Nova Scotia

by Lesley Choyce

  Unimaginably, the ship kept up a haggard westerly path on into January of the next year until she was within eighty kilometres of Tory Island, north of Ireland, and only 160 kilometres from her destination port, Greenock. Bad weather, described by Archibald MacMechan as “a series of hurricanes and heavy seas,” shoved the Research off course again. The newspaper in Glasgow would later say, “The officers and men were freq uently greatly exhausted and upon several occasions the crew desired the captain and officers to give up the ship.” No one would have to wonder why.

  Passing vessels Empress Eugenie and Palmyra came close enough to offer up some desperately needed provisions. Amazingly enough, the captain and crew stayed with the Research rather than give up the battle with the North Atlantic. More rudders were lost or broken and more setbacks occurred, some of the cargo was heaved overboard to lighten the load but much of it was still on board when they were finally towed into Greenock on February 4. For once, man had won the battle with an adversarial sea.

  Saxby’s Storm

  Storms at sea were the most obvious cause for the wrecks of ships and the monumental loss of life at sea. Sometimes the collateral damage of Atlantic-born storms spills over onto land. One of the most famous of all Nova 7Scotia storms was the Saxby Gale, predicted almost a year in advance by Lieutenant James Saxby from the British Navy and written up in the London papers at that time. He calculated that on October 5, 1869, the moon would be at its closest point to the Earth and located directly in line with the equator, while at the same time, “lines drawn from the Earth’s centre would cut the Sun and Moon in the same arc of right ascension.” To Saxby’s mind, this was an extraordinary celestial circumstance and it meant big trouble for mariners.

  Sure enough, the following October an Atlantic storm was moving up the seaboard wreaking havoc on Washington, D.C., and flooding Philadelphia and New England. On October 4 it arrived at the mouth of the Bay of Fundy and by nightfall a wind of hurricane force hammered the coastline. Roads were flooded, bridges washed away, ships were smashed ashore and wharves beaten to a pulp. Incredible stories were reported, like the one about a barn, complete with livestock, being lifted off its foundation and floated for 100 metres. Other barns simply drifted away on the super-high tides, as did a great number of haystacks. Telegraph poles were knocked down. Fields in the lowlands remained flooded for weeks.

  The town of Windsor saw her streets in full flood and in nearby fields many cattle and sheep drowned. The great dyke at Grand Pré was breached for the first time since it was built by the Acadians, more livestock drowned and the salt that remained wrecked the crops for three years.

  Along some parts of the bay, tides rose six to fifteen metres above normal and some shorelines were permanently altered. An unlucky mail carrier and his passenger were crossing the Tantramar Marsh at the time the waters swept over the dykes, carrying them almost a kilometre and drowning the passenger, poor Miss Huldah Bray. At Minudie, near Amherst, an old gent named Steward, who was sleeping in his barn after a hard day of cutting hay, found his barn afloat and breaking apart around him. He jumped onto a passing haystack, so the story from the Amherst Gazette reports, and surfed it off into the wild night until it grounded on a dyke, where he was rescued the following day.

  For weeks afterwards, stories were reported about the devastating and sometimes amazing effects of the storm on people’s lives around Fundy. A house was turned completely about on its footing in one case. In another instance, while a low-lying house was flooding up into the second floor, its occupant climbed into a coffin and floated out the second-storey window to eventual safety. Many survived by sitting it out on the top of barns stubborn enough to stay put during the high tides and blasting winds.

  Ships, like the Genii, whose captain had not been wary enough to take Saxby’s early warning or frequent reminders as the date approached, ended up wrecked in the Bay of Fundy. In this instance, eleven men drowned. Meanwhile, the capital city of Halifax was spared nearly all of the mayhem and the Chronicle-Heraldreported the next day in a slightly miffed tone, “The storm of Monday night was not a success in the city – did not come up to the expectations of the public.”

