End of the Story - and of the 'Straubenzee': Schooner Days CCCXXV (335)

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YOU may wonder why you have been regaled, in these last two numbers, with the story of the Straubenzee and the load of sand which cost the lives of three ships and three sailors—a captain and a mate and a woman cook—before it could be brought from Cleveland and Port Hope. Well the reason for beginning the repetition of that tale, first told in The Telegram when it happened, Sept. 27th, 1909, was a very simple one. Someone, an old friend of Schooner Days, asked for it.

But, before the telling of it was finished, another strange link had been added to the queer chain of coincidences of the burning, the wreck, the fatal collision, the premonitions before the voyage, the dreams in Hamilton and Toronto when the ship was going down in Lake Erie; to say nothing of the apochryphal story of an impossible duel which was said to have blackened the sand with blood and curses a hundred years before.

The letter which brought on the repetition was this:

Sir:

In your article in The Telegram of January 8th, you referred to Captain Dolph Corson and his death when the schooner "Sir C. T. Van Straubenzee" was lost on Lake Erie.

It has occurred to me that this was the same Captain Corson whom I remember when I was a small boy, when he was in command of the old propellor "Lake Michigan," which called occasionally at Lakeport in the fall of the year for canned goods. Sometimes the call was made on a Sunday afternoon, which necessitated the pressing into service of a local gang of "dock wallopers," and in those far-off days when the Sabbath was really a day of rest there were murmurings in the village that the service in the little church should be so disturbed by the non-observance of the Lord's day, as it were, within its very shadows. How time marches on. . . .

Perhaps you may find it possible to give us the story of the "Straubenzee" and Captain Corson at some future date. If it has already been recorded and I unfortunately missed it, I am sure it would bear repeating.

Very truly yours,

W.D.D. McGlennon,

International Mercantile Marine Corporation.

When we got down to the goose-fleshy part where the drowned cook's daughter-in-law dreamed of the voice crying "There lies the boat that was wrecked!" the office-boy brought in a letter from an utter stranger, enclosing a photograph. This second letter said:

Sir:

I am sending you this photo of the side of a wooden ship. It was taken at Point Abino, Lake Erie, in Point Abino or Crystal Bay, about twelve miles from Buffalo.

I would be interested if you could tell me anything of this vessel, that is, her name, or how it became wrecked. Apparently it was blown on to the rocks at the Point, broke into three pieces, the two sides broke away from the bottom, and floated into the bay, where, at low water, one can easily see the three sections.

In the photo you can see then one side; apparently it was three masted.

I am a constant reader of "Schooner Days" and after reading your article on three masted schooners I thought of this one above mentioned.

Yours truly,

J. S. HATHERLEY,

323 Main St. west, Hamilton, Ont.

It is surprising how many requests come to Schooner Days for the identification of ships, chips, logs, hulks, bulks, wrecks and checks, with their full story—usually with fewer clues than Major Hoople shares with his trusty Jason.

But this one was different. At first glance the enclosed photograph looked like any other collection of planks, any wharf or any walk. Turned sideways the flat run of planking assumed the exact appearance of the port side of an old canal-sized schooner— and that schooner the Sir C. T. Straubenzee of St. Catharines, sunk in Lake Erie, twenty miles southwest of Point Abino, at three o'clock in the morning of Sept. 27th, 1909.

There were the twisted chainplates of an "Old Canaller" that had once had square topsails, the lighter plates for the topmast and topgallant shrouds showing abaft the heavier plates for the lower swifters. There were the bulwark stanchions showing where the planking had been torn away. There was the heavy coveringboard, strongly marked by the thick wale or fender-strake below it. And below that again, heavy planking, probably four inches thick, ran in long strakes, just as Louis Shickluna used to spike it on to the white oak frames.

Dozens of vessels have been wrecked on Point Abino, east of Port Colborne. A little snapshot, popping up in the nick of time, is not infallible evidence of the discovery there of the wreck of a vessel which vanished twenty-nine years ago, and Schooner Days will cheerfully accept any proof that the wreckage here depicted is not or cannot be that of the last Sir C. T. Van Straubenzee. But Schooner Days is of the present opinion that this is what the wreckage shown is.

