Enchanted Sand's Third Victim: Schooner Days CCCXXXIV (334)

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PERHAPS you remember—and no one cares if you don't—that last week we began the tale of the hoodooed cargo of moulding sand, which some babbler boasted was dank with the blood of an old-time duel.

A steam barge chartered to carry it from Cleveland to Port Hope, was burned, and the schooner Emily B. Maxwell of Port Hope, which took up the charter, was wrecked, and the Sir C. T. Van Straubenzee sailed from Toronto to get it. We left her walking up Lake Erie on a quiet night—Sunday, Sept. 26th, 1909—while Mrs. Corson, wife of the captain, was so distressed by dreams in her Hamilton home that she became violently ill; and Mrs. John Connolly, daughter-in-law of the Straubenzee's cook, woke with a start in her Toronto home as the clock struck three, the words ringing in her ears: "There lies the boat that was wrecked."

On Lake Erie it was a lovely night, clear and cool, with a multitude of stars, and a light, steady breeze. The Straubenzee's speed rose from three knots to five, from five to six, and by three o'clock Monday morning in the "middle watch" she was walking through the white starlight at seven or eight miles an hour. It was Mate Jimmy McCallum's watch from midnight, Capt. Dolph Corson was asleep in his stateroom, Mrs. Connolly was asleep in hers on the opposite side of the cabin. Two of the crew were on deck, one at the easy wheel, the other on the lookout, walking to keep warm. The sidelights were burning brightly and all was well.

The lights of a passenger steamer twinkled miles ahead. That, Mate McCallum knew, would be the City of Erie, on her regular run. Her passengers would have come on board at Cleveland that evening and would breakfast in Buffalo. "We're doing well," he ruminated "to meet her this far up the lake. This is a dandy breeze for us."

The courses, of the two vessels would never quite coincide, because Buffalo was a little south of Port Colborne, where the Straubenzee had entered Lake Erie. But when he could make out the steamer's green starboard light as well as her red port one he knew she was coming head-on and would pass uncomfortably close if she passed at all. So he did what most - schooner men would do-burnt a flare.

A wad of oakum seized on the end of a sounding rod and dipped in coal oil, was kept handy by the donkey engine for just such emergencies. Thrust into the red coals of the firebed it burst into flame and was waved overhead, shedding a trail of sparks. They should be able to see the schooner in the moonlight anyway, but perhaps not her red and green sailing lights. The flare would surely wake 'em up.

But the steamer showed no sign of altering her course. Jimmy McCallum called to the man at the wheel and burned another flare. The shouting and the banging of the donkey fire-door brought Dolph Corson from his room on the run.

Perhaps, in those last seconds of his sixty-six years Dolph Corson was panicked, for the order he gave seemed madness. Perhaps, and I like to think this was the explanation of it; he was a quick-thinking hero. Had the Straubenzee hit the steamer end-on, like the Augusta did the Lady Elgin, hundreds of passengers might have drowned. But if the Straubenzee could take the blow on the quarter, the worst that could happen would be that she would go down under Dolph's feet. The passengers would be safe.

"Up, hard up, for God's sake, hard up!" he yelled to the helmsman.

The Straubenzee swung off to the southward, across the steamer's bows. The long spearjike jibboom, with its four triangles of sail, ranged across the steamer's tall, straight, cleaving stem with its plumes of spray. The foremast and mainmast with their swelling sails came clear. The mizzen came in line with it. Ten seconds more and the schooner would be safe across. But "crash!" The steel plates bit into the white oak Louis Shickluna had adzed thirty-five years before, and Lake Erie rushed into the empty Straubenzee like a snowslide filling a trench. Mrs. Connolly was drowned in her bed. Capt. Corson and Mate McCallum were either killed by splintering timbers and flying blocks, or dragged down with the ship, as she went stern first.

Tommy Garner was well forward. He jumped info the fore-rigging, almost instinctively. As he climbed he had to go over the lantern box, and he noticed the green starboard light still burning under his feet. The Straubenzee lay over like a worn-out warrior and went down suddenly, so suddenly those on the steamer hardly saw her before she had disappeared. She must have settled on her side, for nothing of her tall spars showed, although Lake Erie is shallow here, as it is everywhere. She went down in sixty feet of water. She measured double that from keel to truck.

The steamer's paddles thrashed and churned and came to a stop. Two lifeboats creaked down from their davits and bewildered deckhands got into them and pulled about awkwardly in the strangely empty lake. Very little floated from the Straubenzee, an odd fender or capstan bar, a hatchcover, and some of the gratings for the coils of gear. After a long search the boats picked up two men, on different bits of wreckage, Tommy Garner on one, Tom Hollis on the other. They were speechless with the chill of the water and the struggle to keep themselves, afloat. It was Pilot Pickle who had been at the City of Erie's wheel, McAlpine, her captain, had turned her over to him. The excuse at the inquiry afterwards was that the schooner was not showing "regulation lights," when the fact was that she had been showing the two regulation red and green lights, and had burned emergency flares when these regulations lights were ignored. But the court acquitted the steamer.

The City of Erie waited on the scene of her slaughter till daylight, and finding nothing more on the smooth lake, went on to Buffalo. Even after she had docked the two survivors were too numbed and exhausted to make plain their own names or the name of their vessel, and the City of Erie thought she had run down some schooner with a name like "Ecclestone." In fact that name was carried in Monday's press despatches.

This third curse upon the reluctant sand produced its further quota of headshakings and I-told-you-so's along the waterfront, and some said they wouldn't go after that sand if it was gold dust and they could have it for the loading. But the captain of the Steambarge Ida E. was not one of these. "They come in threes, don't they?" was his answer when the shellbacks continued to talk about haunts, hoodooes and hexes. He had no hesitation about the Ida E. being the fourth and immune. He took her up to Cleveland, loaded the sand, and brought it down to Port Hope without missing a meal; and for all I know he sang happily in a bathtub moulded from that sand every morning of his life forever afterwards.

THE SIR C.T. VAN STAUBENZEE Cracking Down