  The Mystery of the Mary Celeste

  Not all sea disasters involving Nova Scotians occurred along our own coast. In fact, the setting for one of this province’s most famous sea tragedies was thousands of miles from home port, but it nonetheless constitutes an important legacy of the golden age of Nova Scotian sailing ships. When disasters occur far from port, it is often difficult to piece together the events. Unlike the wreck of the dAtlantic or the Cherokee, there might not even be bodies washing up on the shoreline to confirm the final chapter of the story. The case of the Mary Celeste is one such occurrence.

  Spencer’s Island on the Bay of Fundy was one of those tiny Nova Scotian communities that produced fantastic sailing ships in the third quarter of the nineteenth century. One of the most notable and most talked about was the Mary Celeste. First christened the Amazon when it was launched in 1861, this brigantine had her name changed in 1868 after an unlucky accident in a gale. She was salvaged by a group of Americans and thus became their possession. On the morning of November 7, 1872, the Mary Celeste left New York for Genoa, loaded with 1,700 barrels of alcohol. Master mariner Benjamin Spooner Briggs was in charge and was accompanied by his wife, Sara, and two-year-old daughter, Sophia, along with a small crew of only seven men. What happened on this fateful voyage remains a mystery, but the fragments of that mystery continue to be an intriguing puzzle.

  On December 4 of that year, another brigantine, the Dei Grata, was on its way to Gibraltar from New York. It had been a stormy crossing for the most part and about halfway between the Azores and Portugal, David Morehouse, captain of the ship, spotted some sails on the horizon. It was the Mary Celeste. The seas were high but not dangerous and the wind was blowing out of the north. Three of the Dei Grata’s crewmen boarded the Mary Celeste and discovered it was deserted. Two of the sails had blown away but three were still set. The mainsail had been hauled down and other sails furled. Some of the rigging was missing or damaged. One of the Mary Celeste’s lifeboats was missing but there was no sign that the tackle had been used to put it over the side.

  Some water had flooded the hold but not enough to cause serious worry and the pumps were working away as designed. The binnacle, a stand for the compass next to the steering wheel, was knocked over and the compass itself was smashed. There was no sign of an explosion, and in the kitchen the stove had been knocked out of place but everything else looked neat and orderly. Seamen’s gear was stowed properly away, including the foul-weather gear, the sailors’ pipes and tobacco. Plenty of food and water was aboard, there was no sign of liquor or drunken activity and, in the captain’s quarters, the child’s toys and clothes suggested everything had been quiet and orderly. The captain’s sword was under his bed but his sextant, chronometer, navigation books and ship’*s papers were missing. The final entry in the captain’s log read, “Monday, November 25. At 8:00 Eastern Point bore S.S.W., 6 miles distant.”

  And here was the ship sailing along mid-ocean without anyone aboard. The mystery surrounding the Mary Celeste drew a good deal of interest and speculation, and while no one really knows what happened, theories abound.

  One story at the time suggested that the crew got drunk and murdered the captain, his wife, child and first mate. The murderers dumped the bodies in the sea and then left in the small boat. Some believed that a man named Winchester, one of the owners of the ship, had planned the event as some kind of insurance scam. One investigator claimed that stains on the captain’s sword were blood, but it turned out to be rust.

  A story later surfaced that one of the men from the Dei Grata had discovered the pillow in the baby’s bed still warm and a lukewarm meal upon the table in the galley as he arrived, suggesting that something had just happpened.

  The mystery never seemed to die away fully from public consciousness. In 1884, a story was
published proposing a complicated series of murders revolving around the ship. A 1929 book proposed further that the whole thing was an elaborate hoax to collect insurance. At least four men surfaced and claimed to be survivors of the Mary Celeste, but none could give a convincing account of the voyage or details of the ship.

  Had this been a more recent event, theories about UFO abduction might have fitted neatly into the picture. Nonetheless, an explanation by Dr. Oliver W. Cobb is probably the most convincing. His story runs as follows.

