Cape Race

by Robert C. Parsons

  That same day, a Douglas “Digby” Bomber #752 based in Newfoundland was returning from a routine submarine patrol mission out over the Atlantic when it ran short of fuel. The pilot had to make a forced landing in the ocean off Cape Race.

  The bomber’s five-man crew spotted a schooner in the distance and landed ahead of it. Captain Keeping, in the unwritten understanding of mutual aid on the ocean, manoeuvred Chesley R nearby. Soon the airmen clambered aboard the tern and, within a few hours, Keeping had landed them at Renews. A naval tug was sent to tow in the plane, which remained afloat for some time, but the ditched bomber sank a short distance from Cape Race. Except for a wetting and a few minor injuries, the bomber’s crew were none the worse for the experience.

  Three separate incidents seemed to connect Chesley R’s fate with Cape Race and the southern Avalon Peninsula: first, in November of 1936, it had run aground at Latine Point, near Argentia. The schooner was only refloated after several weeks of intense work by Thomas Duke of Ship Harbour. Then, the rescue of the crew of the downed airplane; finally 13 months after that experience, Chesley R ran aground at Mistaken Point, a point a few miles west of Cape Race. This was the final episode, and the tern eventually went to pieces. The crew – Captain Heber Keeping, his brother Walter, Don Baker, George Lee, and another unidentified seamen – rowed safely to Cape Race.

  Chesley R was the last in a long line of schooners of the Burin Peninsula that had fallen victim to the hazards of the rock-strewn Calamity Coast: in 1917, John McRea and its crew disappeared off the southern Avalon; in 1936 the banking schooner Partanna was wrecked off St. Shotts or St. Mary’s Keys, and all 25 of her crew were lost. Some debris drifted into Portugal Cove South and The Drook. The following year, the schooner Coral Spray went ashore at Watering Cove, near St. Shotts, to total loss and the death of one man. And Cape Race was not through yet with the Chesley R, another Grand Bank schooner.

  On July 14, 1942, Chesley R ran into a ledge of rock near Cape Race and smashed to pieces. Early in July, the tern had loaded general cargo at Halifax, Nova Scotia, for A. H. Murray and, with a deckload of lumber for another St. John’s company, headed for the city. It was still under the command of Captain Heber Keeping.

  One of the crew seemed to sense this would be the last voyage of Chesley R and remarked as the cargo was stacked aboard, “Boys, we may be putting it on her now, but we’ll never take it off.” As the tern schooner sailed the southern Avalon area, dense fog and heavy seas reduced visibility to nil. Mistaken Point, a projection a few miles west of Cape Race, was thought to be Cape Race, and at 6: 00 a.m. the vessel met disaster.

  Her crew of six, including George Lee and Don Baker of Grand Bank, knew immediately the Chesley R was firmly aground and would soon go to pieces. They lowered the lifeboat over the side, but in the tide and surf if drifted away a few feet from the side of the wreck. Each man had to jump into the water to reach the boat.

  One crewman, a non-swimmer, stayed aboard and refused to leave, despite all attempts to persuade him. Five of the six, ready to leave the wreck, made one last plea to the man, finally convincing him to jump. They rowed to Cape Race, leaving behind their home on the sea and place of work, Chesley R, to break up on the rocks of the cape.

  45

  The Beer Wreck

  April 1948

  On May 5, 1943, the ship Bassilour ran aground on Wright’s Point, near Portugal Cove South. The details of the grounding and drama of the wreck itself were not especially memorable, for there was no loss of life. Like the loss of Askild the previous December, news in print might be considered war propaganda, especially in the light that Bassilour had been obtained from the spoils of war.

  A wooden vessel with four masts – two wooden and two steel – Bassilour was built in France. Early on in World War II, the Germans captured the ship from the Free French. Then, in turn, Britain captured Bassilour about midway through the conflict. Britain put the ship up for sale in Canada. Ships to carry cargo, that is, shop goods, food, and supplies, in the coasting trade from mainland Canada to Newfoundland and Labrador were in short supply.

  One local company on the lookout for a coaster was Alberto Wareham and Sons of Spencer’s Cove, Placentia Bay. Warehams acquired Bassilour and used it in the trade for a year or so, carrying lumber from the Canadian mainland to the newly built American base at Argentia.

