In 1869, a devastating gale ripped through the Maritimes, dealing death and destruction on a scale which had never been seen before. For centuries after it struck, the Saxby Gale was remembered in Atlantic Canada as the storm to which all other storms were compared. Tales of the staggering financial cost, of the massive waves it brought, and harrowing stories of near escapes were passed down from generation to generation.
One man had actually predicted this storm a full year before it hit. He had desperately tried to warn the Maritimes that it was coming, but his warnings were, in the words of one newspaper, “treated as fiction of the imagination. … [But] at the appointed time the prediction was fulfilled…”
On Christmas Day in 1868, the London Standard printed a curious letter, which was soon reprinted in newspapers in Atlantic Canada. It warned that a horrific storm would slam into Eastern Canada several months from then, on October 5th, 1869.
The letter, written by Stephen Martin Saxby, said:
“Kindly permit me to offer a special warning … for the safety of mariners … with regard to 1869, that at seven a.m., on October 5, the moon will be at that part of her orbit which is nearest to the earth. Her attraction will, therefore, be at its maximum force. At noon of the same day, the moon will be on the earth's equator, a circumstance which never occurs without mark atmospheric disturbance … in other words … nothing more threatening can, I say, occur without miracle.”
Saxby was speaking in that restrained manner of a British aristocrat in the Victorian Age, but the Saint John Globe explained what he meant in simpler words, saying: “The prediction was a world wide hurricane.”
Saxby urged people to prepare, writing:
“In the meantime there will be time for the repair of unsafe sea walls, and for the circulation of this notice throughout the wide world.”
Stephen Martin Saxby had been an engineer and a Lieutenant in the Royal Navy, in Britain. He had attended university in Cambridge. He had taught at the prestigious Greenwitch Steam College. And he had invented a way to correct compasses on iron steamships.
In short, he was a highly respected and sought-after scientist and engineer. Well, he had been, until he started claiming he could predict the weather using science. He published what he called the “Saxby Weather system” for predicting storms. He kept writing in to sailing magazines trying to warn mariners about storms. He also kept writing letters to the Metrology Department in Britain, alleging that he could predict the weather.
So, while he had been respected once, by the time he wrote that letter was considered to, well, to put it bluntly, to have gone a bit crazy in his old age. The Royal Metrologer told him to stop his investigations and stop writing to them. The Metrology Department published a whole book refuting his Saxby Weather System.
His letter predicting a storm a year from then was widely published across New England, the Maritimes and Newfoundland, but his prediction appears to have been received with a fair amount of hostility.
He was considered to be, in the language of the time, a lunatic.
Saxby had been expecting this reaction, mentioning in that letter: “I am quite aware that in taking this step I am allowing a sense of social duty to outweigh personal considerations; but I accept the consequences.”
One month before the date of the storm, Saxby again published his dire warning in another widely published letter, advising coastal communities to prepare and fishermen to avoid the water. He said: “Could I save one life, it would be very cheaply purchased in making better known certain laws of nature.”
His letter was published in the Maritimes, for example, it ran on October 2nd in the Saint John Telegraph and Journal, but was presented more as a curiosity than a serious warning.
Meanwhile, in Halifax, local amateur astronomer Frederick Allison agreed with Saxby’s predictions, and also wrote to local newspapers saying: “I believe that a heavy gale will be encountered here on Tuesday next, the 5th Oct., beginning perhaps on Monday night, possibly deferred as late this Tuesday night; but between those two periods it seems inevitable.”
As the date of the predicted storm grew near, not everyone casually dismissed the warnings. A young J. Clifford Campbell from the small farming community of Little River, New Brunswick, which is close to Fundy National Park, wrote that his grandparents told him that when they were young, they had heeded the warning:
“In October 1869, Grandmother and Grandfather had been married just twenty-five months and had a baby daughter. Grandmother was expecting another baby in the spring. Grandmother told about how they were concerned when they heard about a terrible storm that was being prophesied by a man named Saxby.”
“On the night of the predicted storm, Grandmother and Grandmother, uncertain whether the old log house would withstand the blasts of the ferocious storm if it were to come, decided that their safest place to spend the night would be in the sturdy new log barn. To be on the safe side, Grandmother, Grandfather, the baby, and Grandmother’s sisters Maria and Lizzie, slept in the barn that night.”
