White Squall: Sailing the Great Lakes

White Squall: Sailing the Great Lakes

First edition, ©Victoria Brehm, 2018

All rights reserved

Introductions, notes, indexes, and glossary copyright Victoria Brehm, 2018

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Brehm, Victoria

White Squall: Sailing the Great Lakes

1. United States Local History—Great Lakes Region—history 2. United States Local History—Great Lakes Region—social life and customs 3. United States Local History—Great Lakes Region—literature 4. Transportation and Communications—Great Lakes Region—Merchant Marine 5. Transportation and Communications—Great Lakes Region—Shipping

Includes index, bibliography, and glossary

ISBN 978-0-9702606-1-1 paper

ISBN 978-0-9702606-9-7 ebook

Printed in the United States of America

Design: Rebecca Lown Design

Production: Wilderness Adventure Books

First Printing

All rights reserved under the International and Pan American Copyright Conventions.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews or articles.

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law.

Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the artists’ rights is appreciated.

Ladyslipper Press

15075 County Line Road

Tustin, Michigan 49688

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

WHITE STONE CANOE

The Approach of the Storm

Ga’gandac’

Introduction

The Underwater Lion

Pete Martin

Getting Bounty from the English

Maskwawā´nahkwatōk

Concerning the League

Skanyátaí·yo’

WAR ON THE LAKES

Perry’s Victory

Andrew C. Mitchell

Introduction

The Voyages

Baron de Lahontan

Diary

René-Hippolyte Laforce

Ned Myers; or, A Life Before the Mast

Ned Myers

Travels and Adventures

David C. Bunnell

The Log of the Nancy

Alexander Mackintosh

THE LONG JOURNEY

Le Voyage, c’est un mariage

Traditional

Introduction

Narrative of the Travels and Adventures

Jean Baptiste Perrault

Personal Memoirs

Henry Rowe Schoolcraft

The Unfinished Autobiography

Henry Hastings Sibley

Deep Water Passage

Ann Linnea

WING AND WING

It’s Me for the Inland Lakes

Eldon Walkinshaw

Introduction

Wooden Shipbuilding

H. C. Inches

A Yarn Without A Moral

Morgan Robertson

From Forecastle to Academy

Lars Gustaf Sellstedt

An Extraordinary Case of Salvage

William Vessey

The Wreck of the Jennie Graham

Captain William D. Graham

Diary

Captain Soren Kristiansen

Woman Hands Down Ultimatum

Detroit Free Press

The Echo in A Boy

William Briggs MacHarg

Haul-Out

Stephen Tudor

ST. ELMO’S FIRE

Introduction

Corpse-Lights

J. J. O’Connor

The Beacon of the Lake

John W. Bell

The Deposition

Vincent Venant St. Germain

A Lake Huron Ghost Story

Anonymous

Moonlight on the Lake

C. H. J. Snider

DAREDEVILS

The Smugglers of Buffalo

Jacob W. Green

Introduction

Short Stories of Vessel Days on the Great Lakes

Captain Jim McNabb

The Flying Glim

Julius Warren Lewis

Sketches in the History of the Underground Railroad

Eber Pettit

The Life of Josiah Henson

Josiah Henson

The Autobiography

Anna Edson Taylor

Under Five Lakes: The Cruise of the Destroyer

M. Quad

TRAVELLERS

Lost on the Lady Elgin

Henry Clay Work

Introduction

History and General Description of New France

Pierre Charlevoix

Lights and Shades of Missionary Life

John H. Pitezel

The Walk-in-the-Water

Mary Palmer and Eleanor Welton

A Thrilling Incident

Niles’ National Register

American Notes

Charles Dickens

Journal

Walt Whitman

The Englishwoman in America

Isabella Lucy Bird

Round By Propeller

Constance Fenimore Woolson

Picnic Boat

Carl Sandburg

MASTER MARINERS

Sailin’ Out O’ Duluth

Ralph Emberg

Keep Moving

Alan Scott MacDougall

Introduction

An Ancient Mariner Recollects

Captain Merwin Stone Thompson

Life on the Great Lakes

Fred W. Dutton

The Search for the Grand Marais

Edwin Balmer

Pop Comes Back

M. Kingsbury Scott

Home for Thanksgiving

James Crandall

Lakeboat

David Mamet

The Best Job in the World

Victoria Brehm

Shipping Papers

Jonathan Johnson

NOTES

GLOSSARY

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INDEX

COMING IN BOOK II:

New selections in War on the Lakes, The Long Journey, Wing and Wing, Master Mariners.

A new section on Sailors in Small Boats

INTRODUCTION

INTRODUCTION

Sunday morning, June, 1982, hot and windless. I am sitting by the goniometer in the wheelhouse of a 730-foot laker loaded with road salt, approaching the mouth of the Calumet River at Chicago. A thick fog surrounds us, created as sun-warmed air meets water still cold from winter.

It is a comfortable wheelhouse, where the mates and maritime academy cadets gather even when they’re not on watch. There is always coffee, and frequently gifts from the galley—hand-made pastries, pizza, and cookies—sent up the deck in a covered basket. The wheelsman talks books and politics with the mate. The radio plays softly on a country-western station because the captain hates rock and roll. He gave up his pipe for chewing tobacco and now he walks a slow, quiet circle around the room: from the port windows, to the front windows and the radar, to the starboard windows, to the windows overlooking the hatches, where he pauses and spits neatly in the middle of the sink drain, and then back to the port windows and so around again. He is wearing a path in the carpeting.

We can hear fog signals from vessels at anchor all around us. The mate, who tends to be anxious, paces now. Think we might have to anchor, Cap? He runs a hand through his red hair. Cap does not answer. A cacophony of horns and whistles does. The marine radio chatters with calls for small boats: Troublemaker, Bootlegger, Dealer’s Choice, Debtors’ Prison, Chicago Police Marine Unit, Captain Nemo, and finally, "Wet Dream. Come in Wet Dream."

I know that boat, a cadet says. It’s a yacht.

Seen it or had it? the Captain asks, deadpan.

