All Standing

by Kathryn Miles

  The Blake, the vessel Munn launched just days before the Jeanie, had also returned to a career as a cargo vessel, and it was a load of timber she was carrying when she set sail from Ship Island, Mississippi, on February 8, 1856, destined for Cork. Despite her winter departure, all seemed well during the Blake’s first month at sea. But on March 5, the waves became heavy and the wind began to blow a gale. The barque labored heavily through the storm and began taking on a dangerous amount of water. Her captain, a longtime veteran of the seas named Edward Rudolf, ordered his crew to begin pumping. But their actions soon proved futile. As the winds continued to squall, the hold filled with water—thirteen feet by March 12. Meanwhile the southwesterly winds became northerly, bringing with them dangerously cold temperatures, freezing rain, and pelting snow. Rudolf’s men were exhausted. Had they been better rested, they might have stood a chance when a punch of wind knocked the vessel hard into the waves. As it was, they were helpless to do anything other than watch as the ocean swept away the vessel’s lifeboats and water casks, along with her helmsman.

  Now completely waterlogged, the Blake could no longer be righted and lay breeched in the roiling sea. The remaining crew clung to the rigging, hoping to escape the fate of their fellow sailor. Few would be so lucky. The winds had now reached hurricane strength and were pelting the men with driving hale and freezing waves. A particularly large wave caused the ship again to capsize, this time carrying away seven men before slowly, laboriously righting. Rudolf ordered the men to tie themselves to the rigging. The waves continued to break over them—for days—as the storm showed no sign of abating. At least one crew member died from hypothermia. The others grew dangerously thin, having had no food for over a week, save for a drowned rat the captain eviscerated and shared with his remaining men. “A delicious morsel,” he would later recall. As the storm began to weaken, the men, now frantic with hunger, spied two ships, but neither ship saw the beleaguered vessel.1

  Conditions continued to deteriorate. So much so, in fact, that when a tenth crew member died, Rudolf and his men chose not to throw his body overboard but, instead, strung it up above the deck and ate it with the same steely resolve that had seen them through the previous twenty days. “I did not see how we ever lived, not having a dry place to lay and the sea constantly washing over us, and as some of us would drop off in our dosing dreams, dreaming of feasting at some friendly table; in a few minutes we would be awakened by the wash of a sea, then see our situation and also the dead body swinging in the pale moonlight.”2 The men’s moans of discomfort and hunger subsided, until the ship was as quiet as a coffin. Rudolf admitted that even he had given up and was merely waiting for death to relieve him. That was when the schooner Pigeon appeared. Assisted by the crew of the Mercury, which arrived soon afterward, the men of the Pigeon managed, with great difficulty, to remove the survivors of the Blake, their clothes disintegrating with the slightest touch and leaving the emaciated men with the added problem of being naked. Between the crews of the Pigeon and the Mercury, a hodgepodge of shirts and trousers were amassed, and Rudolf’s men looked like ghostly children playing dress-up.

  Hundreds of miles north of them, James Attridge was encountering his own difficulties. After leaving the Jeanie in 1855, Attridge had found work as master of the Wilson Kennedy, that grand ship built just a few steps away from the Jeanie back in 1847. The Wilson Kennedy had enjoyed a career almost as dazzling as the Jeanie’s, having first served as an immigrant ship to Australia and then forming part of the fleet supporting the Light Brigade as it charged through the Crimean War. Now she too had been converted back into a cargo vessel. She was the biggest ship Attridge would ever captain. Laden with salt and sailing from St. John’s, New Brunswick, the ship foundered in the Bay of Fundy and began taking on a dangerous amount of water. Attridge flew the distress flag and began to prepare his crew for the worst. But then, almost out of nowhere, the schooner Sultan appeared and rescued all those on board. They were delivered to Boston, where they soon scattered, many of the crew taking work on other vessels. But James Attridge, now fifty-one, had had enough. He returned to his quayside home in Cork and eventually settled in nearby Passage, on the west bank of the Cork harbor, where he served the remainder of his days as deputy harbormaster, ensuring the safety of thousands of passengers and crew. He died an old and much celebrated man.

