It’s been almost twenty-five years since the residents of Gander and other communities in Newfoundland and Labrador took in thousands of stranded airline passengers after the September 11 attacks.
Their generosity inspired books, movies and the musical Come from Away, but it was far from the first time Newfoundlanders and Labradorians had opened their homes to strangers in a crisis.
One evening in July 1828, fisherman George Harvey was walking the lonely beach in Isle aux Morts when he spotted a keg tossing on the waves, a sure sign that a ship had gone down nearby.
At dawn the next morning, he loaded his 17-year-old daughter Ann and 12-year old son Tom into his small punt and set off to locate the wreck.
Hours later, they came upon the Despatch. The ship had struck a rock, but most of its two hundred passengers had managed to cross to a reef, where they were huddled together against the wind and rain “like sea birds.”
Over three days of constant effort, the Harveys hauled the passengers into their punt one by one and ferried them to the safety of the shore.
But their work wasn’t done.
For two to three weeks, while they waited for a relief ship to arrive, the Harvey family cared for the 163 survivors in their home and makeshift shelters.
According to surveyor Joseph Jukes, who stayed with the Harveys a decade later, their food stores “were so completely exhausted, that [they] were compelled to live chiefly on salt fish, with neither bread, flour, butter, nor tea, during the whole of that winter.”
Another shipwreck during World War II had far-reaching impact. When the American destroyer USS Truxtun ran aground on the Burin Peninsula in February 1942, eighteen-year-old Black seaman Lanier Phillips jumped from the deck into freezing waves slick with oil.
He later awoke in the small community of St. Lawrence, where locals had laid the survivors out on tables, stripped off their wet clothes, and were sponging the oil from their skin.
Raised in Georgia in the shadow of the Ku Klux Klan, Phillips said he felt more fear being naked in the presence of white women than he had when he jumped into the water.
“One lady had my hand,” he recalled, “and she said, ‘Gee, this poor fella… the oil is all in his pores.’”
Phillips replied, “That’s the colour of the skin. You can’t get it off.”
The woman, Violet Pike, had never seen a Black man before. She took Phillips to her home, spoon-fed him soup and put him to bed.
“The feeling I had was that all Caucasians were racists and bigots,” Phillips said. “Well, they showed me there were people in the world that were not.”
The experience inspired Phillips to fight segregation and break new ground for Black sailors in the U.S. Navy.
He became the navy’s first Black sonar technician in 1957 and went on to an innovative civilian career as an oceanographer. He was active in the civil rights movement and marched with Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma, Ala.
In later life, Phillips travelled throughout North America speaking about that night in St. Lawrence, his career and his vision for racial equality.
Twenty years after the sinking of the USS Truxtun, thousands of Newfoundlanders were forced to evacuate during fearsome wildfires in 1961.
The town of Terrenceville on the Burin Peninsula was overwhelmed by smoke. While local men stayed to fight the blaze, 450 women and children were ferried in the middle of the night to Bay L’Argent.
Telegraph operators stayed up all night to co-ordinate the rescue, and every car owner in the Marystown area was awakened to drive 60 kilometres and pick the evacuees up.
“Within one hour 40 cars were on the road,” the Evening Telegram reported, “and in less than three hours 200 evacuees were assembled in Marystown’s St. Gabriel’s Hall where hot drinks and sandwiches were distributed.”
Once fed, the evacuees were welcomed into private homes in Marystown, Fortune and Grand Bank.
Then-mayor of Marystown E. P. Reddy said the community’s response was a “spontaneous outburst of charity towards a neighbour in time of dire need.”
Not foreseeing what was to come in 2001, though, Reddy turned out to be mistaken when he reflected that such an act “may never be surpassed in the history of our island.”
Is Newfoundland and Labrador really more hospitable than anywhere else?
Most cultures prize hospitality. A moral imperative to help strangers in need is part of what makes human societies adaptive and resilient.
That doesn’t mean all cultures express hospitality the same way. Some societies prefer structured hospitality, where guests are invited and activities planned in advance. Other communities prioritize spontaneous hospitality, welcoming drop-ins and unexpected visitors.
In her book Foreign to Familiar, Sarah A. Lanier suggests structured hospitality is more common in cold climates and spontaneous hospitality in hot climates, because mild weather encourages outdoor mingling and open-door policies.
Harsh environments, where mutual support is critical for survival, can also foster a welcoming attitude.
Hospitality is one of the highest virtues among the Bedouin, who traditionally lived in the desert. Newfoundland and Labrador’s volatile weather and rugged terrain may have promoted hospitality for similar reasons.
Inhabitants of unforgiving surroundings may also get more opportunities to demonstrate hospitality. The turbulent North Atlantic, for better or worse, has supplied Newfoundlanders and Labradorians with many occasions to care for shipwreck survivors.
Whatever the reason, stories of strangers finding a welcome in the worst of circumstances can inspire us all, like Lanier Phillips, to see the best in humanity.
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