Further to NickE's post of 12 Apr 09 - 07:12 PM regarding "Great Big Sea", GEST's site quotes speculation relating the incident to the great Lisbon earthquake in the eighteenth century, but I don't buy that. Neil Rosenberg's notes to "Songs of Newfoundland and Labrador Volume 1" state that the disaster was a storm surge in the fall of 1920 and include circumstantial details. I've always thought that the subtext of the song refers to the "natural disaster" of unwed pregnancy: "me 'boot' is broke, me 'frock' is tore", if you catch my drift.