On Friday 5th
August 1859 a three-masted steamship, the
Admella left the port of Adelaide, South Australia on her fortieth journey to Melbourne
in Victoria. She carried eighty-four passengers, twenty-nine crew and seven horses.
Deep in her hold was nearly a hundred tons of copper. There were also bags of
flour to feed the prospectors in the Victorian goldfields. From this cargo the
gold diggers saw not one loaf.
Friday 13th
December 1907 was a fateful night for an American ship’s crew, that of the
seven-masted steel schooner Thomas W
Lawson. She had left an oil refinery south of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania,
on 19th November with a crew of eighteen and 58,000 barrels of
paraffin oil aboard bound for London. The Thomas
W Lawson is forever linked with the first ecological disaster involving
spillage of oil from a ship.
The SS Edmund Fitzgerald set sail from
Duluth, Minnesota, in the afternoon gloom on 9th November 1975. She
was loaded with iron ore destined, via Lake Superior, for an iron works in
Detroit. This lakes freighter had numerous nicknames but ‘Pride of the American
Side’ does justice to her power, strength and speed. Waves that night nearly
twenty feet high accounted for a modern maritime tragedy.
The sinkings of the
Admella, the Thomas W Lawson and the
Edmund Fitzgerald remind us not only of the little hope of survival men used
to have when seascapes turned wild but also gigantic storms and heaving seas
often led too often to misery and pain felt by the families of those who died. I
have stood on the shores overlooking these three tragedies; my visits to these
lonely places have spanned forty-eight years. Each took place in spring
sunshine. Yet I could feel the thunderous seas through my toes as my tramp
along these shores revealed nature at its cruelest. The English writer, John
Fowles, wrote in 1974 of the Isles of Scilly (yet it applies equally to the
other two sites) “that these reefs and coasts remain hungry we still have
evidence every year”. His words were written only seven years after the
infamous wreck of the Torrey Canyon.
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The Admella was close to Carpenter Reef,
some thirty-five miles west of the South Australia/Victoria state line, when
one of the horses aboard lost its balance in a heavy swell and fell on to its side. To enable the horse to be
put back on its feet Captain McEwan altered the ship’s course. The ship was
perilously close to the Cape Banks lighthouse but McEwan inexplicably thought
he was far from land. At 5:00 a.m. on 6th August the ship hit
Carpenter Reef and keeled over. The three lifeboats were either smashed or lost
immediately. By 5:15 a.m. the ship broke into three sections, a number of
passengers drowned instantly. At daybreak the survivors glimpsed, across the
churning waters, the mainland coast little more than half a mile away. The crew
of a sister ship to the Admella passing
by in the angry ocean saw nothing and shouts from the survivors went unheard.
Dawn on Sunday 7th
August rose over quieter seas. Two of the crew made a raft and struggled
successfully to reach the mainland. The land is desolate here, there is little
human habitation to be seen today; a hundred and sixty years ago there was
none. Through Sunday night Robert Knapman and John Leach trudged through the
barren landscape heading for the Cape Northumberland lighthouse twenty-five
miles east along the coast. I can only imagine the shuddering sense of
disbelief that Knapman and Leach felt when, on reaching the lighthouse on Monday
they learned there was no telegraph. However such Australians that do work in
the wilderness are made tough; the lighthouse keeper, Ben Germein, set off to
ride the eighteen miles to Mount Gambier post office. Yet another delay was
forced upon the wretched survivors when Ben’s horse threw him off.
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| SS Admella on Carpenter Reef |
Whilst the drama
on land played out the sixty odd survivors aboard portions of the ship were beginning
to die of thirst, exhaustion and exposure. On Tuesday, three days after
disaster struck, the Northumberland lighthouse keeper together with Knapman and
Leach set off back up the coast to the wreck and found one of the Admella’s lifeboats. They set about to
try and repair it. On Wednesday one steamship appeared on the scene with the
Adelaide pilot boat and another came from Portland. Through that day and the
next multiple attempts were made to both fire rocket lines aboard the stricken
vessel and to launch the repaired lifeboat but all efforts failed. On Saturday
13th August the pilot boat and the lifeboat struggled through the
still raging sea. Ben Germein, now back on the scene, steered the lifeboat and
managed to bring aboard Captain McEwan and two passengers. They were taken to
the beach. Once more he turned back to the wreck. He succeeded in rescuing one
other survivor but on the trip back the boat capsized and the passenger was
lost.
