The Doryman (8 page)

Chapter Eighteen

T
he year after their winter wedding in Oderin – all the weddings were held after the fishing season – Richard and Angela built a house on the hill in Little Bay, just up from Steve and Elizabeth's. Their custom, as old as anyone could remember, was that the woman moved to her husband's village upon her marriage.

Richard's sister Rachel had just finished her years working in St. John's; she had worked in a restaurant where Military Road curves into Gower Street, in front of the old Newfoundland Hotel. She wore a black uniform, not unlike those worn by maids in turn-of-the-century France, and she was very proud of it. She was good at her job and she worked hard. Although she loved her time in St. John's, she loved Little Bay even more, and there was never any question of her not returning home to marry and raise a family. Like her brother, she married a native of Oderin, Banks fisherman Jeremiah Abbott.

Everyone expected her to pack up her few things and move to Oderin. But Rachel would not hear of such a thing.

*

“I'm staying here,” she said calmly when the subject came up in her parents' Little Bay kitchen one day.

Elizabeth, and Rachel's sisters, Mary Jane and Annie, all stared at her as if she had grown a second head.

“You can't stay here. You're getting married,” Mary Jane said in a tone that suggested she was talking to an imbecile.

“I know I'm getting married,” Rachel replied, still calm. “But I'm staying here.”

Elizabeth furrowed her brows. “Not in this house, surely?”

“No, Mother, not in this house, just in Little Bay,” Rachel answered calmly.

“Rachel, you can't stay in Little Bay either,” Elizabeth said patiently. “You have to go with your husband.”

“Mother, I love Jerry,” Rachel said even more patiently. “But I've decided that we should live in Little Bay, not Oderin.”

“You can't decide that,” Mary Jane said petulantly. Goodness, Rachel was ridiculous.

“That's not the way it goes,” young Annie said very seriously.

Rachel ignored them.

Elizabeth drew in a breath. “Rachel, you know what you're supposed to do. Now, what is this all about?”

“Mother, why should I move to Oderin?” Finally a tiny crack appeared in Rachel's voice. “Jerry will be away all the time anyway. I'll be among women I don't know. I know everyone here. I should stay here. It only makes sense.”

Elizabeth didn't know what to say to such logic, logic she had never heard before. “But I moved here when I got married,” she said, sounding and feeling quite unsure of herself.

Rachel didn't mean to be cruel by what she said next. “And how often have you seen your own people since? Have you been accepted by the people here?”

Elizabeth had no answer. She felt a little hurt, but she didn't know where to direct it.

“Jerry will be awfully mad at you,” Mary Jane said.

“No, he won't,” Rachel said confidently.

“He might not marry you,” Mary Jane persisted.

Rachel rolled her eyes skyward. “He's got more sense than all the men in Little Bay combined.” Then she looked at her sisters and added sharply, “Don't you two have chores to do?”

The girls scooted.

“I don't know what your father will say,” Elizabeth said finally, shaking her head.

“He'll get over it,” Rachel said and picked up a dishcloth.

Elizabeth's eyes rested on her daughter. She felt her lips curl in a smile.

*

“Mary Jane was just here, and she says Rachel won't shift over to Oderin,” Angela told Richard as the evening light closed in on them.

Richard smiled and shook his head.

“No, I bet she won't,” he said at last.

“Well, what'll Jerry say?” Angela asked, looking worried.

“Not much he can say,” Richard replied. “It's Rachel we're talking about.”

Angela looked out the window from her chair and saw Rachel walk down the path. She was tall – like a Beothuk, some said – her long, black braid flopping on her back. Her head was held high, her walk quick and purposeful. She was out walking by herself at night. Not every woman would do that now, would they? Angela thought.

She thought of Steve and his caves filled with rum. And Richard always trying to get his hands on books. Whenever a schooner came from St. John's, he'd rush over and find out if they had any books on board, right desperately. What kind of a crowd had she married into? Then she chuckled. They were interesting, anyway.