“During the night, the prophecy came true.”
Two days later, the Saint John Christian Visitor put out its first newspaper since the storm. It’s opening line read:
“Lieut. Saxby’s astronomical calculations [were] based upon correct scientific principles … at the appointed time the prediction was fulfilled.”
“The morning of Monday was delightfully warm for the season, and to the general observer was no cause for alarm; but the sudden changes of the barometer indicated that a storm was at hand. Early in the afternoon of Monday the wind came in fresh from the south east, and by 7 a.m. it increased to a perfect gale, and the rain came down in torrents. With the rising wind in rushed the raging sea threatening destruction to everything within its scope.”
The Telegraph newspaper wrote:
“the tide threw boulders, stones, and course gravel right over the tops of houses! Whole families, young and old, women and children, including young babies, were turned out in the streets, barely escaping with the clothes they had on and losing everything else, while, with the noise of the wind and the waves, the cries of men trying to save their property and the wailings of women and children presented a truly appalling scene.”
When it crashed into the Maritimes, what became known as The Saxby Gale brought winds of over 100 miles per hour, and the highest tides that had ever been seen.
Luckily, the Maritimes’ two economic powerhouses, Halifax and Saint John, were largely spared. However, the storm brought massive devastation to small fishing communities and to farms near the coast.
In fishing communities, lobster traps and fishing gear stored on the coast was washed away. Boats disappeared. The large boulders painstakingly piled up as breakwaters were destroyed, quickly followed by wharves and boats.
While this scale of a storm would have been devastating anywhere, it was particularly so in the Maritimes because of a unique trait about the farming in this region.
A great deal of the Maritimes is covered in salt marshes. As far as farming goes, salt marshes are worse than useless – they will actually kill anything planted there. However, way back in the 1630s, the earliest European settlers, the French, discovered if they blocked off the salt marshes and drained them, the soil was so rich they could farm them without having to use any fertilizer.
The dams they built to stop the salt water from getting into their farms were called dykes. This ingenious way of quickly clearing and farming extremely rich soil made early European settlements in Canada possible.
But if the dykes failed, then the salt water they were holding back would rush in, killing the crops, devastating the farmland, ruining the farmers' livelihoods, and risking food shortages across the region.
Over the next two days, a staggering 300mm of rain fell. One by one, all over the Maritimes, the dykes collapsed. Salt water rushed in, and in minutes, the painstaking work that had been built over two hundred years was washed away.
In Windsor, Nova Scotia, The Halifax Chronicle reported:
“About 11:00 o’clock Monday night, four dykes near Smith Island gave way and ten minutes afterwards the low lands for miles around were flooded. The tide rose four feet higher than it was ever known before! Bridges were carried away and destroyed!”
The Amherst Gazette reported from Cumberland County, Nova Scotia that the dykes had held until a single great wave smashed them open:
“At half past 10 o’clock on Monday night the dykes overflowed. The water having [already] greatly accumulated … to the depth of one to two feet, a wave, similar to the tidal bore, swept up with a rearing noise and a great velocity, carrying almost everything before it; stocks of hay, fences, and in many cases, well-filled barns.”
Speaking of tidal bores, the famous Moncton tidal bore on the Petitcodiac River that day was estimated to have been ten feet high. It destroyed the bridge linking Riverview with Moncton. Moncton’s dockside warehouses were washed away, destroying key staples like flour, salt and other perishables.
Of course, the thing about storms is they’re not exactly fair. It’s completely random whose life is devastated and who gets spared, and that is why natural weather phenomena are so terrifying for humans.
Despite being in the geographic centre of the storm, Fredericton was entirely spared serious damage by the Saxby Gale, although, according to this curious report from the Daily Mail newspaper, perhaps one rooster might beg to differ:
“There were no fatal accidents in Fredericton, [but] old-time truck driver “Paddy” McGarrigle, who was loading barrels from the wharf, was blown into the river. He was rescued. Most of the barrels, which contained apples, were blown into the river and floated downstream. [They were not rescued.] One hen house… was blown into the river and floated gaily down on the turbulent waters while a rooster crowed from a pinnacle on the roof.”