  However, in the spring of 1943, the time when Bassilour found its final resting place at Portugal Cove South, near Cape Race, Warehams had a varied cargo in its hold. Captain Rose and his crew encountered no hardships leaving the scene. However, the tales of salvage and spoils from Bassilour live on today.

  Because cost of repairs to the old vessel was judged to be higher than its worth, Bassilour finally became an abandoned ship, a derelict. Any cargo not salvaged by Warehams – and they removed very little from the wreck – was available for the taking. And what a cargo was left behind! According to an article in the Evening Te legram (June 8, 1992):

  There were several thousand pair of brown sport shoes with leather toes and heels and canvas sides. These were only in sizes 7 to 9. There were also a few pairs of black work boots but only in sizes 4 and 13.

  The vessel carried several barrels of medicine for Gerald S. Doyle Limited, St. John’s. [Two types of cough medicine – Dr. Lambert’s and Green. The former tasted very similar to today’s Vicks Formula 44D.]

  There were tons of paper bags in all sizes from the one-half to 20-pound bag. Simon Levitz (a St. John’s merchant) purchased most of those bags for $1 a hundred after they had been dried and re-packed in 100-bag lots. In the cargo were eight large rolls of linoleum consigned to James Baird Limited of St. John’s and there were several bales of school supplies, including exercise books and old-time scribblers.

  . . . Underneath the above-mentioned items, Bassilour’s cargo hold was filled with Black Horse Ale. There were thousands of cases of it in cardboard cartons of 24 bottles each. The boats and dories (of Trepassey and area) on the fishing grounds would always have a few bottles hanging over the side to keep them cool.

  It was okay to drink the beer on board the derelict, but if it hadn’t been through Customs it was illegal to carry it ashore for salvage . . .

  Within a week or so, the Newfoundland Constabulary sent 17 policemen under the command of Sergeant Pike to maintain control of the salvage and to curtail the taking of beer and other items from Bassilour. To put an end to the shenanigans and free beer, the Constabulary obtained dynamite to try and blow up the hulk, and thus the beer.

  But the great timbers, although old, proved to be too strong for the charge of explosives. The hulk, basically still intact, went down in a few feet of water and the hold flooded with sea water. The cardboard around the cartons floated to the surface, but the bottles of beer settled to the bottom.

  The beer now seemed to be inaccessible, but the local fishermen found a solution to this problem. “Everyone got his own 15 or 20 feet of fence railing, or slim sticks of wood, and made a saw cut a foot long up into the stick. A wedge made a V-shaped opening or fork, if you will, in the end of the stick. When jabbed toward the bottom near the ship, it brought up a bottle of beer, nine times out of ten.”

  Three men in a dory could obtain over 1,000 bottles in an hour – and that hour was usually before daylight, when the police weren’t around. The beer was not sold or traded but given away or stashed for better times, usually buried in gardens, meadows, backyards, or hidden in wells or sheds.

  Newspapers of the day, because of wartime restrictions, did not report the loss of Bassilour; tales of the wreck were passed down by word of mouth. The salvage and consumption of much of Bassilour’s varied cargo became the stuff of legends in and around Portugal Cove South, Trepassey, and Cape Race, so much so it became known as the “Beer Wreck” all along the coast. Stories, usually humourous, exist to this day. During the Cape Race Heritage Days, 2007, the heritage society produced the skit “Bassilour – Beer Wreck off Wright’s Point, Portugal
Cove South.”

  46

  Administratrix:

  Cut Down off Cape Race

  April 1948

  On the evening of April 28, 1948, the coasting freighter Administratrix cruised slowly through the dense fog off Cape Race. It had loaded a cargo of 427 drums of oil at St. John’s two days before, and was headed for its home port of Grand Bank. Owned by a group of Grand Bank businessmen that included its captain, Chesley Forsey, the 130-ton vessel had been built 12 years before at Meteghan, Nova Scotia. In Grand Bank, perhaps due to the excessive length of the name, the small coaster was usually called the “Trix” or “Trixie.”

