9 at Anchor in Israel's Rest: Schooner Days DCXV (615)

by C. H. J. Snider

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THAT was a memorable gale which burst upon Lake Ontario sixty-three years ago to-night. All the evergreens of eighty who were sailing at that time can tell where they were and how they came through that particular "breeze of wind," although a thousand other tempests have left not a rack behind in their crowded memories.

A score of schooners were in sight of one another off Oak Orchard on the south shore of Lake Ontario in the lurid twilight of Saturday, Nov. 6th, 1880. By morning every one of them had suffered, thirty-three men and women were drowned, five vessels were complete wrecks, eight more were stranded, five or six others limped into port minus sails, gaffs, booms and gear.

The fury of the sea running on Lake Ontario that night was such that the staunch schooner Bermuda was smashed on the beach at Port Granby into pieces so small that the wooden shell of her carpenter's smoothing plane was the largest fragment left of her.

This is written on a plank of the schooner Belle Sheridan, lost with six hands, at Weller's Bay. The tragedy of the McSherry family, one saved, four drowned, in her crew of seven, has often been related, and should be. But there were other hecatombs to the angry lake more extensive, if less often told.

SIXTEEN souls went out in the blackness which swallowed the steamer Zealand. That was the number of her crew when she left Toronto, and not one of them was again seen alive. She was a Hamilton vessel, but the only Hamilton men known to be in her were the captain, Edward Zealand, and the carpenter, Thomas Armstrong. There was a Miss Frances of Montreal on board, a stewardess. The two engineers, Thomas Dewey and David Taylor, came from St. Catharines. The mates were Frenchmen, Joseph Mullette of Lachine and Danos Lejic of Cornwall. She had two deckhands named George, and a third, Andrew Chestnut, came from Barriefield. The other six sailors and firemen are unknown.

It had been a sulky fall day, that first Saturday in November, 1880, a weather breeder. The wind was light and fitful from the east and south. In the grey of the early twilight Captain Edward Zealand, in the high-cocked wheelhouse of the propeller which bore his father's name, gave the bells to the engine room at the opposite end of the bluff-bowed wooden ship, and she slowly backed away from the dark red northern elevator which used to stand near the foot of old Brock street. She had wheat in her hold, with flour in her tween decks, all consigned by L. Coffee and Co., Toronto, to Montreal.

Capt. Zealand worried less about the threatening weather than about the low water in the harbor. Eleven feet was as deep as we could dredge then, to bedrock, and there had been less than that in the channel till this easterly cant to the wind seemed to raise it. This allowed the large barquentine T. C. Street, which was very deeply laden, to get out, and the Zealand followed.

Forty years lakefaring had taught her captain to be prepared at all times, and take his weather as it came. He had been sailing since he was ten, and he was now fifty-three. At ten he had clung to a stranded wreck with his father off Port Credit in the year of the Mackenzie Rebellion, 1837. At twelve he had sailed one of his father's schooners — not as cook's helper or cabin boy, but in command.

His father, now dead — killed by a maddened cow in Hamilton, after escaping roundshot in Nelson's fleets, perhaps at Trafalgar, and fighting in Yeo's squadron, the Slippery Six, on Lake Ontario, and cutting out the Caroline from before the rebels' camp at Navy Island — he had been a grand sailor, of the old and quickly adaptable school. Born before the first steamboat, he had come to the Great Lakes in the War of 1812, built the steamer Constitution in 1834, run the schooner Aurora all through the winter of 1836 between Toronto and Hamilton, won the race to be the first through the Burlington Canal when it was completed, and built up a little fleet ail of his own. Their names showed him the man of goodwill that he was— Friendship, Hope, Amity, Concord, Royalist. He was a royalist and a loyalist, and had five sons, ship captains.

Eddie, greying now, felt pride in being fit for his father's and brothers' company. They wouldn't wait for weather, while they had water to float a staunch steamer, like this one bearing the family name. She had been rebuilt, five years before, from the burned City of Chatham. If that "barque" the Street, could go, the propeller would go. And beat her down the lake, too. The Street was a good vessel, and had crossed the Atlantic. Well, his old father crossed the Atlantic, and his brother William had crossed the Atlantic, taking over just such another "barque" as the Street, Muir Brothers' Niagara, from Port Dalhousie to Scotland, and bringing her back, too, loaded with pig iron.

