Schooner Days DCCCLXXXI (881)
Watch with a Story, 8 Jan 1949
By C.H.J. SNIDER
This is Mr Snider's account of the loss of the schooner Minerva Cook on the shores of Prince Edward County in November 1868, the loss of the Captain's wife and the bravery during the rescue shown by Jackson Bongard and Saul Mouck.
On the Babylon shore of Prince Edward County they hear hoof-beats clop-clop-clopping on nights windy enough to set the limestone shingle rolling at Little Poplar; and the tale is retold of the phantom horse ridden back and forth in the beachwash by a weeping woman who will not be comforted until her long dark hair rests with her in a consecrated grave churchyard undisturbed by the wrath and turmoil of Lake Ontario. Eighty years have laid their patina upon what may have given rise to this story, and diligent rubbing only produces these incomplete and possibly entangled outlines.
First of all, Arthur Bongard, who lives far away from Poplar Bar at Consecon, has a silver watch, undated, one of two presented to his father, Jackson Bongard, and to Saul Mouck, by James McCuaig, MP, from the Dominion Government, for life saving long ago. The inscription reads: "Presented to Mr. Jackson Bongard in recognition of his humane exertions in saving life at Poplar Point."
Secondly, Delano Dexter Calvin, who felled a tree on Garden Island in 1836 and founded a timber empire which flourished for three generations, built a schooner for his growing trade after five years. She was called the Minerva Cook, after the wife or daughter of his partner. Hiram Cook, of Clayton. The firm sold the vessel in 1863 to John Fraser of Kingston, hardware merchant. Three or four years later she was a wreck on Poplar Bar, off that twenty-mile peninsula forming the south boundary of Prince Edward County and known as Lake Ontario's Long Point. Erie has another.
Disaster in the dark
She had capsized at night, running for Kingston under her foresail in a growing gale. By daybreak she had washed in until she lay on her side, her only boat smashed from the davits, her broken masts pointing shorewards, hundreds of yards of raging white water intervening. The seas were going over her as though she were a mere corpse of a ship. They struck the beach in full force, and spilled over into the marsh behind, so that now the vessel seemed half a mile from shore, now, as the seas receded, only half that distance.
Seven people and a dog perched on the mainboom, the highest part of the vessel above water as she lay. The dog was a big black Newfoundlander, the young captain’s pet. Three times the captain’s sister, Elizabeth Kennedy, the vessel’s cook, was washed off, and three times Nero, the dog, and his master, Capt. James Kennedy, of Kingston, dragged her back on to the boom.
“Oh Jimmy, I’m so cold, so cold!” she cried the last time she was dragged up. Her brother stripped to his shirt to wrap her in his own drenched clothing. The other men on the spar, the mate, supercargo, and four sailors, all contributed something, though their teeth were chattering and each was soaked through. “It’ll help keep the life in her,” they said.
Hard life for horses
The Minerva Cook carried two timber-horses, to work the heavy cargo and tow her when canalling. They were berthed in a horse-box on the tiny circle-deck forward. When the vessel fell over the horse on the lee side was drowned in his halter. The weather horse had kicked his way through the roof of the box and broken free, and began swimming for the shore. "Whoa, Sugar!" called the captain. "Whoa, Sugar! Come back, boy! Fetch him back, Nero! Fetch him back!"
Perhaps it was the dog that changed his course, perhaps the undertow, and perhaps he heard the captain's sister feebly crying "Sugar! Sugar! Come Sugar!"; for she had been good to him. Anyway, he came back, and splintered the lee rail and cabin top with his hoofs as he scrambled for footing alongside. Capt. Kennedy caught the broken halter, and with the help of the others lashed his sister to the horse's back and started him ashore again. It seemed the only way to save the girl's life. Nero went with them, the halter in his mouth.
They never knew what happened. Horse, dog and girl were seen in the worst of the undertow, black notes in the lashing white. At one moment all three seemed on the beach, then the beach itself vanished with them. Everything was hidden at swift intervals by the bursting spray. Then they saw figures moving behind the curtain, and disappearing, and moving and disappearing, and realized that a crowd of fishermen and farmers had gathered. And the lake was full of dancing timbers as the deck-load burst the chains which strapped it down. A timber cargo breaking up is the greatest of seamen's perils in the surf. And then it might have been next moment or next year – there was a fishboat rising and falling under the stern of the disintegrating schooner, with bearded men in it, Jackson Bongard, Abram Cannon and Leroy Spafford, likely, with the great voice of Black Saul Mouck roaring up "If ye won't jump I'll come and fetch ye!" and the next rise of the boat his mighty paws seized the supercargo by the seat of the pants and plucked him from where he hung on a rope, afraid to let go. And then, that trip or the next, they were all somehow through the surf, and on the shore, and being rubbed and blanketed and given hot whiskey.