The music changes to Ronnie Milsap, then Merle Haggard. There is a call from another tug service, asking if the Captain wants tugs for the river. They have been calling for at least six hours, since the ship was half-way up Lake Michigan, and they are still calling. Cap is reserved and polite, his voice very quiet. No, he does not need a tug. No. If he ever wants a tug, he’ll call. He returns to staring out the fog-blanketed front window.

The ship is heavily loaded and water levels are low, so she logs and does not answer the wheel correctly. The wheelsman understeers by six degrees, then oversteers in correction. The mate takes the wheel for a moment. If she starts going off again, let myself or the old man know right away.¹ Then he paces again, stopping to make himself a cup of coffee with two spoons of instant in the cup before pouring in the brewed coffee that’s been sitting in the pot for three hours. The cadets have picked up on the tension and sit quietly at the front windows, watching and listening.

The ship is 75 feet wide. The cement sides of the river she must enter are 400 feet wide. Visibility is still zero and the fog whistles continue. The mate asks again, Going to anchor, Cap?

Cap’s only answer is to shift his chew of tobacco slightly, look at the radar, walk to try to look out the port window, then return to focusing straight ahead out the whited-out front window, his hands in the pockets of his jacket and his hardhat pulled down on his forehead. The music changes to The Gambler, with Kenny Rogers. We can see the mouth of the river only on radar. It is very close. We are sailing blind, dead slow, yet it would still take a mile and a half to stop. But the captain has a schedule to meet, he has sailed into this channel many times, and he knows his ship like an extension of his body.

Put her hard to starboard, Cap orders, and the wheelsman jumps with a yip. Then he orders the rudder amidships. He walks to the window, then back to the radar. He calls for the bow thrusters, and the ship begins to shake as she starts to negotiate the mouth of the river.

Suddenly, the fog vanishes as the ship noses almost perfectly into the center of the river. The sound of her engines and fog horn ricochet loudly back from cement sidewalls and the land.

The wheelsman sighs, a long released breath, and the mate grabs his hard hat off the table and bangs through the starboard door. The cadets chatter out through the port door and clump down the stairs. They will need to point, to call out distances between the ship and the shore through the curves of the river.

Know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em, know when to walk away… Rogers croons into the pilot house.

Radar is a bit off, the captain muses to himself, as if what he had just done—thread a needle with a 730-foot ship in a blind fog with little margin for error—was nothing special.

AND, IN TRUTH, it probably wasn’t, even before satellite navigation with computerized charts made such daring easier. Great Lakes captains, technically known as pilots, are some of the best ship handlers in the world, because the lakes require extremely precise piloting skills applied with cold-nerved skill at estimating speed and distance. One misstep and a channel is blocked or a ship wrecked. Inches matter, even to behemoths. Another captain, who once commanded a thousand-footer, told how, after his old-time Buffalo company was bought by an international shipping conglomerate, he and other company captains were required to go to an international ship masters’ training conference in Germany. They thought it would be important, so they were pretty nervous.

"We were just a bunch of guys from Buffalo, after all, and there would be men there who sailed Cape Horn and the Cape of Good Hope! So the first morning we get up and go out to the harbor and they give us this exercise. They made a big deal out of it, like it was supposed to be real tough, but we kept looking at it and we couldn’t understand what made it so hard. But maybe it’ll be worse when we get aboard we thought, so we got on the launch out to the training ship. But it wasn’t worse. It wasn’t even hard. We routinely docked without tugs and sometimes had to work out of a turning basin using anchors. The exercise was supposed to last all day, but we were done by 11:30. So we went uptown and played pool and drank beer the rest of the day. We did that every day all week until we went home because we could get our exercises done before noon. The salt-water guys, meanwhile, were sweating blood trying to get those training ships to do what the exercises wanted.

The next year we were all looking forward to the same gig—easy exercises, lots of time for pool and beer and sightseeing. But when we got to the dock the first morning, the instructor looked at us and said, ‘You guys from the Great Lakes, you stand over there. We have some different exercises for you.’ And whatever the salt-water men did, we had to do upside down and backwards with only one hand. That was the end of the beer and pool.

These two captains were masters of a type of ship that is unique in the world: the Great Lakes bulk carrier or laker, developed to haul ore, coal, salt, grain, and other bulk cargoes on the lakes and through locks and narrow river passages cheaply and efficiently. Invented in 1869 with the launch of the 210-foot Robert J. Hackett, long ships are the more recent of lakes’ vessel designs, which began with the Native invention of the birch-bark canoe millennia ago. Even as lakers would be modified over time for the requirements of their cargos, the historic Native canoe was adapted for the fur trade until it grew far beyond any size Natives had used. The decentralized nature of the trade in New France, driven by independent traders assigned particular territories, discouraged the building and innovation of sailing ships, but after the British won North America, there began a long era of adapting salt-water models of the schooner and barkentine to carry cargoes faster and more efficiently in the sometimes narrow and shoaling confines of lakes’ river, harbor, and canal passages. One result of attempts to adapt to these conditions was frequent use of a raffee, a triangular sail mounted on a yard on the fore mast to help maneuver in tight quarters and low wind, much like a spinnaker on a yacht.² Raffees were easier to use than square sails and so required fewer crew. Another was tall, raking masts that carried a lot of canvas, and a shallow-draft hull with a centerboard to help hold all that canvas on course.

After the opening of the first Welland Canal in 1829, a new design had evolved to facilitate moving cargo through locks between the upper and lower lakes: the canaller, a ship with a narrow hull and a square shape that fit easily into the hundred-foot locks and could carry both passengers and freight. In 1841 the 138-ton canaller Vandalia was equipped with a propeller and powered by steam, and the ships that came after her, such as the Hackett, and then later ships built of iron and steel, eventually grew far beyond the confines of the first Welland locks to carry the cargoes created by the development of the mid-continent prairies, cities, and mines of Canada and the United States.

