"This Sad and Melancholy Catastrophe:" Port Maitland, Ontario and the Wreck of the Troopship Commerce, 6 May 1850

Publication
The Northern Mariner / Le marin du nord (St. John's, NL), Jul 1998, p. 39-49
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"This Sad and Melancholy Catastrophe:" Port Maitland, Ontario and the Wreck of the Troopship Commerce, 6 May 1850


The broadsheets and nautical journals of the mid-nineteenth century register shipwrecks with the same detachment that can be read in the daily traffic reports of a contemporary newspaper. The human elements in the events are downplayed and the material costs neatly summarized as insurance estimates. Yet in any tragedy it is precisely the human element, when investigated in detail, that awakens the imagination. Spans of history and geography shrink when in the narration of events one can glimpse courage and endurance, desperation and calamity. This same spirit was shown in Canadian waters by the men of the Reserve Battalion, Royal Welch Fusiliers (23rd Foot), on a clear spring night in 1850. The troops were sailing on Lake Erie aboard the Canadian steamer Commerce, bound for Port Stanley, and thence garrison duty in London, Canada West. It was meant to be a routine trip for soldiers accustomed to shifting around the Empire. It became a journey interrupted by tragedy off Port Maitland, an event which touches the community even today.