Meanwhile, in Nova Scotia, according to the Amherst Gazette,
“An old man named Steward, belonging to Minudie Point, was in the habit of spending his nights in a barn there. On the Terrific night, finding the barn afloat and breaking up, he succeeded in clinging to a passing haystack. After being for some time at the mercy of the wind and the tide, hope almost failed as he was fast-borne seaward, when his life buoy grounded on the top of a dyke, seemingly on the brink of destruction. He was rescued by means of a boat on the following day.”
Seventy years later, Willard Wry, then a young man from Tantramar, reminisced, “One particular incident happened in which a mare and her nursing colt floated on a haystack bottom across the Bay of Fundy to Rockport, alive and well.”
An Albert County legend tells of a young married couple building a farmhouse and arguing over which way their window would face. The bride wanted it facing North because she liked the view, but the Groom wanted it facing South because it would keep the house warmer in the Winter. The Groom built the window to the South despite his Bride’s wishes, and the Bride angrily stormed off to stay with her mother.
Then the Saxby Gale hit.
When the worried bride returned home to check on her husband, she found the house was rotated around by the storm and now the offending window was facing North, like she had asked for.
As for young Clifford Campbell’s grandparents, he wrote that “Never had they known the wind to blow with such fury. As the hours passed, the storm died down. The new barn had stood the test of the severe blasts of the gale.”
“In the morning, they ventured forth to survey the damage. Grandmother said she was surprised to see the old log house was still standing. The porch had been ripped off the house and carried 100 yards behind the house, where it had been caught up in the trees at the edge of the cleared land.”
The Saxby Gale and the damage it wrought marked a huge crisis for the then brand-new country called Canada. It also offered something of an opportunity for the leaders of Ontario and Quebec to try and get the reluctant Maritimers to embrace the new country that they had rather reluctantly joined a year earlier.
You see, from the Maritimers' perspective, joining Canada had not been a part of the plan. The leaders of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island had gone to Charlottetown to discuss forming the Maritime Union – their three colonies uniting into a new country of their own. The leaders of Ontario and Quebec had insisted on coming to Charlottetown, too, claiming they would be mere observers.
Much to Maritimers’ surprise, their leaders returned from Charlottetown no longer talking of Maritime Union, but rather about forming a new country called Canada with Ontario and Quebec. Few Maritimers wanted this, but they were forced into it anyway, less than two years before the Saxby Gale hit.
In the wake of the storm, the Maritimes were devastated. This was a time before there was any kind of insurance, and not only individual farmers but entire communities were completely and utterly ruined.
A Windsor, Nova Scotia newspaper wrote ten days after the storm,
“The floods have abated. On Tuesday the last field was left dry and now nothing but a barren scene meets the eye in every direction. The beautiful green afterfeed of the dykes is turned into a muddy green marsh, which produces an unhealthy dismal fog and a sickening smell. Fences are lying strewn in every direction. Haystacks are racked and ruined. Occasionally the carcass of a dead animal is seen bleaching in the sun. The Town Dyke at Avondale will not be repaired … it will not pay for the trouble … the structure will be abandoned…”
Willard Wry later reminisced that in New Brunswick, “when the great Saxby tide and gale came on October 4th 1869 … anything that was loose had moved. Barns and even small schooners were driven up on high land and dykes were torn down in all directions. Farmers lost nearly all.”
The Ontarians’ and Quebeckers’ ingenious solution was to not only rebuild the dykes, but get railway companies to run brand new train tracks along the waters on raised beds where the old dykes used to stand.
The new railway beds would not only act as new dykes, but would be constructed by hiring local people. They would bring economic prosperity to the region and would link the Maritimes more closely with the rest of Canada, which would lessen the rather intense anti-Canadian attitudes of Nova Scotians and New Brunswickers of the time.
As for Stephen Martin Saxby, he enjoyed a sudden reversal of fortunes – overnight going from an often mocked and ridiculed figure to becoming a celebrated and respected scientist. He would die shortly after at the peak of his prestige.
But here’s the plot twist – although he had indeed correctly predicted the storm which bears his name down to the hour, it was actually just a coincidence.
The moon cycles he spoke of don’t actually cause storms, and his Saxby Weather system was not accurate and is certainly not used today.