And she liked living in Little Bay. She liked the spontaneous “times,” often when the schooners and western boats returned from the Banks. People gathered in kitchens and danced. Richard played the harmonica and danced. What a dancer he was, light as a feather on his feet! She loved to watch him fly over the floor. He was like a spirit.

Chapter Nineteen

T
he children came in quick succession. The girls were first, four in a row: Lucy, Monica, Bridget (named after Angela's mother) and Elizabeth, who they called Lizzie, named after Richard's mother. Then finally a boy arrived, Richard, named after his father.

But he was a sick little baby. He failed to thrive. They did everything they could for him. They kept him warm and fed him with a dropper because he couldn't nurse. They had Elizabeth work every kind of medicine on him she could think of. But he couldn't live. Although the house was full of children and every one meant Angela and Richard had to work that much harder, baby Richard was deeply mourned. His father felt his loss way down in his belly. It was like a gaping hole had opened up deep inside him and refused to close. Angela let herself grieve for three days, and then deliberately turned her attention back to her remaining brood. She had to, she decided. But Richard struggled. He felt caught between the baby boy he'd lost and the children who still remained with him.

At night in bed he cried for the little lad, as he called him. Angela held him tight.

“Come on, now,” she said. “God wanted him. That's God's way. That's what God wanted.”

She was able to accept it, but he found it hard. Surely God wasn't that greedy, he thought.

He healed a little when three more boys followed: Vince, named after Angela's brother, who fished out of Oderin and sailed the world over; then Jack, called after Richard's brother; and Patrick, named for Captain Paddy, Angela's father.

Next door, Rachel raised her children largely alone, as she had predicted, since Jerry spent most of his time at sea. He fished out of Gloucester in the States, and Nova Scotia, in addition to ports in Newfoundland. Rachel had eight children, including two sets of twins. One set, little boys, died as infants. The other set were Margaret and Jim, her oldest children.

The families on the hill settled into a routine, a seasonal round of activities that saw the men gone for much of the year and the women making fish in the spring, summer, and fall. Women rationed fruit and eggs through the fall so they'd have enough to make fruitcakes and figgy duff at Christmastime. In late winter they started to run out of vegetables; it got even harder to spare things along. Children went to school for a few years, maybe more if their parents could spare them from chores.

There were flus and colds. As the 1920s drew to a close, the dreaded tuberculosis that was sweeping the world visited their village, carrying Rachel's brother Jim and her daughter Margaret away. So many were sick and trying to cling to life. One winter, of the couple of hundred people in Little Bay, twenty-one died. The people felt helpless and cursed as they waited to see who the disease would take next or if it would leave them. Then finally as spring came, it disappeared.

Years passed. Richard and Rachel's mother Elizabeth died. Old Steve died. Their children grew.

Through it all there was always the threat of storms that would take their ships and men away from them. And for all its summer brightness and gentle breezes, there was always a sinister threat in the August air.

*

Strange things happened in August, especially on coastal shores and in the waters that surrounded islands like Newfoundland. August Gales are at least as old as the written record. The first recorded August Gale made herself known in Pensacola, Florida in 1559, when she drove five Spanish ships ashore. The first recorded shipwreck in North America occurred in August of 1583, when the
Delight
met her doom in a gale off Sable Island, Nova Scotia. Torrential rain and dense fog blinded the captain while heavy seas tossed the
Delight
to bits.

As the centuries passed, these summer windstorms kept on tormenting fishermen and vessels. In 1609, a “tempest” made its way up the Atlantic seabord, putting the vessels in a British convoy on their way to the colony of Virginia asunder. Two of the ships sank, while a third, the
Sea Venture
, was presumed lost at first. Eventually, though, she made landfall at Bermuda, where her crew was shipwrecked. After ten months on the island, they built two small boats and sailed to Virginia. Their story is believed to be the inspiration for Shakespeare's play,
The Tempest
.

Less than two decades later, the New England coast was struck by another August Gale, “the Great Colonial Hurricane.” The Reverend Increase Mather wrote that there was “no storm more dismal.” Indeed, the gale left many shipwrecks in her wake. In 1788, another wind blast destroyed a great swath of woods through New Jersey to Maine.