Surprise had often been expressed that the Straubenzee sank so quickly and so completely. She was "light," that is, with a cleanswept hold and no ballast. The wood in her sides and bottom and deck and masts might have floated the weight of her anchors, chains and donkey engine. Of course she had been built thirty-five years, and the white oak in her, heavy when first adzed, had been soaking up water and adding weight all that time. Old oak chips often sink, and new oak timbers sometimes need pine logs to float them. Oak sometimes runs 70 pounds to the cubic foot, eight pounds heavier than water.

The Straubenzee went down like a stone, but it is quite probable that the southwest gales of nearly thirty years have pushed her shattered hull along the bottom until it has been tossed up on the strand in three sections, as the letter indicates. The Belle Sheridan's oaken corpse was flung on the beach at Weller's Bay in this way five years ago, fifty-three years after she struck and sank and was bedded in the sand, four hundred yards from shore.

Let us give Dolph Corson, master of the Straubenzee, the meed of dying like a hero, instead of accepting the steamboat allegation that he perished as the result of unauthorized signals. Had he run the Straubenzee into the City of Erie there is no telling how many passengers might have been drowned. Instead he deliberately swung her across the steamer's bows and took the blow himself, on the very quarterdeck where he stood. He was a good vesselman, and had been in steam himself. His cradle was one of the little wood scows that used to bring cordwood from the Bay of Quinte to fuel the locomotives and the passenger steamers in Toronto. The family grew up in the schooner Wanderer and the scow Sunshine, and the sons sailed the Starling and the Suffel and the Merritt and the Straubenzee, all schooners. Dolph was in them all at different times.

The little old propeller Lake Michigan was his first steam venture. Old Alex. McKay of Hamilton was doubtful about the daring Dolph makings the change from sail to steam, and pointed out that he knew little about steamboating.

"Maybe so," said Dolph, flicking his coal black whiskers, "but I'll blank dash soon find out about it." His steamboating was not altogether happy, but he was master of the Michigan, the Arabian, and perhaps for a short time, the Myles. The windship was, however, his home, and he went out of steam into the T. R. Merritt, when she was refitted with new topmasts and a new outfit, in 1900. He lost her that year above Oswego, in the tail end of the Galveston hurricane.

As exhibit Z comes a letter from Mr. Hugh Margesson which almost answers its own question as to the naming of the schooner Straubenzee, and results in the portrait of the old gentleman appearing here. The schooner, built in St. Catharines by Louis Shickluna, was named in compliment to a brother officer of Mr. Margesson's father, in the Indian Mutiny of over eighty years ago.

How did the schooner receive her somewhat resounding name, sometimes erroneously prolonged into "Sir Christopher Theodore Van Straubenzee" and often clipped by sailors to the "Benzy"? Louis Shickluna, who built her, was a native of Malta, a shipwright of the Royal Dockyard there, and proud of the fact. He called one of his schooners "Malta," another "Valetta," from the capital of the island. This one bore the name of a "native son" of Malta, who became governor of the island after serving his Queen and country in India and the Crimea. Sir Charles Thomas Van Straubenzee was born in Malta. The family is an old English one, having come over from Holland in the army of William Prince of Orange in 1688. It has served in many parts of the Empire and is well known in Ontario — particularly in Toronto, Kingston and St. Catharines. Col. Charles Turner Van Straubenzee, killed in the Great War after service in the South African War, formerly lived here at 12 Spadina Road. Mr. C. B. Van Straubenzee, manager of the Airo Insulation Co., Toronto, resides in Oakville.

THIS WAS THE SNAPSHOT

WRONG WITH THIS PICTURE.—It is just turned sideways to bring out what it is—at the expense of the bare-legged lads seem to stick out horizontally while their launch appears to do a nosedive. The picture is the enlarged photograph of the wreck of a schooner lying on her side in shallow water. Seen thus, as it was in Point Albino Bay last summer, the hull appears to be that of the Sir C. T. Van Straubenzee which nothing had been known since her disappearance twenty-nine years ago.