They carry them still. From before the Civil War until the 1950s, the Great Lakes were the crossroads of the Continent, and the tonnage moved on them annually exceeded all United States and Canadian salt-water ports combined, despite their being locked in ice several months every year. Unfortunately, the explosion of industrialization and development in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that drove lakes’ shipping and canal expansion was not matched by safety. Lighthouses, buoys, accurate charts, harbors of refuge, and life-saving stations were slow to be built and far apart. Accurate weather forecasting did not exist except for the captain’s skill in reading weather signs. The inherently unsafe design of the ever-longer, underpowered bulk carriers, combined with the aging of the wind-sailing fleet and unpredictable storms, created one of the most shipwreck-strewn coasts in the world, with such heavy losses that a Congressional investigation was held in the nineteenth century. Historians will forever debate the exact number of lives and ships lost, but the carnage then, and the sinking of a number of large steel freighters in storms in the twentieth century, has darkened lakes’ maritime culture with shadow. Lakes ship handlers became experts because sometimes they would not have survived to tie up their vessels otherwise.

Our Son, the last working schooner on the Great Lakes, with a raffee spread on the fore mast.

One consequence is that lakes maritime history and culture are frequently dominated by shipwreck stories, which are crowd-pleasingly dramatic and lucrative, but seldom capture the true horror of people dying by drowning or freezing to death. Shipwreck tales pay the bills at museums, earn book royalties, and fill auditoriums, but the result can be a highly romanticized history focused on death and disaster. By most reckonings, there have been between 6000 and 10,000 shipwrecks on the Great Lakes, not all of which resulted in loss of life and many of which were subsequently refloated.³ Over the same period there have been an estimated 15,000 to 25,000 ships enrolled, perhaps more. While this underscores the difficulties of sailing here, it also suggests that the history is more than shipwreck.⁴

Over time, story becomes myth, and myth becomes history, a story we have told ourselves about a past that may be only dimly recalled. Events and ideas that one era prefers to ignore are frequently slighted, only to be resurrected by a later generation that wishes to tell different stories. For example, one oft-told tale about the Great Lakes is of a pristine and empty wilderness lightly populated with noble, hunter-gatherer Natives, who were then deprived of their lands and sustenance by ignoble whites, although scholars have demonstrated this is a romantic fantasy.⁵ A successor story is of iron men in wooden ships soon replaced by steam and steel, of brave sailors disappearing into a crack in the lake, of great cities rising from the plains and woods to empower two nations, of a freedom trail for slaves escaping bondage. These are the stories memorialized in archives, museums, educational programs, books, and monuments across the Great Lakes, a socially constructed past preserved by those who have the power to choose. As Joseph-Ernest Renan said, To forget, to get one’s history wrong, are essential factors in the making of a nation.⁶ The past is a complex web that does not yield simple answers.

Geographically and culturally the lakes are unique. In one bounded basin, one commercial waterway, the change from canoes, to sail, to steam, to the present can be observed as if in a large laboratory of economic, political, and cultural forces. The creation of an innovative shipping company, or the sinking of one ship, may scarcely be noted on the Atlantic or the Pacific and may not influence the literature at all. But in a marine environment of numbered ships and few companies, nearly all the ships that have sailed the lakes, from LaSalle’s Griffon in 1679 to the present, can be discovered, as can many of the sailors who crewed them, most of the owners, and all of the companies. Understanding lakes sailing, however, requires more than collections of data.

Histories can be as much a creation as fiction or poetry, because they cannot be separated from the historian’s worldview and because history is more complicated than data, which can be inaccurate or conflicting. Newspapers frequently sensationalize and speculate to sell issues, but they are sometimes the only record of an event. Until recently, most sailors did not write their autobiographies, if they could write at all. The few lakes captains who have written tend not to dwell on their ship-handling mistakes, their fears, or the problems with their crews and ships. They became minor gods when they walked into the pilot house as master for the first time, and they are loath to risk that respect. People of color and women, aware of their precarious positions in the maritime world, left little more than folksongs, court records, and news reports.

In consequence, understanding a subject as complex as sailing the Great Lakes requires not only objective facts but literature as well—autobiographies, essays, fiction, diaries, drama, poetry, folksong, and folklore—because without literature the record of what it means to travel on the lakes or to command a vessel is incomplete. The archives of data on vessels and records of losses seldom say enough about those who built them, sailed them, and sometimes died with them. Only when the historical record is combined with the literature does a more accurate and complex portrait of fresh-water sailing begin to emerge.

There are many types of artists: gifted ship handlers, riggers, engineers, and builders, but also writers, who can notice a telling detail or understand a feeling as others may not, so they can sometimes tell a deeper truth. Like folklore and folksong, literature can reveal shadows in the past that later generations cannot see in official records. This book, then, includes not only non-fiction, but a literary kaleidoscope of experiences written by sailors of one sort or another in all types of vessels who knew the Great Lakes as only sailors can. Together, they help describe a world that most can know only obliquely, standing on the shore.

WHITE STONE CANOE

WHITE SQUALL BEGINS with Native stories because birch-bark canoes were not only beautiful and functional, a technological improvement over animal-skin boats or dugout canoes that rotted or cracked, they were also the earliest unique Great Lakes vessel. Made of local materials and easily repairable on nearly any upper lakes beach, birch canoes were also light and portaged easily, yet were capable of carrying cargoes sometimes in excess of four tons. Without them the lakes could not have been explored as easily, nor could the fur trade have developed as it did. But for all their beauty and utility, they were also extremely tender and liable to swamp in even a moderate sea. Best suited to rivers and inland lakes, for centuries they were the only mode of transport over Natives’ extensive trade routes. After Contact with Europeans, there are numerous travelers’ accounts, beginning with missionaries in the seventeenth century, that describe long, painful days spent sitting absolutely still so the canoe would not ship water and sink.

Despite the dangers, Native traders, primarily Odawa (which translates as trader), developed commercial networks throughout the lakes, exchanging furs from the pays d’en haut (upper country) for corn, tobacco and other agricultural products from more temperate regions such as present-day southern Ontario and the Midwest. Before Contact, Native nations filled the Great Lakes region to its carrying capacity, and most of them were agricultural. The first missionaries to North America in the 1600s didn’t get lost in a trackless wilderness, but in Huron cornfields that stretched for hundreds of acres, and the surplus was a coveted trade commodity with more northern Native nations.

