Lake Erie Stories

by Chad Fraser

  By this time, passengers had begun throwing whatever they could find that might float — trunks, deck chairs, even bedding — over the side before leaping themselves. The Norwegians, many of whom could not even understand English, were among the first to do this, thinking, perhaps, that it would be the best way to escape the chaos that was now at full rage aboard the passenger steamer. But, as the ship continued to sink, and more and more passengers jumped in after them, many of these unfortunate souls were pulled beneath the surface as the mass of humanity now writhing in Lake Erie’s waters desperately grabbed for anything that would float. Of all the immigrants who were aboard the Atlantic that night, it is estimated that more than half never lived to see the end of the long journey they had started so many months before.

  As it turned out, the safest place to be was aboard the ship itself. When the bow slipped beneath the surface, an air bubble buoyed up the stern, giving those who remained there enough time to wait for the return of the Ogdensburg, whose lights many had noticed were growing larger as she raced back toward the scene. When the freighter arrived, these fortunate survivors simply stepped across to her deck.

  The Eidsmoes had a more difficult time of things. When the bow went under, the water washed over and swept them into the lake. Miraculously, they were able to stay together and, with his wife and two small children clinging to his back, Eidsmoe treaded water for several minutes until crewmen from the Ogdensburg spotted them and pulled them to safety. Of his unexpected salvation he wrote: “When I discovered that all of my family were alive, I was full of joy, as if I had become the richest man in the world, despite the fact that we had lost all of our goods.”

  The Ogdensburg circled the debris field three times, until well after dawn, her crew pulling survivors from the water as they came across them. But eventually an eerie silence fell over the wreck site, and there were simply no more lives left to be saved. At seven o’clock in the morning, about an hour after the Ogdensburg had sailed away, the air bubble that had been supporting the Atlantic’s stern finally seeped away, and it, too, slipped beneath the surface.

  The scene aboard the Ogdensburg as it steamed back toward Erie with its wretched human cargo must have been heartbreaking, as frightened and exhausted mothers searched for lost children, and wives scoured the deck looking for their missing husbands. Because of the haphazard manner in which the Atlantic had been loaded, there is no way to know exactly how many went to the bottom of Lake Erie with her on that dark night, but the estimate is somewhere between 200 and 300, making the Atlantic tragedy the fifth-worst in the history of the Great Lakes.

  For many years, it looked as though the Atlantic story might end here. Aside from a series of dives immediately after the wreck to retrieve the purser’s safe, which contained US$36,000, divers appear to have paid little attention to the Atlantic. As time passed, her location was eventually forgotten.

  But all that ended with a bang in 1991, when Mar Dive Limited, a salvage company based in Los Angeles, announced that it had rediscovered the wreck in the summer of 1989. Mar Dive’s president, Steve Morgan, quoted in the June 26, 1991, Kitchener–Waterloo Record, said: “We knew we found it when we saw it. We could tell just by the size of her wheels.” At the time it was rumoured that the Atlantic contained up to $60 million in gold coins.

  There were a couple of obstacles facing this claim: one was an objection by Mike Fletcher, a professional diver from Port Dover who quickly refuted the company’s assertion that it had discovered the Atlantic. “I’ve had almost 100 dives on the wreck,” he said in the June 28, 1991, Kitchener–Waterloo Record.

  And then, of course, there was the tricky matter of sovereignty. The Atlantic, though an American vessel, rests well inside Canadian waters. Responding to the increasing tension over ownership of the Atlantic, the Ontario government ordered the Ontario Provincial Police to patrol the site and arrest anyone trespassing on it. This they did, both by boat and, according to the August 19, 1992, Toronto Star, through a sophisticated electronic monitoring system placed in the Long Point lighthouse. If a vessel remained too long over the Atlantic, the device would send a signal to the OPP office, which would then dispatch patrol boats. This was to be the state of things until the courts decided who spoke on behalf of the Atlantic.

