It was upon the bleak and uncharitable dawn of November the sixth in the year of our Lord nineteen hundred and eighteen that the great steel leviathan, CHESTER A. CONGDON, departed the frosted docks of Fort William, Ontario. The hour was precisely two-and-twenty minutes past two o’clock in the morning when the mooring lines were cast adrift, and the vessel, laden with a veritable mountain of wheat—whether 380,000, 400,000, or, as some claimed with widening eyes, three-quarters of a million bushels—slipped silently into the black waters, bound for the distant port of McNicoll.
Her cargo, loaded at the Ogilvie and Pacific elevators, was no ordinary consignment, but the bread of nations, each golden kernel a promise to feed the weary millions of a war-worn world. But the Lake, that great and mercurial tyrant, had other designs.
The Gathering Gale
As she cleared Thunder Cape, the wind rose from the southwest like some ancient enemy roused from slumber. The seas, white-fanged and ravenous, crashed against her iron flanks, bidding her return whence she came. At four o’clock in the morning, Captain William Anderson—whose face bore the lines of both age and experience—ordered the helm about. The CHESTER A. CONGDON sought refuge in calmer waters, there to anchor and bide her time until the gale abated.
Hours passed with the slow cruelty of a prison clock, the wind's shriek only partly diminished. By ten-fifteen a.m., the Captain, convinced the worst had passed, gave the order to resume. Yet, as if resentful of human presumption, the Lake conjured a fresh hazard—fog, thick and unyielding as wool drawn before the eyes.
The Fatal Course
At precisely ten-forty a.m., with the fog enveloping them in a grey and ghostly shroud, Anderson set a cautious course for Passage Island at nine knots. “Two hours and a half,” he told the mate, “and should this cursed veil not lift, we shall heave to.” But fate, that most patient of hunters, was already drawing back her bow.
At one minute past the hour of one, a grinding, splintering roar shook the vessel from stem to stern—the southerly reef of Canoe Rocks had claimed her. The CHESTER A. CONGDON, that proud steamer, was fixed fast upon the teeth of the hidden reef, her great heart pounding against the stone.
Boats Away!
There was no wireless to cry for aid—whether absent or disabled, the truth remains cloaked in uncertainty. Yet the crew acted with urgency. One boat, manned by hardy souls, pulled for Passage Island to seek the lightkeeper’s assistance. Another, with grim determination, sought to reach Fort William in the borrowed strength of a fisherman’s launch. The latter faltered, its engine failing in the wilderness of the lake, but limped into Fort William by dawn of November seventh.
The wrecking barge EMPIRE, the tug A.B. CONNER, and later the SARNIA were dispatched. At first, there was hope. The great tanks in her belly were still dry. Plans were made to lighten her burden onto the waiting barge OREL. It was whispered in the dockside taverns that the CHESTER A. CONGDON might yet be saved.
The Fury of November
But November is not a month for mercy upon the Great Lakes. On the eighth day, the wind returned with renewed venom, lashing the waters into chaos at fifty-five miles per hour. The men abandoned their stricken vessel for the comparative safety of the EMPIRE, huddling in her lee behind Isle Royale. It was there, amid the howling of the gale, that calamity struck anew. Wireless operator Thomas Ives, entangled in the cruel machinery of the hoisting gear, suffered a grievous injury—his thigh mangled, his cries swallowed by the storm.
That night, the CHESTER A. CONGDON surrendered. With a shudder like the sigh of a dying giant, she broke asunder aft of hatch No. 6. The stern slid into the deep, claimed by water blacker than midnight, while the bow remained, marooned in but twenty feet.
Loss and the Shadow of War’s End
On November ninth, the crew—thirty-five souls all told—returned to Fort William. They bore little more than the clothes on their backs and such personal effects as could be salvaged from the stranded bow. Four-fifths of the wheat was lost to the Lake’s insatiable hunger. The survivors arrived in time to join the Armistice Day celebrations, parading with the ship’s flag held high—a tattered banner from a battle of a different sort.
The financial reckoning was grim. Over $1.5 million in losses, only partly salved by insurance: $365,000 on the hull, $369,400 in expenses. The cargo alone—valued at $393,000—was the greatest single loss of wheat in Great Lakes history, eclipsing even the 1913 wreck of the HENRY B. SMITH.
This is a work of fiction inspired by real-life accounts; while based on actual events, characters and details have been altered for narrative purposes.