"Where's Lizzie? Where's Lizzie?" was the young captain's first word. They thought him delirious. There was no Lizzie among the Mehetabels, Mercys, Prudences and Mary Anns who had thronged to the rescue.
A mother’s vigil
He was taken to Jackson Bongard's there, searching, searching the shore, every hour of daylight, for his sister. They found Sugar, his head thrust into the cedar thicket that grew above high watermark; but no trace of his precious burden. Even his halter was gone. Later they found Nero, his brains had been dashed out, either by Sugar's hoofs, as he frantically struggled against the undertow, or by a stick of wave-hurled timber.
Jimmy Kennedy was never alone in his patrols. Grandma Spafford, Leroy's mother, was keeping a watch as well on the cruel hungry lake, for her youngest son Delos had been drowned some time before, coming home from Oswego with Capt. Peter Collier in the schooner Primrose. It was on a sunny Sunday morning. Young Delos shaved after breakfast, for he had had the first morning watch, and it was now his watch below. Then he came up on deck very jauntily, wearing his new schooner cap which he had bought in Oswego the day before. They were still in sight of the place, for the wind had been light. Capt. Collier called a warning, that the boom was coming over, but Delos was caught on the taffrail and flipped into the lake. They dropped the yawlboat, and got so close to him that one of the crew grabbed for the top of his head, but his wet hair slipped through his fingers, and he vanished. They found his new cap, dry, and floating with the imprisoned air. They brought it home, saying wistfully, "He was so proud of it and wanted his ma to see it – and perhaps he'll come home for it." Devotion’s reward
So day after day, Grandma Spafford trudged the beach from Petticoat Point to Point Traverse, looking for her son, and she promised Jimmy Kennedy she would continue the search for his sister, and he went home to Kingston, leaving the Minerva Cook a broken wreck. Men must work and women must weep.
Long afterwards, making her ceaseless round, accompanied by Black Saul Mouck's first wife, Grandma Spafford saw something shining in the morning sunpath on the water east of Little Poplar Point. They hurried and by the time they had come abreast of it it had washed in at the cranberry marsh. It was not Delos, not a man, but a floating woman. Her face and hands were bruised from contact with beach stones and timber butts, and her long dark hair was loose and tangled with weed and water moss, and full of sand. And she wore a fine gold ring. It was that which had gleamed in the sun.
They got men to help them take her body from the water. They prepared it for burial where it lay, washing it tenderly, and Grandma Spafford bringing her own night dress for a shroud. The hair was so full of moss and sand and weed that they could not comb it, so they cut it off with scissors and wrapped it in a bundle by itself. Hair and body were buried in a lined grave scooped out of the clean gravel and word was sent to Kingston, sixty miles away by the shore.
Some of the Kennedy family came in an old democrat. The horse seemed to be snorting and smelling for Sugar as he picked his way gingerly along the shingle, the iron, tired wheels gritting on the stones. When the grave was opened they identified the girl by her clothing and her ring. Slowly the democrat crunched its way back to Point Traverse, where lay Sam Ackerman's scow-sloop, waiting for its burden. Capt. Will Head, of Picton, now alive and 93, described the 80-year-old scene quite recently. There was a strong southerly breeze blowing, a fair wind for the passage to Kingston, and the seas were pounding on the False Ducks and the Duckling Bar in antiphonal requiem to the gulls cries as Sam lowered his bunting to half-mast and swung his sloop off for the Limestone City, with the body on deck, covered with a new sail.
Grandma Spafford was consoled for her vain vigils for her son by the pious kindness she was able to show the stranger. Only one thing worried her. Not realizing what it was, the family had left where it lay the parcel of Elizabeth's hair, over which she had taken so much trouble. She thought it should have been taken with her. It had to be again covered with the gravel.
Grandma Spafford has long gone to her reward. Delos has not yet come home for his new cap from the south shore of the lake. Perhaps he is comforting his mother and Elizabeth on the Other Side.