The Wake

The Deadly Legacy of a Newfoundland Tsunami

Linden MacIntyre

• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781443452045
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

NATIONAL BESTSELLER

“Fascinating,
infuriating, eloquent and cautionary.” —Postmedia


A Globe and Mail, CBC Books
and Maclean’s Book of the Year


In the vein of Erik Larson’s Isaac’s Storm and Dead Wake comes an incredible true story of destruction and
survival in Newfoundland by one of Canada’s best-known writers


On November
18, 1929, a tsunami struck Newfoundland’s Burin Peninsula. Giant waves up to three
storeys high hit the coast at a hundred kilometres per hour, flooding dozens of
communities and washing entire houses out to sea. The most destructive
earthquake-related event in Newfoundland’s history, the disaster killed twenty-eight
people and left hundreds more homeless or destitute. It took days for the
outside world to find out about the death and damage caused by the tsunami,
which forever changed the lives of the inhabitants of the fishing outports
along the Burin Peninsula.


Scotiabank Giller
Prize–winning writer Linden MacIntyre was born near St. Lawrence, Newfoundland,
one of the villages virtually destroyed by the tsunami. By the time of his
birth, the cod-fishing industry lay in ruins and the village had become a
mining town. MacIntyre’s father, lured from Cape Breton to Newfoundland by a
steady salary, worked in St. Lawrence in an underground mine that was later
found to be radioactive. Hundreds of miners would die; hundreds more would
struggle through shortened lives profoundly compromised by lung diseases ranging
from silicosis and bronchitis to cancer. As MacIntyre says, though the tsunami
killed twenty-eight people in 1929, it would claim hundreds if not thousands
more in the decades to follow. And by the time the village returned to its
roots and set up as a cod fishery once again, the stocks in the Grand Banks had
plummeted and St. Lawrence found itself once again on the brink of disaster.


Written in MacIntyre’s
trademark style, The Wake is a major
new work by one of this country’s top writers.


 

Index

The pagination of this digital edition does not match the print edition from which the index was created. To locate a specific entry, please use your ebook reader’s search tools.

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Abbott, Benjamin, 62

Adams, Ian, 294

Agricola, Georgius, 229

agriculture, 17, 108, 139

Alcan. See also Newfluor

finances of, 326

insurance coverage by, 284

labour relations of, 268

mine closures by, 325–26

Newfluor purchase, 154

Quebec smelter, 324, 326

St. Lawrence Corp. purchase, 274–75

and tariffs, 264

and working conditions, 259, 260, 266, 274

Allan’s Island, 51

Allen, Billy, 62

Allen, Louisa, 62

aluminum, 71, 135, 156

Aluminum Company of Canada. See Alcan

American Newfoundland Fluorspar (ANF), 153–54, 281

American War of Independence, 28

appetite, loss of, 155

Argentia, Nfld., 171, 196, 200

asthma, 287

Atlantic Charter, 171

atomic bomb, 171–74, 263

Australia, finances of, 56

autopsies, 291, 296, 316

Aylward, Fabian, 294

Aylward, Fintan J., 294, 299

Aylward, Patrick, 160, 294

---

Bank of Montreal, 96

banks, 106

and the Dominion of Newfoundland, 90–91, 94, 96, 97–98, 99

paycheques held by, 147, 148

and St. Lawrence Corp., 236

and St. Lawrence merchants, 130

Bartlett, George, 36

Bartlett’s Island, 61

Bates, George, 209–10

Bay Roberts, Nfld., 27

Bay St. Lawrence, NS, 21–23, 29–30

Beaumont-Hamel, France, 28

Beck, Amos, 3

Beck, Tom, 190

Bell Island, Nfld., 27, 146

Bennett, Mary Ann, 63

Bennett, Raymond E., 240

Bennett, R.B., 96

Bergeron, Edward, 188–89, 190, 191, 192, 194

beriberi, 109, 244

biopsies, 242

Black Duck mine, 146, 287, 327

accidents and deaths in, 140, 149, 299, 315

conditions in, 123–27, 231

fluorspar vein at, 81–82

Hope Simpson visit to, 134, 320

illness in miners. See lung cancer; silicosis

opening and closing of, 115–16, 259

Poynter’s role at, 122

road to, 122, 125

in St. Patrick’s Day dispute, 162, 165

Black Duck Pond, 124

Blue Beach mine, 127, 274, 327

collapse of, 253

in St. Patrick’s Day dispute, 162, 165

vein reopened, 327, 328

bonds, 93–94

bone cancer, 312, 313

Bonnell, Amelia Alice, 48, 49–50, 59

Bonnell, Bertram, 47, 48, 49, 50

Bonnell, Bessie, 47, 48, 50

Bonnell, Bridget, 48–49

Bonnell, Clayton, 47, 48, 49

Bonnell, Cyrus (husband of Mary Ellen), 47

Bonnell, Cyrus (son of Robert and Bridget), 48, 49, 50

Bonnell, Dinah, 47, 48, 49

Bonnell, Elizabeth, 47, 48, 49, 50

Bonnell, Gilbert, 48

B...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Maps
• Title Page
• Dedication
• In Memoriam
• Epigraphs
• Contents
• Conversations with the Dead I
• Prologue
• One: The Quake
• Two: The Wave
• Three: Legacy of Chaos
• Four: The Cooperation
• Five: Revolt
• Conversations with the Dead II
• Six: The Rescue
• Conversations with the Dead III
• Seven: Mr. Isaac’s (Extraordinary) Wake
• Eight: The Daughters of Radon
• Nine: Dying by Inches
• Ten: Memory
• Conversations with the Dead IV
• Acknowledgements
• Notes
• Index
• Photo Section
• About the Author
• Also by Linden MacIntyre
• Copyright
• About the Publisher