Nova Scotia (33 page)

   
The bad weather persevered while the crew jury-rigged a
rudder out of spare parts. In order to fix the rudder in place,
Aaron Churchill, first mate and nephew of the captain, was let down
over the side in a bowline. Figuring that wet, freezing clothes
would impede his progress, the brave young man did the job totally
naked. A newspaper would report later that the younger Churchill,
“when taken back on board wasn insensible but
recovered.”

   
Unfortunately for all aboard, this rudder too was wrecked by
the continued hammering of the storm. Another one was painstakingly
constructed as the ship was driven along by the storm. As the new
rudder was being lowereend over the side for placement, a wave
smacked into it hard enough to send it floating away. The undaunted
crew created a huge manual pole-like rudder from the timber aboard
but it too proved useless. Mountains of water smashed over the ship
and wrecked the deckhouse where the men lived, sweeping away many
of the provisions. To add to the calamity, the oakum began to work
its way loose between the boards and the ship started to take on
water below. Heavy with wood, the ship and its cargo wouldn’t
exactly go the bottom of the sea but everything was becoming
waterlogged and soon the ship would be a helpless pile of floating
wreckage at the mercy of the unforgiving winter Atlantic. A third
rudder was put into place and the men pumped away to get rid of the
constant flush of water. Rudder three was lost, as was rudder
four.

   
Unimaginably, the ship kept up a haggard
westerly path on into January of the next year until she was within
eighty kilometres of Tory Island, north of Ireland, and only 160
kilometres from her destination port, Greenock. Bad weather,
described by Archibald MacMechan as “a series of hurricanes and
heavy seas,” shoved the
Research
off course
again. The newspaper in Glasgow would later say, “The officers and
men were freq  uently greatly exhausted and upon several
occasions the crew desired the captain and officers to give up the
ship.” No one would have to wonder why.

   
Passing vessels
Empress Eugenie
and
Palmyra
came close enough to offer up some
desperately needed provisions. Amazingly enough, the captain and
crew stayed with the
Research
rather than
give up the battle with the North Atlantic. More rudders were lost
or broken and more setbacks occurred, some of the cargo was heaved
overboard to lighten the load but much of it was still on board
when they were finally towed into Greenock on February 4. For once,
man had won the battle with an adversarial sea.

Saxby’s Storm

Storms at sea were the most obvious
cause for the wrecks of ships and the monumental loss of life at
sea. Sometimes the collateral damage of Atlantic-born storms spills
over onto land. One of the most famous of all Nova 7Scotia storms
was the Saxby Gale, predicted almost a year in advance by
Lieutenant James Saxby from the British Navy and written up in the
London papers at that time. He calculated that on October 5, 1869,
the moon would be at its closest point to the Earth and located
directly in line with the equator, while at the same time, “lines
drawn from the Earth’s centre would cut the Sun and Moon in the
same arc of right ascension.” To Saxby’s mind, this was an
extraordinary celestial circumstance and it meant big trouble for
mariners.

   
Sure enough, the following October an Atlantic storm was
moving up the seaboard wreaking havoc on Washington, D.C., and
flooding Philadelphia and New England. On October 4 it arrived at
the mouth of the Bay of Fundy and by nightfall a wind of hurricane
force hammered the coastline. Roads were flooded, bridges washed
away, ships were smashed ashore and wharves beaten to a pulp.
Incredible stories were reported, like the one about a barn,
complete with livestock, being lifted off its foundation and
floated for 100 metres. Other barns simply drifted away on the
super-high tides, as did a great number of haystacks. Telegraph
poles were knocked down. Fields in the lowlands remained flooded
for weeks.

   
The town of Windsor saw her streets in full flood and in
nearby fields many cattle and sheep drowned. The great dyke at
Grand Pré was breached for the first time since it was built by the
Acadians, more livestock drowned and the salt that remained wrecked
the crops for three years.

   
Along some parts of the bay, tides rose six to
fifteen metres above normal and some shorelines were permanently
altered. An unlucky mail carrier and his passenger were crossing
the Tantramar Marsh at the time the waters swept over the dykes,
carrying them almost a kilometre and drowning the passenger, poor
Miss Huldah Bray. At Minudie, near Amherst, an old gent named
Steward, who was sleeping in his barn after a hard day of cutting
hay, found his barn afloat and breaking apart around him. He jumped
onto a passing haystack, so the story from the
Amherst Gazette
reports, and surfed it off into the wild night until it
grounded on a dyke, where he was rescued the following
day.

   
For weeks afterwards, stories were reported about the
devastating and sometimes amazing effects of the storm on people’s
lives around Fundy. A house was turned completely about on its
footing in one case. In another instance, while a low-lying house
was flooding up into the second floor, its occupant climbed into a
coffin and floated out the second-storey window to eventual safety.
Many survived by sitting it out on the top of barns stubborn enough
to stay put during the high tides and blasting
winds.

   
Ships, like the
Genii
, whose captain
had not been wary enough to take Saxby’s early warning or frequent
reminders as the date approached, ended up wrecked in the Bay of
Fundy. In this instance, eleven men drowned. Meanwhile, the capital
city of Halifax was spared nearly all of the mayhem and the
Chronicle-Herald
reported the next day in a slightly miffed tone,
“The storm of Monday night was not a success in the city – did not
come up to the expectations of the public.”