The Caribbean Islands to the south were even more vulnerable to the moodiness of August. In 1666, a howling gale smashed every boat along the coast of Guadeloupe, including a seventeen-ship fleet with 2,000 troops. The island's batteries, featuring six-feet-thick walls, were totalled and her cannons swept out to sea.

For five days in 1785, an August storm battered the Eastern Caribbean, from St. Croix in the Virgin Islands to Cuba. Over 140 people died from her impact. In 1813, more than 3,000 Martiniquais died when an August Gale swept onto their island. In 1831, almost 2,000 people in Barbados lost their lives to an August Gale.

The vagaries of August weather are known on the other side of the Atlantic, too. In 1456, Prince Machiavelli witnessed a tornado that tore across Italy. He wrote, “From confused clouds, furious winds, and momentary fires, sounds issued, of which no earthquake or thunder ever heard could afford the least idea; striking such awe into all, that it was thought the end of the world had arrived.”

It must have seemed like the end of days in France, too, in August 1845, when a tornado all but destroyed the town of Moneuil. Between seventy and 200 people were killed by the tornado, which was between 330 to 1,000 feet wide, over a distance estimated between nine and nineteen miles. Another August tornado swept almost forty miles through the Jura Mountains in France and Switzerland in 1890 before running out of steam.

England experienced her highest ever rainfall in August, when more than nine inches of water fell on the town of Cannington in 1924. Seville, Spain reached her highest ever temperature on August 4, 1881: a shockingly uncomfortable 50° Celcius, or 122° Fahrenheit.

For the Banks fishermen of Newfoundland, late summer also brought the threat of August Gales. They said little, but every fishermen feared them. These gales were always in the backs of their minds as they walked to their schooners, sailed to the Banks, and went into their dories to haul trawls. When they were out there, whether it was drizzly, foggy, or even sunny, they kept their eyes on the sky and the horizon, ready for a sign, any sign at all of hurricane-fed winds.

Some of them had their worst fears realized on August 25, 1927.

Chapter Twenty

R
ichard was still fishing with the Mannings out of Oderin when they bought the schooner
Tancook
in 1924. Captain Paddy had retired, and John Manning was now skippering their vessels. The
Tancook
was modelled after the famous Nova Scotia schooner, the
Bluenose
, and was built by the same people. Most schooners were made with “green wood,” but the
Tancook
and the
Bluenose
were constructed with steamed timber. Although the
Tancook
would end up as a Banks fishing vessel, she was originally destined for a New York millionaire. Eventually she was sold to Jack Cheeseman in Fortune Bay, and then to the Mannings of Oderin.

The Mannings had done well in the years after World War I. The price of fish was good, and they'd enjoyed healthy catches. They sold their fish to and did business with Bairds of St. John's.

The
Tancook
was forty tons and carried five dories. It was Richard's favourite ship on which to sail, perhaps because of her beauty, perhaps because of the closeness he felt to his in-laws, the Mannings, who made up much of its crew.

As Richard baited his hooks with squid on August 20, 1927, he looked up from his work, noted the balminess of the day, then carried on.

*

In tropical Africa, a sea storm was developing. On August 21, fierce winds swept across the Atlantic, over to the Caribbean. Then they passed northeast of Puerto Rico, turning to the northwest, howling all the way. Over the next couple of days the gale snaked and screamed its way along the eastern seaboard of the United States.

Lacking ship-to-shore communication of any kind, the crew of the
Tancook
knew nothing of this. There seemed to be nothing untoward in the atmosphere, as is the case with most hurricanes. They kept baiting hooks, setting trawls, hauling them, unhooking fish, pitching them on deck, then counting, washing, gutting, and dressing them. They did all this like clockwork. Then when the
Tancook
was loaded down, they'd start the long trip back to Oderin. August was almost over. Captain John Manning was glad of it; he had his father's morbid fear of August and her gales.

