The Gale of 1929 Read online

  The blocks squealed as the sails were hauled aloft into the protesting, swaying rigging and the stately schooner sailed out of the last channel and cleared the land.

  “Full the main. Full the mizzen!” came in a fainter and what Mary believed to be a different voice as the Neptune II headed to sea with all three of her masts sprouting with billowing sail.

  Part of Mary wanted to be aboard the schooner and heading to the city. Providing she could go where she wanted to, of course. She was now a beautiful sixteen-year-old woman with a mind of her own. There were times when people left here for a different way of life altogether. She knew of one whole family that had left to board a steamer for the United States. They had never returned. There were even a few who had gone away to board steamers to go on a vacation. Mary wasn’t sure what it meant, only that if you had one you didn’t have to work at all.

  It was when she saw ships at night that Mary wondered most what it would be like to be aboard one heading for some exotic port where the sea was always warm. Out on the open sea roads past the shores of Newtown, on the night horizon the great ocean-going liners silently sailed by, their lights twinkling against the dark sky. What would it be like, she wondered, to be a passenger on such a ship? Dressed in expensive clothes and eating succulent meals from fancy dishes she would never have to clean. And after that, sleeping in a bed big enough for three, on sheets that slid against her skin, her head snuggled deep among the many fluffy pillows.

  The last time Mary had left here on schooner and sailed to St. John’s had been little different than her trip north to the Grey Islands. She was older and more experienced now, but the little-girl fears of going to strange places and having to work and live with strangers still went with her.

  * * *

  The hundred or so miles between Newtown and St. John’s slid by all too quickly under the stern of the schooner, and one bright spring morning, having sailed all night, Mary arrived in the harbour of St. John’s early one Monday morning. The entire waterfront seemed filled with schooners as well as huge ships. She waited on the quay beside the schooner for over two hours for someone to come for her. She didn’t even know the name of her employer.

  Mary kept looking for someone, and when she saw a big man walking along by the wharf and talking to men on the different schooners as he passed, she knew instinctively he was looking for her. At the sight of him, she hoped she was mistaken. The man was huge. He wore a full-length fur coat that she later learned came from a bear he had shot. The man stopped when he came up to her and looked first at the schooner’s bow, as if reading its name, and than at her.

  “Yer Mary Sturge from Newtown, I s’pose!” he said in a voice that sounded as though it had come out of a cave. She answered in the affirmative.

  He grabbed both her bags—one of them her old battered portmanteau—in one massive hand and without further comment walked away. Mary followed him up the streets and away from the smelly harbour to his home on Kennas Hill. It was her first time in a city. Her first impression was that it was a place of confusion: smelly, dirty, and messy. All along the narrow stone streets, horse and cart and automobile jostled with hurrying pedestrians for the same space. Mary had never seen a car before. A ship’s horn sounded in the harbour below. A train whistle blew farther to the west. Mary had never seen a train before, either. The young woman took in all that was new and different to her and tried her best to keep stride with the powerful man she was following. Mary would have liked to spend more time looking into some of the store windows she passed, especially one with all feminine apparel on display, but her leader didn’t slow at all until they came to a large, two-storey house with bay windows built near the street. He opened a black wrought-iron gate that needed painting and, without holding the gate open for Mary, entered a pleasant green yard. Budding trees of a species Mary hadn’t seen before swayed above her. Aside from stunted firs and spruces, few trees grew on the barren lands of Newtown.

  Despite his rough exterior and burly manners, she would soon discover that the man who had met her—her employer—was a gentle person. The woman who appeared, with the sharpest, thinnest nose, and sharpest shoulder blades to match, and with the fiercest black eyes young Mary had ever seen—was not.