Natives also dealt in sacred goods such as copper, transported through the trade networks from its origins near Lake Superior to nations located as far south as the mid-Atlantic and the Appalachians, becoming rarer and more expensive the farther it traveled. Dealing in fur with Europeans was a logical extension of the commerce Natives had engaged in for millennia, and for two centuries, they played European nations against each other for their own benefit. Without them, there was no international fur trade because only Natives had the manpower and the skills to gather the volumes of furs needed. Europeans were hardly Caesars of the wilderness, as Radisson once crowed, but were frequently, sometimes helplessly, caught in the middle of Native wars and political infighting that required endless negotiations and great expense.

After the French lost their North American empire in 1763, however, Native power would be writ in water. The British and Americans did not intermarry as frequently with the Natives; they drove harder bargains, gave fewer presents, and turned what had been a fur trade run largely by families and kin relationships into international corporations. Worse, the Americans wanted land and they took it, believing with many in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that land rightfully belonged to those who could best develop all its resources. The lakes would be their highway into the heart of the continent. The ships they created were their transportation, and for some, their route to riches.

WAR ON THE LAKES

FEW CONTEMPORARY RESIDENTS of the Great Lakes think of them as a war zone, but the lakes region was at war much longer than it has been at peace. The wars for the lakes’ rich resources of fur, fish, timber, and minerals began in the 1500s and did not cease until the end of the Civil War in 1865, 300 years later. Before Contact, Native nations and bands had fought each other, leading the Iroquois to become so warlike they risked destroying themselves. Their solution was to form a confederacy, which kept them from killing each other, but they then turned on their neighbors. The French sided with some Native nations against the Iroquois, then against the English. The English sided with different Natives to fight the French, then the Americans and their Native allies. The Americans won against the English, but resumed fighting Natives who resisted being moved to reservations. A few Americans then began a guerrilla war to free Canada to become a democracy, whether or not she wanted to become one. And finally, Southern rebels planned to seize a ship to free Confederate officers imprisoned on Johnson’s Island, and then attack lakeside cities, controlling the lakes for the Confederacy. Although there have been persistent rumors in the modern era of enemy submarines on the lakes, nothing has ever been confirmed. Nevertheless, extraordinary precautions are always taken around the locks and river passages during wars or emergencies because of the danger to the most recently valuable commodity: iron ore.

There are many descriptions of local Native/European skirmishes in historical records, so Baron Lahontan’s description of a French and Native raid on Iroquois slavers is excerpted here as an example. The finest narratives, however, come from the European wars for the lakes: the French and Indian War [Seven Years’ War in America] and the War of 1812. By then education was becoming more common, so more sailors could write or hire someone to write for them, and the action involved war ships rather than hit-and-run Native raiding.

THE LONG JOURNEY

SINGING. THAT’S WHAT travelers—fur company executives, government officials, explorers, tourists—always noted about travel with voyageurs: they sang to keep their paddle strokes in unison, to banish boredom (one reason there is music in pilot houses today), to keep themselves awake during fourteen and sixteen-hour days, and perhaps to console themselves. They worked at a killing pace: forty-five paddle strokes to the minute, which drove the canoe at nearly seven miles per hour, using different songs for different tempos and different types of canoe. Slow chansons à la rame (songs of the stick/paddle) were sung in heavily loaded canot du Maître propelled by large paddles. Quicker chansons à l’aviron (songs of rowing) were sung in the smaller canot du Nord, while the songs with the fastest tempos were chansons de canot à lège (songs of the light canoe) sung in express canoes used by executives or for document delivery.⁷ They sang romantic, melodic Old French ballads such as A La Claire Fontaine, and Quebeçois complaintes, sometimes a bit witty, which memorialized the hardships of the trade and deaths of fellow voyageurs, such as Le Voyage, c’est un marriage. Some songs were particular to certain events, such as the arrival of a flotilla—Youpe! Youpe! River along, / Hear us faintly far off, / Youpe! Youpe! River along, / Hear us coming, coming, coming!—much like the master of a laker blowing a salute in a river passage.

Three voyageurs, sketched in the 1820s, illustrating their preferred dress: moccasins, hooded coat, tall hat, and ceintures flechées or woven sashes.

Voyageur lives have come down to us as colorful and cheerful, but the reality was that many were born poor, worked at hard labor all their lives, and died poor as well. As Jean Perrault notes in his memoir in this section, being a voyageur, or even a clerk, in the fur trade, seldom made anyone rich except the company owners. The success of the coureurs des bois, the woods runners—independent traders who did not work for an organization, operated without licenses, and could make a great deal of money—depended on timing and did not last long, particularly after the American Revolution when consolidation and vertical integration began in the fur business.⁸ Fur was an international commodity, dependent on markets that were sometimes oversupplied, sometimes not, and worse, subject to the whims of fashion in Europe and to multinational politics in North America.

Voyageurs were the ordinary sailors of their era who took orders when required and larked about when they had the chance. They were trained in a craft—canoe operation and cargo handling—that was necessary for movement in a frontier, and although they had to take orders, they could be, like anyone who has to take orders from others for low pay, as rebellious as they dared. The owners wanted as much work as they could get for the least cost, and the voyageurs wanted to do as little of that work as possible. That they knew more about sailing conditions and traveling the Great Lakes than most of the people giving them orders did not help. Lakes maritime accounts are filled with instances of workers in all eras taking orders from superiors who are confused, lost, and putting everyone in danger. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.⁹

Their vessels, which had begun as Native handcraft, became a business as the fur trade grew beyond what Natives could supply. At the height of trade and travel by canoe in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, there were several canoe manufacturers in Quebec, one of whom pushed the boundaries of what was possible with the materials he had available. His canoes were so well made and became so popular in the eighteenth century that his name became synonymous with a particular style: canot du Maitre, a large, eight-place canoe. Louis LeMaitre (Louis the Master) developed his canoes in Trois Rivières, designing them to carry as much cargo as wood and bark could support and still allow for passage on some rivers. Thirty-five feet long and five feet wide, they became the most common size used to ferry goods west, furs east, and passengers everywhere. Canots du Maitre were the bulk carriers of their time, hauling the commodities gleaned from the interior to markets elsewhere, and LeMaitre was like many vessel builders who would follow him on the lakes: curious about what was possible with his materials and willing to experiment.

