A Terrible Tide: A Story of the Newfoundland Tsunami of 1929

Those are the first tremors Celia (CeeCee) Rose Mathews and her family feel at 5:00 p.m. on November 18, 1929—the night Celia is about to celebrate her thirteenth birthday with her family in the tiny village of Taylor’s Bay on the Burin Peninsula, Newfoundland. The night a 7.2 earthquake on the Richter scale shakes Celia’s birthday party apart, the village is pulverized, and lives are lost when a 30-foot wall of water slams ashore and drags whole houses and people into its icy depths.

Based on a true event, Suzanne Meade’s historical fiction, A Terrible Tide, told through CeeCee’s eyes, gives readers a close-up view of one Newfoundland family as it struggles to come to terms with disaster on a scale unknown to anyone in the village of Taylor’s Bay before that fateful night.

When the flood water recedes, only five of the 17 houses in the village and the schoolhouse remain standing. Six lives have been lost, and the survivors whose homes have been demolished must all find someplace to stay that is out of the bitter cold of a Newfoundland winter.

In one respect, CeeCee Mathews and her family are among the lucky. CeeCee is saved from drowning by Boomer, her Newfie dog, and none of the others in her family are killed outright by the tidal wave. However, their home and all their belongings are gone; her father’s schooner has been swept out to sea; and her younger sister, Winnie, lies unconscious. No one knows when, or if, Winnie will wake up.

In the beginning, Winnie and Celia’s older sister, Viola, are at the Taylors—the home of the family that owned the village store, which is also gone—while CeeCee and the rest of her family are at the vastly overcrowded schoolhouse. However, soon the entire Matthews family is taken in by the Taylors, and some of Celia’s family’s immediate problems are alleviated. Her family escaped the tsunami with only the clothes on their backs. The Taylors have a house, some fuel for heat, a few chickens and some stored vegetables.

But now there are eight Taylors, seven Mathews, and one other survivor whose home was lost crammed into the Taylors’ house. And Bessie Taylor, who is the only girl in the village who is CeeCee’s age, has always been CeeCee’s nemesis. So, though everyone currently has something to eat, albeit mostly turnips, CeeCee must navigate an environment that is hostile toward her as well as the effects of the disaster. Worse, the hosts’ cold-storage shed is emptying fast, and foxes kill most of the chickens, so soon there will be nothing for any of them to eat.

They cannot turn to others in the village for help because others have even less. Nor can they turn elsewhere. The telegraph was destroyed days before by a winter storm, the telephone line is down, just one seaworthy dory in the village still exists, and a new storm brewing means going for help by sea is too dangerous. The supply boat that comes to the village is not due for several days, and no one knows what’s happened to other towns on the peninsula and whether the boat will come. In addition, fuel to heat the schoolhouse and the other houses and to light lamps is in very short supply.

After much discussion among the adults, no one seems to be willing to go for help. With her stomach grumbling from hunger and aching with worry about Winnie, CeeCee decides to go overland to Lamaline. Her younger brother Henry is eager for adventure and wants to go with her. Not to be left behind, Boomer tags along. The trio slog over difficult terrain through knee-deep snow. When they get to the first place where there used to be a bridge to get across a gap, Henry is injured, and a bad situation for CeeCee’s family becomes even worse.

The strength in Meade’s writing in A Terrible Tide lies in the details of the era, such as CeeCee’s family’s excitement at being able to talk to someone 40 miles away on the telephone, and the visual and sensual depiction she gives of the earthquake while it’s happening, the ensuing tidal wave, the destruction of the village and the deprivation suffered by the survivors, all of which transport readers to that time and place.

Readers will feel the Mathews family’s pain as its members struggle to survive. They will gasp and pant along with Celia as she tries to outrun the water that will smash the village. They will fight with her as she struggles to surface and survive when the water pulls her into its icy depths, applaud her courage when she decides to go for help, and suffer with her when her stomach knots with worry or clenches from hunger.

When it comes to personalities and inter-personal relationships among family members and between the Mathews and Taylor families, the author mostly relies on stereotypes.

Newfoundlanders are shown as stoic, argumentative, taciturn and non-communicative when it comes to difficult personal subjects. What they don’t say carries as much or more weight than what they do say. And when the pressure is overbearing, they release their pent-up worry and sadness with music and dance.

The stereotypical class divide between those who feel superior to others due to their work and those who do manual labor for a living is brought to the fore in the relationship between Celia and Bessie Taylor. It comes to a head when the two girls square off in a physical fight.

The individuals in Celia’s family are also stereotypical. Nan is a feisty, independent grandmother who lives with Celia’s uncle until her house is destroyed. Mom is the head of the household when it comes to the children and matters of the house. Dad (George) works and plays hard and mostly stays out of Mom’s (Addie’s) way in the house. Viola is the responsible oldest child who has gone off to work but returns for her sister’s birthday and stays to help. Eddie is a typical 15-year-old who has grown up in a self-reliant fishing community and sees no need for any more schooling than he already has. Celia is what is considered a fairly typical teenage girl: sullen and quick to anger when asked to do anything by a sister older than she or by people who are not family, reliant on the family dog for comfort when she is feeling misunderstood, sad or angry, tender toward a younger sister with a disability, and sometimes tolerant of a younger brother who often annoys her. And Winnie and Henry, the two younger children in the family, are Newfoundlander tough and eager for new adventures.

Stereotypes aside, this dramatic story of one family’s fight to survive a horrific disaster, shown through the eyes of a 13-year-old, will keep 9 to 12-year-old readers engaged. A Terrible Tide may also spark classroom discussions that ask the hard question: if my family lost everything, or if someone I know lost everything, what could I do to help? Coping strategies as well as typical life in a small Newfoundland village in the 1920s and historical details included that are not well-known, such as the Carrel-Dakin method of treating a septic wound, may be points for classroom discussion with older readers.