Before dawn on August 24, the winds swept just east of Cape Hatteras in the United States. Then the storm passed by Cape Cod in Massachusetts. By now it was trapped in prevailing westerlies, typical of gales and hurricanes. It kept heading north, through New England and past the coast of Maine. Thus far it had caused minimal damage. Then it went through mainland Nova Scotia. It destroyed orchards, fruit, vegetable, and hay crops in the Annapolis Valley to the tune of one million dollars in losses. More than 250,000 barrels of apples were written off. The gale brought torrential rain around mid-morning on the twenty-fourth which lasted until mid-afternoon. One estimate was that more than four inches fell in this time. Roads were washed out and railway journeys made impossible. From the first night of the storm until one o'clock the next afternoon, only one wire between Halifax and Yarmouth of the Western Union Telegraph Company was working. The lines at Maritime Telephone Company were down even longer.

By then the gale had crossed to Cape Breton. Barometers on the island showed that atmospheric pressure was falling rapidly. In addition, easterly winds had developed as the storm began to reach its full force.

It flattened buildings in Cape Breton and tore down telephone and telegraph lines. This meant that islanders could not communicate with the outside world, including Newfoundland, where the storm was headed. Ditches and pathways in Sidney, Glace Bay, and other Cape Breton towns were flooded. So were highways and railways, making transportation almost impossible.

Even worse, this August Gale had already shown its murderousness. She had sunk the
Joyce M. Smith
off Nova Scotia. The
Joyce M. Smith
was a two-masted schooner built in Salmon River, Nova Scotia in 1920. Her tonnage was 122.57, and she was 122 feet long and twenty-five feet wide, a big vessel. Her captain was Edward Maxner of Lunenberg, Nova Scotia, and his son William travelled with him.

Almost the entire crew of the
Joyce M. Smith
were Newfoundlanders. Fred and Andrew Barnes came from Fortune Bay. Charles and George Burbridge came from Epworth on the Burin Peninsula. Robert Cheeseman and his stepson Philip Cheeseman were Burin Peninsula men, too, from Burin Bay Arm. Samuel Crocker was from Creston South, near Marystown. Arthur Dominick was a native of Belloram; so was Thomas Poole. It is unknown what communities James and Thomas Samuel Farewell came from. James and Murdock Hancock came from Pool Cove in Fortune Bay. Benjamin Hannaram (probably Hanrahan) came from an unknown community, undoubtedly on the Burin Peninsula. Cousins James and Thomas Hodder were from Rock Harbour. Archibald Keating and James and Samuel Warren were from Salt Pond, Burin. John Whalen, married with six children, came from Fox Cove. John Pike, a father of seven, was a Newfoundlander from an unknown South Coast community.

Richard knew a number of these men; he'd met them at the Hollett and Brinton premises in Burin, and he'd fished with a few of them. Angela knew John Whalen's wife, now widow, and she'd heard tell of many of the rest. Most of the men were in their twenties and thirties. The storm showed all of them no mercy as they fished and then struggled for their lives off Sable Island.

Not for nothing did the Nova Scotia newspapers call the August Gale of 1927 one of the worst in their history.

*

The storm turned its attention to Newfoundland, as if the island had been its target all along. It was in the wee hours of August 25 that the gale reached over to the island. With Cape Breton, Nova Scotia cut off, there was no warning. It started licking the Southwest Coast first, then swooping small boats out of the sea and pitching them on land or into the sky. They came crashing down in a hundred broken pieces, a man's livelihood lost. The storm aimed at wharves, and they crumbled as if on cue, falling into the water, where the next day fishermen could only stand onshore and stare helplessly at the sticks covering the waves. Then larger vessels were pulled from their moorings and masts torn from schooners. People looked out their windows and saw these things happen. Then they drew back in fear. They thought worriedly of the Banks fishermen out there somewhere. They said silent prayers or crossed themselves.

By now, the storm's force was full and its breadth was immense. It blew houses off their foundations all over the island. It blew down a church at Ship Cove. It tore up fences, pulled out trees, and shattered windows. It wrecked fishing premises, sent drying fish flying from beaches, and shredded crops that had been tended all summer. Its effects were felt in St. John's in the east, Port aux Basques in the west, and Fortune in the south. It seemed impossible to overestimate its maliciousness.