by Chad Fraser
As he closed on the Clarion’s position, a lone light on the stricken freighter’s stern caught Anderson’s eye (this turned out to be an oil lantern that Welch was holding in his hand). He brought the Hanna around in a wide circle so as to be able to bring his boat’s side up against the Clarion’s stern, essentially forming the two vessels into a “T” shape. This type of maneuver, with the wind and waves pushing the two ships in all directions above the dangerous shoal, would push the Hanna to her limit. Even so, slowly but steadily, Anderson managed to ease the ice-covered Hanna up against the Clarion’s burning stern, just — but only just — brushing up against it as he did so.
The men aboard the Clarion simply could not believe their eyes. But as the Hanna’s lights grew brighter and brighter, they came to realize that her captain meant business. As she glided past, they steeled themselves. Then, one by one, they leapt. But not all of them, as the Marine Review describes: “The sixth man, benumbed with cold and advanced in years, was unable to make the leap in the precarious footing on an ice-covered ship, rolling deep, broadside to a raging sea, and as the Hanna passed on, threw up his hands in despair.”
That sixth man was none other than Welch. As the Hanna passed on into the darkness, it appeared to him that all hope was exhausted. The fire was now so close that it was only a matter of time before he would have to make the same horrible choice that all of the remaining men were contemplating only minutes before. He held onto the deckrail and prepared himself for the end.
Welch had no way of knowing that Anderson had no intention of leaving him to die. He had seen Welch throw his hands up into the air from up on the Hanna’s bridge, the lantern clasped in one of them. Anderson resolved to try again.
Skillfully guiding the Hanna abeam of the wind to the south, away from the shoal, Anderson looped around in a wide arc, making his way around again to brush the burning stern of the Clarion. This time, his crew was ready: as the ships touched, they reached out to Welch. Staring straight ahead, the engineer threw his lantern into the lake and leapt. As he did, the Hanna’s men latched onto his arms and, at the last second, snatched him from Erie’s grasp.
With every one of the Clarion’s remaining men now safely aboard, Anderson proceeded on his way, bringing to an end one of the most incredible rescues in Great Lakes history, and leaving the tough little Clarion to founder, alone, off the Southeast Shoal.
But it was oh, so close. As Welch said humbly in the days afterward: “The intense heat had driven us to about the limit of endurance when we were rescued.”
They had been fighting the fire and the storm for over four hours.
The days following the horrible storm of December 8, 1909, were marked by confusion and sorrow. As news reports trickled out, it became clear that the Clarion was not the only ship to go to her grave that night. The massive railcar ferry Marquette & Bessemer No. 2 had left Conneaut, Ohio, at about the same time as the men of the Clarion were fighting the blaze on their ship and had disappeared, taking her thirty-two-man crew with her. And off Buffalo Harbor, the steamer W.C. Richardson had run aground and sank, killing five before the rest of her crew could be taken off by another vessel.
The men of the Clarion eventually made their way to the Anchor Line offices in Buffalo before being reunited with their anxious families. A search was immediately launched for Captain Bell and the men in the lifeboat, but there was little to be hoped for, as the December 10, 1909, Toronto Globe glumly reported:
Somewhere on Lake Erie a steel lifeboat containing, it is believed, the bodies of the ill-fated thirteen sailors from the steamer Clarion, is aimlessly drifting with wind and current. Corpses, rigid in death, are encased in caskets of ice formed by the flying spray. The boat itself can now be little more than a big cake of floating ice, and this fact will probably delay its finding. Although all hope has been abandoned for the thirteen missing men, the big steel tug Alva is sweeping the lake in the hope of finding the lifeboat.
But neither the boat nor any of the “encased” corpses would ever turn up. Most likely, it overturned in the high seas shortly after launch, dumping the thirteen unfortunate souls into the frigid waters where, like the young oiler Joseph McCauley, they never stood a chance.
Remarkably, A.E. Welch chose to continue serving on Anchor Line boats, and returned the very next season to the Clarion’s identical sister, the Lehigh.
