GREAT LAKES WINDS IN THE RIGGING
by Kathy Warnes
In his lifetime, Captain Donald Sutherland McDonald didn't think of himself as a symbol. His concerns lay with his family, his career and his grape harvest. One of his big ambitions was to be home on his farm in North East, Pennsylvania for the harvest, instead of away at sea. An irony of fate brought him home for the 1905 harvest; but to be laid to rest, not to harvest grapes.
The life span of Captain McDonald, 1861-1905, symbolized the merging of Great Lakes and ocean commerce and its growth and importance to the economies of the United States and the world. For over 150 years, the lake ports had been seaports, with access and trade to the ocean. In 1824, Captain Samuel Ward of Newport, Michigan built the St. Clair, a schooner of 30 tons burden. He loaded her with skins, furs, potash and black walnut lumber for gun stocks and in June 1826, he started for New York City. He sailed the tiny schooner-rigged St. Clair from Detroit to Buffalo and eased into the new harbor. Captain Ward then took out her spars, lowered her masts so they would clear the bridges and towed her through the Erie Canal to Albany with his own horses. She was then towed by steam down the Hudson River to New York City. He returned to his home the same way, making the voyage in eight weeks. The St. Clair was the first vessel to pass from the lakes to the ocean via the Erie Canal.
Deep water trade from the lakes had its beginnings when the brigantine Pacific sailed out of Cleveland, in 1844, with a cargo of wheat bound for Liverpool. At the height of the gold rush in 1849, the barque Eureka cleared Cleveland for San Francisco carrying fifty-nine passengers and a manifest of merchandise. She crossed Lake Erie, locked through the Welland Canal, ran with the wind down Lake Ontario, threaded her way down the St. Lawrence and through the canals. She sailed down the Atlantic, rounded Cape Horn, traveled up the Pacific and safely deposited her fortune seekers at the Golden Gate. In 1850 the first lake steamer reached salt water when the propeller steamship Ontario churned out of Cleveland and took the long loop around Cape Horn for San Francisco.
A flourishing trade between salt and fresh water developed during the 1850s. In 1854 John Thorson, a native Norwegian, sailed his brig Scott from Lake Michigan to Norway and back. In 1856, Lake Michigan farmers sent their grain directly to Europe on the steamer Dean Richmond. It loaded 14,000 bushels of wheat at Chicago and Milwaukee in mid-July and arrived in Liverpool on September 29th. In 1857 the Madeira Pet loaded hides in Chicago and staves in Detroit, and delivered them to Liverpool. In 1858 eleven lakes ships crossed the Atlantic and in 1859, according to one account, forty-one vessels cleared the lakes for London and Liverpool.
Even inland papers recorded lake-ocean commerce news. Oconomowoc, Wisconsin is about thirty miles inland from the port of Milwaukee. This geographical fact did not prevent The Oconomowoc Free Press of Thursday, June 2, 1859 from noting "that a vessel is now loading at Milwaukee with hardwood lumber for Hamburg."
The relationship between fresh and salt water sailors developed as gradually as a sand dune on a Lake Michigan shore and sometimes deteriorated as quickly as calm waters on Lake Erie. Some salt water sailors, a few of them secretly, others publicly, looked down their masts at Great Lakes sailors. After all, salt water was much more dangerous and challenging to navigate than the Lakes, they argued. They conveniently ignored the fact that the Great Lakes generate storms as ferocious as any ocean gale and the impact of a Lake Superior wave can be just as deadly as an Atlantic swell. Other lake and ocean sailors recognized the fact that they were brothers united in navigating the deep, whether it be Huron or Pacific, and traded friendship and benefits. Countless Great Lakes sailors began their careers on the oceans, and countless ocean tars proved themselves on the Lakes before moving on to salt. Captain William Callaway was an example of an ocean sailor transferred to the Great Lakes. In a reminiscence at the Milwaukee Old Settlers Club, he summarized the interchangeability of the ocean and lake sailors. He said: "My next trip was on the ship Petrel, bound with passengers for New York. While we were lying in New York harbor, two sailors from the Great Lakes who came aboard to spin yarns, told us what good things they had to eat on the Lakes vessels. They said they had ham and eggs for breakfast, two kinds of meat and pie or pudding for dinner, and hot biscuits and cake for supper." They also said that when they "wanted a drink, all they had to do was drop a bucket overboard and draw it up full of fresh, cold water. I thought they were awful liars, but found when I came to the Lakes, after making three more voyages from England to this country and Canada, that they were about right. I came to the Lakes in the year 1857, and started my career as fresh-water sailor."