  The ship’s cargo of alcohol was affected as it moved from the colder climate of New York to the warmer reaches of the Atlantic. The alcohol expanded with the heat and fumes began to leak. On the morning of November 25, the captain decided to ventilate the hold. When the hatch was opened there was an explosive rush of gas – a blast but no fire. Thinking that a fiery disaster was at hand, the captain launched the ship’s boat with everyone aboard. They would stay tied to the ship and wait to see if it was safe to return. A storm could have come up quickly and the boat was cast adrift from the ship. The tiny boat was overloaded with the entire crew and eventually went down, drowning all aboard and leaving the Mary Celeste to sail on for nearly 965 kilometres with no one at the helm and no one aboard.

  They “Held Onto Their Manhood”

  Lumber was a common cargo that brought profit to Nova Scotian ship owners. Trees were plentiful and there was a ready market to the south. All you had to do was deliver the goods. That’s what the brigantine Louisa was trying to do when she shipped out of Bridgewater late one December, headed to Barbados with her cargo. She soon ran into a North Atlantic blast of a storm that started the ship leaking and forced the crew to cut the lanyards and some of the rigging. As the storm raged, the foremast broke clean off and the maintopmast did as well. The men survived the night on the roof of the forehouse only to face a worse nightmare the following day when the whole stern of the ship was ripped apart by waves. The lumber in the cargo hold began to drift out into the open sea and the boats that had been in place for emergencies disappeared. The vessel was literally disintegrating beneath them, but as the ship was full of wood, what was left was still afloat. Nonetheless, it was a pretty sorry state of affairs.

  On Christmas Eve, the crew attempted to get the attention of a passing ship by lighting impromptu torches made from jackets soaked in oil, but failed. The weather improved somewhat, however, and they found some bread, carrots, turnips and tinned water on board. The ship was still afloat, thanks to the lumber below, but there was no way to steer it. Miraculously, the galley stove had been above deck in the forehouse, and as the water ran out, the men figured out how to capture the steam of boiled salt water, and painstakingly distilled desperately needed fresh water a few drops at a time. Each of the men was allowed four teaspoons of water a day as his ration. Luckily on December 27, the liner Olympia arrived, having been blown far off course herself. Soon after the men were safely aboard the Olympia, another gale came up and bashed what was left of the Louisa to pieces. So the crew was saved by a fluke of fate. Had the Olympiaremained on course, all aboard the Louisa would have certainly perished.

  After the loss of a ship, the captain was obliged to make a formal report to the Nova Scotia “Wreck Court” and in it Captain Bain stated that any sailing ship should have withstood the storms he encountered and “no wood en ship of her age should have gone to pieces, if she had not been suffering from some defect of workmanship in her building or some defect of material.” He did, however, praise his men for their “stoic demeanour” and said, “they even showed cheery defiance to the cold, the hunger, the thirst, the menace of annihilation.”

  The captain had high praise for all aboard the ill-fated Louisa and he surmised that they survived because each of them “held onto their manhood” d– an ambiguous but lyrical phrase that sums up much about life aboard a sailing ship when caught in the grip of some tumultuous exercise in maritime survival. All one could do was to “hold onto one’s manhood” and hope for good luck, a passing ship or a painless watery death.

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 30

  One Big Ship Instead of Two

  The Golden Age of Sail was fuelled not only by wind and a quest for adventure. It was driven by greed, or at the very least, a strong desire for profit. The W.D. Lawrence was one of the largest sailing ships of her time, or any time for that matter. She was built by William Dawson Lawrence in the small, sea-sheltered village of Maitland on the Fundy Shore. Lawrence had begun his shipbuilding career by cutting his own frames for his first ship and hauling them by hand out of the woods. He had prospered and gone on to build a number of ships but, thinking that one large ship could be operated more economically than two smaller ones, he set about constructing a vessel larger than any that existed. He first carved out the traditional miniature model and then proceeded to build the monster-Tsize ship that he would modestly name after himself. The enterprise attracted fame for Lawrence and curiosity-seekers from near and far descended upon the little village. Lawrence disdained the critics who showed up to suggest that such a large vessel made of mere pine and spruce would not weather rough seas. Some thought it would be too unwieldy and hard to steer and they told Lawrence this to his face. Some simply came to laugh at him. Whenever Lawrence tired of his critics or the job of overseeing the massive con struction pro-ject, he would escape by locking himself away in his study and playing the fiddle.