  Nicholas Donovan, whose success continued in the years after he sold the Jeanie Johnston, died on November 9, 1877, one of Tralee’s wealthiest men and a landlord several times over. And, to what must have been his great satisfaction, he also died a town leader. His death was enough to halt, at least temporarily, trade in the busy city. The Chamber of Commerce turned out in force for his funeral, marching as a body, wearing mourning crepes and scarves, to a place more than a mile from town, where they paid their respects at the enormous pink tomb that had been erected in Donovan’s honor.

  Katherine Donovan’s health declined sharply with the death of her husband, and in her final days she developed a nearly pathological fear of death. Revising her will, she left a large sum so that two doctors could check her body for at least eight days after she had been declared dead, lest the original proclamation be made in error. Her coffin, she said, was to be kept open during that time until it was determined that she “was really dead.” Afterward masses were to be said weekly for her “poor soul” and those of the other Donovan family members.3 Well into the twentieth century, they were.

  31

  The Final Test

  1858

  THE JEANIE JOHNSTON was a testament to one of the greatest nautical feats of all time and the very embodiment of the New World Order. But that alone could not save her from the deadly gale of 1858. Overloaded with timber from the Ottawa River Valley, the three-masted barque lurched through the water that October, hampered by the shifting weight in her hold. Despite this, the Jeanie and her crew managed to travel nearly a thousand nautical miles—almost half the journey from Quebec City to northern England—before the storm overtook her.

  Just after midnight, the winds increased to an easterly gale. As it began to squall, the crew turned in all standing, retiring only briefly to their bunks, fully dressed and drenched in spray, but at the ready whenever needed. Meanwhile the ship heeled dangerously from side to side, pitching the stacks of timber against her hull. The men knew they would have to disarm the storm’s punch as best they could before she capsized. Captain Johnston ordered the crew to lie to, turning the vessel into the wind so that she would yield to rather than fight the growing storm.1 That also meant shortening all fourteen of the Jeanie’s square sails, which were capturing the wind’s blast and threatening to overturn her. Those men standing evening watch climbed high into the ship’s spars, trying unsuccessfully to furl the heavy canvas. Again and again the winds pushed them back onto the deck. After a dozen attempts, they finally secured the shortened sails, only to discover that their efforts did little to abate the power of the storm.

  The seas continued to grow. Down below, Johnston’s wife and two-year-old son were bracing themselves in the officers’ quarters. It was customary for wives and young children to travel with a captain, and indeed Johnston’s wife had made many a voyage with her husband. Even still, she was far from prepared for the rush of seawater that soon burst through the hull. Above her, the captain ordered all hands to man the pumps as he cursed this late-season run and the extra load of timber, both of which now threatened to bring down his tired ship. As the storm continued to grow, he knew the crew had but one option remaining: they’d have to disable the barque and hope for the best. Johnston ordered all men on deck and sent the main watch back up into the rigging, this time to bring in all but the main topsail, which he hoped would at least stabilize his imperiled vessel.

  Weary and dangerously chilled, the crew nevertheless labored throughout the night, furling the remaining sails. But their efforts weren’t enough. By 9 P.M., the storm had reached hurricane proportions. Waves now topped twenty-five
feet; they slammed against and over the Jeanie, shearing away lifeboats and the massive crane, and crushed the wheel-house and galley, sucking the cookstove and navigation table into the roiling ocean.

