(Host) With a shipwrecked cruise ship capturing recent headlines,
commentator and Lake Champlain Maritime Museum Co-Director Adam Kane,
has been reminded of the heroism of an old Lake Champlain captain.
(Kane)
The tragic wrecking of the Costa Concordia off the Italian coast seems
to have occurred in the wrong century. It’s hard to imagine in our
modern age that something as avoidable as running into a well-charted
reef could doom a massive, modern cruise ship. And the captain’s
apparent neglect is startling enough for the tabloids. "Captain orders
meal as ship sinks" You just can’t make this stuff up.
The sad details of the captain’s behavior bring to mind a quite opposite story from our own Lake Champlain.
The
schooner General Butler was captained by James Montgomery, a rough and
tumble lake captain, as she sailed on Lake Champlain between Isle La
Motte and Burlington in December 1876. At Isle La Motte the 90 foot-long
wooden schooner was loaded with 30 tons of marble. Montgomery had his
deckhand on board, and was accompanied on this day by an injured quarry
worker en route to the hospital in Burlington , and his sixteen year old
daughter and her girlfriend. The girls were going Christmas shopping in
Burlington.
Suddenly, a storm blew up and engulfed the schooner.
The
boat struggled through the rough, cold seas. As it approached
Burlington, a wave struck it so hard that its wheel was torn off the
rudder post. Without the means to steer, Montgomery’s deck hand threw
out a storm anchor to hold the boat in place while the captain worked
furiously to jerry-rig a tiller. But fierce winds pushed the schooner
ever closer to shore.
With the tiller rigged, the storm anchor
was cut and Montgomery tacked for the placid waters behind Burlington’s
massive stone breakwater, as spectators, sensing an unfolding tragedy,
lined the waterfront.
The winds and the newly rigged tiller did
not cooperate. Rather than sailing safely past the breakwater, the
General Butler ran headlong into it. After the initial jarring impact,
onlookers watched as the little schooner was repeated pulled off and
then driven back into the unyielding stones.
Amidst the
confusion, Montgomery gathered his charges onto the deck and with each
cresting wave, dropped another person onto the breakwater below. With
the schooner disintegrating beneath his feet, Montgomery, in true
maritime form, was the last to leave the ship. The beaten schooner was
promptly taken straight to the lake bottom by that Isle La Motte marble.
Having been saved from drowning, the shipwreck survivors now
faced the prospect of dying from exposure on the breakwater. Their
savior came in the form of Burlington ‘s lighthouse keeper and ship
chandler, James Wakefield. A Scottish immigrant and Royal
Navy veteran, Wakefield rowed a skiff out to
the breakwater, and saved all five from certain death.
And not
long after the sinking, Montgomery ‘s daughter is said to have asked
when the schooner could be raised – so they could sail her back home.
Like I said. Stuff like this? Well, you just can’t make it up.