Andrew’s target being closest at hand, he thought to reach it, plant his charge, and rejoin his son within an hour to await the dawn at the transmitter while the others were still being dropped off at one-mile intervals in both directions. Thirty minutes after their parting salute—“To the Second Revolution!” which meant different things to the several bombers — and before even my grandfather had slipped past the watchman and lockmaster at Port Robinson, all 25 charges went off together.
That is to say, there were three explosions: a tremendous one on the back road south from Port Robinson, where the truck carrying THE QUICK BROW group toward Port Colborne was about to discharge its first passenger (Comrade W) near Welland; a similarly tremendous one on the road north from Port Robinson, where the truck carrying FX JMPD V LAZY G toward St. Catherines was about to drop off Comrade F near Allanburg; and a third, only one-twelfth as great but sufficient nonetheless to distribute Andrew Cook V over a considerable radius, within sight of the locks at Port Robinson itself.
And there are at least three explanations, (a) The detonation was an accident, caused by the coincidental transmission at 125 kc. of either an SOS from some distressed vessel in Lake Erie or Lake Ontario, or any other message containing either an S or letters from each of the three groups (i.e., THEQUICKBROW, N, and FXJMPDVLAZYG). But there is no record of ships in distress in the canal area on that pleasant Thursday night or Friday morning. Coincidental transmission remains a possibility: a wireless operator just coming on watch, say, aboard any vessel near or in the canal, waking up his fingers with THE QUICK etc. My Tuscarora grandmother preferred this explanation.
(b) The saboteurs were sabotaged, suicidally, by one of their number. This was my father’s theory: that by a fatal patriotic rebroadcast of Marconi’s first transatlantic message, say, or some sufficient three-letter combination, A.B.C. V martyred himself to the Allied war effort, whether because his anarchism recoiled at the mounting totalitarianism of the Bolsheviks (the Romanovs had been murdered just two months earlier), or because his anarchism had all along been a cover for infiltrating subversive groups. To the objection that suicide was unnecessary to foil the plot (one letter from each of the truck-borne groups — a T and a G, say — would have done the trick), my father would reply either that not to have blown himself up would have blown my grandfather’s cover, or, more seriously, that inasmuch as it had been necessary to sacrifice his wife’s brother Gadfly, Andrew V had felt morally constrained to sacrifice himself as well. In support of his argument he adduced the fact that his father had handed him, at the last moment, “for safekeeping” while he mined the lock, the old Breguet pocketwatch passed on to him by his mother Henrietta.
But contemporary accounts of the event (I have read them all, especially since 1953, the “midpoint” of my own life, by when, alas, my father was eight years dead and unable to defend his theory against my new objections) maintain that the three explosions were separate not only in space but, slightly, in time, and while opinion on their exact sequence is less than unanimous, most auditors agree that the two big blasts preceded the smaller one by a little interval—boom boom, bang — and that the southerly boom was the earlier of the two. An ex-artillery officer at Port Robinson reported feeling “bracketed” by the booms and hit directly by the bang.
I have thought about this, and conclude that we may rule out the SOS theory, coincidental or otherwise, except possibly as the third signal. Likewise the theory of self-sabotage by any member of the group except, I reluctantly admit, my grandfather. Not impossibly he did destroy his comrades and thus himself: the quickest signal would have been a simple dot (E) to wipe out the southbound twelve, followed by a dot-dash (A) to detonate the northbounders, and either the N (dash-dot) or the S (dot-dot-dot) to do for himself. Or he could have tapped out any of at least seven English words: BAN, CAN, HAS, RAN, TAN, WAN, WAS, etc.
But I am struck by the reminiscence of an old Port Robinson telegrapher whom I interviewed on the subject some ten years ago. A religious man, he had been awakened by those blasts from dreams of a telegram from God, whose sender he recognized by the thunderous subscription of His initial. Awake, he forgot the text of the heavenly message (he was to spend the rest of his life vainly endeavoring to recover it, as I have tried in vain to recover the signal that blew my grandfather and his company to kingdom come), but he understood in immediate retrospect that the coded initial had been the blasts themselves. Boom boom bang: dash dash dot.
