“How’s Lydia?” Herbert asked of Thomas’ wife.

“Well,” Tom answered, his brow knitted, “she has another baby due soon.”

Herbert shook his head again.

“I’m very sorry for your mother,” he said suddenly.

Tom nodded.

By now they had reached a group of men who were looking for bodies. It was a difficult task given the amount of debris clogging the beach and harbour. They broke into small groups and assigned each other sections of ground to cover. They were confident by now that the erratic tidal action was over and the bright moonlight was helpful to them as they went about their grim task.

Two of the men found Thomas Hillier’s body at ten o’clock. Water-logged and leaden, it took four of them to carry the body to the hall.

“Right where his boat would have been,” said Herbert. “It’s the strangest thing. Was he dragged out and brought back in? Or hit on the head by a piece of wood?”

“There wasn’t a mark on him,” Tom answered. “He obviously stayed out too long. He tried too hard to get his boat to safety.”

“He wasn’t a fisherman,” Herbert muttered. “He wasn’t around the water as much as the rest of us. Perhaps he wasn’t as afraid of it as we are…”

At the hall, pregnant Lydia cried over the body of her husband. She pushed her large tummy to the side and lay her chest and head on him as he reclined lifeless on the table. She could not hear the sobs that rippled through the hall for her and her fatherless unborn child. At her side, her daughter, Caroline, sniffled for the birthday party that would never happen. She kept thinking of an incident from earlier that night. Before supper, her high-spirited father had thrown a stone into a pool of water and splashed mud on his jacket. At home, as the family’s potatoes boiled on the stove top, Caroline had asked him, “Father, may I brush the mud off your jacket?” Thomas had turned to his daughter and answered quietly, “Yes dear, you do that as you may never get the chance again.”

Not long afterwards the men came across the body of Nan’s sixty-six-year-old mother, Lizzie. She was not far along the beach from Thomas Hillier, making the villagers think that she might have died from injuries sustained in the initial crash of the first wave, although there were none visible to the naked eye. Very soon afterwards, Herbert and the other men found the little bodies of Jessie’s three children, Thomas, Henry, and baby Elizabeth. Three-year-old Henry, clad in his pajamas, was lying in the house of a motorized dory trapped in the landwash. His hands were curled around the rails as if he were trying to save himself; it was obvious he had survived the impact of the first wave and was trying his best to live. The men who found him buried their faces in their hands and tried to stifle the sounds of their grief.

After finding the children and bringing them to the hall, the men gave up searching for the night. They knew young Irene Hillier was still out there, and so were the Walsh women, but they were too tired and grief-stricken to continue. They simply could not take anymore.

8

As the awful day of November 18, 1929 ended, the people of Point au Gaul counted their dead. They began to wonder, too, how many had died in the neighbouring villages and towns along the coast. Many of them had friends and relatives in nearby Lamaline, where Nan and Herbert Hillier and Jessie and David Hipditch had journeyed for their aborted supper at the Loyal Orange Lodge. Mayhem had broken out when Lamaline harbour had emptied of water. Further panic had ensued when the harbour and the lower parts of the village itself had bulged with sea water, the result of a great crush of a wave and then another wave.

Lamaline first appeared in French maps in 1620 as Cap de la Meline. The French name La Maligne, directly translated as “evil” or “wicked,” likely refers to the difficulty of landing a boat in the harbour there because of the many shoals and the low-lying, flat, almost swampy land. In 1763 Captain Cook charted the South Coast of Newfoundland, looking for suitable sites for fishing settlements; one of those chosen was Lamaline.

Despite the early French connection, the first European settlers came from England and Ireland. Lamaline had a significant population by the early 1800s; in 1807, Reverend John Harries of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel baptized seventy-five souls, one-third of whom were adults and “many very old.” Harries was the first clergyman in Lamaline and the only one most of the livyers had ever seen.

Conflict with the French was ongoing. In 1827 the residents of Lamaline appealed to Newfoundland Governor Thomas Cochrane for help, claiming “the French constantly fish on our shore on Sundays (presumably the Newfoundlanders’ day of rest) with boats from sixty to a hundred in number—have taken our dry fish from the beach—have lately burned a boat belonging to one of us and stolen his wharf posts…” Their petition was successful in winning the sympathy of the governor. He immediately dispatched the British naval vessel HMS Manlyto patrol the coast. The people of Lamaline sent Cochrane a gift of fish in thanks.

While they portrayed the French as their enemies in this instance, in reality the ties between the two groups were far more complicated than that. Lamaline fishermen sold caplin to the French in contravention of the law. Some tension arose when Captain Alexander Milne of HMS Crocodilediscovered the illegal sales as well as considerable smuggling of liquor from St. Pierre to Newfoundland. The French tried to convince him with a taste test that the Newfoundland caplin tasted much better than their own—they failed. All hands breathed sighs of relief when Milne decided not to arrest anyone, but to issue warnings instead. The Loyal Orange Lodge, perched on a hill overlooking Lamaline, was at the centre of social life. Catholics of the town were welcome there, too—in small communities dominated by a harsh North Atlantic environment sectarianism was a luxury they could not indulge. As Jessie, David, Nan, and Herbert fled the hall, they left behind people as dumbfounded and fear-filled as they were. Most of the Lamaline people who had been in the hall left their dinners uneaten and rushed to their homes, heading straight to their children’s bedrooms. They plucked their children from sleep and scurried to higher ground with them.

Twenty-six-year-old Melinda Hillier held her three children close to her as her husband, Frederick, kept a watch on the ocean, waiting for the next wave. Melinda herself could not bear to look. Her ribs rocked as her heart pounded in her chest. Wilomena Emberley, the same age as Melinda, escaped with her brood of five. Like quite a few Lamaline men, Wilomena’s husband, Henry, was in Corner Brook, working on the giant mill and townsite under construction there. It was a great chance to put a few dollars in his pocket. But now, alone with the children, Wilomena ached for him as she watched the first wave batter their house. She knew from the whipping sound the wave made as it hit the dwelling that they wouldn’t sleep there that night and that repairing it would be a real job. As she pushed down her own sob, her youngest started to cry and Wilomena pulled the child to her breast. “Shhh,” she said. “It’ll be all over soon. You’re safe.” Then she bit her own lip so hard it bled.

Jane Hillier’s husband was also at Corner Brook. She had two boys, Fred and Cyril, who fished with their father now, and four younger children. Jane had been terror-struck to see the harbour run dry from her station outside the Hall with her friends and neighbours, who also stood mesmerized. Down below, her oldest sons rushed their younger siblings out of the house, realizing that it was dangerously near the beach and acting on instinct. As their toddler brother, Stanley, ambled out, Fred picked him up under his arm, despite the child’s protests, and pushed each of the other children from behind, trying to hurry them to higher ground. By now, Jane was running toward them.