The Independence Hurricane
On September 9, 1775, a hurricane struck eastern Newfoundland at the height of the fishing season. A storm surge of twenty to thirty feet smashed coastal buildings and destroyed over 700 boats. At least 4,000 people were killed, roughly a third of Newfoundland’s summer population. The Annual Register recorded that for days afterward, fishermen “often found 20 or 30 dead bodies” in their nets. The storm takes its name from a hurricane that had swept through the American colonies in the weeks prior, battering every major colonial capital from North Carolina to Boston at the outset of the Revolution. Whether the two events were the same system remains debated.
The Grand Banks have always been treacherous. Shallow shoals, freezing fog, icebergs, and violent nor’westers made them a graveyard for ships long before and after 1775. The Banks of Newfoundland captures the same misery decades later: Irish sailors who pawned their warm clothes in Liverpool and froze on the Banks, dreaming of landfall at Sandy Hook.