The Zealand was a good vessel, and his all was in her, and he would have her in Montreal before the Street got to Kingston. Even if he didn't like this dropping barometer, the fitful puffs, flat calms, and short flaws of this November evening.

The Street never got to Kingston. By midnight the wind was blowing at hurricane force. Before morning the Street was lying along the stony beach above Wellington, breaking up, her crew in the rigging.

And the Zealand?

Her lights were seen from Port Hope in the gale. She was hauling out into the lake, to weather the west coast of Prince Edward. In the frightful sea offshore know Cobourg crossing what fishermen call the Badgely Shoals she may have shifted her cargo or shipped so much water as to flood her firehold. She broke up and sank, spewing her cargo and upper works all over the lake.

THE year following, Presqu'isle fishermen were amazed by a flour barrel bobbing up ahead of them when they were homeward bound from a set. The barrel war, branded Garden City. That was in the Zealand's cargo. It had been under water for a long time, for it was covered with marine growth, but the flour within was dry and sweet It had sealed itself in the barrel when the water formed a paste with the outer shell.

The fishermen were so excited by their find that they forgot to buoy the spot, and it was so far off shore that their bearings could not bring them back to the exact place where lay the remains of the Zealand. It was probably the "Mulcaster patch" of the charts, five miles offshore from Lakeport, where there is only six fathoms over the rocks and twenty-three fathoms beside them.

The Mary Taylor of Cobourg (later renamed Loretta Rooney) reported on Nov. 9th at Oswego that she had passed through a lot of flour floating in the lake, branded Garden City, and that among it was an empty yawlboat with the Zealand's name on it. This wreckage was fifteen miles southeast of Point Peter, having been carried fifty miles by the scend of the seas and the scourging wind.

The schooner Maria Annette reached Port Hope Nov. 9th and reported passing through the upper works of a steamer with door frames and cabin material at the same spot in mid-lake. The Zealand's name was on a hawser box among the wreckage.

The schooner Guiding Star, Capt. Wm. Griffin, reached Port Dalhousie the same day, from Oswego, and had passed through pieces of white railing, cabin bulkheads, bedclothes, a watertank, and barrels of flour marked T. W. Tyson & Son, Clarksburg, Ont. The Guiding Star passed the schooner Ariel hove to and picking up flour barrels.

In Weller's Bay, where the Belle Sheridan was wrecked, Capt. Corson of the schooner Nellie Sherwood picked up one of the Zealand's gangways. This was forty miles from the other wreckage, and twenty miles from where she went down. An empty chest, with the lid torn off it, but bearing the name of the Zealand, was picked up by a Prince Edward County fisherman near Wellington, and somewhere nearby, and north of Wicked Point, were found way-bills of the Zealand and about $75 in bills. The "empty chest" may have been the captain's desk.

A sailor in a Zealand lifebelt was washed up at Point Peter at the southwest corner of Prince Edward County on November 19th. He was buried, it is believed, in the little farm cemetery now known as Israel's Rest, or Nine Stone Field, north of Point Peter lighthouse, where sleep a few of the pioneers and some other, unidentified victims of shipwrecks. There are nine beach stones in this plot, all unmarked, and there was, before the unknown mariners made this their last port, a stone with the name ISRAEL FERGUSON, probably the first here to anchor. The farm belonged to W. R. Wright seventy years ago. When it was cleared for an anti-aircraft battery for this war some grading and leveling was done and trees and fences removed, but the shrubs guarding the plot were left, and a simple cross was erected by the Royal Canadian Air Force. It is the only visible marking, for the gravestones from the beach are sunken amid a tangle of grass and few folks even in nearby Cherry Valley know that here was once a cemetery.

POINT PETER LIGHT, at the southwest corner of Prince Edward County, and the forgotten plot above is where sleep nine unknown victims of Lake Ontario's rage, and some of the pioneers of Prince Edward.

THE BELLE SHERIDAN of Toronto (her name misspelled in the old Gibbon's crayon drawing here reproduced) was lost with Capt. James McSherry, his sons John, Tom and Eddie, his mate John Hamilton, and another sailor, Patrick Boyd, sixty-three years ago to-morrow. Twenty-seven others were lost in the Great Gale of 180.