Shipwrecks and Sailors of Prince Edward Island

Robert C. Parsons

• Publisher: Pottersfield Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781989725566
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Anything that could happen to a ship has happened to a Prince Edward Island hull, and scores of tales withinShipwrecks and Sailors of Prince Edward Islandpresent those weird, wonderful and tragic epics. This volume covers the period from 1775 to 1899 – the era of bark, brig, brigantine and schooner. Arranged chronologically, the stories are complete with the names of our seafaring ancestors plus descriptions of the local ports that sheltered the ships.

For more than a hundred years the wooden sailing ship was an important and vital transportation link along the shores of Prince Edward Island. The maritime records are full of stories in which local ships and their crews played an essential role. Self-sacrifice, daring, skill, wreck and rescue are all part of a fabric which makes up the history of the ships and the heritage of the villages that knew them. All of this and more is documented inShipwrecks and Sailors of Prince Edward Island.

Prince Edward Island's legacy of tales from this era of sail is great. There is the wreck of the immigrant-ladenElizabethat Cascumpec where the castaways were saved by a Native and the unique tale of PEI'sJessythrown onto the shores of deadly St. Paul Island. Then there is the strange tale ofRivalcaught in the "Yankee Gale" and the SSQuebec's demise in the death-dealing tides of East Point.

PEI ships were involved in mystery, mayhem and wrecks in practically all parts of the North Atlantic: gripped in the sandbars of Sable Island, plundered on the rugged coasts of Newfoundland, drifting with no crew off Ireland, wrecked on Nova Scotia's shores, stranded on the Magdalenes, and "Lost with Crew" in the vast Atlantic.

CHAPTER 1: 1775-1847

DELIVERING THE GOODS IN STORM AND CALM

One of the island’s earliest tales of wreck comes from Scottish immigrants and is briefly mentioned in Peter Stewart’s entry in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography. On September 10, 1775, the Peter Stewart family – husband, wife, two sons, three daughters and four servants – left Campbeltown, Scotland, for Prince Edward Island as he had been appointed chief justice of the colony. The brig Elizabeth had an English crew and several of Stewart’s extended family on board as well as immigrants moving to the island. They had ample provisions of pork, a two-year supply of oatmeal, and enough personal effects to get them safely settled on land near Charlottetown.

Penelope Stewart, who was ten years old in 1775, later wrote that despite storms, they reached Cape Breton in the latter part of October and several days later, in rough weather, arrived at P.E.I. Penelope’s account, The Sinking of the Elizabeth, 1775, written some years after the voyage, says the captain, John Russell, erred: he thought he was on the south side of the island when it was the north. During the night a gale drove the ship ashore at a desolate place somewhere around Cavendish Inlet. No one knew where they were.

Penelope wrote: “We had small hope of saving ourselves, but providence was kind. By morning the wind abated and the morning showed us we were on a dreary shore with nothing but breakers raging along the beach. The sea subsided however and the seamen launched the small boat, and found a place where all were landed with a stock of provisions and clothing.

“The men made a great fire and we passed the night in the woods with the most gloomy apprehensions. When the next morning broke, the wind rose to a perfect hurricane, accompanied with snow and the provisions we had saved would only last a week.

“We all thought the breaking up of the ship was the final touch to our misfortunes, but it turned out to be the saving of us all. As the wind blew in its fury, it put upon the shore pieces of the wreck with parts of the rigging and sails together with casks of beef, pork, oatmeal and flour.

“How we thanked God for our deliverance, and how cheerfully the men secured the material that had, practically speaking, saved our lives!”

The next day the families and sailors built two camps: one for the Stewart family and attendants, another for Elizabeth’s crew and other immigrants. However, the settlers lost “all personal effects, including books, clothes, furniture and much provisions.” Yet all survived. Both living quarters were covered with the ship’s sail and protected everyone from wind, rain, snow and hoar frost.

Penelope says they lived for months, knowing nothing of their location. Her older brothers tried to penetrate the woods to find inhabitants, but the frost was so severe and the snow so deep, any extended travel was impossible. To the castaways’ surprise, about mid-winter a Mi’kmaq hunter visited the camps. He used snowshoes and told them he could travel as much as forty miles a day and could speak English. The elder Stewart spoke with him to learn they were stranded at Cascumpec on the north side of the island and about forty miles from Malpeque. Charlottetown, the intended destination of Elizabeth, was about a hundred miles to the southeast.

The man said he would come again in the spring when the ice cleared away to canoe Peter Stewart to Malpeque where a guide could be found to bring him to Charlottetown. True to his word, around April or May the man appeared and conducted Stewart through a narrow passage of water, protected from the sea and wind by sandbanks, leading from Cascumpec to Malpeque harbour.

Penelope Stewart says, “It was then well on toward the latter part of June and one day … the joyful news came that a schooner was in the offing; it proved to be a vessel my father had sent from Charlottetown for us. My brothers got us safely around the coast and on board the schooner and in a couple of days we were in Charlottetown. Eleven months had passed since we left the dear old Scottish shores behind us.”

Another account of the voyage exists, also written from memory several years after the event: Thomas Curtis’s “Voyage to the Island of St. John’s,” which can be found in Journeys to the Island of St. John or Prince Edward Island 1775-1832, edited by D.C. Harvey. Curtis, a steerage passenger, recalled that a few days after the wreck, three men went off in a small boat to search for a settlement on the wild coast.

