Flotsam and Jetsam of Great 1913 Gale: Schooner Days CXIV (114)

Capt. Jas. McCannel of the good C.P.R. steamer Assiniboia, wrote from Port McNicol on Armistice Day:

"Ready to sail in about an hour. It is a very blustery day, visibility low and turning colder. Twenty years ago yesterday, after the Great Gale of 1913, I went into Fort William with over four hundred tons of ice on the ship-all outside too.

"The last three weeks have been stormy. Three weeks tomorrow got quite a trimming on Superior. Took me thirty hours to cross. My actual distance was 237 knots, but the engine knots were 315. She was standing on end.

"I seemed to be the only one out, as I never saw any other boat. For a couple of hours I only made four miles per hour-weather cold, and lots of snow here and at the Soo.

From John Hunter, Goderich boy, son of the organist and choirmaster of Knox Presbyterian church there in 1913, and known to hundreds of thousand of the great unseen etceteras who listen to his Telegram broadcasts, come this vivid bit of recollection of the Great Gale of November 9th, whose twentieth anniversary we humbly endeavoured to observe in "Schooner Days" last week:

"There was a little island in Goderich harbor then, since dredged out, and I remember the way the great seas piled over the breakwater, poured into the harbor, and picked up the harbor tug and chucked her on the mudflat of this little island. Then the next one would sweep her off and surge her into deep water. And the next would suck her back again.

"You remember Capt. John Macdonald, of the Schooner Azov and his boys, who are fishing out of Goderich yet? Especially "Red" or "Rudolph" whose pungent contributions always please? Well, the Macdonald boys had a little fish tug in the harbor at the time of the Great Gale, and the seas that were running picked their tug up and landed it high if not dry on the pier, and there it stayed. 'S a fact.

"After the gale, when sailor after sailor was being washed up, all glazed in his lifebelt and oilskins, the story got around that there was a reward of fifteen dollars for every body found. We schoolboys used to search the beach north and south like boy scouts on an Indian trail. What we would do if we found a body was less on our mind than what we could do with fifteen dollars.

One day, when the whisper went round. "There's another found' I hung around the door of the Morgue.

"Here". Said the caretaker, see if you know this poor fellow!"

"He took me into where half a dozen overcoated, oilskinned mittened men lay dead on the slabs, with wet towels covering the poor wave-battered faces. He switched the towel from the latest, who was still dripping Lake Huron water, and propped him up. I let a yell out of me and ran faster than I gallop around the world now in the Saturday Tely. I was cured of all desire to make fifteen dollars by finding dead men.

"I knew the crew of the lost Wexford well, and also men in the lost Carruthers. Both those steamers went past Goderich in the height of the storm. They couldn't come in on account of the sea that was running. They couldn't make the harbor entrance. Perhaps they were lost trying to turn around and falling into the trough.

"The most remarkable experience I know of in that gale was that of the Kaministiquia and the McKee, of the Western Transport line. The Kaministiquia was bound up the lake, light, and the McKee was coming down loaded with grain. Neither was able to get into shelter, and both had to ride the gale out in the lake. They maneuvered so as to come alongside one another and make fast, with all their heavy fenders supplemented by big cedar posts and dock-logs hung between them. The Kaministiquia sitting high in the water, was brought down to the McKee's level by flooding her ballast tanks. One was headed one way and the other the other, and the one kept her propeller turning over ahead and the other astern.

So they rolled the gale out, nosing or backing into it, and they came through safely. But all those oak and cedar fenders between them were chewed down into match splinters, and the wooden wale-strakes along their sides were scrubbed down flush with the steel plating.

MODEL LETTER THIS.

Loudon Wilson of Royal Oak, Mich. (good Republican hailing port!) writes:

"The Telegram certainly is a gem for those who love boats. The procuring of it each Monday has become the brightest spot in the week for me, and until I have located 'Schooner Days' there is always a bogey man whispering in my ear: 'There isn't in this time! Ha ! Ha! Hey! Ha ! Ha! But he is always wrong. Although you have never to my knowledge put the articles in book form, I feel that not to do so would be one of the outstanding crimes of our century.

"I can picture your keen enthusiasm as you watch the progress of the 'Schooner 'Nancy' model. After your years of research and study this will be the materialization of a dream."

Enough Mr. Wilson. Spare our blushes. Also accept our tribute of admiration for the marine pictures you paint and this model you yourself have completed of a typical lake schooner, showing everything from the centreboard to the fly at the mizzen truck. It is perfect in every detail and has personality as well. Only thing in it we have never seen in real life is the middle jumper-stay between the maintopmast head and the eyes of the foretopmast rigging. It is good engineering, better than the unneeded jumper stay above it, but while the latter was usual in three-masters we do not recall ever seeing the former. What do 'old-timers like Friend "Red" Macdonald think of it?

GUNBOAT VANISHES IN MORNING LIGHT

From Victor Lauriston of Chatham, novelist and historian-he, by the way used Goderich as the stage for his "The Twenty-first Buff"--comes the information that the "gunboat" uncovered by low water in the Thames at Chatham turns out definitely to be the Morning Light and, as this department's investigation last October indicated, no gunboat at all. He supplies the following from the Chatham News:

The Thames it appears, froze up early in 1880. Apparently they had the same sort of zeroward dip we had this week. Ice began to form on November 14. Captain H. E. Crow's boat was compelled to tie up at Cook's Dock, at the foot of the Pain Court road and there remained through the winter. The sudden freeze-up also caught the steam barge "Labelle" at the mouth of the river.

The "Morning Light," a small steamer owned by Frank Cartier and plying between Chatham and Detroit and Amherstburg was tied up at Northwood's flats, where a saw mill was then operated, a short distance west of the present Piggott's mill.

The river broke up on April 9, 1881. The northwest winds held the ice in the Thames and the river was jammed up to Prairie Siding. The result was one of the greatest floods in the history of the Thames. The Pain Court settlement was practically a lake, and on the Raleigh plains the water extended as far as the 18th and 19th side road.

The ice, brought down by the exceptionally high water, stove in the side of the "Morning Light" and she sank at her moorings. The craft was so badly damaged that it was not considered worth while to raise and repair her.