OHIO STATEWIDE FILES - Know your Ohio: The Great Lake Erie [5]
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File contributed for use in USGenWeb Archives by
Darlene E. Kelley
http://www.genrecords.net/emailregistry/vols/00026.html#0006374
October 2, 2000
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Historical Collections of Ohio
Diaries of S. J. Kelly
Plains Dealer
Know Your Ohio
by Darlene E. Kelley
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The Great Lake Erie -- part 5.
Lake Erie / weather/ messages in bottles and wrecks.

       
The shipping news for the navation season of 1845 carried the following
notice;
     Boisterous Weather-- The extremely boisterous weather was very
destructive to lives and vessels, amounting to, as nearly a  careful
account can make it, thirty six vessels driven ashore. Twenty of these
became total wrecks. Four foundered at sea.

The boisterous weather struck again in November of 1869, visiting all
five of the Great Lakes with the worst toll of shipwrecks in recorded
history. A catastrophic storm rode a gale out of Lake Superior to
hurricane down Lake Michigan and Lake Huron, and blasted across the
Lower Lakes to blow Lake Erie and Lake Ontario spray into the clouds
that dropped snow on the St Lawrence River.

From the Apostle Islands in Lake Superior to the Thousand Islands at the
foot of Lake Ontario, the Lake shores were littered with masts and
spars, hulls and sails, lifeboats and life belts, the latter ironically
named because they contained nothing but dead men. In Buffalo and
Chicago, in Detroit and Cleveland, in Saginaw and Toronto, in Duluth and
Milwaukee, owners waited for ships that would never come in, and women
yearned in vain for the sailors they kissed good-bye.

Through four November days, the storm king raged over the Lakes, strikng
icy fists at six propellers, a paddle-wheel steamer, one tug, eight
barks, four brigs, fifty-six schooners, three barges, and eighteen
scows-- a total of seventy
seven vessels wrecked or swept from sight forever.

There are some who claim that this storm marked the turning point
between sail and steam on the Lakes. Shipping men examined the
statistics and decided that sailing vessels were too vulnerable to
fresh-water's bosisterous winds and lee shores, whereas steamboats could
fight for the sea room that meant survival.

This point has nothing to do with the right for supremacy between sail
and steam, but to offer in evidence a last minute message corked in a
bottle that washed ashore on one of Lake Erie's
so-called Wine Islands, Kelley's Island to be exact, the next spring.
This message was reprinted in the Islander, Kelley's Island local paper.
" Nov. "69. Mast gone. Sinking fast. Good-bye all. Gold Hunter."

There were at least half a dozen Gold Hunters on the Lakes in this era,
three of them schooners and all lost or wrecked, but only one left a
farewell note that was found, and she remains unidentified.

Earlier in the same decade, on Aug 18,1861, Mrs. E. Bowen was walkng
along the docks of a bustling Cuyahoga River in Cleveland when she spied
a corked bottle floating towad shore. The message read;  " On board
schooner Amelia, August 12, off Grand River, schooner lost foremast,
also mainsail, leaking badly, cargo iron. Must go down. All hands must
be lost. C.S. Brace, Captain."

There were at least three Amelias on the Lakes in this era, starting
with the one in Perry's squadron, and all of them schooners, but only
this one delivered a message written by a dead man's hand and both the
sailing vessel and the Captain remained unidentfied.

No great mystery is inferred. The large shallow Lake Erie has swallowed
many an unlisted ship and unlicensed master. Sailing in those days was a
haphazard business. Even so, the authenticity of some farewell notes
found in bottles could provide an interesting subject for speculation. A
number of them studied calm. or a theatrical flair, or a gossipy
newsiness that may not be inconsistent to the crank letters that follow
a tabloid crime or they give the impression of having been planted, as a
hoax, after a shipwreck, in an place of easy finding.

Dropping notes in bottles during pleasant weather long has been a
popular hobby among Great Lakes sailors. Such notes generally contain
the writer's name and address, along with the request that any finder
drop him a line as to where it was picked up. The vast majority
of these hobbyists are still waiting for their bottles to be discovered.

A professor studying Great Lakes currents at the Duluth Branch of the
University of Minnesota has reported that out of a thousand bottles
dropped in Lake Superior to test currents, only 350 have been found.

