Through the Jaws of Death: Schooner Days MCCXXXII (1232)

by C. H. J. Snider

HERE is a Death's Door on Lake Michigan. This compiler went through it with Kingarvie in '46 without trouble. Five hundred Winnebago and Potowatomi are said to have perished there in a canoe battle ended by a violent thunderstorm in 1600 and something. La Salle the intrepid had a narrow escape from complete disaster there in 1679. Many sailing vessels were lost there in the centuries following.

But that was not the death's door from which the schooner Acacia of Kingston emerged alive, when the jaws snapped on an older sister, on the First of July, 1900. This was on Lake Ontario, on the edge of the hundred fathom curve, east of Rochester. 'Come, list- awhile, and ye soon shall hear.'

A smart medium-sized fore-and-after was the Acacia, capable of carrying around 10,000 bushels of wheat or 300 tons of coal. And a good looker.

On Dominion Day, 1900, four similar sized Canadian schooners, three black, one white, were lying in Charlotte, the port of Rochester, N.Y., laden with coal for Canada. Our Acacia, then sailed by Capt. Byron Bongard of Picton, was one of the blacks. She had 300 tons under hatches and half a carload on deck, besides 17 tons of lignum vitae piled amidships - a very heavy wood, so hard it was to be used for shaft bearing in some Belleville machinery works. The coal was for Kingston.

The Acacia was down to her full summer marks, which left about "one plank out" amidships. Capt. Bongard was in no hurry to go. He didn't like the look of the glittering high proud morning, all shine warmth. There was still a sea running in the lake after the preceding day's blow. The glass, which had been low, was rising, which meant more wind. He wondered how much.

The other vessels were the Two Brothers, white and pretty, the Annie Minnes, and the Picton, all laden with coal for Belleville - as long a run as to Kingston but half of it in the smooth water of the Bay of Quinte, after reaching South Bay.

All were content to wait except Capt. Jack Sidley of the Picton, a younger man and a pusher. The others had to shift anyway, to get him out of the tier in which they lay, so the four started for Canada while they had a fair wind to take them out.

BETTER LATE THAN—

The Acacia was the last away for Byron Bongard stopped to reef his mainsail in the still water before starting. By the time he got the sail set the others were three or four miles ahead, out in the lake. The Picton running like a scalded cat was leading the other two. She was always very fast, and was carrying all sail.

The Acacia, although reefed and deep laden, began to overhaul the others, for a gale had bitten in hard from the west, and she was, as sailors say, bringing the wind along with her. The three ahead clewed up their gafftopsails as it freshened. They were running wing-and-wing, foresail and mainsail on opposite sides booms cocking up to crosstrees.

Byron Bongard saw the Picton's patched sails shake and begin settling down. They came down fast, till only the peaks showed.

"Sensible man," he said to himself, "He's reefing. Glad we did it in smooth water."

He focused his binoculars. The Picton was swaying and lurching more than the others, perhaps because her sails were lowered. She seemed to swing into the trough, roll one or up, and then he could not see her.

Thinking clot of spray had blurred the binoculars he gave the lenses a quick rub and looked again.

The focus was perfect. The Picton was not there.

He saw two poles, like fish buoys. From one a whiplash wind finder waved like a blood stained sword. They were her topmast heads, a hundred feet above her deck. They vanished downwards in the second he saw them.

The two vessels ahead of him altered course a quarter of a point and passed over the place where the Picton had been in within five or six minutes. Without pausing they shortened sail and hauled up for South Bay, forty miles or so away.

Fifteen minutes after the Picton had begun to strike sail, the Acacia ploughed the third furrow over her grave. Byron Bongard searched every tossing wave crest with his glasses. All that he was was one or two screaming gulls, two caps, a handspike, and some loose boards such as every schooner had on deck to keep gear coils and such out of the scuppers. No yawlboat, no cards, no bodies living or dead.

Four men and a boy, alive half an hour before, had gone to another world in less time than the space between a ship bell's striking - Capt. Jack Sidley and his 12-year-old son, his mate Frank Smith, Walter Dunn, and Barney Ayers the cook, all of Belleville.

CAME THROUGH

The Acacia, bound for Kingston, 20 or 30 miles past South Bay, did get a dusting as she crossed the Traverse shoals and the Pinicons. The gale was bitterly cold, though it was the first of July. Even ashore men were shivering in overcoats.

One man on the Acacia's jib boom, casketing the jibtopsail, was alternately plunged into the lake over his head and thrown up 30 feet, as the vessel reared up from her dives. He lived to become master of the Niagara steamer Chicora, and to tell the tale of this Dominion Day gale. But he had no expectation of either while he was on that jibboom end.

Waves bursting over both quarters met billows roaring over the bows, and fought it out on the deckload. The two men at the wheel were under water again and again. The captain on the cabin top had to jump on to the gaff of the stowed mainsail at times. The half carload of coal on deck vanished at the are of a ton a minute.

Everything movable followed. The Acacia writhed and wallowed like Laocoon wreathed in serpents, with a hundred fathoms of lines and running gear trailing and squirming astern. The drag of them kept her from broaching to - a stratagem sometimes employed by Cape Horners in running their easting down.

Everything movable followed the coal overboard. But not the lignum vitae. It never budged. It seemed frozen to the deck by its own specific gravity. Had it gone adrift it would have ripped away hatches, stanchions and bulwarks and the lake would have swallowed the Acacia as it had the Picton.

But the staunch Acacia came through, delivered her below-deck coal at Kingston, and sailed up to Belleville with the lignum vitae when the weather served.

She had other adventures, to be recounted later.