On the fourth day after the tsunami, a messenger arrived from the telegraph office in Epworth near Burin, asking for Isabel to come and assist them. Isabel’s eyes brightened at the request and her shoulders cast off a load of which she had not even been aware. It was, she realized, helplessness that had been dogging her. That afternoon, with an overnight bag in her hand, she boarded a small boat to travel to Epworth, sailing out through Mortier Bay, still littered with the odd piece of clapboard or broken stagehead. Isabel wrapped her wool scarf around her face as the boat travelled past the sheltered inlet of Little Bay, then the mouth of Beau Bois harbour and into the winter-like wind. The hollow faces of people made homeless by the tidal wave passed before her as Stepaside and Port au Bras drew near. She uttered a “Hail Mary” for them and tried to focus on the work ahead of her.

Almost unique in the region, the telegraph office at Epworth was capable of receiving and sending messages. In the days following the tidal wave, people from surrounding communities had poured into the Epworth office to communicate with friends and relatives in St. John’s and other parts of the country. The operator could not keep up with the volume of messages and was desperate for Isabel’s help.

As soon as she landed in Epworth, Isabel went straight to the office and to work. She barely had her coat off when the Epworth operator handed her a stack of messages. “Hello! Thanks!” the bulky woman said breathlessly, and quickly returned to her own pile of papers.

As she laboured in the gathering darkness, Isabel learned what the tidal wave had done to the people of Burin. She knew now they needed lumber for stores, stages, flakes, barrels, furniture, houses, boats—and coffins. They needed coal, clothes, boots, and food. They needed sympathy, consolation, answers. And they needed all these things in a great hurry. Her fingers tapped out their urgency, the flustered heat of her warm blood driving them. As the clock ticked midnight, she finished and fell back in her chair, letting what energy she had left drain out through her legs and feet. Inside Isabel’s chest was a black lump made up of the stories she had told through the language of dots and dashes. She took it to a strange bed with her that night in Epworth.

The next morning the local telegraph operator told Isabel the cable between Epworth and Burin had been repaired and that the Burin office could get messages to St. John’s. The woman thanked Isabel for her help and arranged her passage back to Marystown. When Isabel left, the black lump was still there.

19

The great gushes of water had reached the shores of the Burin Peninsula on a Monday night. With the telegraph cables broken and Isabel Gibbons and the other operators unable to communicate to sites beyond the afflicted communities, the rest of the world did not know the extent of the damage and pain wrought by the tsunami.

On Tuesday night thirty-eight-year-old Magistrate Malcolm Hollett wiped the sweat off his face as he composed yet another letter to Prime Minister Richard Anderson Squires in St. John’s. Hollett sat at a mahogany desk in his Burin parlour, feeling no comfort by the smell of century-old oak wall panels or the tray of tea and gingerbread a maid had left for him. He dipped his pen in the inkwell and began again.

Hollett bit his bottom lip. There was no way to get the letter to St. John’s, at least not the last time he sent a messenger to the telegraph officer to check an hour ago. The darn lines were still down and suddenly travel by ship seemed slow. It felt like they were on their own, on the edge of the world, nay, the universe.

What an odd position for Newfoundland, a sea-going nation, whose men and ships regularly travelled to Iberia and the Caribbean.

Then his mind jarred back to the tidal wave. Hollett kept writing—he had to do something.

After signing the letter, Hollett set down his pen and stood up. He walked to the parlour doorway and called out to his wife Lucy, who was on her way upstairs with their baby. “Shall we send Peter back to the telegraph office to see if the lines are working? I’ve got to get a message to St. John’s.”

Although the cable lines were still not functioning, Hollett wrote again on Wednesday to the government in the capital. The Daisyhad brought much sad news upon her return to Burin. This time Hollett reported the death of old Thomas Lockyer of Allan’s Island, who had been fatally crushed in the tidal wave. And he sadly recorded the death of Jessie and David Hipditch’s three children in Point au Gaul. He had already written of the deaths of Frances Kelly and her daughter, Dorothy, in Kelly’s Cove, and the near drowning of the elderly Inkpens from Stepaside.

Now the magistrate’s face was permanently the colour of a beet; it had turned that way after the Daisy’s Inspector Dee told him that fifteen of twenty-four families in Taylor’s Bay were homeless and that the harbour was a wasteland. Of the villages closer to his own home in Burin, he wrote to the prime minister, “William Moulton’s house is washed away. The family barely escaped with their lives… Corbin practically every bit of waterfront property with some dwellings gone.”

After some time alone in his parlour, Hollett made a bold suggestion to the prime minister:

On Thursday morning, three days after the tidal wave, telegraph operators in St. John’s reeled in shock when they received the news from the wireless operator on the SS Portiacalling from Burin. The message was sent to Prime Minister Squires from Magistrate Malcolm Hollett.