  As Administratrix reduced speed in the dense fog that often surrounds Cape Race, the men in the wheelhouse, Captain Forsey, Mate George Barnes, and Seaman Robert Lee, listened to what they believed was the fog alarm on Cape Race. Before a check of the timing or intervals of the alarm could be completed to determine if indeed it was the Cape Race horn, a freighter loomed up out of the fog only 60 feet away.

  The Norwegian freighter Lovdal, bound for Botwood, Notre Dame Bay, appeared to be headed straight for amidships on Administratrix’s starboard side at a slight angle. Although Forsey threw the wheel over to avoid a collision, it was too late. The three men in the wheelhouse rushed out on deck to save their lives and, if possible, warn the other four crewmen.

  Without any apparent variation in course or change in speed, Lovdal sliced Administratrix apart near the engine room. The stern section of the schooner sank almost immediately, carrying the two engineers, Arch Rose and George Welsh, down with it. Three others, Captain Forsey, Robert Lee, and Harvey Keating, disappeared with Administratrix that night.

  Mate George Barnes, who was in the wheelhouse when Lovdal hit his ship, found himself clinging to wreckage in the freezing water. In his report to the newspapers, he stated:

  The captain was standing near me on the head of an oil barrel. When the ship started to sink I caught hold of the wire stay as did the captain. Not one of the crew could swim. The captain and myself were thrown into the icy water with oil barrels pitching and tossing all around us. I think the captain must have been knocked unconscious shortly after being thrown overboard.

  I let go the wire stay which was pulled down with the ship and clung to an oil barrel. The water was freezing and fuel oil caked my face and was into my eyes. Later I caught hold of a portion of the wheelhouse as it swept by, and I was still clinging to this when I was picked up an hour later by the Lovdal’s men in a lifeboat.

  Charles Fizzard, the cook, was in the forecastle, washing supper dishes with another seaman, Harvey Keating. He thought at first Administratrix had hit an iceberg. He and Keating rushed on deck and stood for a brief moment on the fore hatch. Just as Fizzard saw that the stern was sinking, an oil drum hit him in the back, throwing him overboard. He didn’t see Keating again.

  When he surfaced, covered with oil and numb with cold, and regained his senses, he saw Captain Forsey. The captain was clinging to an oil drum but spoke to Fizzard, saying, “You’ll see your wife again, cook, but I won’t.” Fizzard believed the captain sank shortly after that.

  Events had happened so quickly, with the fright and shock of being plunged into the dark and icy sea, that both survivors found it difficult to recount the exact circumstances. Fizzard clung to wreckage for one and a half hours in freezing sea water before he was picked up by the lifeboats. By then Barnes was already aboard Lovdal.

  For Barnes, it was his fourth misadventure at sea: he and his shipmates abandoned the schooner Nobility in the mid-Atlantic in March 1920, and left the sinking Nordica in October 1920. In both cases, he and his mates were rescued by a passing steamer. Barnes had also been a crewman on the freighter Saganaga a few days before it was torpedoed near Bell Island harbour during World War II.

  In a subsequent report to Marine Radio, Cape Race, Lovdal stated:

  Searching in vain for other survivors. Still moving through rough debris. Using searchlights. Darkness and dense fog.

  After a fruitless two-day search for the five missing seamen, Lovdal returned to St. John’s with two mariners snatched from the icy waters off Cape Race.

  47

  On the Cliffs of Cappahayden

  July 1954

  “We were lucky to be alive, for we were all non-swimmers and there was a heavy swell on. If the Marvita hadn’t drifted in near a large rock, we would have had to jump in the surf at the bottom of this cliff.” Clyde Collins, July 1954, near Cape Race.

  It was under these conditions that Captain Mike Macdonald and eight crew, including the storyteller, Clyde Collins, escaped the wreck of the customs boat MV Marvita.

  Thursday, July 15, 1954, was a grey, foggy day off Cape Race, and although Marvita was supposed to be five miles off land, it went aground about 6: 00 p.m. “We saved some suitcases, ” recalled Collins, “a bit of clothes, and the captain saved his log, but that was all. Yes, we were fortunate there was no loss of life, and I’ll tell you why.”

  Built in 1930 in Nova Scotia, Marvita was known as one of the “Banana Fleet” boats, designed as a tanker to carry illegal liquor during the American Prohibition. It was one of several vessels built in that era designed with a low profile and given lots of speed. In a way, they resembled submarines, or bananas, hence the name. The 190-ton Marvita was one of the most successful rum carriers stealthily running the triangular route between St. Pierre–New York–Nova Scotia.

