Double-Belted the Globe for Unknown Erie Grave: Schooner Days CLXXXI (181)

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WHEN a November gale strewed the E. P. Dorr all along the lake shore between Port Maitland and Fort Erie, fresh water quenched a fiery spirit whom Yellow Jack and African Fever and all the salt of the seven seas had failed to daunt.

This was Donald MacArthur of Collingwood, one of the seven drowned with the Dorr. She went under with all hands; just where, no man ever found out. Her cargo of oak plank, white wood and sycamore columns, was strewn for forty miles. With the exception of a piece of her mainmast, a hawser box and name board, which came in at Point Abino, the scattered cargo was all that was ever seen of the Dorr, after Capt. Woods, of the schooner W. H. Oades, lost sight of her in the grey of the November twilight one Sunday. The two vessels had left Toledo in company on a Sunday, Nov. 13th is said to have been the date. They may have had a slow passage down Lake Erie, for apparently the Dorr was lost a week later. When Woods last glimpsed the Dorr she was wallowing in the sea and making bad weather of weather that was already decidedly worse. She was very heavily laden.

The Dorr, built by J. W. Banta, at Chicago, 1861, and repaired or rebuilt four times afterwards, was a two-masted schooner, registering 215 tons. She was 120 feet long, 26 feet one inch beam and 10 feet deep in the hold. She rated A2 1/2 and was valued at $6,900. In that gale in which she was lost, the fine new steamer, John B. Lyon, rolled out both her smokestacks on Lake Michigan, and the schooner John M. Hutchinson, which she had in tow, lost all her sails. The passenger propeller Toledo, from Green Bay to Buffalo, also rolled her smokestack out, and the schooner Helvetia reached Milwaukee with six inches of ice all over her. Her staysail and squaresail were frozen so stiff, that the tug Mason had to pump boiling water on them from a hose before they could be lowered. The steam barge Bell Cross, bound from Buffalo to Bay City, had to lie at anchor under Long Point for nine days, and was two weeks on the voyage.

The E. P. Dorr was owned by Capt. Peter Dufresne (or Dufrane) Jr., an Oswego man who had recently moved to Buffalo. She carried down with her her master and owner, his mate, James Renaud of St. Catharines, and a crew of four men and a woman cook. The other members of the Dorr's crew were; James Henderson of Kingston, Ont.; James Blakely, of Detroit, Michael Rooney of Toledo, and Mrs. Minnie Brainard of Detroit, cook.

Donald MacArthur was one of the MacArthurs who came from the Island of Islay, in Scotland, and farmed on the tenth line of Nottawasaga Township, near Collingwood. Donald, the youngest son, had a full share of the salt water blood of his sea-going father. In 1869, five years after the family had settled down to Simcoe County fanning, young Donald ran off to sea. The first his folk heard of him, he was on a timber vessel in Montreal, bound for Liverpool. In Glasgow, two months later, he met a boy with whom he had gone to school in Islay, and they both shipped on the barque Mona, bound for Callao, in Peru.

Capt. Collins of the Mona was a good Christian, and instead of hazing the runaway youngster, according to the best nautical traditions of Hollywood, he found where his home was and promised to put him on board a vessel bound to Canada when they returned to Glasgow. But after eighteen months trading in the southern ocean the Mona was run down by a steamer, and Donald MacArthur and all the others, after a close call from drowning, were landed in Bahia, in Brazil, with nothing but the clothes they wore.

Donald reached New York, penniless, and beat his way homeward as far as Thorold, where he got hard and fast aground. Capt. James McCannel, a neighbor, was then at the commencement of his lakefaring. When joining a vessel in Thorold in May, 1871, he tried to find Donald there, but learned he had shipped in another craft going to Montreal.

From Montreal MacArthur made a voyage to Glasgow. Here he joined the ship Ancilla, bound for the west coast of Africa. Most of the crew were shanghaied, waking up on board with the ship at sea, and learning that they were signed on for three years' service in a white man's graveyard.

As soon as they arrived the dreaded African fever broke out on board. Several men had died when Donald was stricken. He recovered, but saw too many going overboard sewn up in hammocks and never coming back. There was a ship lying near the Ancilla, homeward bound but shorthanded, for the fever had decimated her crew also. Donald got a word with her captain, and in the dead of night he slipped down a rope over the Ancilla's side, dropped into a waiting boat, and joined the outward-bounder. She sailed for Glasgow before he was discovered. Of the thirty-six men shipped or shanghaied aboard the Ancilla, only ten came back to the Clyde. Twenty-six died of the African fever.

Next Donald joined a clipper ship in Glasgow, and sailed for Ceylon, and came back with a cargo of tea. Then out of Glasgow he made his only venture in steam. He shipped as boatswain in a steamer for Calcutta. When the voyage was completed, he went back to sails. He joined the full-rigged ship Morning Light, and again went out from Glasgow to Calcutta, and back to Belfast. Crossing to Glasgow again, he sailed for Havana aboard the Scotch ship John Ure, with a cargo for Cuba.

The yellow fever was as bad in Havana as the black had been on the Guinea coast, but Donald did not get it. From Havana the Ure sailed in ballast to Pensacola to load timber. On arrival in Florida the ship was quarantined for ten days, and fumigated with her hatches sealed. When the crew took off the hatches to commence loading, they were over an hour carrying out dead rats.

From Pensacola he sailed for Belfast with the timber cargo, and there took his discharge. He came back as a passenger in the steamer Bolivia for New York, and then came by rail home to the farm near Collingwood. He arrived in October, 1879, after having been away at sea for ten years and furrowing fifty thousand miles of salt water, twice the distance around the earth's circumference.

After a winter in the lumber woods near Menominee, Michigan, he joined the Canadian schooner Jane McLeod, Capt. Finlay McPherson, of Goderich, at Collingwood. In the fall of the year this vessel was wrecked at the lower end of Lake Ontario. The cook was drowned, the others escaped in wet shirts, and Donald went back to the lumber woods. In the spring he joined a vessel in Sheboygan, and sailed in her all season until she laid up at Detroit, early in the fall.

Thriftily desirous of making a few more dollars before going back to the lumber woods, Donald joined the schooner E. P. Dorr, which was lying in Toledo, laden for Buffalo, and so sealed his doom.

OWEN SOUND'S WATERFRONT AT FITTING-OUT TIME FIFTY YEARS AGO.

Through the kindness of Mr. J. P. Weagant, of Owen Sound, here are two photographs of fitting out time on the waterfront of that town about 1882 or later.

Who in Owen Sound or elsewhere can identify these long lost ships?

Starting on the extreme left is a little schooner with a squaresail yard and "of Montreal" faintly discernible on her sternboard. Many of the earlier lake schooners hailed from Montreal when that was the port of registry for Upper Canada, before 1867. Immediately ahead of this little vessel is the old wooden propeller Scotia. Across the slip from her is the black-hulled schooner Garibaldi of Hamilton. The fine big light-colored schooner astern of her has, in the photograph, "Sary Jane" in white letters on the starboard bow. Something about the way this is painted gives the impression this was not the vessel's actual name. In the second half of the picture is a group of steamers, with a smart looking little black one in the foreground, and, across the slip from them, a group of sailing craft, all unnamed. Astern of the nearest fore-and-after, which has just bent her staysail, is a large black three-masted barge, without topmasts, a cut-down schooner. Beside her lies a little vessel which might be the Royal of Sault Ste. Marie, and astern of the big black barge is another fore-and-after with a squaresail yard, and a three-master which has her fore gafftopsail bent. Around the elevator cluster a number of large lake steamers—possibly C.P. R. boats.