 7. She knew the vessel was headed south for the city of St. John’s. There came the usual excited shouts that accompanied a vessel leaving port. With its bow already pointed downstream, the Neptune II moved away from the wharf as soon as the last line was dropped. Job Barbour stood at the helm and shouted orders as he always did. Many who had sailed with him said it was all for show, that Barbour made sure to man the wheel at all entries and leavings, but that when at sea, away from the eyes of land, he relegated the ship’s handlings to his crew.

  “Up full the fores’l,” came from the gravelly throat of the Neptune II’s skipper. “Up be half the mains’l. Down the gaff tops’ls. Snub tight the win’ard foresheet. Stand by the mizzen as she clears!” Then in a louder, sterner voice, “Bosun, get yer missus below out of the way! Tie off the spanker an’ ready the wind bag!”