WING AND WING

THE CRAFTSMEN WHO succeeded LeMaitre built with oak. Captain Inches, whose memoir opens this section, grew up when ships, like canoes, were built by hand on the banks of lakes or rivers near many little ports, and he describes the skill required. For much of the era of military and commercial sail on the lakes, which began in the seventeenth century and lasted into the nineteenth, ships were individually designed, built without power tools from trees felled nearby, and modified as their captains and builders chose, a practice that now gives marine archaeologists migraines. Like canoe builders before them, workers shaping wind ships experimented with various sizes, configurations, and equipment until the different practices of many artisans eventually coalesced into the classic Great Lakes ship: long and narrow, shallow-drafted with a centerboard, and two or three high-raking masts that carried a cloud of canvas: the lines of a canoe expanded and reinterpreted in oak.

Schooners worked well on the lakes because of the prevailing westerly winds, and many were supremely beautiful, the consummation of the ship builders’ art and skill. Builders also constructed two-masted brigantines and three-masted barkentines on the lakes, square-rigged on the fore mast and fore-and-aft rigged on the others, used primarily in the fast grain trade from Chicago to Buffalo and in early iron ore transport. Even after barkentines fell from favor because they required more crew, many schooners used square sails on the fore mast for running before the wind.

The construction of lakes sailing vessels began on Lake Ontario, where the French built the twenty-ton Cataraqui. In 1678, they launched the forty-ton brig Frontenac, lost soon after in a 1679 January gale at the aptly named Cape Enrage. The Frontenac was carrying equipment for the vessel LaSalle planned to use to explore the upper lakes and ship furs east, but he still managed to launch the seventy-foot galliot Le Griffon into Lake Erie that spring. Based on the design of Dutch ships used in the relatively calm Zuyder Zee and shallow inland waters, this first sailing ship on the upper lakes was wrecked a few months later in northern Lake Michigan because her salt-water pilot ignored the advice of local Natives and sailed into a fall gale. Like many salt-water sailors in the following centuries, he had learned to hate the unpredictability of fresh water and wanted to go back to the ocean as soon as possible.

His condescending fury during an earlier storm on Lake Huron, described by Father Hennepin in A New Discovery of a Vast Country in America (1697), is the first of many salt-water diatribes against the lakes. "He did nothing all that while but curse and swear against M. LaSalle, who, as he said, had brought him thither to make him perish in a nasty lake, and lose the glory he had acquired by his long and happy navigations on the ocean. The party managed to make it into Lake Michigan, meet Natives, and load the ship with furs, but the pilot refused to listen to their advice about the return trip. Our pilot…was dissatisfied, and would steer as he pleased, without hearkening to the advice of the savages, who, generally speaking have more sense than the Europeans think…."¹⁰

The long argument between fresh-water sailors and salt-water shellbacks that began with LaSalle’s pilot lasted into the twentieth century, when competition with larger, steam-powered ships and the undermanning of sailing vessels made lakes’ sail less attractive to salt-water mariners. The tides of sailors always ebbed and flowed both ways, however, depending on the season and the wages and whether there was work as a scab during a strike. Until John D. Rockefeller created the Bessemer Fleet in 1896 and paid men bonuses for staying with the same ship all year, there was little incentive for crew to be loyal to a ship unless they knew the captain personally. For many years, wages on the lakes were higher than on the ocean, particularly in fall, so a number of ocean-trained sailors migrated west, only to discover that fresh-water sailing, like fresh-water ships and fresh-water weather, demanded new skills and new respect. Although lakes ships were more relaxed, partly because crew were hired for one trip only and could easily leave if they disliked a master, the sailing itself was difficult and dangerous because there was little sea room and the rocky coastlines had to be navigated by dead reckoning, which required familiarity with the terrain. Education in the art of sailing flowed both ways, with saltwater men teaching fresh-water sailors the finer skills of rope work and rigging, and fresh-water sailors teaching ship handling in narrow passages and dangerous weather. Particularly in the early years of sail, ocean-trained mariners were in demand on the lakes because of their skills.

The brigantine Columbia, first ship to carry a cargo of iron ore through the Sault Ste. Marie locks in 1855.

Nevertheless, salt-water sailors, especially those who were masters during the various wars on the lakes, seldom learned to like the inland seas. Commodore Arthur Sinclair came to the lakes in 1813 with fifteen years’ successful sailing, taking prizes and eluding pursuers with his skillful ship handling on the Atlantic. Then he encountered Lake Huron. Tasked with trying to unseat the British from Mackinac Island after Perry’s victory on Lake Erie, he spilled out his frustration in a letter to a fellow officer stationed in Virginia:

Lake Huron is the most dangerous navigation in the world—Bold, rocky coast—boisterous, covered with impenetrable fogs—filled with small islands and sunken rocks, and entirely unexplored—scarcely a good anchorage in it, and I have been in one of these fogs suddenly, from no soundings [to] surrounded by rocks, obliged to anchor and grope a passage out by boats.¹¹

Commodore Perry, meanwhile, had leveraged his fame to go back to salt water where the sailing was easier and the prizes richer.

This conflict, between the old ways of salt water and the new of fresh, begins in literature with the first novel set on the lakes in 1836, Scenes on Lake Huron, whose anonymous author tells the reader he wrote "... in order to place the Lake Seamen upon an equal footing, or to redeem if possible, a race of the most hardy and skillful men from the imputation, which has been often cast upon them by their Atlantic brethern [sic]…that they were, in fact, ‘no seamen at all.’"¹² The theme was picked up by James Fenimore Cooper and Herman Melville, and then spread through lakes literature, usually in the guise of a tough, salt-water mate or captain striding on deck determined to shape things up, only to get his comeuppance during a storm.