The Mystery of the Mary
Celeste

Not
all sea disasters involving Nova Scotians occurred along our own
coast. In fact, the setting for one of this province’s most famous
sea tragedies was thousands of miles from home port, but it
nonetheless constitutes an important legacy of the golden age of
Nova Scotian sailing ships. When disasters occur far from port, it
is often difficult to piece together the events. Unlike the wreck
of the d
Atlantic
or the
Cherokee
, there
might not even be bodies washing up on the shoreline to confirm the
final chapter of the story. The case of the
Mary Celeste
is one such occurrence.

   
Spencer’s Island on the Bay of Fundy was one of
those tiny Nova Scotian communities that produced fantastic sailing
ships in the third quarter of the nineteenth century. One of the
most notable and most talked about was the
Mary Celeste
.
First christened the
Amazon
when it was
launched in 1861, this brigantine had her name changed in 1868
after an unlucky accident in a gale. She was salvaged by a group of
Americans and thus became their possession. On the morning of
November 7, 1872, the
Mary
Celeste
left New York for
Genoa, loaded with 1,700 barrels of alcohol. Master mariner
Benjamin Spooner Briggs was in charge and was accompanied by his
wife, Sara, and two-year-old daughter, Sophia, along with a small
crew of only seven men. What happened on this fateful voyage
remains a mystery, but the fragments of that mystery continue to be
an intriguing puzzle.

   
On December 4 of that year, another brigantine,
the
Dei
Grata
, was on its way to
Gibraltar from New York. It had been a stormy crossing for the most
part and about halfway between the Azores and Portugal, David
Morehouse, captain of the ship, spotted some sails on the horizon.
It was the
Mary
Celeste
. The seas were high
but not dangerous and the wind was blowing out of the north. Three
of the
Dei
Grata
’s crewmen boarded
the
Mary Celeste
and discovered it was deserted. Two
of the sails had blown away but three were still set. The mainsail
had been hauled down and other sails furled. Some of the rigging
was missing or damaged. One of the
Mary Celeste
’s
lifeboats was missing but there was no sign that the tackle had
been used to put it over the side.

   
Some water had flooded the hold but not enough to cause
serious worry and the pumps were working away as designed. The
binnacle, a stand for the compass next to the steering wheel, was
knocked over and the compass itself was smashed. There was no sign
of an explosion, and in the kitchen the stove had been knocked out
of place but everything else looked neat and orderly. Seamen’s gear
was stowed properly away, including the foul-weather gear, the
sailors’ pipes and tobacco. Plenty of food and water was aboard,
there was no sign of liquor or drunken activity and, in the
captain’s quarters, the child’s toys and clothes suggested
everything had been quiet and orderly. The captain’s sword was
under his bed but his sextant, chronometer, navigation books and
ship’*s papers were missing. The final entry in the captain’s log
read, “Monday, November 25. At 8:00 Eastern Point bore S.S.W., 6
miles distant.”

   
And here was the ship sailing along mid-ocean
without anyone aboard. The mystery surrounding the
Mary Celeste
drew a good deal of interest and speculation,
and while no one really knows what happened, theories
abound.

   
One story at the time suggested that the crew got drunk and
murdered the captain, his wife, child and first mate. The murderers
dumped the bodies in the sea and then left in the small boat. Some
believed that a man named Winchester, one of the owners of the
ship, had planned the event as some kind of insurance scam. One
investigator claimed that stains on the captain’s sword were blood,
but it turned out to be rust.

   
A story later surfaced that one of the men from
the
Dei Grata
had discovered the pillow in the
baby’s bed still warm and a lukewarm meal upon the table in the
galley as he arrived, suggesting that something had just
happpened.

   
The mystery never seemed to die away fully from
public consciousness. In 1884, a story was published proposing a
complicated series of murders revolving around the ship. A 1929
book proposed further that the whole thing was an elaborate hoax to
collect insurance. At least four men surfaced and claimed to be
survivors of the
Mary
Celeste
, but none could give
a convincing account of the voyage or details of the
ship.

   
Had this been a more recent event, theories about UFO
abduction might have fitted neatly into the picture. Nonetheless,
an explanation by Dr. Oliver W. Cobb is probably the most
convincing. His story runs as follows.

   
The ship’s cargo of alcohol was affected as it
moved from the colder climate of New York to the warmer reaches of
the Atlantic. The alcohol expanded with the heat and fumes began to
leak. On the morning of November 25, the captain decided to
ventilate the hold. When the hatch was opened there was an
explosive rush of gas – a blast but no fire. Thinking that a fiery
disaster was at hand, the captain launched the ship’s boat with
everyone aboard. They would stay tied to the ship and wait to see
if it was safe to return. A storm could have come up quickly and
the boat was cast adrift from the ship. The tiny boat was
overloaded with the entire crew and eventually went down, drowning
all aboard and leaving the
Mary Celeste
to sail
on for nearly 965 kilometres with no one at the helm and no one
aboard.

They “Held Onto Their
Manhood”

Lumber was a common cargo that brought profit to Nova
Scotian ship owners. Trees were plentiful and there was a ready
market to the south. All you had to do was deliver the goods.
That’s what the brigantine
Louisa
was trying to
do when she shipped out of Bridgewater late one December, headed to
Barbados with her cargo. She soon ran into a North Atlantic blast
of a storm that started the ship leaking and forced the crew to cut
the lanyards and some of the rigging. As the storm raged, the
foremast broke clean off and the maintopmast did as well. The men
survived the night on the roof of the forehouse only to face a
worse nightmare the following day  when the whole stern of the
ship was ripped apart by waves. The lumber in the cargo hold began
to drift out into the open sea and the boats that had been in place
for emergencies disappeared. The vessel was literally
disintegrating beneath them, but as the ship was full of wood, what
was left was still afloat. Nonetheless, it was a pretty sorry state
of affairs.