The August Gales by Gerald Hallowell

Author:Gerald Hallowell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Nimbus
Published: 2013-09-24T16:00:00+00:00

Survivors, as usual, told harrowing tales. The schooner Madonna Hayden arrived in Harbour Buffett on August 30, having battled successfully with the storm. The vessel ran for Red Island in Placentia Bay and all was going well, “though seas were running mountains high,” till what the captain, Thomas Hayden, termed “a foul bowler” broke over the schooner, smashing the main boom though it had been safely secured. One crew member was badly injured. The J. M. Hayden, James Hayden master, reached Spencer’s Cove, also in Placentia Bay, in a disabled condition. The wind had changed direction suddenly, causing a tremendous sea to run, throwing the schooner on her beam ends and taking dories, trawls, and everything movable on deck into the sea. Two men were washed overboard. One of them grasped a rope and was quickly secured, according to the Telegram of August 30, while the other “performed the unique feat of grasping and clinging to the mast-head till the schooner righted,” arriving safely back on deck though suffering some injuries.

Not all the men and vessels at sea that day were so lucky. The John C. Loughlin, a western boat of 21 tonnes owned by John Henry Loughlin, had only recently been built, at Creston near Marystown. The schooner and the seven men aboard were from Red Harbour, a small settlement on the eastern shore of the Burin Peninsula, and from nearby Flat Island. Carrie Brennan related how her husband Edward had come upon the wreckage of a schooner at Ship Cove, near Argentia: “As the ship rose and fell with the rhythm of the waves, a man tied or strapped to the rigging, seemed to be waving or signaling to him....As the stricken schooner listed in the wind, the man, hanging from the crosstrees by his right arm, would dip below the waves. The fishermen soon realized that he was dead…the schooner was the JOHN LOUGHLIN and the body was that of her captain.”

On September 5 Ed Brennan wrote to the Loughlins, saying that he had been the first man to board the stricken vessel. He explained that the rescue crew had brought the captain’s body to land, “clothed and coffined him…We thought there might be a man lashed to the wheel but it was only a suit of oil skins twisted around the wheel. It was impossible to do much as the craft was so much under water.…We took up…a work coat and a clothes bag marked J. Barrett Woody Island, but not a sign of a body.…It is too bad all the brave men lost their lives in this gale. We know the crafts and so on can be replaced, but the poor men after a summer’s toil it is sad indeed. May God comfort their friends and help them to bear the blow.”

Winnie, the sister of the three Loughlin men who were lost, remembered years later that it had been “a beautiful dawning, no sea and a splendid day on the water…the gale flew at them

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