Captain Matthew Anderson was lauded as a hero for his incredible tenacity in the face of such long odds. His remarkable seamanship that terrible night was on a level that has not been seen, before or since, anywhere on the Great Lakes. In the days following the disaster, the Clarion’s owners presented the flattered captain with a ship’s bell clock honouring his bravery, to which he reportedly gave pride of place on his mantle until his death in February 1952. The inscription read simply: “Presented by The Erie and Western Transportation Company to Captain M. Anderson of the steamer L.C. Hanna in grateful recognition of his bravery in rescuing six of the crew from the steamer Clarion while burning on Lake Erie December 8, 1909.”
The James B. Colgate vs. Black Friday
When the ferry’s whistle first shook Captain Walter Grashaw from his fitful sleep, he must have thought it had all been a terrible dream.
The newly minted captain was stretched out on a tiny wooden life raft, bobbing along on a calm Lake Erie morning off Rondeau Park, Ontario. He was freezing cold, his shredded clothes were soaked completely through, and he was well into the state of delirium that often precedes death at sea. Yet ironically, Grashaw was surrounded by tranquility: the gentle motion of the waves as they sloshed against the side of the raft, the fresh autumn breeze and, overhead, just a hint of sunlight piercing the slate-grey sky.
To the casual observer, it would have been hard to believe that just two days earlier, in the early morning hours of Friday, October 20, 1916, Grashaw had steamed out of Buffalo full of confidence in his boat, the freighter James B. Colgate. It was a vessel he knew well, having served aboard as mate for over ten years before being given command a mere two weeks earlier. Loaded with coal, the Colgate’s destination had been Fort William, Ontario (present-day Thunder Bay). Grashaw commanded a crew of twenty-one men who, like most freighter crews of the day, were young; twenty of them, in fact, were less than thirty-two years of age.
But now there seemed little evidence that any of them, or the James B. Colgate itself, had ever existed. There was only Walter Grashaw, alone, bobbing along on his little raft.
With his last ounce of strength, he lifted his head to see where the whistle had come from. The appearance of the railcar ferry steaming toward him, her crew waving from the deck, must have seemed equally unreal.
The James B. Colgate glided into the still waters of Lake Superior at Superior, Wisconsin, over twenty-four years earlier, on September 21, 1892. Ninety-four metres long and 11.5 metres wide, the Colgate was not a particularly large boat for her day. But her hull design definitely made her unique. The Colgate was what was referred to as a “whaleback” freighter. Derisively named “pigboats” by the men of the Great Lakes shipping trade, the whalebacks were a revolutionary take on the cargo steamers of the time.
The design, which consisted of a single wheelhouse astern perched atop a nearly cylindrical, flat-bottomed hull, was the brainchild of Captain Alexander McDougall, a man who, as evidenced by the peculiar appearance of the whaleback itself, was hardly averse to taking a few risks. And he had quite literally done it all: a renowned seaman, inventor, real-estate developer and entrepreneur, McDougall had scratched his way up from the very bottom to become one of the giants of the Great Lakes shipping business.
He was born in 1845 on the Island of Islay, off the west coast of Scotland. McDougall’s family had left their ancestral homeland behind for the wilds of North America while he was still a young boy. Like many Scots before them, they came to Canada and made their way to the rapidly industrializing Great Lakes region. But although the McDougalls were no longer the tenants of autoc
ratic landowners, as they had been in Scotland, life in the Ontario countryside (the McDougalls had settled in the mainly Scottish village of Nottawa, near Collingwood) had not been easy, either, as McDougall points out in his autobiography, titled simply The Autobiography of Captain Alexander McDougall: “When eleven and twelve years old I was able to cut our wood and occasionally spend a few days at the log schoolhouse nearby. At night in the village I used to cut wood for others, to earn money with which to buy my school books.”
Photo from the collection of Walter Lewis
Whaleback freighters passing through the locks at Sault Ste Marie, Michigan. The James B. Colgate is at the top left.
In July 1861, at the age of sixteen, young McDougall took a job as a deckhand on the passenger and cargo steamer Edith, mainly because, in his words, “I was to receive $12.00 a month, the first real sum of money that had ever come into my hands.”