These bottles were dropped under average circumstances, not in the
height of a storm whose heavy seas could plunge them to depths where
they would explode under pressure, or smash them against rocks, or coat
them with ice, or hurl them high onto uninhabited shores, or a thousand
other mishaps, which glass is heir to.

This raises a much more interesting and dramatic question than the
genuiness of farewell notes found in bottles. How many have been written
at death's elbow on a sinking ship during a man's last few precious
moments of life, never to be found?

One of the most genuine instances of a farewell note at the moment of
shipwreck, and certainly one of the most poignant, was written by Capt.
Hugh M. Williams to his wife during Lake Huron's great storm of Nov
1913. that also created havoc on ake Erie. Capt Williams commanded the
Government Lightship No. 82, anchored at the entrance to Buffalo Harbor.
After a storm, the lightship was no more to be seen then if she had been
swept clear of Erie by a giant's broom. The only clue to her fate was
found on one of her boards which came ashore.
On this board the Captain had written these last few words to his wife;
" Good-bye, Nellie, ship is breaking up fast --- Williams."

Among old time Lake dwelllers, Black Friday long has been a household
phrase, rivilled only by Dark Sunday, somber nickname for the Nov.,1913,
Lake Huron storm, when clouds were so dark and blizzard so thick that
midday differed no all from midnight.

October 20, 1916, marked the grimest modern date in Lake Erie's
shipwreck-studded history.
The storm king who visited her differed from other storm kings in that
he concentrated al his force against her instead of wasting any strength
on her sisters.

On Black Friday there were four boats caught out on the open Lake; the
schooner D. L. Filer. the lumber hooker Marshall F. Butters, the
Canadian steamer Merida, and the whaleback frieghter James B. Colgate.
They all went down
in the storm. Four brave captains stayed with their ships to the last.
Three of them lived to tell the story. Two of the three were the only
ones left to tell what happened, because they survivied the bitter
experience of watching thir entire crews perish.

The Canadian steamer Merida was sighted once on Black Friday, about 10
miles off the Southeast Shoals in Lake Erie, by Capt Massey of the
steamer Briton. He observed her to be making bad weather of her passage,
and he considered himself lucky to be able to make shelter off Cedar
Point.  The doomed Merida was never seen again. Several days after the
storm blew itself out, bodies of men were found floating in the middle
of the lake, their heads bowed in life preservers bearing the name
Merida. All hands were lost, twenty three.

The steamer with the most ominous number aboard on Black Friday proved
to be themost fortunate as far as human survival was concerned. The
lumber carrier Marshall F. Butters carried thirteen men, counting
Captain and crew, out of the mouth of Detroit River into the storm.  She
was loaded with shingles and boards for Cleveland, and her cargo started
to shift as she rolled wildly in the sharp seas. The Butters developed a
list.

" Trim cargo!" roared Captain McClure. " For your lives!"

Fear of death put wings on the feet of the men, and eyes in their hands,
but they were unable to keep the ship from sinking under them.  Water
crashed abroard. Captain McClure grabbed the steamer's whistle and
sounded the distress signal, but it had no more chance of being heard
above the storm than a pin dropping in a boiler factory.

As the Butters settled lower in the water and the fires in her boilers
went out, she lost headway and drifted at the mercy of Black Friday. Ten
of the crew kept him company while he yanked in despeation at the
steamboat's whistle while the decks began going awash.

Two large freighters, the Frank R. Billngs and the F. G. Hartwell, were
approaching the scene. The Hartwell picked up the men in the
half-swamped lifeboats. Captain Cody of the Billings could not hear the
distress signals of the Butters, but he read the message conveyed by the
puffs of white steam from the doomed ship's whistle.

Despite mountainous seas he guided his big freighter all the way around
the Butters, dropping storm oil as he went in order to calm the waters
and get close enough to send a line aboard. This he managed in a display
of great seamanship, and the remaining men were pulled to safety aboard
the Billings in the nick of time before the lumber hooker went to the
bottom of Lake Erie.

"That wind blew seventy miles an hour," Captain McClure said after his
rescue. " Worst
storm I ever experienced."

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to be continued in part 6--