  Mary had an older sister, Sophie, who also worked as a maid somewhere in the city of St. John’s. Mary didn’t know which street Sophie worked on or even the name of her sister’s employer. Then one day, after she had been in the city for nearly three weeks, she answered the door. A young man stood there holding a cut of beef from the butcher shop. He stared curiously at Mary as she took the parcel wrapped with brown paper and tied secure with string. Her mistress, who had heard the knock at the door, appeared as if from nowhere and instructed Mary to take the meat to the kitchen. When she returned, the lady of the house had just counted out the price for the beef and, with a pained look on her face, dropped it into the man’s hand before disappearing down the hall. Turning to leave through the opened door, he saw Mary.

  “You wouldn’t have a sister workin’ ’ereabouts, would ya now?”

  “Yes, I do. Her name is Sophie!” she answered excitedly. “Have you seen her?”

  “Oh, I don’t know ’bout that,” replied the young man, holding his hands up chest high. “All I can tell ya is that I jest delivered a small rack of ribs an’ a blade roast to a house two streets down, to a girl who looks a lot like yerself!”

  Mary had found her sister.

  No, Mary thought as she watched the Neptune II sail out of sight, I don’t want to go back to St. John’s to work. She was now working here in Newtown and was content with her lot. Well, sort of. She would still like to sail away somewhere, where endless work wasn’t waiting for her.

  * * *

  Esther had heard Jobie Barbour when he ordered her below as they sailed out of Newtown. It now seemed like such a long time ago. But the shouted order, directed at her through her husband as they sailed out of Newtown, mattered little to her. She knew she would be seasick and willingly went to a berth below deck. Esther was like most victims of seasickness, who dreaded even the thought of the confines of walled cabins. The very sight of an undulating horizon, grey rolling seas that rose above and fell below the sea rails of the schooner, wind-filled sails that forever kept the schooner on a permanent, nauseating list, a swaying deck that just wouldn’t be level—not even for a moment—was all too much for her. She hurried below and stayed there and endured the sick feeling in her stomach without complaint until the next morning, when the Neptune II docked in the calm, greasy waters of the port of St. John’s. It was November 8.

  Esther stayed with friends in the city while Peter slept aboard the Neptune II. She rarely saw him for the first week or so as his time was spent dockside overseeing the off-loading of the schooner.

  They were delayed several times in this task by rainy weather. It took seventeen days to complete the discharging of the Neptune II’s sea cargo and a couple of days more to load her with provisions for the Barbour chandlers of Newtown.

  Esther was tired of the city by this time. She had strolled the streets of the old downtown district of St. John’s many times while she waited for news of their return voyage. She and her husband had four small children waiting at home. Christmas was near and the shops beckoned her. Esther wanted to buy something special for her children, something different from the hand-knitted wool mittens and socks she usually gave them. She wanted to buy something in a store. When she entered the few stores with prices to match her tightly gripped pocketbook, she soon discovered she would be able to buy only the cheapest of gifts.

  As bosun of the Neptune II, Peter Humphries sailed under wages when the vessel freighted along the coast, and shareman when he was fishing for the Barbours. Shortly after arriving in St. John’s, Job Barbour had told him that, due to the sudden drop in the fish prices, the bonus he would have gotten for a good voyage of fi
sh was not going to happen. Captain Barbour further informed his bosun that while he would have to discuss the matter with his brothers back in Newtown, it was likely his bosun wages would be cut by a few cents per hour to allow for the company’s loss at the hands of the fish merchants.

  Esther ran her fingers over the fine clothing that her children would never see. She was in one of the stores up from the noisy waterfront, wondering if the decline in fish prices would affect the Barbour children as much as it did her own.

  Thinking of her children made her impatient to leave for home. She missed them very much and, despite knowing she was in for a full day or more of being seasick on the trip north, she was eager to be away. When she got the word to be ready to sail by 5:30 p.m. on the evening of November 29, she walked down over the hill toward the docks. She didn’t hurry her step; she didn’t want to be aboard the schooner for one minute more than was necessary.

  They were already casting off when she arrived on the dock at the side of the Neptune II. The last line holding the vessel to the wharf had been loosed and the gangway had been hauled aboard. Job Barbour was already at the wheel, as impressive as always. Esther had to jump down aboard the Neptune II. She landed in the arms of her anxious husband.