Although he couldn’t have known it at the time, this hesitant first step would prove to be the launching pad for his wildly successful shipping career. And his timing couldn’t have been better, for the American Civil War was by then driving demand for raw materials through the roof — and fuelling the need for men to handle the ships that moved them.
Over the next two decades, McDougall worked his way steadily upward, spending many long weeks at a time away from home, until he finally got his own command. From 1871 to 1873, he carried passengers and freight from Chicago to various Lake Superior ports as captain of the Japan, a new iron-hulled boat that McDougall had helped build for Buffalo’s Anchor Line. The experience of building the Japan, along with its identical sister ships, the China and the India, introduced McDougall to the art of shipbuilding and, combined with his sailing experience, planted the seed of the whaleback idea in his mind. McDougall himself explains his conception of the whaleback in his autobiography:
While captain of the Hiawatha, towing the Minnehaha and Goshawk through the difficult and dangerous channels of our rivers, I thought of a plan to build an iron boat cheaper than wooden vessels. I first made plans and models for a boat with a flat bottom designed to carry the greatest cargo on the least water, with rounded top so that water could not stay on board; with a spoon-shaped bow to best follow the line of strain with the least use of the rudder and with turrets on deck for passage into the interior of the hull.
McDougall was late in his storied career when he got around to designing the whalebacks. And though he had earned the respect of his peers in the shipping business, the response to his design, particularly from other lake captains, was scathing. According to McDougall, the comments ranged from the ignorant (“She will roll over, having no masts to hold her up”) to the insulting (“You call that damn thing a boat — why it looks more like a pig”).
None of this deterred McDougall. When he financed and built the first whaleback barge, No. 101, on his own property in Duluth, and brought it to Two Harbors, Minnesota, to have it loaded with coal bound for Cleveland, he found his business office there “full of lake captains, all making fun of my boat, and I joined in good-naturedly with them.” Even his wife wasn’t so sure. As No. 101 slid down the skids at Duluth in 1888, she reportedly turned to her sister-in-law and uttered, “There goes our last dollar.”
Luckily, success came quickly for the whalebacks. And no doubt the captains weren’t laughing so hard when they heard that McDougall’s odd little barge had caught the eye of Colgate Hoyt, a colleague of legendary American industrialist John D. Rockefeller. McDougall showed Hoyt the model for his next barge, No. 102, which was planned to be almost twice the size of No. 101, and Hoyt, a methodical, no-nonsense businessman with a large amount of iron ore to ship, was immediately impressed. He knew a good idea when he saw one, and moved quickly, proposing that he and McDougall join forces in an attempt to change the way shipping was done on the Great Lakes. The pair registered a new venture, called the American Steel Barge Company, to which McDougall sold all of his patents and plans for the whaleback for US$25,000 in stock, with 20 percent of the remaining shares being held by the company for McDougall until he could pay for them.
Now flush with cash, McDougall got right to work on building his first whaleback freighter. Soon, the Colgate Hoyt, named for McDougall’s new business partner, slid into Lake Superior at Duluth. She came in on time and under budget and, according to McDougall, achieved “such good results in operation that the lake fraternity feared competition more than ever.”
In December 1889, McDougall moved his operations to a lot in Superior, where, by June 1890, barely five months later, he had constructed a brand new, state-of-the-art shipyard. As usual, the frugal captain had done it all for less than US$90,000, a modest sum for such an ambitious project.
Between 1890 and 1897, the American Steel Barge Company turned out thirty-seven whalebacks, which works out to an impressive average of over five a year. Of those, twenty were barges, sixteen were freighters, carrying mostly iron ore and wheat (although two were rigged as oil tankers), and one, the Christopher Columbus, held the title of the world’s only whaleback passenger steamer. Built almost entirely by hand for the Chicago World’s Fair, the Columbus’s durable hull was tested to carry up to 8,000 passengers. McDougall himself drew up the plans, built the models, and tested them in a pond before closing the deal to build the boat on August 26, 1892. She was launched by December 3 and, on May 13, 1893, barely five months later, the Columbus departed Superior for Chicago, making the trip in thirty-three hours and reaching speeds as high as thirty-two kilometres per hour. During its first year of operation, shuttling revelers from downtown Chicago to the fair site, the Columbus carried two million people. After the fair ended, she went on to carry passengers between Chicago and Milwaukee before the Great Depression finally put an end to her career in 1931. McDougall had an almost fatherly pride in his only passenger liner, calling it “probably the most wonderful ship contracted for and constructed up to that time.”
