But then Prosper Walsh spoke up.
“That was no laughing matter,” he said. His dark eyes fixed on each man and boy, one by one. “Hear what I’m saying. That was an earthquake. And there’s going to be a tidal wave next.”
“Go ’way with you, Prosper,” one of the men said as he shuffled the deck of cards.
But Prosper shook his head. He had been on schooner crews and had travelled to places these shore fishermen had never been: the Caribbean, the Mediterranean, North Africa. He had been in earthquakes, seen tidal waves, lived through the eyes of southern hurricanes.
“No, fellows,” he said. “It’s no joke. I’m telling you there’s going to be a tidal wave. Look—there’s going to be a big storm, here onshore.”
“Have another drink, Prosper,” one of the fishermen said, bringing gales of laughter from the others.
“We’ve got to get all the women and children to dry land,” Prosper pleaded. “It won’t be safe right down in the village.”
“Are you going to build an ark, too?” the same fisherman asked.
“God help us if I’m right,” said Prosper. “This whole place will be swamped by a great big sea while you fellows play cards.”
As Prosper spoke, young Martin Rennie found he couldn’t laugh with the rest of the boys and men, even as his father and brother did. In his chest was a monkey’s fist that kept twisting tighter and tighter. By the end of the conversation he was as stiff as a cold junk with fear.
Lord’s Cove lies at the tip of the Burin Peninsula and is shaped like a horseshoe, with high hills rising way up out of the sea ringing the harbour. Lord’s Cove is likely named after the rainbowfeathered Harlequin ducks that frequent its shores and were nicknamed lords and ladies by the island’s early settlers.
One family was living in Lord’s Cove by 1800, at least for the duration of the summer, to fish; they might have repaired to the less exposed woods for the winter, as most early rural Newfoundlanders did. They had no doctor or nurse, just their own common sense and the kitchen medicine their mothers bred into their bones. By the middle of the century, the fifty fishermen of Lord’s Cove had nineteen boats from which they caught more than five hundred quintals of codfish as well as four barrels of salmon, worth more than five hundred pounds. They had cattle, milch cows, and sheep as insurance against hunger. They also had eighty-five acres of land under cultivation. Ten years later their children were taking lessons, in a house, not a school—it would be another half century before they’d have one.
By 1921, eight years before the earth rumbled for a full five minutes on a beautiful November evening, there were 208 people living in Lord’s Cove. In its harbour were forty-six boats and seventeen fishing rooms. They had built a community.
Unlike nearby Point May and Taylor’s Bay, Lord’s Cove wasn’t built on flat land and surrounded by meadows and semi-tundra with the woods way in behind. Here the trees came almost right up to the village, combining with the hills and jumble of twostorey clapboard houses to make for a cozy feeling. The rich cod fishing grounds were just offshore, too, giving the men of Lord’s Cove an advantage that their brethren in more sheltered parts of Placentia Bay and elsewhere in Newfoundland lacked.
An hour or more had passed and Prosper Walsh had abandoned his friends at their card game as his heart ached at their indifference to his warning. Young Martin Rennie followed him out the door, casting a backward glance at his father, Patrick, and brother, Albert, still enjoying the game. Prosper ignored the boy at his heels and banged on his neighbour’s door, calling out, “We’re going to have a tidal wave! Get to higher ground.”
Bruised from his experience with the card players, he didn’t wait to gauge anyone’s reaction this time. Instead, he went from one house to another as if in a barn dance, calling as loudly as he could, “We’re going to have a tidal wave! Get to higher ground.”
Martin saw two women standing in the pathway between their houses, looking after Prosper as he sped along banging on doors.
“I believe him,” said one. “I’m getting my youngsters and going up to the woods.”
“My husband is not back yet from the cards,” her friend responded, shaking her head. “He’s not worried. Why should I be?”
“I’m not waiting for my husband,” came the reply. “I’m the captain of the shore crew anyway.”
Martin was glued to the ground but he willed his feet to move. He didn’t follow Prosper this time. He headed back to the Walsh’s kitchen; he would try and convince his father and brother that Prosper was right and that they must act quickly to get their mother Sarah and the little children to the safety of the woods.
3
To the south, Nan and Herbert Hillier were walking to Lamaline from their home in Point au Gaul for an Orange Lodge meeting scheduled for seven o’clock that evening. Nan had spent the day baking blueberry pies and sponge cakes for the gathering. She had picked the blueberries that fall with the help of her two eldest, Leslie, ten, and Ruby, eight; the berries had been the fruit of a bumper crop. Ruby had helped her with the sponge cakes, too. Then Nan and her husband packed the baked goods in a suitcase for the three mile journey. It was a beautiful evening; with the sun about to go down in a cloudless sky, the autumn air was bracing, just the way Nan liked it. There was no wind and hence, almost no noise from the sea, something they were not used to.
At about the halfway point between Point au Gaul and Lamaline, the earth began to tremble and Nan and Herbert froze in their boots. Nan looked up to see telegraph wires vibrating and emitting a loud buzz, as if they might explode. She drew toward Herbert, too shocked to speak. She tried to steady her feet on the hard ground but the rumbling of the earth continued a full minute. Then it stopped.
When it was over she cried, “Herbert, what’s happening?”
Her husband, a veteran of the first world war, had been to southern climes and recognized what he had just witnessed. “It’s an earth tremor, Nan,” he said gently.
“Will we go back home?” Nan asked anxiously, thinking of their children. Besides Leslie and Ruby, she had two little boys, Lawson and Charlie. She wondered if they had felt the tremor too, and were frightened. She assumed it went all the way to Point au Gaul, seeing as it travelled on the telegraph wires like that.
Herbert stomped his feet as if to demonstrate the steadiness of the earth. He smiled broadly. “Solid again!” he said. “No, it’s nothing. We’ll go on.”
Nan, in her shyness, always deferred to Herbert. She looked around, trying to convince herself that everything had returned to normal. She relaxed and breathed in the comfort of the clean air.
They crossed the three-hundred-foot-long Salmonier Bridge, bringing them into the next community. In Lamaline everyone was talking about the rumbling; it seemed that no one had experienced such a thing before. Some of the women told Nan their houses had shaken as if they would never stop. They had run outside in fright and been too afraid to go back into their homes. When it was over, they finally went inside to find dishes and glassware scattered and broken all over their kitchen floors. Although the earth seemed to have returned to its usual quietude, they were still frightened. When Herbert registered the women’s fear, he came over and explained the nature of earth tremors to them. Then he added, “It’s over and finished.”
But, try as she might, Nan could not stop thinking of her children back in Point au Gaul.
Point au Gaul lies at the bottom of the Burin Peninsula, flat and exposed to the North Atlantic Ocean, not far from St. Pierre Bank and north of the famous Grand Banks that had been a food basket for numerous nations for centuries. At Point au Gaul a narrow beach runs for half a mile, separating the cold waves from the level grasslands that reach far inland to the low-lying coniferous woods. The name Point au Gaul may be a translation of Frenchman’s Point, a reference to the first European settler, a man from France called Hillier. The area was of vital importance to French fishermen for many years; they recognized its easy access to abundant cod stocks and the usefulness of its flat land and beaches for drying fish.