A spirit of camaraderie floated on the waves and in the winds blowing around and across the Lakes, a feeling large and tangible enough to conquer the vast stretches of these inland seas. It connected passing ships and inspired captains to tie up next to each other at the dock so the men could visit. It touched the lock tender at Soo St. Marie and the light keeper at many an isolated lighthouse and made them feel they were united in a common battle against the destructive forces of nature that sometimes possessed the Lakes. For 150 years, the common trade on the lakes gave men a character in common: endurance, enterprise, imagination, patience. As Great Lakes historian Walter Havighurst put it: "No other thousand miles of continent are linked so closely as the lakes basin. It has given inland men a wide sense of geography and a habit of thinking in large terms."
Captain Donald Sutherland McDonald symbolized this habit of thinking in large terms from the perspective of both lake and ocean sailor. He was born at Dunnville, Ontario on August 28, 1861, son of James and Margaret Burgess McDonald. The captain's father, James, was born in Scotland and his mother at Niagara Falls. The McDonalds had six children. James was a grocer in North East and his brother, Hall, worked in the store with him. John was an assistant cashier at the First National Bank of Erie, and Arthur was a bookkeeper there. Frederick worked in New York as correspondent of the First National Bank, and Annie lived with her parents in North East.
When he was two years old, Donald came to North East with his parents and attended the local schools until he was sixteen. In the summer of 1877, Donald followed his desire to be a sailor. He voyaged on Lake Erie on the steamer Georgian which his uncle, Captain John Burgess of Port Ryerse, Ontario, owned and operated. He liked the life of the sailor so well that he stayed on for the season as a crew member. When the Georgian laid up for the winter, he decided to "go salt water" and went to New York. On November 11, 1877 he shipped out as a boy on the steamer State of Pennsylvania, bound for Glasgow, Scotland. From there, on January 14, 1878, he shipped as ordinary seaman on the Norwegian brig Hilding, bound for the West Indies.
January of 1878 turned out to be a bad month for sailing the North Atlantic. The progress was slow and erratic and on the tenth day of the voyage, a storm carried away the lifeboats, top masts, sails, yards and topside casks of fresh water. The captain decided to square away and run for the north coast of Ireland. He sighted the entrance to the Londonderry River off the north coast of Ireland, but the winds and the waves rampaged, and the shore seemed unattainable. When the captain tried to work the Hilding into the estuary, the remaining sails were carried away. The crew and ship were at the mercy of the sea, being driven in toward the beach. The captain ordered the anchors to be dropped in seven fathoms of water, but the bottom was quicksand and the anchors would not catch. The ship's ensign was hoisted downward, the universal signal of distress.
The Hilding struck on rocks offshore, and the shock sent the foremast and all the headgear overboard. Only the lower mainmast stood. Two of the crew were swept away with the forward cabin; the remaining nine made for the mainmast and its rigging. Donald McDonald and another sailor climbed to the grating around the trestle trees, and the captain, mates and other seamen stayed in the netting underneath. The seas carried away the other cabin, bulwarks and hatches. At midnight, the hull began to break up and the mainmast heeled over at a rakish angle. The captain and the other men jumped into the sea and were drowned or killed by floating spars. McDonald and his young shipmate stuck to their perch. Throughout the night, wind, freezing rain and hail lashed them. People ashore stood watch, highlighted by flickering flames from the fires they had built on the beach.
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Wisconsin
Marine Historical Society
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