The rivalry between fresh water and salt disappeared once the sailing era ended. Certainly this was not because there was less movement of sailors back and forth; the records show many early lakes shipping companies imported men from salt water to break unions and fill out crews in times of scarce labor. Theoretically then, there should have been more conflict during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but there was often less and the reason is craft skill. All wind-ship sailors considered themselves highly skilled craftsmen, which was the major reason lakes sailors initially refused to allow steamboat men, mariners they called roustabouts or monkey-wrench sailors, to join their early unions. (In order to qualify for membership in the Lake Seaman’s Union in the 1870s an applicant was required to reef, steer, splice, wind and unwind canvas, and to shape a boom or spar.)¹³ But once technology rendered the many of the skills of wind-ship sailing superfluous, this conflict disappeared. There had been nearly two thousand sailing vessels on the lakes in the late 1860s, but their end was already in sight. Almost none were built after 1880, and by 1886 more vessels were propelled by steam. The last commercial lakes’ sailing ship, the Our Son, was built in 1875 and foundered in 1930, her crew rescued by a self-unloading laker.

The sailing era has never truly ended, however. Salt-water terminology, such as Wobbleshanks and Skillagalee, still appear on charts. Lakes’ professional mariners call themselves sailors, rather than merchant seamen, as on the ocean. Small sailboats, once required for transportation, now fill lake ports created to ship cargoes. Yacht racing, which came to the lakes with the development of cities in the nineteenth century, continues to expand categorically and technologically, despite the problems encountered by long-distance racers on the open lakes, including weather and annoyed laker crews. Maersk, the largest shipping company in the world, is now experimenting with adding sails to its fleet to save energy and meet environmental regulations,¹⁴ so sails may once again appear in the Great Lakes bulk cargo fleet as well.

ST. ELMO’S FIRE

THOSE WHO HAVE not sailed the lakes nor lived near their capricious weather may not understand that their blue enchantment has another face. White squall storms explode on sunny summer days almost without warning. Fogs wraith up like the souls of the drowned come back to haunt living ships. This writer has seen the sand dunes of West Michigan, newly risen to a thousand feet high, loom just off the port side of the ship, and watched Caribou Light in Lake Superior float serenely upside down forty miles off its rock. The combination of cold lake water and warm air can create astonishing weather, including the mast lights known as St. Elmo’s Fire that come during and after storms. In addition, sailors tend to be superstitious because so much of what they depend on is beyond their control. Wind, water, weather, luck, and the skill of the master hold their lives in thrall. Away from land, another reality rules and one result is superstitions and ghosts.

Natives went through elaborate ceremonies to propitiate a safe voyage, including black dog sacrifices and receiving new names, such as Âjawac (Wafted Safely Across the Water). For centuries women, preachers, and cats were considered certain to sink vessels that shipped them. Cats, in particular, were thought to raise storms, and wind flows across the water are still known as cats’ paws. Whistling was also certain to bring bad weather. Crews often refused to sail on a ship that departed on a Friday. Changing a ship’s name spelled doom for ship and crew, a superstition that dates to the Middle Ages when ships carried votive prayers on a tablet fixed on the poop. These Dieu Conduit (God leads) sentences protected the ship. Seagulls, for all the mess they create on decks and rigging, are never killed because they are the souls of drowned sailors. A dead sailor’s clothing could not be worn by others until the voyage was over, lest the ship sink. Ghost ships abound on the lakes, the particular ghost changing with the times. These days, it’s the Edmund Fitzgerald. Earlier it was the Bannockburn. Earlier still the Alpena and the Chicora. Nearly every lighthouse around the lakes has a resident ghost or two, who appear periodically to titillate the bed-and-breakfast tourists. We love to be astonished, and love even more to be safely scared, so ghost stories, like shipwreck stories, are lucrative catnip for curious readers, as nineteenth-century newspapers knew and contemporary movie makers have discovered.

But underneath the spookiness and the drama is a more sinister reality and most stories in this section reflect that. Ghosts appear when some creature, perhaps human, has suffered, and so they give form to anguish that otherwise might not have a voice. In the nineteenth century, it was sailors before the mast, including women cooks and former slaves, who might be represented by unions but often weren’t, were sometimes paid well but frequently took whatever they could get, and were always subject to the whims of the captain who could abuse them however he chose, sometimes brutally. The law of the sea is the law of the master still, so even in the twenty-first century a captain can confine an unruly crew member to quarters on bread and water. Ships cannot be democracies in an emergency, and the person who must take responsibility makes the rules. But as the stories in this section suggest, ghosts are a way to even the playing field and an excellent way to wreak revenge. Ghosts can give power to the powerless and demand respect for those who might otherwise not have it, allowing those who died because of a master’s arrogance to have the last word. They also serve to remind the living of their fallibility before nature, which complacent mariners often forget.

DAREDEVILS

THE FREEDOM OF a frontier, which is what the lakes long were, not only allowed immigrants, women, and minorities to begin new lives when otherwise they might not have had the chance, but also enabled gamblers, hucksters, and every variety of daredevil out to make a fortune by fair means or foul. On the water, that often means smuggling. While the most infamous smugglers on the Great Lakes were the rum runners of the Prohibition era, they were only the more notorious, thanks to their gangland behavior. Before them, smuggling had an old and illustrious history on the lakes, beginning with furs ferried by canoe out of New France into New England where prices were higher. Some of the most successful fur smugglers were French Canadian businesswomen, including nuns, from Montreal and Quebec who invested in stores, canoe manufactories, and all manner of merchandise, contraband included. Because they belonged to the elite of New France, even if they were caught, they were seldom punished.¹⁵ Alcohol followed furs, followed by just about every other commodity imaginable, including grave-robbed body parts for dissection. Whenever laws, prices, and supplies conflict across borders, there will be smuggling, particularly if it is as easy as loading your goods in a boat in the dark and sailing over a familiar waterway. Smuggling has always been, and remains, the most profitable maritime business on the lakes.¹⁶

The most forlorn cargo smuggled was slaves, both Native and African. Before the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, many people owned black or Native slaves, or both if they could afford the more expensive Africans, and both races were bought and sold throughout the lakes. The tenth article of the Treaty of Ghent called for the abolition of slavery, which did not have anything to do with ending the War of 1812, but addressed a long-standing practice in both the United States and Canada. Slaves were taken in Native wars or in dedicated slave raids, traded to seal treaty negotiations, and given as gifts to restore the dead to avoid a prolonged feud between Native bands. Names such as Pomp, a typical African-American slave name, appear in sailing accounts, as does the description panis or panise, from the Old French compaignon, or companion, someone you break bread with. In North America, the word originally referred to the Pawnee nation, but so many Pawnee were taken as slaves that the meaning shifted to describe a Native slave of any nation. A panis cost about half that of an African slave, and Native women were particularly in demand as slave mistresses by fur traders who did not want to become encumbered with Native wives and their subsequent children. As in the South, the children of slaves followed their mother’s status. Although there were numerous panis sailing ships, manning canoes, and hauling packs of furs, as well as working at urban trades, women were valuable because they could not only work, but provide sex as well.