  In Toronto on December 20, 1996, Mr. Justice Douglas Lissaman handed down a 117-page ruling handing the right to the Atlantic over to the Province of Ontario. “This is good for the ship, and for shipwrecks in general,” said Fletcher, quoted in the December 21, 1996, Toronto Star, but he admitted he was concerned that all the publicity would attract more attention to the beleaguered wreck.

  So, has the end of the Atlantic story finally been written?

  As with all matters involving our heritage shipwrecks, only time will tell.

  Amund Eidsmoe and his family made it to Wisconsin, but not without the help of Milwaukee’s German community, which raised US$450 in cash and forwarded $350 worth of clothes for the Atlantic survivors. Of their generosity, Eidsmoe wrote:

  . . . the Germans were very kind to us and had taken up contributions so we were all supplied with money and clothes. A merchant, named Carlsen, was very kind to us and gave me a suit of clothes and $30.00 in cash. There were probably those who received more, but I was glad that they had helped us this much.

  From Milwaukee, it was out to the Wisconsin countryside, where the Eidsmoes finally got down to the business of farming. But it was not quite over for them; two years later, a rival claim on their property forced them to abandon everything once more and move to Green County, where Eidsmoe’s brothers were settled. While still a humble farmer, Eidsmoe couldn’t resist his original calling and became the first teacher in the newly formed English school division there.

  And he never lost his optimism, even during the hard times. In his twilight years, he wrote:

  On the first of January, 1900, our children had a postponed Golden Wedding for us (November Thanksgiving, 1899). Two weeks later my wife died quietly and peacefully, after an illness of but three days with lung fever. I thank God earnestly for his care over me so far. If he has laid a burden on me he has also, fatherly, helped me to carry it. If I could prepare myself for a blessed departure from this world and my passing away be as my dear wife’s, my wish would be fulfilled. God help me . . . Amen.

  Unlike many of his fellow passengers on the doomed Atlantic, Eidsmoe lived a long, full life. On November 11, 1903, scarcely two years after writing his account, he passed away. He was eighty-nine years old.

  Abigail Becker: Long Point’s Lifesaver

  Abigail Becker had put in a long night.

  It was the morning of November 24, 1854, and the young mother hadn’t slept a wink. Instead, she spent hour after hour staring up at the ceiling of her small, drafty cabin among the sand dunes on the south shore of Long Point, Canada West (present-day Ontario). Outside, the wind was howling at gale force, whistling through the cracks in the small cabin’s walls and whipping Lake Erie into a frenzy. To make things worse, the temperature had dropped below freezing early in the evening, lowering the temperature inside the cabin with it, and bringing a blizzard that left the sparsely populated peninsula thinly blanketed with snow.

  The Becker home was located not far from what was referred to as the “Old Cut,” a natural canal created by another violent storm that had hit Long Point over twenty years earlier, in November 1833. The Cut bisected Long Point near its base, not far from the current gates of Long Point Provincial Park. It offered a shortcut for mariners, who used it as a way to avoid having to navigate all the way around the end of the forty-kilometre sandspit, with its hundreds of treacherous and ever-shifting sandbars, and to wait out nasty weather on the other side, in the shelter of Long Point Bay.

  To accommodate this new and unexpected shipping route, the colonial government sent a lightship to mark the bayside entrance to the Cut in 1840. It remained there until, in 1879, the Old Cut lighthouse was built on the lake side, which was th
e more important position in terms of safety. The Old Cut lighthouse, now privately owned, remains in good condition, though it looks wildly out of place today, for the Cut itself disappeared just as it had been born — it was filled in by a violent storm in 1906. The storm ended Long Point’s brief history as an island and turned it back into a peninsula — and left the Old Cut lighthouse high and dry.

  But, in 1854, shipping through the Old Cut was in its heyday, and on that cold November morning, Abigail’s mind was almost entirely on her husband, Jeremiah. The previous day, he had set off in the family’s rowboat for the nearby settlement of Port Rowan with a load of furs to trade for supplies. Just before he left, perhaps sensing his wife’s unease about the wind, which was already beginning to gather, Jeremiah promised he would stay close to shore the entire way. Still, Abigail worried. She prayed he was safe and warm in Port Rowan, carrying on his business or waiting out the storm.