  When the ban against the importing or manufacturing of alcohol – commonly known as Prohibition or Volstead’s Act – ended in the United States in 1933, Marvita was eventually sold to the Newfoundland government. Fred Hounsell was its first local captain. In Newfoundland waters, its role reversed; it became a revenue cutter designated to reduce smuggling from St. Pierre to Newfoundland.

  For its work on the south coast, often it steamed through cloying blankets of fog that often covered that area in midsummer. On Marvita’s final run in July 1954, it was a real “pea-souper.” Marvita’s duty was to carry Customs Inspector Gus Gardiner from Argentia to St. John’s. Macdonald, an experienced and veteran captain, wisely kept his vessel about five miles off shore and set a course that would take Marvita safely around Cape Race. All the crew knew the reputation of Cape Race and discussed which stretch of coastline was the most dangerous. They knew that over the years, that shoreline between Cape Ballard and Trepassey Bay, with dangerous Cape Race in the middle, had justly earned the dubious name “Graveyard of Ships.”

  Marvita carried nine crew: Captain Macdonald, born in St. Mary’s and a resident of St. John’s; Mate Maurice Murphy, Fox Harbour; Chief Engineer Boyd Duffett, Catalina; Second Engineer Martin Barron, St. John’s; Cook Patrick Barron, probably from Placentia; Steward Frank Burry, Greenspond; and sailors George Collins, Lamaline; Larry Sheehan, Cappahayden; and Clyde Collins, who lived in St. John’s but was born in Lamaline.

  Many of the crew were ex-servicemen. Maurice Murphy had served in the Royal Navy, Larry Sheehan in the Newfoundland Regiment, and Captain Macdonald had been in the navy as well.

  Clyde Collins and Mate Murphy, who both took watch at 4: 00 p.m., sounded the vessel’s foghorn every two minutes. As Collins recalled:

  Both the mate and I kept a sharp lookout, but the only indication of being close to the rocks we had was an echo. It seemed to bounce off a cliff and by the time we sounded a second blast, it was too late. We both saw white seas breaking and put Marvita in reverse. She had two Fairbanks Morris engines. There had to be time – from several seconds to a minute or two – for the engines to stop and then gear into reverse.

  But it was too late! Apparently a strong inset of tide, or iron on the bottom from scores of other steamers and ships wrecked in the general area, threw the compass variation out by a degree or two. Marvita slid upon a rock, one engine stopped, and a propeller blade went through the bottom of the vessel. There was no way to back off the ledge. Collins remembered:

  We had a lifeboat, but there was too much sea to
get it off deck. The swell kept her on the ledge for 20 minutes, but she gradually moved closer to a large flat-topped rock near the base of the cliff. Seeing he could do no more, Captain Macdonald gave the order to “Abandon ship.”

  Seas would take Marvita in close to the rock; then she’d fall back. The mate and I stood outside the rail, and when she was carried in closer to the rock, we jumped. We got a rope ashore and the guys left on Marvita kept pressure on the rope keeping her close to the rock.

  Each man jumped; the cook missed his footing and went into the water, but caught the rope. Last off was the second engineer, who was probably getting some personal item before he jumped.

  We were lucky no one was drowned or injured. If we had to jump into the surf to reach the beach or the cliff, things might have turned out differently.

  All nine men now stood on a rock barely above water at the base of a cliff somewhere near Cape Ballard. No one knew exactly where they were. Fortunately, no one was hurt and, although they couldn't see the top of the cliff in the fog, it was not steep. Collins remembered the climb:

  We all helped each other up. Mr. Gardiner, the customs officer, was a heavy-set man, about 250 pound and around 60 years old, and he couldn’t scale the incline. George Collins and I went down to help him.

  At the top we tried to get our bearings, but had no idea which way to walk. Before we grounded we heard the horn on Cape Race; so we knew we were near Cappahayden. We walked inland from the cliff for a good while, but, disoriented and in the fog, we went in a complete circle and arrived back at the cove where our ship was. By now Marvita was partially submerged; planks and wood drifted away from her.