Our Son: Schooner Days DCXLIII (643)

by C. H. J. Snider

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Perhaps Capt. Harry Kelley, of Milan, O., was an orphan, for before the American Civil War broke out he had made good in the thriving commerce of the Great Lakes, and when Wm. Jones built him a fine big schooner at Black River on Lake Erie, in 1862, he christened her the Orphan Boy. She was big for her time, 150 feet long, and insurable for $17,000 when new. She prospered like her owner, and twelve years later Capt. Kelley had a still larger schooner built at Black River, one 182 feet long, 35 feet beam, and from 14 to 16 feet deep in the hold, depending on where she was measured. She was a three-master, with several square sails in her foremast, and as she measured 720 tons register she was capable of carrying 1,500 or 1,600 tons deadweight; an enormous lake cargo in 1875, and then too much to get through the Welland Canal readily.

While the Orphan Boy was still earning dividends and her successor was yet on the stocks, a heavy blow fell on Capt. Kelley. His first born son, for whom he had destined this paragon of the lakes, was drowned. It was a disaster to the parents. The mother was heart-broken. The father, rallying to the support of his wife, went on with the launching preparations for the new vessel. When she plunged into Black River with a mighty splash, as he ripped the covering Stars and Stripes from her sternboard, he pointed to the newly painted name, which the flag had concealed. It read: Our Son.

"She's the finest monument any sailor ever had," said he, kissing away the tears that streamed down his wife's cheeks. "Harry would be proud of her."

The Son prospered like the father's Orphan Boy. Capt. Kelley sold her in '79. He had already sold the Orphan. She went down with all hands in Lake Michigan afterwards, drowning twelve men. The Son had several owners, towing behind the steamer J. H. Outhwaite with the barge Genoa, in the 90s, and going later on the Milwaukee register under the ownership of Winand Schlosser.

In 1923 Capt. Fred Nelson, one of the last of the schoonermen, who had taken the Alice of Milwaukee to salt water in 1918 and was shelled for his pains at Mobile, got hold of Our Son. The reason the Alice was shelled was that the harbor guard had never seen a lake schooner in his life and thought she was a German because she was not flying a coastguard flag. That was better than Pearl Harbor, but not healthy for the helmsman.

Capt. Nelson came back to the lakes and took over the task of rejuvenating the 48-year-old half-brother of the long lost Orphan Boy. Our Son's lofty spars had been cut down to very little to reduce windage (and wage bills) in the long years while she was towing, but Capt. Nelson got three good-sized barge sails for her remains of masts and a pair of jibs and a little spike bowsprit in place of the sixty-foot nose pole she formerly carried.

Being a practical man he managed a stubby topmast for the foremast, and got a short yard across, so that he could spread that piece of canvas dear to every schooner man on the lakes, the triangular raffee, so useful in turning the vessel's head the way she should go. Once Our Son had square double topsails and a topgallantsail where the little raffee grew.

Although her original sixteen sails had been reduced now to six smaller ones, Our Son was once more manageable under canvas. She was not independent of tugs for docking purposes, no big schooner was, but she was no longer condemned to the towbarge trade, to be dragged all over the lakes at the end of a hawser by some steam barge. For seven seasons Capt. Nelson sailed her with tremendous cargoes of spruce and balsam pulpwood from Georgian Bay for the Muskegon Paper Co.'s plant on Lake Michigan.

Poor old Son, he (or she, for she was still a ship) looked anything like the father's and mother's consolation of 1875. She had been built up forward and aft like a Spanish galleon, to make room in the hold for cargo and keep her crew from getting rheumatism in their bunks, for as she grew old she grew increasingly damp downstairs, though pulpwood cargoes guaranteed that she would continue to float. She had drooped so much at the ends that the height of these fore and after castles was not very noticeable. A sort of turret or lookout tower was built so that the man at the wheel could see over the high cabin top. When they took the bowsprit out of her to save tangling with the towline they also took away her fine curving stemhead and cutwater, and left her snubnosed and vacant-faced as a hippopotamus. Her attenuated rig was smart and sailor-like and when it blew hard enough it could drive her at her old speed of twelve knots. But when it blew that hard Our Son hastened for shelter, hoping to arrive all in one piece. And when it wasn't blowing that hard the small area of her sail plan made her creep like a snail.

The end had to come soon, and it came Sept. 26th, 1930, on Lake Michigan. It blew fresh, and before the ship could reach shelter Our Son was completely waterlogged and uncontrollable. Capt. Nelson, now eighteen years older than his ancient vessel, did all that man could do to save her and wanted to stick to her to the last, but his crew had other ideas, and the Stars and Stripes, which had revealed her name fifty-five years before, now mounted to half mast, Union down, in token of distress. Despite the enormous sea running a big steel steamer, a self-unloader, put down a lifeboat and took crew and captain off. By chance her name was the same as his, Nelson, but William instead of Fred.

It was an heroic and critical rescue, for just then the whole bottom fell out of the wreck, heavy with half a century's submersion, and the upper works blew ashore near Sheboygan, Michigan.

That was the end of Our Son.

Last schooner in active service on the Great Lakes was the J. T. Wing, a three-masted tern schooner, as they are called in the East, brought up from salt water a few months before the Son was lost and engaged in pulp and lumber carrying on Lake Huron up to 1938 or so, when she was taken over for training purposes by some of the U.S. services. Not having been modeled, built or rigged for fresh water, she could not properly be called a lake schooner. The last real laker was the Lyman M. Davis, burned at Sunnyside in 1934 after sixty seasons' active service ....

It is the fashion to sniff at lake craft as short lived, because built of green timber. Remains believed to be those of La Salle's Griffon, examined in Mississagi Straits in 1930, were still strong enough to hold their iron fastenings. The Griffon was lost in her first year but her wood—if it is hers—has lasted nearly three centuries. Vessels like the Davis and Our Son were working fifty and sixty years after they were launched. We hear much of the preservative effects of salt water, and "Schooner Days" saw in the Danish West Indies the ex-privateer schooner Vigiland, when she was 110 years old, carrying mules to Puerto Rico. They said she had been salted by the cargoes she used to run from Turks Island to Denmark. And that same year, 1920, in Bermuda, we saw the cedar schooner Gleaner, which had been a mail packet, one hundred years before, according to the customs entries of Hamilton, Bermuda.

But in general salt water vessels do not last as long as the hardwood ones built on the lakes, where fifty and sixty years service was not uncommon. The Bluenose, a strongly built fisherman, is still afloat, but not fishing. She is twenty-four years old. She is considered a venerable patriarch. It is doubtful if any of the fishermen built in her year, 1920, are now alive. The life of a good fishing schooner is placed at 10 years. After that they are supposed to be good enough for the coasting trade for 10 years more. Then—if not sooner—curtains.