  A noisy harbour tug was slowly approaching the bows of the Neptune II, stern first. A man threw a heavy line from the Neptune II down aboard the tug. The line was fastened to the tug’s stern grump and a bellow of black smoke poured out of her lone stack as her engine roared to full life. Under her settling stern came a seething wash of sea water. The Neptune II was plucked unceremoniously away from the wharf and pulled out into the ebbing stream of the St. John’s port.

  “Tell your woman this, Bosun, if she had been three minutes later she would have missed her passage aboard of this vessel!” came from Captain Barbour as he spun the helm with one hand and looked at a gold watch in the other.

  Esther stood on the deck of the slow-moving schooner and held to the ratlines on the port side. The city of St. John’s slipped by on both sides of the schooner in a glimmer of lights. Through the lower rigging and far beyond the bows of the Neptune II she saw several dimples of light bobbing in the black granite frame of the Notch toward which they were being pulled. They were the hoisted lights of other schooners heading out into that black Atlantic night.

  Barbour ordered sails aloft as the Neptune II took the first swells of the open sea. The tugboat slowed a bit. A dark figure on her stern threw the bight of the Neptune II’s hawser overboard and there came a sudden roar as the black tug pulled away on the schooner’s starboard side. The Neptune II heeled to port as her sails took the night wind. The tug blew once on its whistle as it passed and Barbour and the crew of the Neptune II waved to the tug’s skipper.

  “Take the helm, Bosun. Crack on all the sails the vessel will bear as she presents herself. Stay the jumbo, though, fer now. Make course for home,” said Barbour as he walked aft toward his cabin. Then, over his shoulder he said, “Tell your good wife to go below, if you please. No place for a female up on the deck of a working schooner, as you well know.”

  Barbour walked away, his figure disappearing in the murky evening before he reached his cabin door.

  “Same bunk as before, Ess, maid. The after one on the starburd side,” Peter said calmly.

  “Oh, I knows me bunk, Pete, b’y, and I knows me place, too. Not on the deck of this one, but hidden below, accordin’ to Jobie Barbour!”

  Esther walked forward and opened the forecastle door. The light from below illuminated her for a minute before she turned and stepped backward down below the deck of the heaving deck of the Neptune II. The next time the woman would see that same deck, or the sky above it, she would be on the other side of this ocean. She would sail near death’s door and remain adrift there for days on end. And again and again she would wish she had been just three minutes behind the Neptune II’s leaving St. John’s.

  The schooner had been constructed in Denmark in 1920. At 126 gross tons, ninety-one feet long, twenty-three feet wide, and with a depth of nine feet she was the largest of all the schooners that left St. John’s harbour on November 29, 1929. She was also the last one to leave the port. The Danes had built her well with stout northern oak. She had copper nailing in places and her mast stays, or chain plates, were fastened to her hull with wide iron strapping. Boasting three tall masts, she was considered a tern schooner, the word taken from the Latin meaning “a set of three”—though all who sailed in her considered her a tern schooner, named for that magnificent bird, the Arctic tern, which unerringly finds it way to the shores of Newfoundland from South America each spring.

  Due to the vessel’s size and because he had delayed long enough to miss the pull of ebb tide, Barbour had called for a tug to get the Neptune II out of St. John’s harbour. The captain knew his schooner could sail the 100 miles to Newtown in twelve hours or less with a fair wind and with all three of her masts drawing full sails. But even the weight of the biggest schooner was as nothing before the might of an Atlantic gale.

  Like all the others the Neptune II was borne away from the land of her handlers by a fetch of wind that was fierce to hear and terrifying to look upon. And below her heaving deck was a lone frightened woman who was violently sick and who for the next forty-eight days would go through her own personal hell.

