William Ratigan - Great Lakes Shipwrecks & Survivals

Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.

2140 Oak Industrial Drive N.E., Grand Rapids, Michigan 49505

www.eerdmans.com

Illustrations 1960 William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.

Text 1960, 1977 William Ratigan

All rights reserved

First edition 1960

Revised edition 1977

Printed in the United States of America

26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 27 28 29 30 3 1 32 33 34 35 36

Library of Congress catalog card number, 60-10088

ISBN 978-0-8028-7010-0

For my son Shannon
and my Pelton and Ranger grandchildren
loyal crewmates all

O wha is this has don this deid,

This ill deid don to me,

To send me out this time o the yeir,

To sail upon the se!

Mak hast, mak haste, my mirry men all,

Our guid schip sails the morne:

O say na sae, my master deir,

For I feir a deadlie storme.

Late, late yestreen I saw the new moone,

Wi the auld moone in her arme,

And I feir, I feir, my deir master,

That we will cum to harme.

O lang, lang may the ladies stand,

Wi thar gold kems in their hair,

Waiting for thair ain deir lords,

For theyll se thame na mair.

(from Sir Patrick Spens, old Scots ballad)

I want to pay my respects in print to Walter Havighurst, Fred Landon, and Harlan Hatcher, loyal chroniclers of the Lakes; John Brandt Mansfield, editor and compiler of the monumental History of the Great Lakes, storehouse of source materials (1899); the editors of Inland Seas, Quarterly Bulletin of the Great Lakes Historical Society; Capt. Marryat, whose Mr. Midshipman Easy is Britains Huckleberry Finn; and the author (name unremembered) who thrilled my boyhood with a book called Heroic Deeds of American Sailors.

Many seafaring men who never dreamed of writing a book but who were born storytellers have contributed one way or another to this volume. The best of the lot was my own father, who always recalled his brief years as a sailor with fresh enthusiasm. On holiday outings he introduced me to the clanging mysteries of the engine room, and he could sing out the name of an oncoming freighter long before my young eyes could spell the letters. Without his inspiration, and without the indelible impression left upon me by my mothers love for boat trips (she never missed a chance, despite the work involved, to pack up her four boys and a bulging picnic basket for an excursion to Bob-lo or Tashmoo or Put-in-Bay), this book would never have been written. In view of title and contents it seems appropriate to add that, while I was working on the manuscript, she sent a faded clipping from Ripleys Believe It or Not, to the effect that Effie Laing (her maiden name) had been burned as a witch in the year 1689 for raising a storm that destroyed a lighthouse off the coast of Scotland, thereby causing a number of shipwrecks.

W.R.

: Charcoal and wash. The sinking of the limestone carrier Carl D. Bradley in Lake Michigan.

FACING : Oil. A Lake freighter against the sun in a stormy sky.

FACING : Water color. Decks awash on a Great Lake ore carrier.

FACING : Photograph. Survivors rescued from the wrecked ore carrier Mataafa following a storm on Lake Superior. The forward end of the broken ship lies in the background, just off Duluth. Courtesy, U.S. Steel.

: Artists map of the five Great Lakes showing several points of interest in the history of shipwrecks and survivals.

FACING : Etching. An engineering tug at the Grand Haven, Michigan, quay.

FACING : Charcoal. Mackinac Bridge and Great Lakes tanker passing underneath.

FACING : Mezzotint. Beach scene after one of the Lake storms.

Of death these jolly lads

Never once did dream;

Brave hearts sailed under canvas

And brave hearts sailed in steam.

Lost in Lake Michigan

They failed to reach the shore;

The gallant ships and crews

Will sail the Lakes no more!

(Fresh-water chantey, 1892)

The original version of the chantey on the preceding page told of the loss of the large new steel freighter W. H. Gilcher, with all hands, 21, on the stormy night of October 28, 1892, most probably in a collision with the schooner Ostrich, also lost with all hands, 7, on the same date. Wreckage from the two vessels washed ashore not a hundred feet apart on High Island in Lake Michigans Beaver archipelago, where wreckage from the Carl D. Bradley was found after the spring breakup in 1959.

Neither the Americans who dwell along the seaboards nor those who hail from the inland reaches of plains and mountains can understand the vastness of the Great Lakes. Here, where the high walls of water stretch in lonesome grandeur to the horizon, only seeing is believing.

Perhaps the best impression of the size of the Great Lakes may be given in the following typical reactions. Newcomers from the Atlantic or the Pacific coasts, unconsciously paying their respects to these wide bodies of water generally unbroken by landmarks, call whichever Lake they visit the ocean. Similarly, when people from the inland-sea area take their families on a visit to California or Florida, the children, at first sight of an ocean, cry out: Look, theres the Lake!

The greatest of all American seafaring stories, Moby Dick, offers due homage to the Great Lakes. Ishmael, spinning a yarn at the Golden Inn to a group of South Americans, sets the scene:

Now, gentlemen, in their interflowing aggregate, these grand fresh-water seas of ours Erie, and Ontario, and Huron, and Superior, and Michigan possess an ocean-like expansiveness. They contain round archipelagoes of romantic isles. They have heard the fleet thunderings of naval victories. They are swept by Borean and dismasting waves as direful as any that lash the salted wave. They know what shipwrecks are; for, out of sight of land, however inland, they have drowned many a midnight ship with all its shrieking crew.

There are fifteen hundred rolling miles of water from the top of Lake Superior to the toe of Lake Ontario. When the Jesuit explorers first came upon Lake Huron and Lake Michigan, they knelt down and tasted the waters, marveling that such mighty inland oceans were fresh instead of salt. When Champlains canoe burst out upon a single bay in Lake Huron, Georgian Bay, he was so impressed with this fragment of the great lake that he named it the fresh-water sea.

In modern times, Champlains canoe has yielded to ore and grain carriers longer than football fields. During the season of navigation, an average of more than ninety long ships a day pass through the Soo Canal, a busier waterway than the Panama and Suez canals put together. Every twelve minutes a big Great Lakes freighter passes Windmill Point between Lake Erie and Lake St. Clair on the Detroit River.