The Great Storm of 1913 sunk 12 big ships on the Great Lakes 11/12 - Ottawa, Ont. – One hundred years last Saturday, Dancing Jimmy Owen – he loved the dance halls – steered his 160-metre, steel-hulled freighter out of a Michigan harbour and into oblivion. The night and the thick snow quickly hid his ship, the Henry B. Smith, as the Great Storm of 1913 tore into the Great Lakes. Capt. Owen should never have left port, but he had been behind schedule all summer and fall, and the ship’s owners were in a hurry to deliver the season’s last cargo of iron ore. Like the Edmund Fitzgerald six decades later, the Smith simply vanished into a November gale; its final resting place a mystery until this year, when searchers found it split in two in 163 metres of water just a few kilometres from port. It was one of 12 ships that sank with their entire crews that weekend in the Great Lakes, in the greatest shipping disaster in the lakes’ history. Many more were beached or destroyed. Americans today call it the White Hurricane, Canadians the Great Storm, Black Friday or other local names. It forced Canada and the U.S. to design safer ships, to put wireless on board, and to put greater effort into understanding storms. Yet outside a few communities beside the lakes, the tragedy of Nov. 8, 9 and 10, 1913, is barely remembered in Canada today. Like many captains that day, Dancing Jimmy ignored the gale warnings displayed with flags in every port. The storm had whipped up Lakes Superior, Michigan, Huron and Erie and dumped up to 50 centimetres of snow, but the captain saw the weather improving and ordered his ship loaded in the port of Marquette. It was what sailors later called “a sucker hole” in the storm, a temporary slackening. Harbor officials urged him to stay put. The winds blew at a sustained 110 km/h that day, gusting to hurricane force in places — 127 km/h in Cleveland, 130 in Buffalo, 140 beside Lake Huron. As darkness fell, the Henry B. Smith left port. The crew hadn’t even had time to secure the hatches on deck, designed to keep water from spilling into the hull. The waves were higher than the ship. As it disappeared from the view of land, the Smith turned to port — left — when the normal course would have been a starboard turn. Historians think Owen realized his mistake and was trying to head for safety. None of the crew survived and few bodies were even found. The Smith and the others sunk that day were monster ships, most more than 120 metres long. In the days before trucking they were the main way to transport heavy goods such as ore, lumber, coal and wheat between western provinces and states and the cities and factories of Chicago, Detroit and Cleveland, with rail links to eastern cities and trade with Europe. Yet one storm overwhelmed them that weekend, most of them on Lake Huron but also on Superior, Michigan and Erie. The lakes haven’t had such a storm in recorded history. Not even Hurricane Hazel did so much damage. What happened? “There were two storms,” said David Phillips, senior climatologist for Environment Canada. The forecast saw one coming: a typical stormy November day coming with northwest winds from the Prairies. But a storm that had moved from Texas to Virginia joined it. Such storms typically blow away over the Atlantic but this one, like Hurricane Sandy in 2012, turned left instead and went inland. “What happened was the storm from the south,” Phillips said. “It did the most unthinkable thing. It changed direction. That’s when hell broke loose. It was a weather bomb. It just exploded. No one would have thought that this storm would behave unlike all its brothers and sisters in the past. “The wave heights were 10, 11 metres and there was no lull, just boom, boom, boom. The pressure on the hulls must have been incredible.” Ships that had been hugging the west shores of lakes to shelter from a west wind were now exposed to a howling wind and big waves from the northeast. The sucker hole also fooled them: “They were seduced. It was like a sneak attack; nobody could see it coming.” Spray froze where it hit, coating the ships with hundreds of tonnes of ice that made them top-heavy. And without wireless communication, the ships never got weather warnings. The Charles S. Price, a 150-metre coal carrier, was found upside-down in Lake Huron near Sarnia. Canada’s largest freighter, the brand new James Carruthers — the crew complained paint was still sticky — also disappeared in Lake Huron but has never been found. The sister-ships Argus and Hydrus vanished with everyone aboard. So did the Wexford, the Regina — on and on, most with crews of 20 or more. More than 250 crewmen died, though crew lists were often incomplete and some feel the total was close to 300. Bodies were washing up all along the frozen shorelines of the lakes, many in useless life jackets. On the Canadian side of Lake Huron, searchers were paid $10 per body found. Witnesses left many accounts. Aboard the George C. Crawford in Lake Huron, Capt. Walter Iler watched waves crash over his deck and down through a broken skylight into the engine room, ship’s galley and crew’s sleeping rooms. As he turned south for shelter he passed the ore carrier Argus going north. A moment later “the Argus seemed to crumple like an eggshell. Then she was gone.” The 22 crewmen on the L. C. Waldo tied themselves to the rigging after their ship ran onto rocks in Lake Superior. They waited, coated in ice, until a lifeboat from shore rescued them all the next day. The Port Huron Times-Herald wrote of a wreck near Sarnia: “The fact that the huge vessel is lying bottom up, eight miles out in the storm-swept lake has convinced local mariners that the crew had practically no chance to escape.” It took a diver to read the ship’s name, Charles S. Price. The Manitoulin Expositor reminds us of smaller dramas, like this story of six survivors trapped all day and night on a wooden schooner aground near Manitoulin Island: “Capt. McKinnon is 67 years of age and has been sailing 44 years and says it was the worst storm that he ever encountered and was master of 30 years and never before had an accident of this kind. All are thankful that the entire crew were saved and the schooner and cargo of lumber are not a total loss. “Before leaving the wrecked schooner, Mrs. Fitzgerald suggested that they have a little breakfast, so they gathered up some broken boards that were floating around and by pouring on coal oil were able to make a fire and boil a cup of coffee. The Captain says this with bread that was floating around the cabin made the best breakfast that he had ever eaten.” In Goderich, Ont., a harbour town that was the centre for recovery efforts and for the inquiry that followed, townspeople are marking this anniversary with a book, a play and other events. “It warrants a place in the history books and unfortunately it hasn’t found it,” said Paul Carroll of Goderich. He’s a historian and author of a book on the 1913 wreck of the Wexford, a freighter carrying steel rails, in Lake Huron. “The Great Lakes have become our back door,” he says. But they and their ports were once the main route that allowed Canada to stretch west, and fighting storms was the price travellers paid. Dancing Jimmy Owen’s body was never found. The ship’s owners, the Acme Transit Company of Cleveland, got an insurance payment of $335,000. Ottawa Citizen
Posted on: Tue, 12 Nov 2013 10:57:56 +0000
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