  * * *

  Mary Sturge heard about the missing schooners like everyone else in Newtown. The first day or so no one was alarmed. After all, it wasn’t unusual for a schooner to be delayed by a day or two or even longer. It was the way of vessels dependent solely on wind and tide. The word came that both schooners from Newtown, the Gander Deal and the Neptune II, had left the port of St. John’s on Friday night, November 29. It was now December 2, late Monday evening, and still there was no sign of either one of the schooners. Not only that, it was now known that several schooners from the outports all along the north coast of Bonavista Bay were overdue as well. Still, although everyone cast frequent anxious looks south over the endless ocean, hoping to see the first glimpse of sails, no one was yet overly worried. Since Friday night the winds had been a gale. The schooners had holed up somewhere, maybe Catalina or Elliston, or possibly in some sheltered cove in the lee of a headland.

  Funny about wind sounds, Mary thought as she plodded along the snow path between house and well, a gale of wind just as strong could come blowing in over the sea and race across the land in midsummer, but it would never bring the mournful sounds of a winter’s gale. Mary’s right boot was filled with water. In her haste to get the water barrel filled before it became full dark, she had forgotten to take the water-hoop with her. A person stepped into this simple, square, wooden device, about four feet across. With its outer edges placed on the bucket rims inside the handles, a half pulling, half lifting motion made lifting the five or so gallons of water a much easier task. It also kept you dry, as any water that flopped out of the buckets was kept well away from your feet.

  Mary hated Mondays. Monday was washday, and aside from washing clothes, which meant extra water—which she had to carry—it also meant catching up on housework. Outside of cooking, nothing was done on Sundays. No floors were allowed to be mopped or even swept and no water would be brought from the well. God forbid anyone would be seen lugging water from the well on a blessed Sunday! Even most of the dirty dishes were piled on the counter waiting for Monday morning.

  At last evening’s vespers everyone’s mind was on the missing schooners. The knelling of the first bell had brought whole families out from lamplit kitchens and along the narrow path toward the church, its rectangular windows aglow and beckoning with the same soft light. The minister had prayed for the schooners and their missing crews and had asked his flock to bear them before the throne of Him who ruled the wind and wave. But no one was overly concerned about the schooners yet. This time of year was unpredictable, anyway, they said. Everyone expected the sch
ooners were riding out the winds in some safe port, and as soon as the wind moderated they would be seen sailing home.

  But all that night and into another the wind had howled without let-up. It was now a cold, raw wind from out of the northwest. Before the dark had come, black scuds of wind could be seen racing out over the water’s surface in hundreds of dark, twisting, velvet-like shadows until the reach of the sea whipped them into countless caps of white. The cold wind mourned like a living thing around the corners of houses and whined and whistled along their eaves, seeking entry into each wooden seam, and howled overhead with a sound that nobody liked.

  Mary staggered the last few steps to the low bridge beneath the porch door. She lowered one bucket, opened the door, and stepped inside. She dumped both buckets of iron-rich, tea-coloured water into the water gully. The barrel was not quite full but would do for the night. Mary knew the water barrel in the cold porch would be frozen over by morning. When she opened the kitchen door the inside warmth meeting the frigid outside air produced a waft of foglike steam that for a moment surrounded the girl’s head like a wreath.

  From strings above the stove and from hooks behind the stove and from the backs of chairs was draped clothing set to dry. Mary had heated boilers of water early this morning and had flensed the usual piles of Monday morning clothes over a serrated scrubbing board until it was spotless clean. She wrung out every garment and cloth by hand until her arms ached. Some people had a modern hand-cranked device to wring the water from clothes; Yetman did not. Carrying the heavy mound of clothes outside in a galvanized oval tub balanced on her hip, she pinned it to the clothesline. The winter wind dried little of the water but rather froze most of it solid. Shortly after noon she hung and draped it wherever she could around the kitchen to dry. It had been a busy, back-breaking day for the young girl, which was why she was late fetching the water. And her day was far from done yet. She hurried the partially dried clothes away from the kitchen; her master didn’t like to see clothing strung around the kitchen while he was eating his supper. She set the supper table, scurrying back and forth between cupboard, stove, and kitchen counter like a wisp. When supper was done—she was allowed to eat with the family—she was expected to clear the table, wash the dishes, and sweep the floor again. And then there was the ironing to do.