"No More Lake for Me": Schooner Days CLXVIII (168)

Being the Swan Song of the Schooner ARIADNE Forty-eight Years Ago

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IT is almost fifty years since the schooner Ariadne, of Toronto, was lost on Stony Point, below Oswego. The twenty-ninth of November, 1886, was the date. This Ariadne was a black, plumb-stemmed, two-masted schooner, with a white covering board and white beading. She was built at Port Burwell in 1871, and had been owned by Capt. Alex. Ure, of Toronto, who is still alive. He sold her to Capt. Sutherland McKay, who used to live at 12 Berryman street. Sutherland McKay sailed in the vessel as mate, his eldest son, Hughie. being the captain.

The Ariadne came across Lake Ontario from Oswego in the fall of the year, to load grain in the Bay of Quinte. She got some at Shannonville, and here she shipped Charlie Dean as an extra sailor for the return voyage. His young wife didn't want him to go, but freights and wages were good for these late fall trips, and he sailed in the Ariadne for Bath, in the Bay of Quinte, where she completed her 10,000-bushel cargo of barley. The other men in the crew were "Dutchy" Maurice Young, born in Germany. and Tommy Cox, both Toronto men, and Ed. Mulligan, of Greenbush, a brother of James Mulligan in G. E. Fraser's establishment in Picton.

The Ariadne sailed for Oswego from the old U.E. Loyalist town of Bath on Saturday, Nov. 26th. When she got well out in the lake she found a big sea running, and as she was loaded deep she stood back for shelter under South Bay Point. She made another start on Monday, but it began to freeze hard out in the lake and she iced up, so they ran back to South Bay Point again, and up to Prinyer's Cove, where Capt. James Peacock was lying with the Flora Carveth. Capt. Peacock, now live in Port Hope, well remembers parting with the Ariadne for the last time when the two vessels stood down to South Bay Point again, the Carveth bound to the westward, the Ariadne to the southward.

"That Tuesday morning," said Tommy Cox afterwards, "was beautiful, and with this third start we figured we were going to have a fine run at last and be in Oswego by night.

"Twenty miles out in the lake it clouded over and came on to snow very thick. We held on, and at 6 o'clock that night sighted Oswego light, for one glimpse. We were below the harbor, with the wind fresh from the westward and snow still falling.

"We stood off and on, and at 8 the light showed up again. It was still to windward of us. The sea was making up for the wind had freshened to a gale. We stood in so close that we could hear the tugs whistling for us, from their snug berths in the river, and saw rockets shot up by the life saving crew to guide us in. We even saw the breakwater, but couldn't make the entrance that tack, so came in stays and stood out. We tacked again, stood in, and found we had lost ground, for the sea made up so very rapidly. Then we tacked again, and in trying to come around the flying jib flogged itself out of the boltropes. She wouldn't stay for us, and we had to wear her around, losing more ground.

"She was loggy and steering wild, and a glaze of ice was on everything. We heated the sounding rod red hot in the cabin stove and got it down the pump well, and it showed three feet of water in the hold. No wonder she steered wild. The seas were breaking over her, and we had to knock out her bulwarks with axes and handspikes to let the water run off the deck and keep her from swamping.

"We gave up hope of reaching Oswego and ran her for the Stony Passage, to get what shelter we could, by picking up the lee of Stony Island and the Galloo. Both pumps were frozen solid in the wells and we couldn't thaw them. The seas were breaking over her all the time.

"With all that water in her there was no holding her with the wheel, and she jibed several times, in spite of all we could do. The first time she jibed she carried away the mainboom, and the mainsail was blown to ribbons. Then she jibed again, and came back, and jibed again, and the fore gaff went this time.

"This left her helpless, for there was nothing but the staysail steady her. We were so far down the lake by now that we could see Stony Point light, on the mainland. She was so full of water, on deck and below, that it was only a matter of a few minutes before she would go down under our feet.

"'We're done for, Hughie, I guess!' yelled old Capt. McKay to his son, grinding away at the wheel.

"'Courage, dad, we'll do our best, and we're all in God's hands!' the skipper yelled back.

"So he tried to steer her for the point to run her ashore before she sank. At half-past two in the morning we felt the first bump, and though it meant shipwreck, everybody was glad.

"But where she struck was a reef called Drowned Island, three-quarters of a mile from the Stony Point shore, and here she pounded for two hours. We all ran into the cabin and closed the slide and doors and battened them tight, but every now and then a sea bigger than the others would spout in through the shutters of the windows and the crack of the door.

"At half-past five, while it was still pitch dark, she pounded off the reef. She was still afloat and drove along before the seas, bumping the bottom with every plunge, until she brought up with a bang two hundred yards from the beach.

"Then the big seas, driving down Lake Ontario for two hundred miles, whacked her like a flail. A bigger brute than all the others ripped the roof off the cabin and washed us out. This was at 6 a.m., for I saw the cabin clock stop with the flood of freezing water.

"We all caught at the rigging of the mainmast, and climbed the slippery shrouds. Every rope was solid in three inches of ice, and our clothes had all been wet through since 8 o'clock the night before. With the spray flying over us in sheets, no matter how high we climbed, we were soon iced over as heavily as the ropes.

"It was still dark. We had not been in the main rigging long before the mast itself fell, carrying us all with it. It fell against the foremast. None of us was killed in the fall, and we all managed to reach the fore rigging, after untangling ourselves from the frozen ratlines and main shrouds.

