In the early evening of November 7, 1817, a fire broke out in a small house adjoining the shops and warehouses of Lower Path, known by this time as Water Street, in St. John’s.
Almost the entire path had once been covered by high fish flakes, rough trellises of spruce logs where salted cod was spread to dry. Most of these were gone now, some victim of a Water Street fire the previous winter, others torn down to make way for buildings as St. John’s became less a fishing village and more a centre of commerce and trade for the colony. But several stretches of the street still ran under the rows of loosely fitted lungers, which were themselves covered with a layer of tinder-dry spruce boughs.
On the harbour side of Water Street a row of large wooden stores warehoused dried cod for export in the late summer and, by early fall, much of the imported food and supplies that saw the inhabitants through the winter months. The north side was a mile-long strip of houses interspersed with retail shops selling food, hardware and clothing, patent cures such as Extract of Mustard, sarsaparilla, Balsam of Life, antibilious pills. There was a shoe repair shop, a millinery, a bakery, a blacksmith’s, there were taverns such as the Royal Oak, Shoulder of Mutton, the Globe, the Jolly Fisherman.
The street itself was still unpaved, uneven and rocky at the best of times, in inclement weather a relentlessly muddy quagmire. Up to fifteen feet in width at its most generous, there were points where little more than six feet separated the shops on either side. The prevailing wind funnelled through this long, narrow tunnel of two-storey buildings, ripping hats from the heads of pedestrians, inverting the ribs of parasols, restlessly swinging the painted wooden signs of dogs, goats and fish that hung over merchants’ stores.
On the night of the seventh, a steady wind lifted large flankers from the single burning building and showered them along the darkened street like sparks flailing off a pinwheel of fireworks. Within minutes the neighbouring houses and fish flakes were alight and the flames had jumped to the south side of the path. The fire bell was sounded and parties of marines and soldiers and volunteers from the town itself were dispatched with buckets, hatchets and hawsers to try to contain the blaze. Every establishment between King’s Beach and the Governor’s Wharf was raging by the time the firefighters assembled on the street, the fierce glow of the flames under a low cloud of smoke lighting the harbour’s ring of hills like torches set around a stage. Ships docked at the wharves slipped their moorings to drift free of the fire’s reach, the calm surface of the water roiling with reflected light beneath them. Wind carried flankers onto their decks and several caught fire, the vessels burning down to the waterline. Crowds of people from the shanties and tilts built higher above the harbour came down to Water Street and began looting from the buildings in the path of the flames. Some merchants guarded their wares with rifles until the fire forced them to abandon their posts, others threw open their doors to allow the looters to make off with whatever they could carry before the conflagration overtook their stores. There was an intermittent roar of roof timbers collapsing two storeys into the buildings they once covered. Burning walls foundered and fell into the street.
Within six hours of the first alarm the merchant houses along Water, Duckworth and Holloway streets had burnt to the ground, along with the courthouse, dozens of storehouses, sheds and wharves and 130 homes. On the eastern side of the town as far as Hill o’Chips nothing but a few scattered outbuildings remained standing.