Nine days later a small craft with two men arrived with supplies from Malpeque, about thirty miles away. The women and children were put aboard and taken to safety in New London, forty-six miles further down the shore. The next day, two whaleboats showed up with a couple of residents to help salvage the precious food and items from Elizabeth which would be desperately needed to help the newcomers through the severe winter weather. Three of Elizabeth’s number were left to guard the remains through the winter.

Curtis gives a vivid account of the starkness and difficulties of life in eighteenth-century Prince Edward Island. He decided to return to England and concluded his account with the words, “I cant express The Joy I Felt when I got on my native Country the 2d of Feb. 1777.”

THISTLE

One of the earliest ship tales of Prince Edward Island was also a mystery. Thistle disappeared. In 1814 Donald Nicholson of Belfast, P.E.I., built his own schooner. The last sighting of the 59-ton vessel was in mid-August 1815 when Nicholson left it firmly moored at Wood Islands, some thirty miles from Charlottetown, after it had arrived from Orwell Bay. However, he had an idea what had happened to it. He believed Thistle was taken away illegally – stolen.

Nicholson sent a description of Thistle and its crew to news-papers and shipping agencies on the eastern seaboard, hoping someone would report on the schooner or its men. The schooner was painted black with new bulwarks, fore and aft. The crew was mate John Livingston, an American about five feet two inches tall, with a swarthy complexion and tattoos on his right arm: a cross, a mermaid, an American eagle, and thirteen stars (representing the thirteen American colonies). Seaman Donald Buchanan was a native of Scotland, but Nicholson did not suspect he had taken the ship.

The man he did suspect was Donald M’Donald, a passenger. M’Donald, about five feet eight inches tall, fair and stout, had been born on the island and was a resident there. Apparently, M’Donald slipped away in Thistle and sailed it to the Gut of Canso, Nova Scotia, telling everyone he was master and owner. Nicholson discovered this thief had offered part of the cargo for sale at Canso on August 20, then sailed to Antigonish and left there for Burin, Newfoundland, where he arrived on August 22. After that, there was no news of the missing Thistle or its crew.

Whether Nicholson ever regained possession was not reported in official sources; however, ships’ registries show that the “Official Closure Year” of Thistle is a blank – with no year, place, or reason for closure given. Most likely Nicholson never found his ship again, nor is it known if M’Donald or his conscripted crew were ever caught or punished for their actions.

The Northeast light on icebound St. Paul Island in the winter. (Canadian Coast Guard photo)

FROM CHARLOTTETOWN TO ST. PAUL ISLAND – THE JESSIE

St. Paul Island lies directly in the route between Prince Edward Island and the east-west shipping lanes off southern Newfoundland. It lies in the Cabot Strait at the entrance, or exit, of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, about fourteen miles off the tip of Cape Breton Island. On the first day of 1825, the Prince Edward Island barque Jessie was close to the notoriously dangerous St. Paul.

Jessie, built in Charlottetown in 1823, was 340 tons with an overall length of 102 feet. Merchant Donald McKay of Charlottetown owned the barque and on December 24, 1824, he went on his vessel as a passenger to some foreign port. In addition to the crew, a Mr. Forbes of Pictou was also aboard as a passenger, making a total of twenty-seven people on Jessie. In a blinding snowstorm and high winds, McKay and company drifted close to St. Paul’s rocks near what later became known as Jessie’s Cove – no doubt so named because of the ship and its crew.

When the barque struck land, all aboard managed to get ashore and climb the high cliffs to safety. They saved what provisions they could. A subsequent search revealed that not another soul was to be found on the island. They were in relatively good shape. The fires they maintained dried clothes, kept them warm and served as a signal to people living on the mainland. People living in the vicinity of Cape North could see the blazing signal fires, but because heavy pack ice filled the Strait, a rescue vessel could not reach St. Paul. They sent word to the governor of Cape Breton but he, too, was powerless to give immediate aid.

On the island there was little running water and scant shelter. Determined to survive until the spring when ships would pass the island again, the survivors managed to salvage pieces of the ship and built some kind of crude shelter. The precious food was rationed accordingly.

An account of the loss of Jessie and other ships on St. Paul was carried in The Times of St. John’s on September 6, 1884, saying, in bold, on its front page:

ST. PAUL ISLAND
THE GRAVEYARD OF THE ST. LAWRENCE
HISTORICAL FACTS WHICH ARE STRANGER THAN FICTION

According to The Times, Donald McKay kept a diary or journal (now housed in a Boston museum) and in it he wrote of the terrible effects the cold, exposure, lack of food and shelter were having on all. Slowly they perished one by one from cold and hunger. McKay’s last journal entry was dated March 17, 1825.

In April, when the ice pack slackened or moved off, a sealing vessel owned by a Frenchman from the Magdalen Islands, Quebec, or Cheticamp, Nova Scotia, ventured near the island. He and his crew regularly called at St. Paul and Anticosti not only to hunt for seals but also to look for shipwrecks and their associated spoils. At St. Paul, the Frenchman’s crew spotted the signs of a wreck, went ashore to investigate and then found bodies.

The remains of McKay, the captain, and a few others may have been interred at that time; however, what happened to McKay’s body afterward is described in The Times account:

“McKay was one of the last to die and he was wrapped in his rich cloak. The cloak was taken off the body. During the summer the Frenchman went to Charlottetown and wore McKay’s cloak there.

“Mrs. McKay met him on the street, knew her husband’s cloak, pulled it open, and on the inside found her husband’s name written by herself. She at once spread the news and the Frenchman was seized by the authorities.

“He also carried one hundred English gui...