  The storm continued throughout the day and showed no signs of abating. At 9 P.M., a rogue wave described by the captain as “a monstrous sea” struck the ship with such force that it crushed the main cabin, sending a torrent of water deep into the hold. It would be only minutes before the entire ship was swamped, and the crew would have to act fast if they hoped to survive. They grabbed what little food they could and then climbed the hundred-foot masts. Meanwhile Johnston hurried to his own quarters, where he found his wife and son crouching in terror. There was no time for either of them to change out of their nightclothes before they too made the climb up into the topmasts of the sinking ship. There Johnston and his family and crew tied themselves to shrouds with the ship’s tattered sails. They hung there in the dark and the pelting rain, not knowing how much time remained before the ship, already submerged up to her splintered deck, would sink. Throughout the night, the crew was certain the masts would snap off in the violent winds, sending them all to their deaths. More than one was surprised to see the next morning dawn.

  As the sun rose somewhere behind the raging storm, Captain Johnston raised his distress flag. During the course of the next several days, at least two large ships sailed within a mile of the beleaguered vessel, but she sat too low in the water for them to see her. The Jeanie’s crew remained tied high up in her masts for over a week, eating only the hardtack and bacon grabbed before the galley was consumed by the storm and sucking water from the saturated sail canvas. When their thirst became too great, they chewed on pellets of lead, believing this might lessen their discomfort. Their skin blistered and split from the sun. Their hands and feet swelled painfully from the pressure of the shrouds and lack of water.

  Miraculously, on the ninth day the Dutch barque Sophia Elizabeth, the very same vessel that had spied the Kennellys’ Lesmahagow in the storm of 1853, spotted the sinking ship. Her captain was certain no one had survived. Still, he commanded his crew to launch the auxiliary boats and sail over to the Jeanie Johnston. Once there, they were amazed by what they saw: fifteen people, severely sunburned and dehydrated, dangling in the ship’s rigging seventy-five feet above the deck. The Sophia’s men had to carry down the Jeanie’s captain, family, and entire crew, so weak were they from dehydration and edema. They had arrived not a moment too soon. As the Sophia’s crew loaded their new passengers and prepared to sail for New York City, the Jeanie Johnston shuddered and then slipped below the waves.2 She took with her an unparalleled safety record: save for Samuel Nichols, each of the more than one hundred men who sailed as crew lived to tell their story. So too did the fathers and mothers, the weavers and farmers, the spinsters and children who huddled below her deck. For the rest of their lives, they would say proudly that they came to America aboard the world’s luckiest ship.

  MINNEAPOLIS, MINNESOTA

  FEBRUARY 8, 1904

  The day was cold enough to snap the axles on several streetcars. By afternoon the thermometer had yet to climb above zero. Most of the Midwest was still snowed in after an unexpected January blizzard dumped feet of snow from Illinois to New York and everywhere in between. Snowplows worked around the clock to clear streets and rails, though few people ventured outside.

  Three weeks earlier, Nicholas Reilly had been walking to work when his heel caught a patch of ice and sent him tumbling to the ground, breaking a hip. He had been bedridden ever since. On this day, Cecilia went to their bedroom to check on him late in the afternoon. Nicholas seemed as cheerful as ever and asked her to fetch him a cigar from his dresser. When she turned back around to give it to him, he was dead.

  Two weeks later, she would win a settlement against the city of Minneapolis for improper care of their sidewalks. In the suit, she presented his death certificate, showing that he had died of cardiac paralysis. But that didn’t interest the city clerk nearly as much as Nicholas J. J. Reilly’s place of birth. In letters cramped to fit on the slender line provided, that place was listed as the Atlantic Ocean.

