"Sunken Hopes of Ships and Men": Schooner Days CMXXXII (932)

by C. H. J. Snider

Raising

THIS time of year, when the new kisses the old goodbye, we get so many passing hails - don't we all? - that we have to throw up both hands in friendly despair and hope everyone will understand the difficulty of immediate acknowledgement in other form. God bless you all through 1950.

Eddie Finn, 83 Varick street, Oswego, sent "a few prints from a fine collection held by my brother Leo Finn, tavern proprietor at West Second and Lake, directly across the river from Schooners' Graveyard."

We recognize the location. A hundred schooners perished there. Likewise the vessels picture. Each is her own monument, not more out of plumb than most tombstones in most graveyard. Here's the Daniel G. Fort, sitting bolt upright on the limestone shelf, apparently as snug as in a canal lock, not a rope yarn out of place, except her fore gaff is on deck and the foresail has been stripped.

What a contrast is the wreck of the Baltic, of Hamilton, whose bows rub the Fort's rudder! This schooner Baltic, Capt. Alex Baird, had a cargo of Prince Edward County grain shipped by Matthews in Toronto. The photograph shows her hogged amidships so that her rail has a three-foot hump in it, worse than a camel's back. The strong curve of her sheer cocks her port quarter up as the builders at Wellington Square built it in 1851. Yet the whole stern has dropped out of her, over the rudder-head, and the cabin has fallen into the cavity.

Capt. Baird would not sail on Sunday. He had as many afflctions as Job and in the end was rewarded as Job was rewarded. He lost the Baltic because the tug could not pick him up in the sea running outside the pier heads and the river current pouring out made the vessel unmanageable. That same night the Daniel G. Fort of Oswego missed the entrance in the same way and came in so close to the wreck of the Baltic that she must have taken the jibboom out of her, if was still standing.

The Oswego lifesaving crew rescued all hands in both vessels. Their station, under old Fort Ontario, was only a few rods away but the sea was bursting so high they had to use the breeches buoy. Afterwards you could walk dryshod to both wrecks. I did in July 1895, crawling into the Fort through a port cut in the bluff of her bow at the light waterline. She had been on the beach eight months then and look as good as new, but her stern sprung up and down with the waves. Her back was broken.

Five years later my first ship, the Albacore, came in almost at the same spot. Hunky Scott, the tugman, having to cut her adrift to save his tug from going ashore with her. They were in the backlash off the hurricane that destroyed Galveston. The little Fred L. Wells, an Oswego schooner, was last in the same blow. Eddie Finn sends a picture also of the Albacore's wreck, and of the T. R. Merritt, lost farther up the Oswego shore that night. Both vessels look perfect, except that their headsails are in ribbons. Even the whiplash flies still stream stiffly from their mastheads in pathetic defiance of the hurricane raving through their long slim cones of bunting. Their slender signal halliards held when chain cables and hempen lines were of no avail.

Another picture from the Finn collection is a double-header of November, 1892, two years before the Ford-Baltic wreck. This shows the Canadian schooner Flora Emma of Picton going to pieces just east of the harbor entrance, with the tug Eliza J. Redford already broken in two half across her bows.

That long ago wreck, like the Noronic disaster of 1949, was a grim warning of what can happen in the supposed security of a friendly port, when too many of the crew are ashore pleasure bent and too few are left to 'tend ship. The Flora had been safely berthed in the new harbor at Oswego at the box factory wharf, with a cargo of Canadian lumber. The mate and two men, her normal crew, went uptown to buy oysters for a stew to celebrate their successful passage. This left only Capt. Tom Fox of Port Hope, his woman cook, and a boy.

The rising wind whipped up a heavy sea and in the exposed new harbor the vessel began to surge and parted her lines. The old captain and the boy tried to get others out but she got adrift. She blew down past the Toronto schooner Sir C. T. Van Straubenzee, so close that Capt. John Williams hove a line aboard her but they could not make it fast on the high piled deckload of lumber and lost it.

By herculean efforts the old man, boy and cook got the anchors off the bows, but they dragged on the stony floor of the harbor and the river current aided the wind in pushing the vessel out into the stormy lake.

The fireman of the tug Redford had gone home for supper and Capt. Henry Featherstonehaugh blew for his crew until his steam was low before he could get under way to help the schooner. When he picked her up outside both harbors she was still dragging and the tug could not move her against the wind with her anchors down. Instead of slipping the cables and losing a couple of hundred dollars worth of hardware the feeble crew tried to heave the anchors up with the windlass.

The tug and the anchored schooner were almost in the breakers when a steampipe burst or broke with the forced draft or the tug striking the bottom. An engineer or fireman was fatally scalded.

The tragic tangle crashed on the corner of an old wharf just east of the harbor entrance. The tug crew jumped out to fend her off. Capt. Featherstonehaugh, perhaps already injured, fell between the tug and the stringpiece of the dock.

The lifeboat crew shot a line to the schooner and got her captain, cook and boy ashore before she broke up. John S. Parsons, ship chandler and friend of every sailor, passed the hat to the tune of $300 for the stranded Canadian. Everything he had was in that lost schooner. Oswego paid tribute to Henry Featherstonehaugh's worth in a magnificent funeral.

By one of those strange sequences which give rise to superstitions, the same night the tug Eliza J. Redford was lost at Oswego her sister tug, the M. J. Cummings, launched on the same day, burned to cinders in Cape Vincent.

M. J. Cummings was an Oswego magnate who laid the foundation of his fortune as a ferry boy, carrying schooner captains and their orders of stores and provisions to and fro in the crowded Oswego harbor in his little skiff or bumboat. The tug was named after him and so was a fine three-masted schooner, one of several that flew the Cummings houseflag.

This schooner was wrecked at Milwaukee, May 18th, 1894, with the loss of most of her crew. She was believed to have been hoodooed by shipping at the last moment a sailor who, had had a steamer burned under him and a vessel wrecked already that season, with an earlier trail of disaster to him and those associated with him—a trail so marked that he had great difficulty in obtaining a "site."

But because we yarn over the Yule log now of "most disastrous chances, of moving accidents by flood and field, o' hairbreadth scapes i' the imminent deadly breach," you must not think that schooner men were more morbid than others. Eddie Finn concludes his hail thus: "As a kid I was eyewitness to most of these sad endings and sunken hopes of ships and men, but in those days they had good wooden ships and iron men; today in some cases you could reverse the saying."