The Portland
lifeboat was a robust craft. By Saturday night it was able to get close to the
wreck and it’s crew could lift off more survivors. Through a number of trips
back and forth, by Sunday – an incredible eight days after the shipwreck – the
last remaining survivors were brought ashore.
Thirteen
passengers, thirteen crew and three horses survived the wreck of the Admella. Visiting a nearby beach at
Carpenter Rocks and Portland last year I was humbled by the bravery and
fortitude of the passengers on the ship and of the folk on land who bent every
sinew to render help. I looked across the southern ocean and thought of the
unimaginable pain, suffering and desperation the passengers experienced
possibly matched, in a different way, by the anguish felt by the rescuers. Today
sections of the meagre landscape overlooking the site of the wreck are planted
with pines, others are left to fester in the salty air, whilst the southern
ocean forever pounds away at the shoreline. Where modern arboriculture is
evident it is leading to the loss of indigenous birdlife. This is a forlorn
part of South Australia. Of the few people who once inhabited this land most
have gone to the cities in search of work.
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Gentle waves from
a deep turquoise sea lap along a rocky beach bathed in brilliant sunshine.
Black rocks are visible half a mile away, they lurk like phantoms. In May 2016 I
am tramping around the tiny Scillonian island of St. Agnes. The circular walk,
at a leisurely pace stopping to enjoy the sight of seabirds soaring and wild
flowers bobbing in a gentle breeze, takes two hours with the sea constantly in
sight. The land is flat; the highest point is only sixty feet above the
seashore. A tiny hamlet of white washed cottages includes a low built church in
Lower Town. My tramping party enters. At first there is a familiar church sight
- small pews, a pulpit and confined spaces to worship. Then I look up and see a
rustic wooden plaque. I read terrible words – of disaster, shipwreck and death.
I am transported to be a bystander on St Agnes 13th December 1907:
After helping to prepare the
church for Christmas with some village folk I left the squat building in
blackness, the wind roaring in my ears. I could hear the storm whistling
through the hedges and stunted trees but I could see nothing. Spray from the
sea drenched everything in its path inland. Rounding a street corner all of a
sudden I heard voices coming towards me. One belonged to Charlie Hicks. He and
a bunch of men were shouting something about a ship in trouble. ‘Not another
one’ I thought. We had witnessed three wrecks off St Martins the previous
summer of 1906 and it seemed we were overdue another disaster on St Agnes.
Needing to get back to The Turk’s Head to secure the windows from the gale I then
went back to my cottage to shut out the latest storm from my consciousness.
The next morning
my imaginary self and the other residents of St Agnes would have discovered the
awful story. The Thomas B. Lawson had
been making its way just to the south of St. Agnes at Annett. She was caught in
the fierce seas and currents. The captain (grandly named George Washington Dow)
dropped anchors, amongst the rocks of Minmanueth that he could not have known,
to wait for the storm to abate. The lifeboat crews from St Agnes and St Marys
were alerted and they made their way to the ship off the North West Porth. Captain
Dow refused requests to abandon ship. I can surmise that the local lifeboatmen would
have cursed him for a fool as they returned to their ports, the St Agnes boat having
left one of their own, William Thomas Hicks, as pilot on board the ship. During
the night one anchor broke free. The ship, despite her power and size, was now
at the mercy of the tempestuous sea. Dragged onto Shag Rock the seven masts of
the ship all snapped, taking with them into the broiling maelstrom most of the
crew and “Billy” Hicks. They had all been sent up the rigging ‘for safety’!
Fifteen men drowned - what a horrible death. The next day Billy Hick’s son,
Frederick Charles Hicks, set out in a pilot gig boat to look for his father. At
Hellweather Rock Charlie found not his father but Captain Dow and the ship’s
engineer, both alive and clinging miserably to life and rocks with decreasing
certainty. Both were saved, the only two survivors of this needless disaster.