  The W.D. Lawrence was launched in October of 1874 and according to the Halifax Morning Chronicle, 4,000 people came out to watch. She weighed in at 2,459 tons, at a price tag of $107,453, a pretty penny in those days and much of it was Lawrence’s personal investment. Lawrence himself sailed her to Liverpool, then on to Aden in the Middle East and back to France. In 1882, he sold the big ship to some Norwegians for $140,848, realizing a hefty profits which, of course, was why he had undertaken the massive endeavour in the first place.

  “Boundless Fleets of Magnificent Steamers”

  If the emergence of the steamship rang the death knell for the Nova Scotian sailing industry, it is somewhat ironic that the entrepreneur who was so successful at embracing the new technology and making a great fortune from it was a Nova Scotian. Samuel Cunard was born in Halifax in 1787, the son of a Philadelphia Loyalist who had moved north during the American Revolution.

  Samuel Cunard worked as first clerk in the Royal Engineers’ lumber yard and in 1813, along with his father, opened a shipping business by purchasing a sailing ship from the “prize court” – that is, a ship that had been hauled to port by privateers. They succeeded in landing His Majesty’s mail business between Halifax, Newfoundland, Boston and the West Indies and later nailed contracts to protect fishing rights and perform customs inspections. Pretty soon, father and son had nearly forty vessels at work and they were involved in everything from mail service to sealing and whaling.

  A razor-sharp businessman with an instinct for making money, Cunard also had a passion for navigational aids and became the first Commissioner of Lighthouses. It made good sense: he had a lot of vessels afloat and wanted to protect his own interests. Cunard had his hand in all sorts of things from charitable soup-kitchen work to military activity and fire protection for the city. He became involved with an early insurance company and helped to establish the first bank in Halifax. After all, he needed some safe place to keep his money.

  The really big deals were in London and so Cunard made a number of trips across the Atlantic to compete with the big English shipping firms. He successfully landed a contract with the East India Company and sailed his ship the Countess of Harcourt into Halifax Harbour amidst considerable fanfare as it carried 6,000 chests of tea from China. By forty, Cunard was a wealthy man and had negotiated more English contracts, including one withd the General Mining Association.

  A fan of new technology, he became enamoured of the steamship and fostered a dream to create a kind of “ocean railway.” He became a central figure in forming a company to build the Royal
William, the first ship to cross the Atlantic entirely by steam. She was launched in Quebec in 1833 and made port in Halifax, then went on to Pictou where she took on 300 tons of coal, and then proved herself by crossing the Atlantic in three weeks.

  Cunard tried to ignore the opposition of the naysayers who believed the big sailing ships run by the Shakespeare, Dramatic and Black Ball Lines were the epitome of oceanic travel. Even though he had proven that the steamship could be used for reliable trans-Atlantic travel, he was scoffed at. Sadly for Nova Scotia, Cunard was right and the die-hard sailing men would see progress outstrip them, robbing many of them of their dignity and income.

  Wheeler-dealer that he was, Cunard and his ever-growing body of associates took on more mail contracts, including the big one with the English government to shuttle mail across the Atlantic on a fortnightly basis. The service proved to be successful and Cunard courted passengers as well, once offering 2,000 free dinner invitations to the people of Boston. He found plenty of people willing to take passage across the Atlantic and provided plenty of high quality food and spirits. At one point, he found his passengers consuming too much of the free-flowing wine so, like the airlines of the 1990s, he reluctantly decided to charge extra for wine.

  In 1859 Cunard was knighted by Queen Victoria – for shipping all that mail, capitalizing on steamships and, presumably, making a fortune. He died in 1865 at age seventy-eight. A verbose and slightly skewed biographer of a later day, Abraham Payne, would write, “Let the mind’s eye survey the boundless fleets of magnificent steamers traversing the seas at this very hour in every quarter of the globe. The first standard bearer of this host eof leviathans was Sir Samuel Cunard, who remodelled the Ocean Navigation of the world.” *