The Great Lakes: The Vessels That Plough Them: Their Owners, Their Sailors, and Their Cargoes, Together with a Brief History of Our Inland SeasCurwood, James Oliver
History
The Great Lakes: The Vessels That Plough Them: Their Owners, Their Sailors, and Their Cargoes, Together with a Brief History of Our Inland Seas
Curwood, James Oliver
Great Lakes (North America); Inland navigation -- United States; Shipping -- Great Lakes (North America)
In view of the action already being taken to bring about legislation
to prevent collisions, it is interesting to note that no similar area
of any ocean, if suddenly robbed of its waters, would expose to human
eyes more sunken ships, or more valuable cargoes, than the Great Lakes.
During the twenty years between 1878 and 1898, only one less than
6000 vessels were wrecked on the Inland Seas, and 1093 these were
total losses. The loss of cargo during this period of a little more
than one fourth of the years of navigation on the Lakes was nearly
$8,000,000, and from this it is quite safe to figure that the total
amount of property that has gone to the bottom of the Lakes, including
only cargoes, would make a total of at least $15,000,000, involving the
wrecking of 14,000 vessels and the total loss of over 2000 ships. Were
these “total losses” strung out in a row, there would be a sunken ship
at a distance of every half-mile over the thousand-mile length of the
Lakes between Buffalo and Duluth. What a field for romance here! What
material for the seeker of human achievement, of heroism, of sacrifice!
Scores of these vessels disappeared as suddenly and as mysteriously
as though some great power had smuggled them from the face of the
earth, leaving naught behind to tell of the tragedies; hundreds of
ships carried with them valuable cargoes which remain to this day for
lucky fortune-hunters to recover from the depths; and in their going
thousands of lives were snuffed out, and thousands of unwritten acts of
heroism were played and never heard of, or forgotten.
How many remember the name of Captain James Jackson? Jackson is only
one of a thousand heroes of the Inland Seas, and the deed which made
him famous among Lake seamen is only one of a thousand of a similar
kind. It happened one year in the closing days of navigation on
Superior. The owners of the freighter _W. F. Sauber_ had sent that
ship from Duluth with one last load of iron ore under the command of
W. E. Morris. Off Whitefish Point the vessel was caught in a fierce
storm from the north. All night she weathered the gale, but with
morning there came a blinding sleet with fierce wind and intense
cold, and the breaking seas froze as they touched the upper works of
the ship. Under the increasing weight of ice the disabled _Sauber_
gradually settled. When thus the “little ice devils” of Superior gather
upon a victim, it sometimes happens that no power of man can save the
ship, and in this instance the crew of the doomed freighter realised
that it was only a matter of a short time before the end would come.
But strange things happen on the Inland Seas, as on the oceans.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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