The polite Native fiction that slaves were almost always adopted into the slaveholder’s family, if it had ever been true, had collapsed entirely by the mid-1700s. Most slaves were women and children, since they were easier to seize and to transport, and children could learn a new language more readily. Slaves were a lucrative sideline for fur traders, who shipped them to Detroit or Montreal to be sold to merchants, the clergy, and government officials. John Askin, the wealthy trader on Mackinac Island who owned Monette or Manette, mother of some of his children, manumitted her in 1766 so that their children would not automatically become slaves upon his death. A daughter by a different slave mother, his favorite Kitty, eventually became the wife of Askin’s wealthy business partner, Robert Hamilton, the founder of Queenstown, Ontario. Nevertheless, Askin traded other slaves for years, at one time owning more than twenty, and his ships were sailed with some free and some slave labor. Slaves he characterized as too stupid to make good sailors or anything else, he sold to other traders who resold them to merchants elsewhere.¹⁷ Askin and others moved to the Canadian side of the Detroit River at the beginning of the American Revolution not just for patriotism, but also to keep their slaves, who, of course, did all they could to escape back across the river and frequently succeeded.

Native slaves were seldom taught to read or write, so their stories appear in court records or tangentially in the writings of traders such as Askin or Jean Baptiste Perrault. Once the Northwest Ordinance was enforced, the practice disappeared openly from the American side of the lakes, but it persisted in Canada until 1833, and it may have endured in both countries until the beginning of the reservation era.¹⁸

The smuggling of African slaves to Canada began in earnest with the passage of the second Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, which put all Africans, South and North, freed or not, in danger of being returned to slavery. At least 60,000 risked the trip to northern ports on the lakes, hoping for food, shelter, and a sympathetic lakes captain to carry them to Canada. Detroit, Sandusky, Cleveland, Ashtabula, and Buffalo became major slave-smuggling ports, where a fugitive could always find a captain, usually of a steamboat, willing to ship living contraband and frequently glad to outwit slave catchers to do so. The Underground Railroad ran until Emancipation, but by then a number of former slaves had found work on sailing ships and steamboats as porters or maids or doing the heavy work of passing coal and loading and unloading bulk cargoes like iron and copper ore before that was mechanized. They were also hired as strike breakers during the formation of sailors’ unions, which so enraged striking sailors that they created a snarling folksong about it,¹⁹ but strike breaking also suggests the sailing skills many former slaves possessed.

Not all daredevils were desperate. Some were out for glory, preferably leading to money. Anna Edson Taylor, the first woman to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel, needed cash, and the several ship designers who experimented with submarines on the lakes expected fortunes if they succeeded. The dream of sailing under the water inspired tinkerers, ship designers, and, so the public believed, fools. One of the first submarines built on the lakes was nicknamed the Foolkiller, which is what it had done when it was found on the bottom of the Chicago River. Fiction was not far behind, and one of the most entertaining little novels set on the lakes, Under Five Lakes: The Cruise of the Destroyer, partially reprinted here, describes a submarine voyage from Chicago to Toronto, completely underwater, past myriads of shipwrecks and skeletons, just a few decades before submarines were perfected by a designer from Milwaukee who sold his skills to the U.S. Navy.

TRAVELLERS

MOTORIZED SHIPPING ON the Great Lakes began with three small, sidewheel steamboats: the Ontario and Frontenac built in 1817 for Lake Ontario, and the Walk-in-the-Water built for the upper lakes in 1818. These were primarily passenger and package-freight vessels, and despite the power of steam, they were not always faster than canoes or sailing ships. The Walk-in-the-Water was so underpowered that she could not stem the current of the river where she docked and had to be hauled into Lake Erie by a team of oxen, known as the horned breeze, and she used her full complement of sails frequently. Still, the steamboats were popular and grew apace, despite the first boiler explosion on the lakes on the Peacock in 1830.

By the 1840s and 1850s, when hundreds of thousands of passengers, emigrants as well as tourists, traveled the lakes every year, passenger steamers had grown from the 170-foot Ontario and Frontenac to 300-foot, sidewheel palace steamers with stained glass, pipe organs, skylights, chandeliers, rosewood, and damask.²⁰ Even the spittoons were elegant. Tourists were impressed, including the first female travel writers making money by describing the lakes frontier for readers in the city. They churned out dozens of books about an easily accessible wilderness where they could observe exotic-looking Natives and spectacular landscapes, both required for any self-respecting nineteenth-century travel narrative, without great discomfort to themselves. Rhapsodic or grumbling, samples of their narratives are included in this section. Emigrants, meanwhile, traveled more simply, many on the open decks along with cargo and livestock, as Charles Dickens describes in American Notes, excerpted here as well.

The Frontenac

The Walk-in-the-Water, Captain James VanCleve

Sidewheel passenger steamers were expensive to build and operate, their configuration with engines amidships reduced cargo space, and their side paddlewheels left them vulnerable in bad weather because of the inefficient action. They required prodigious amounts of fuel, and their cabins on deck prevented them from shipping the truly lucrative bulk cargoes, such as wheat, coal, salt, iron, and copper ore. They could carry only expensive package freight and were usually too large to squeeze through the locks at Sault Ste. Marie or the Welland Canal. When the Panic of 1857 began, the first international depression, passenger business on the lakes plummeted and the palace steamers were docked, permanently, as it turned out. While some ships continued operating, the luxury business never recovered, and the passenger ships built after the Civil War were usually hard-working steamers that promised elegance but crammed in as much package freight and as many passengers as possible.