  So Abigail rose earlier than usual the next morning and, before her children began stirring, groggily made her way down to the beach to fetch some water. But just before she dipped her bucket into Lake Erie’s still churning waters, something bobbed into her line of sight, less than a kilometre in the distance, near the shore. Straining her eyes, she began to make out a white, rectangular form, and as she did, a sense of dread filled her. She hoped in vain that it was an illusion, but it was not to be. The floating form could only be one thing — an overturned rowboat.

  Abigail trembled with fear as the realization set in: sailors had been out in last night’s storm. What’s more, if they were lucky enough to still be alive, they were no doubt shipwrecked nearby. Not missing a beat, Abigail dropped her bucket and sprinted down the beach toward the small craft.

  Little did she know that her fears were about to be compounded. For when Abigail reached the rowboat, her eyes fell on an even more terrible sight: in the near distance, the tattered rigging of a ship protruded from the surface of the water. She was sure she could see human forms clinging to it.

  Abigail Jackson was the first-born in a family of Dutch Loyalists from Pennsylvania, who eventually settled in Norfolk County. At age seventeen, she married Jeremiah Becker, a local trapper and fisherman of humble means. Jeremiah was a widower who was significantly older than Abigail and already had five children of his own. That number would later swell to thirteen, as Abigail would bear eight more — three girls and five boys.

  While the Beckers had few of the comforts of life, their home was largely a happy one, as her stepdaughter Margaret Wheeler (a product of Jeremiah’s first marriage) told Reverend R. Calvert many years later. Calvert would transcribe and publish Wheeler’s retelling of Abigail’s life in 1899 as The Story of Abigail Becker: The Heroine of Long Point:

  When my father met Abigail Jackson, she was a slender young girl. She worked hard and devotedly to make us comfortable, and has often since expressed her pleasure in us. We are, you may be sure, proud of her. She really raised three families, seventeen children in all. It is her boast that she raised her eight boys and not one of them uses tobacco or liquor.

  Shortly after their marriage, Jeremiah built the small cabin on Long Point, mainly out of logs and driftwood.

  By all accounts, Abigail enjoyed life on Long Point, despite the loneliness and isolation she endured when Jeremiah was away. And she seemed to have had a knack for being in the right place when help was needed, as Margaret Wheeler notes, “. . . she [Abigail] saved a child from drowning in a well, and a man from a similar fate at Nanticoke by throwing him a plank and holding him up till assistance came.”

  Then came the first Long Point shipwreck that Abigail was caught up in. Again, Wheeler provides a detailed description:

  There was an iron-laden vessel wrecked on Long Point Island, near the lower lighthouse [the Old Cut light], the crew of six escaping to land. On reaching the lighthouse they found the keeper had gone for the winter . . . Only four of the six succeeded in walking to our place; the other two gave out about a mile and a half away. Mother sent the boys with food and raiment for them. A little later they were able to get to the house.

  Illustration courtesy of the collection of the Norfolk Heritage Centre.

  Abigail Becker displaying the medal she was awarded for saving the crew of the Conductor.

  One can only imagine Jeremiah’s surprise the following day when he returned to find six exhausted and frostbitten sailors sprawled out across the cabin. Over the next several weeks, the generous Abigail nursed all of them back to health.

  It was a harbinger of events to come.

  Little did Abigail know that just as she was seeing Jeremiah off to Port Rowan on the chilly morning of November 23, a far more fateful voyage was beginning far to the west. At Amherstburg, on the Canadian side of the Detroit River, the two-masted schooner Conductor, under Captain Henry Hackett, an Amherstburg native, was easing its way out of its berth and edging south toward Lake Erie, its hold stuffed with 8,000 bushels, or over US$10,000, worth of corn. Hackett planned to sail east through the Pelee Passage, around Long Point, and into the Welland Canal, which would deliver the Conductor onto Lake Ontario and the short trip to Toronto, where it would deliver its cargo.

  But as the ship made her way east and night fell, the weather began to take a turn. The ship’s barometer fell, the wind came up and, just as she approached Long Point, the Conductor was beset by blinding snow squalls.