"All except the young captain. He was only twenty-three. He said: 'Boys, I'm going to try for the cabin again to see if I can't get the stove going and make us some coffee.' Perhaps he was hurt in the fall, for he stayed aft, clinging to a stanchion, while the rest of us climbed the rigging of the foremast. I turned and saw a sea wash him from his hold. He grabbed a plank as he went over, but sank, and the plank washed away by itself. His father called in agony, 'Hughie! my boy! My boy!'

"The Ariadne started to break up where the seas had made a hole in her by washing away the cabin top and cabin sides.

"The foremast began to sway, and we were afraid it would go next and kill us or drown us in its fall so we clambered down, man by man. By this time it was broad daylight. The Ariadne's stern was all gone, and her deck was under water as far as the foremast. About ten feet of deck and the bulwarks of the bow was all that was above water, and even this was swept from time to time by the seas. The shore was plain, covered with ice and snow, with wreckage, none of it bigger than cordwood sticks, bobbing up and down in the ice.

"On the catheads and anchors and monkey-rail of the bulwarks the five of us huddled together, to keep as high as we could out of the seas. Boys starting out for school that wintry morning sighted the wreck and ran and told the neighbors. Farmers mounted their horses and galloped to the lifesaving station, six miles away. But we knew nothing of this. We could see folks gathering on the beach, for it was quite close, and they kept waving to us, but we could not hear what they shouted against the screaming wind.

"Charlie Dean froze to death on the rail. He murmured, 'Nellie, Nellie,' the name of his wife in Shannonville and 'God have mercy on my soul!' and fell in a solid lump to the deck. His body froze fast there. We could not get him up. This was at eight o'clock in the morning.

"Then old Capt. McKay, tho skipper's father, gave up. He was sixty-eight and had sailed for fifty years. He died hard. It was the worst sight I have ever seen. The loss of his son told on him. He bewailed that. Then he cried that he was going blind and could not see anything and that he was deaf, and could hear nothing, and he kept raving and trying to make himself hear himself shouting. Then he was silent, for a while, and slumped to the deck. He turned his face up to us, sightlessly, and said: 'There's my wife and the two young ones left in Toronto. Tell my poor wife how I died. I'm thinking of you, Lizzie, dear, with my last thoughts.' After that he never made a sound.

"Old Capt. McKay died about ten in the forenoon. This left only Mulligan, Young, and me. We were so numb now with cold and wet and hunger that we could not speak to one another. I kept thinking about how foolish it was for me to have been saved from the E. W. Rathbun, only a month ago, to be drowned or frozen to death here. I had shipped in the schooner Rathbun, of Napanee, in October, to help take her to Goderich. The insurance on midnight. and before 1 o'clock in the morning she hit the Goderich breakwater coming in, and by the time the lifesaving crew got to us she was a total wreck.

"Mulligan, the Greenbush boy, started to go as the day wore past noon. He kept making a fight for life, but we couldn't help him. We couldn't budge from our places on the rail. We watched the crowd of two hundred men and women and children waving to us from the beach. At last they all pointed one way, and I could see the lifeboat coming.

"By this time it was almost three. The lifeboat had been loaded on a wagon and dragged over winter roads, full of ruts and snowdrifts, and then launched at the nearest smooth spot. A dozen men waded out to push her off.

"They had a terrible time getting out to us against the seas. The boat seemed to stand on end. Then when they got alongside there seemed more likelihood of it being smashed and the lifesavers drowned than of their being able to take us off.

"Mulligan's face and hands and feet were frozen purple under the ice that covered them. He was insensible, and hung in a frozen mass across the cap of the monkey-rail. The lifeboat was dashed against the round of the schooner's bow with a crash that seemed to crack her like an egg. But the crew grabbed Mulligan ere she settled in the trough. I thought they would pull for the shore if they could keep afloat, but no, those Yankees were game. They bailed and let her bang the bow again, and this time they grabbed me. Then they lurched off and crashed on.to the wreck again. and grabbed "Dutchy" Young.

"'Any more?' yelled the coxswain.

"'All drowned or dead,' I mumbled, and off the lifeboat shot for shore. Men rushed out up to their necks in the icy water, and dragged her bodily up the beach, with all of us inside. The boat was so smashed that the water poured out of her like from a dipped basket when she was run up.

"They had a sleigh loaded with robes and blankets waiting for us, and they rushed us to the nearest farm house, and stripped us in front of a red hot stove. It hurt as much to have the heat on us as it had to have the ice. Mulligan was all but dead. Ten minutes more and he would have been gone. It was hours afterwards when Dr. Chapman, of Belleville, who happened to be on the island, brought him to. He thought he was still on the Ariadne; knew nothing of his rescue. His hands and face were badly frozen, but his feet were the worst.

"I couldn't stop shivering, nor could "Dutchy" Young, and we ached as though beaten in every bone. But a hot supper made great difference. "Dutchy" said he would sail again. But no more lake for me, if I can get a living any-where else."

THE END OF THE ROAD FOR THE LAKER—Schooner Moonlight and consort, Henry A. Kent, wrecked in the Chocalay River, Marquette, with the steam barge Charles J. Kershaw, which was towing them. The year was 1886, the time of the Ariadne tragedy.