The James B. Colgate, the twenty-first whaleback hull to roll down the skids (and the fifteenth built at McDougall’s Superior shipyard), was an exact replica of the Colgate Hoyt and the other whaleback freighters that had preceded her. They were utilitarian vessels that, in order to reduce construction costs, rarely deviated from McDougall’s original design specifications. They were tough, practical ships that, unlike their immaculate cousin the Christopher Columbus, carried few creature comforts. What’s more, when the freighters were loaded, the main deck, with little freeboard already, sank perilously close to the water, making working on it at sea a perilous proposition for the crew, something akin to working on the deck of a rolling submarine. The design also left the ships’ hatch covers exposed to the ravages of the water, a danger the Colgate’s crew would become all too familiar with.
Even still, the whalebacks boasted an excellent safety record. But they were not immune to the human error and technological shortcomings that often plagued nineteenth-century shipping. The Colgate and ships of her generation were not even equipped with radios and this, combined with an ever-increasing number of vessels roaming the lakes, was a recipe for disaster. Collisions were common, and the Colgate was involved in four documented ones during her Great Lakes career, including a particularly severe impact with the wooden schooner Duvall on December 6, 1905, while the Colgate was steaming southbound on the St. Clair River. The Buffalo Evening News reports:
The steamer James B. Colgate and the schooner Duvall collided off Tashmoo Park, St. Clair River, Tuesday night. The schooner drifted down and finally sank near Muir’s Landing, the crew escaping in the lifeboat. The steamer was run ashore above Muir’s Landing on the Canadian side to prevent her sinking in deep water.
Miraculously, workers managed to remove forty-five tonnes of ore from the Colgate’s forward section, raising the damaged part of her hull just above the water so that a temporary patch could be welded into place. With that, the Colgate pressed onward and successfully delivered her cargo.
With such a proven tra
ck record of dependability, which the whalebacks undoubtedly possessed, it’s no wonder the Colgate’s new captain, Walter Grashaw, had few worries about taking his ship out into the maelstrom that was beginning to gather over Lake Erie in the early morning hours of October 20, 1916.
The storm that hit on what came to be known as “Black Friday” was undoubtedly the most ferocious in the history of navigation on Lake Erie. When it unleashed its fury, it almost immediately drove all but the very largest freighters (and the bravest captains) into port, effectively shutting down shipping, as the October 21, 1916, Toronto Globe reports from Sarnia, Ontario, at the mouth of the St. Clair River:
Storm signals are flying at this port, and a score of large freighters are lying at anchor or are tied up to the docks here or at Port Huron [Michigan]. The wind is in the southwest, and is blowing strong. Downbound vessels report heavy seas getting up on Lake Huron. Only the largest freighters are taking chances and proceeding.
On Lake Erie, all of the passenger steamers of the Detroit & Cleveland Navigation Company were moored solidly to their docks. This was because A.A. Shantz, the company’s vice-president and general manager, had learned that a ninety-kilometre gale was by now raging over the lake. The savvy Mr. Shantz, the Globe reported, “decided to take no chances.”
But at the eastern end of the lake, one vessel was doing just that. Just after midnight, the whaleback James B. Colgate had made its way out of Buffalo Harbor. Captain Grashaw set off bound for Detroit, the same port where Shantz’s passenger steamers were wisely tied up, with a load of coal.
Walter Grashaw harboured none of Shantz’s concerns. His long experience as mate of the Colgate, and a strong confidence in both his own abilities and those of his young crew inspired him; after all, he had seen his vessel, with its innovative whaleback design, stand up to a good number of blows, and it had successfully prevailed over every one of them.