MASTER MARINERS

WHILE THE PALACE steamers were blazing over the lakes like roman candles, a lasting revolution in how cargoes were shipped had begun. Captain James VanCleve, one of the most successful and respected masters on the lakes, built the 138-ton Vandalia at Oswego, New York, in 1841. The lakes’ first propeller steamship, she was essentially a barge designed to fit through the Welland Canal. Propellers, called puffers for their volume of smoke and noise, were cheaper to build and operate, easier to sail and service, and required fewer crew, although they would not be efficiently powered until the invention of the double and triple expansion (two and three cylinder) engines later in the century. They undercut sidewheel steamers on freight rates, and proved so popular that they began threatening the schooner fleet as well. At the beginning of the Civil War, with economic conditions still not recovered, steam-vessel owners began buying up abandoned schooners and sidewheel steamers and converting them to barges. Pulled by a steam-powered tug, or later a steam barge, they could be used to ship bulk cargoes and lumber the length and breadth of the lakes. It was cheaper to buy wood than to pay sailors, particularly after the sailors’ unions succeeded in raising wages. The tug needed a powerful engine, however, and those were expensive and took a lot of fuel to pull the tows. Until the invention of triple-expansion engines used in powering iron and steel ships, early propellers put in wooden bottoms could sometimes be outsailed by a well-equipped sailing vessel. Both the sailing ships and the tugs with their tows would soon be superseded by the invention of the quintessential Great Lakes ship, the bulk freighter, a variant of the steam barge that is with us still.

The Vandalia, Captain James VanCleve

Captain Elihu Peck, of the shipbuilding firm Peck and Masters of Cleveland, wanted a powerful vessel that would ship bulk cargo easily, particularly iron ore, so he designed a boxy ship like a canaller to pack in a lot of cargo, with wide deck hatches that would line up with the gravity-fed chutes on the ore docks in Marquette on Lake Superior. These docks, with chutes that dispensed ore directly into the hold of a vessel, favored sailing ships because of their more open decks. Peck’s design had a long, open midship with the pilot house placed forward and engine room and quarters aft, an unconventional design for the time, when paddlewheels and their engines were centered amidships for stability, and wind ships were steered from behind the masts so the helmsman could see the set of the sails in the wind. The Robert J. Hackett, named after another captain and Peck’s investing partner, came off the ways in 1869, and observers who were used to graceful schooners and beautiful passenger steamers were not impressed. Detractors described the new design as a barge with a factory at one end and a tenement at the other. Peck built her without a buyer, and her odd looks did not attract one, so Peck and Hackett took in other investors and formed the Northwest Transportation Company. In 1870 the 208-foot Hackett sailed off to revolutionize lakes ships. After Captain Peck, they were floating barges and they still are: deep, square, open-decked, and efficient.

Ore docks at Marquette, Michigan

The Robert J. Hackett

The Hackett was built of wood, but even before she was launched, an iron propeller, the Merchant, had been built in Buffalo in 1862 for the passenger and package freight trade.²¹ Iron, and later steel, worked better with propellers since those materials were better able to handle the stresses caused by rear propulsion. Ships could also be larger because the metals had greater longitudinal strength without increasing thickness.²² By the mid-1870s there were several iron ships, including the first iron freighter, designed like the Hackett primarily for bulk cargo. The Onoko was described by the local papers as a 287-foot long monster, but her efficiency—she could carry over 2000 tons of iron ore—made her owners a fortune, even in the tough economic times after the Civil War. Steel ships followed by the mid-1880s, and they continued to lengthen beyond what anyone believed possible because ship owners had discovered that low-powered ships with large carrying capacities made the most money: 500 feet by 1902, 640 during World War II, 730 feet in 1958, and finally 1000 feet in 1972 with the opening of another new lock at the Sault. That same year the first laker with all her works aft, the William R. Roesch, was built, and her arrival was greeted by ship watchers as enthusiastically as earlier ones had greeted the Hackett. Once again, because she carried more cargo and was cheaper to build than her predecessors, lakes shipping companies ceased building classic fore-and-aft designed freighters. The last one, the Algosoo, was built in 1973 and went to the ship breakers in 2017. Steam engines were replaced by diesel for cheapness and efficiency as well. The Hackett could carry 1200 tons of iron ore in 1869. The largest ship on the lakes in 2017, the Paul R. Tregurtha, carries 68,000 tons, and could carry 80,000 tons if waterway depth allowed.

The Onoko

The William R. Roesch

Along with wheat and lumber, ore was a lucrative cargo, and one that drove innovation in unloading facilities as well as ship design, beginning with the Civil War. After the locks at Sault Ste. Marie opened in 1855 so ships could sail directly from the Lake Superior ore deposits to foundries on the lower lakes, ore tonnage shipped increased dramatically. By the 1890s it had eclipsed all other cargoes. The locks at the Sault were enlarged and enlarged again to handle the ore required to make steel for two world wars and the post-war expansions. All that cargo was unloaded first by men and mules and several types of hoists, then giant Hulett clamshell cranes that dove into the hold and scooped 4000 tons of ore per hour.

Hulett Unloaders

These unloading mechanisms, however, limited ships to harbors with equipment, so beginning in 1902 with the Hennepin and perfected in 1908 with the Wyandotte, self-unloading equipment was developed that allowed ships to unload anywhere. Self-unloaders, now standard, drop bulk materials from the holds onto a moving belt running along the bottom of the cargo hold, then propel it up with buckets or compression belts and over the side on a conveyor belt on a boom.

A self-unloading laker

The longer ships grew, the more technologically sophisticated they became, and the more money they made for shipping companies, especially because automation reduced crew size. But the opportunity for a single owner or a small group of investors to build one ship and then begin a company disappeared after the Depression of the 1930s and has never returned. Shipbuilding now requires corporations with access to sophisticated financing and economies of scale. Technology, beginning with the invention of the birch-bark canoe, has always driven lakes shipping and still does. But technology has yet to completely overcome the weather on the lakes, particularly in