  Like many lake captains before him, Hackett made the decision to change course and head for the safety of the Old Cut.

  But the storm made finding the mouth of the Cut something of a needle-in-a-haystack proposition. Hackett circled several times in vain, but, unable to spot the channel, he could wait no more; he gave orders to make a run for the tip in hopes of rounding into the Point’s lee side. With that, the Conductor slowly came around. In such conditions, the ship was barely manageable, but just as the Conductor began to respond, the unimaginable happened: the schooner gave a hard lurch and came to a dead stop. Even though the crew could see very little because of the blizzard, they were hung up on a sandbar, less than 200 metres from shore. Shortly, the waves began to curl up over the side, and were soon washing over the deck of the swaying and creaking schooner. As a final indignity, the lake swept away the ship’s only lifeboat. The heavily laden Conductor was both sinking and being torn apart.

  The crew was out of options; they knew their chances of surviving in the freezing water, in the dead of night, were next to none. So, with the captain leading the way, they climbed the rigging. Once there, they lashed themselves down and, with the screaming wind and blinding snow whipping their exposed bodies, proceeded to put in what was undoubtedly the longest night of their lives.

  By the time Abigail got back to her cabin, she was completely out of breath. “Children,” she called, “there is a vessel ashore about a mile up the beach. Edward, you go and see if we can help them.” The boy went, and shortly returned with a blunt assessment: “If they cannot get to shore,” he said, “they will all perish.”

  Abigail needed time to formulate a plan. She left the cabin and climbed up on one of the nearby sand dunes to see for herself what kind of shape the men were in. There were eight of them clinging to the rigging, and to Abigail it didn’t appear that they had much strength left in them. Time was not on her side. Nor was the lake, whose roiling, freezing waters made any attempt at rescue by boat or raft impossible. There was really only one chance: get to the beach opposite the wreck and try to encourage the men to swim for it.

  When she returned to the cabin, Abigail gathered her oldest children and headed for the beach opposite the helpless Conductor. When the men in the rigging saw her coming, they let out a cheer. Soon, Abigail had a roaring fire going on the beach, on which she put a kettle of water for making tea. She then waved to the half-frozen men to let them know that if they would swim for it, she would help them. Margaret Wheeler remembers the results:

  He [Captain Hackett] pulled off his coat and shoes and plunged into
the water. The waves carried him down the beach a great distance. He was becoming exhausted and Mother, who was tall, waded in and caught him by the hand. She dragged him to the fire and gave him some hot tea, and then beckoned for the rest to come.

  And they did, again according to Wheeler:

  The mate was the second to make the attempt. Edward, my brother, who was lame and walking with crutches, wanted to help, and he tried to go in to his mother’s assistance, but the sea was so heavy he could not stand, and she had to get them both out of the water.

  Over and over, Abigail continued this routine, sometimes wading into the frigid water all the way up to her neck to drag the men ashore. Some, particularly toward the end, lost consciousness and Abigail had to drag them all the way up to the warmth of the fire by herself. There was only one problem: The cook could not swim a stroke, and with the lake still running high, he had no choice. The poor fellow would have to face another night in the Conductor’s rigging — but this time all by himself.

  By nightfall, Abigail had returned to the cabin, bringing the men along with her. The other children had already started a fire, around which the haggard crew of the Conductor gathered and dried out their tattered clothes.

  For Abigail it would be another sleepless night, this time spent worrying about the Conductor’s stranded cook. By morning, the lake had calmed and she called the men together to make another attempt. When they got to the beach, they could see the cook still holding fast to the rigging. Moving quickly, they built a raft out of wood that had washed ashore from the ship and set out for the wreck. The cook was unconscious, but alive, and had lashed himself tightly to the rigging to keep from being swept away. They brought him back to the cabin, where Abigail placed his frozen feet in a bucket to draw out the frostbite. According to Wheeler: “The men were very grateful for what had been done for them. The captain remarked to Mother that it was a good work she had done that day, for not one of them was prepared to die.”