What thoughts must have gone through Charlie Hicks’ mind when he met the foolhardy
captain but no sign of his father.
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| The Thomas W Lawson |
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One Friday
evening in late April 1968 I became co-driver of a three quarter race-trimmed
MGB Roadster making a non-stop journey from Vancouver on the west coast of
Canada to Toronto in Ontario. The objective was to drive the 3,000 miles across
the Trans Canada Highway in forty-six hours. We were once stopped by police in
Kenora, western Ontario - they use aerial surveillance colleagues to measure
car speeds and spot from above - we survived as the car had been mistaken for
an identical vehicle involved in a robbery. It took twenty-four hours to drive
from Vancouver to the western border of Ontario and a further twenty-four hours
to reach Toronto, but my friend Rick, the MGB’s owner, got to his family party
on time. We returned a month later at a more leisurely pace and stopped at the
industrial border town of Sault Ste. Marie on the Canadian side of Lake
Superior. We paused to take in the vastness of the lake and the waterways that
feed it. I found it difficult to comprehend that huge merchant vessels steamed
from Duluth in Minnesota across the lake, threading their way down through the
locks at the split city of Sault Ste. Marie and then on southwestwards to Lake
Huron, finally ending their voyages in
Detroit, Michigan, USA.
My contemplation
across Lake Superior (‘the big lake they called Gitchee Gumee’) was in benign weather
conditions. The water lay smooth and tranquil, silver and black in the mist.
The land on the north shore of Superior is covered with forest, home in
Hiawatha’s time of the Ojibwe indigenous people. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s
long poem written in trochaic tetrameter was read to me when I was eight years
of age and its rhythm mesmerizes me still:
By the shores of Gitchee
Gumee
By the shining Big
Sea-Water…
Dark behind it rose the
forest
Rose the black and gloomy
pine trees
On this land the
Great Lake imposes its Big-Sea presence on all who come near. Seven years after
my brief May homage to Gitchee Gumee, in November 1975, ‘the gales of November
came slashin’. The SS Edmund Fitzgerald had
set sail from Duluth in the afternoon gloom on 9th November. She was
loaded with iron ore, destined for an iron works in Detroit. This freighter had
made the journey across the lake on numerous trips before. But as with the Thomas W. Lawson, the Edmund Fitzgerald was no match for the
‘hurricane west wind’ that tore into her at the eastern end of the lake in the
early hours of 10th November. There has never been a conclusive
account of why she sank near Whitefish Bay, just fifteen miles from safety at
Sault Ste. Marie. Captain McSorley radioed that some of the hatches had been
blown off the freighter. Lake water penetrated the hold causing the ship to
list so allowing more water in to do its damage. All twenty-nine crew went down
with their ship.
 |
| The Edmund Fitzgerald |
There is a
poignant commemoration to this disaster. The Canadian folksinger Gordon
Lightfoot’s song, The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, remains
one of the best folk-rock ballads ever recorded. His interest in the families
of the men who died keep alive the memory of the ship and its men who sailed
her. He spoke for all victims of shipwrecks, never more than for the passengers
aboard the Admella for eight days and
the crew of the Thomas W Lawson cast
upon the black rocks in the English Channel:
Does anyone know where the
love of God goes
when the waves turn the
minutes to hours?
…and all that remains is the
faces and the names
of the wives and the sons
and the daughters
Sitting in the
comfort of our landlubber’s homes we read every month of natural disasters that
kill multiple and unfortunate sacrificial humans. It is a basic instinct to
want to know all about the circumstances. Yet we have a terror of being caught
in any such circumstance. An aeroplane crash off Guernsey two weeks ago, a
terrorist bombing in Iran last week, a fire in a high-rise building in Paris
this week – we search ghoulishly for details and think all the while that we are
relieved not to be part of it. Drowning may be lead to a quick death but
reflect on the lives of the families left behind.
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| Big-Sea-Water |
References:
Longfellow’s
Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald by Gordon Lightfoot from the album, Summertime Dream, 1976
Shipwreck; John
Fowles. 1974
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