  EPILOGUE

  Fergus Falls, Minnesota

  June 22, 1919

  After nearly six months of negotiation, the Paris Peace Conference was in its final days. Woodrow Wilson, the first U.S. president to visit Europe while in office, had been holed up for what felt like ages, waiting to see if Germany, defeated after a world war, would accept the Treaty of Versailles. Wilson promoted an ideal first generated in the era of Manifest Destiny: that America had a mission to defend democracy around the world. This ideal, though, was meeting with plenty of resistance at the conference. France, still dealing with horrific casualties and a war-bruised landscape, remained bellicose in the face of concessions for Germany. Britain was balking at the idea that both Canada and Ireland had become independent during the fighting. Both, albeit for divergent reasons, objected to Wilson’s commitment to self-determination and a true end to colonial powers. Neither had much patience for his Presbyterianism, which seemed to smack of the previous generation’s Providentialism. What resulted were days upon days of debate between Wilson, Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau of France, and Lloyd George, prime minister of Britain. When asked, upon returning home to London, how he had fared in Paris, George would famously reply, “Not badly, considering I was seated between Jesus Christ and Napoleon.”1

  But that was still days away. In the meantime, America was waiting to see what would become of a world torn apart by the war to end all wars. Soldiers, many irreparably scarred, were returning to a nation changed in their absence. Those who never left struggled to receive them.

  At the Rathskeller Café on Marquette Street, Robert E. Reilly stood behind the bar, preparing for the afternoon. The weather was oppressively humid that day, and the air both outside and in pressed down on Minneapolis with the weight of water. With a stout build like his father’s, Robert toiled in the humidity, wiping the sweat from his round face and pushing back the sleeves of his starched shirt. A few blocks away, his mother was helping her youngest daughter, also named Cecilia, prepare Sunday dinner in the house she rented with her husband, Florenz. Since Nicholas’s death, his wife had moved between her children’s homes, and when President Wilson reintroduced the draft in 1917, Robert listed her support as one of his major responsibilities. Doing so was probably what kept him out of battle and, instead, pouring drinks at the Rathskeller, just as his father had done for years.

  If Robert didn’t begin his shift at the Rathskeller thinking about Nicholas’s tenure behind the bar at places like the Grand Hotel in Fergus Falls, he certainly finished his day doing so. Just as he set about replenishing his icebox and counting his till, the sky became an ominous black as a supercell thunderstorm gathered strength on the state’s western border, focusing its power on Otter Tail County.

  In Fergus Falls, the rumbling began just after 4 P.M. Elsie Rathbun, who was waiting for a train at the Great Northern Station, had never heard such a noise, “like a dozen factories all full of buzzsaws running at once,” she would later say. When the deluge began a few minutes later, Elsie and the other people seeking cover at the railway station thought that would be the end of the storm. When hailstones the size of marbles began to fall, they knew things were about to get much worse. The three tornados—black, massive, and twisting ominously—dropped out of the sky shortly thereafter, gaining in strength and size until the largest of them was nearly four hundred yards wide. That’s when pandemonium hit. The noise, Elsie said, was deafening. Part of that was the sheer force of the wind alone—wind so strong that it blew straw and slender weeds through six-inch boards, embedded clover in living-room plaster, and sucked checks out of bank drawers, depositing them intact sixty miles away. The storm produced other oddities as well, stripping a flock of thirty chickens clean of their feathers, relocating a chest of clothes from one attic to a neighbor’s, demolishing a house but leaving
its piano without a scratch. But the real damage—not to mention the cause of the deafening roar—was more tragic. The force of the storm lifted the passenger cars of the Great Northern Oriental Limited and the rails underneath—the very train Elsie Rathbun was awaiting—and would have thrown them into the river, were it not for the fact that it also wrapped the baggage car around the rails, saving the train’s passengers from death by drowning.

  Not everyone was so lucky. John Kreidler’s four children were blown from their cottage into nearby Lake Alice, where all four drowned. More than fifty people were found dead in the days that followed, thirty-five in the Grand Hotel, which was leveled by the storm. For two days rescue workers picked through the rubble of the hotel, most of which had been julienned into strips of debris the size of yardsticks. There were a few survival stories: the night clerk of the hotel was pulled alive from the wreckage with two broken legs; little Agnes Palmer was sucked from her father’s lap and set down two yards away, just before the house collapsed, killing the rest of her family.