Message from the Dead: Schooner Days MCCXLI (1241)

by C. H. J. Snider

SCHOONER DAYS has sailed long enough for little enough to have nothing but sympathy, alike for the Lake Erie fishermen in the March hurricane of 1955 and for all hurricane victims of the last twelve months. And with Capt. Jack Sidley who lost everything--son, life and ship--with the schooner Picton on July 1, 1900.

Although the circumstances were very different, these all took risks in order to provide for dear ones. Sidley miscalculated his risk. His miscalculation, both on the weather and the condition of his vessel, was deplorable, for it drowned three other men and his own son as well as himself. This calls for condolence rather than condemnation. It is quite otherwise when owners send other men out in death traps to earn profits for them.

Complete disappearance of the Picton almost within hail of three other schooners, and within 10 miles of Charlotte, the port they had left an hour before, still causes headshakings in Prince Edward County, where the vessel was built.

Though it occurred 55 years ago.

All that was ever found of her was her main boom, picked up weeks afterwards by Capt. John Williams in the schooner Straubenzee. It had floated 20 miles eastward after disengaging itself from the wreck. The vessel sank in 200 feet of water, on a steep slope of the lake bottom that drops to 100 fathoms east of Charlotte, N.Y. Lake Ontario is too cold there, never warmer than 40 Fahrenheit, for any body that reaches that depth to rise before the resurrection.

Months after the Picton foundered a fisherman's son down Sackets Harbor way saw a bottle bobbing in Chaumont Bay, off Point Peninsula, one morning. He saw it again next day. And the next.

"Dad," he said, "I can't get over that bottle. It seems to bob up every morning."

"Well," said the father, "take the boat and row out and see what it is. Could be a buoy of some kind, to mark something hidden."

But this was no smuggler's calling card.

It was a ketchup bottle, corked, and the cork seized into place by wire. There was a sheet of paper inside. On it was this, in pencil:

"HAVE LASHED VESSEY TO ME WITH HEAVING LINE SO WILL BE FOUND TOGETHER"

J. SIDLEY, PICTON

Jack Sidley was the captain and the owner of the Picton. His 12-year-old son, Vessey, was with him in the Picton for this last voyage, for she was shorthanded.

Television was fifty years in the future, but the 15-word message televised the end of the Picton better than if a radio camera had been aboard on July 1, 1900. Next week we shall try to give the picture, not to harrow feelings laurated long ago, but to acquit, as far as possible the chief actor in the tragedy.