She didn’t, however, ask him not to go.

He was a fisherman, had been for the past seven or so years. He had never ventured out in winter but jumped at the invitation to be a late addition to this outing.

“He was only going to go for the one trip,’’ said MacPhail, who lived in East Baltic at the time.

“He said, ‘I should be home in about three weeks to a month’.”

He called home on Feb. 17, the day his baby daughter Johanna turned one. The couple’s second child, Clara, was two-and-a-half years old.

He did not call after the Feb. 22 storm and this concerned MacPhail. Prompted by her unsettling dream, she made some calls and received word that the fishing boat was safely in port. She believes this false assurance was delivered by someone who did not feel able to give her the tragic news.

That unpleasant task fell to Fan MacIntyre, a fisherman who had been too ill to join the expedition and that created the opportunity for Hendsbee to join.

MacIntyre showed up at MacPhail’s doorstep with a relative of Hendsbee’s.

“He took me aside and then said, ‘well, they found the boat and there are no survivors’,’’ said MacPhail. “I felt like I had just been hit in the stomach with a plank.’’

MacPhail chose not to go to Nova Scotia to view her husband’s body after learning he had been badly mangled in the rocks.

“I did not want to see him like that,’’ she said.

Hendsbee had told her shortly before setting out aboard the Iceland II that he wanted her to wear his wedding ring if anything happened to him. She scolded him for talking that way, then they laughed about his dramatic request.

“You don’t think you are going to die anyway when you are young,’’ said MacPhail, who was 23 at the time. “So anyway he went out and that (ring) is the only thing I ever got back. I never saw him again.’’

The body was buried in Souris West Cemetery following a closed-casket ceremony.

MacPhail continues to respect what proved to be her husband’s final request. She had the ring reduced so she could wear it on her right hand.

“It’s just something he wanted me to do, so I honoured that,’’ she said.

Still, MacPhail does not to live in the past. She now lives in Stratford with Paul MacPhail, her husband of 37 years. The couple has two children.

Johanna MacPhail only pulls out her newspaper clippings of the disaster once every five or so years on or near the anniversary date.

She doesn’t do anything to mark the sad occasion. She doesn’t need to.

“No, it’s there,’’ she said, tapping her chest. “It’s there in your heart.’’

Copyright
Waldron H. Leard