Sacramento
Union / December 13, 1909
SCHOONER SINKS; 14 DROWN.
CHARLESTON
(S.C.), Dec, 15. That the five-masted schooner Governor Ames, bound from
Brunswick, Ga., to New York, foundered and went to pieces near Cape Hatteras
Monday afternoon, and the captain, his wife and the crew of twelve men all
perished, is the story of Josiah Spearing, sole survivor. Spearing was picked
up yesterday morning, half dead from cold and shock. He said that the schooner
struck rocks about midday Monday in a high wind and a heavy fog. All attempts
to launch rafts failed. The captain’s wife was lashed first to one part of the
ship and then to another, a mast finally falling upon her and killing her.
Spearing was thrown into the sea, but crawled up on some of the cross ties and
held on until rescued.
The Wreck of the Governor Ames
By Steven Ujifusa (Philly History
Blog)
On December 9, 1909, the lumber
schooner Governor Ames set sail from
Brunswick, Georgia on a routine coasting voyage to New York. On board were 14
souls, including Captain King and his wife. Lashed onto her upper deck was a
cargo of freshly cut railroad ties, most likely headed for the New York Central
Railroad’s supply yard.
Captain King was in command of a
unique vessel. When launched in 1888, the Governor Ames (named after
Massachusetts governor Oliver Ames) was the only five masted schooner in the
world, and one of the largest cargo vessels afloat, grossing 1,600 tons and
stretching 252 feet in length. She was also an expensive ship, costing $75,000.
Her owners, the Atlantic Shipping Company of Somerset, Massachusetts, had built
the Ames for short cargo runs up and down the Eastern Seaboard, as well as
longer runs to South America. She was also swift, with a reputation of being
“speedy and a good sea boat.”
Yet the Governor Ames got off to a
bad start on her maiden voyage from Boston to Baltimore. In December 1888, she
was dismasted off Cape Cod and ran aground on Georges Bank. As the wrecked ship
groaned and wallowed in the Atlantic, the wet and shivering crew prayed for
help before the Ames broke up. “Here we remained clearing up and waiting for
assistance,” recounted J.F. Davis, the brother of the Ames’s captain. “Up to
Sunday we saw but few vessels, and they passed at a distance.” Sunday,
the fishing schooner Ethel Maude of Gloucester ran up to us, and we made a
bargain for a passage for myself and the two extra carpenters to Gloucester.
The extent of the damage at the time I left the vessel was about $10,000 due to
loss of spars.”
Miraculously, no lives were lost,
and the maimed Ames did not break up. Help arrived, and she was re-floated and
repaired by February of the following year. She departed New Haven, Connecticut
for Buenos Aires, Argentina carrying 2,000,000 board feet of lumber, expected
to sell for $15.50 per square foot. Three months later, she departed Portland,
Maine, carrying a similar sized cargo of spruce, valued at nearly $30,000 and
according to The New York Times, “the largest cargo, perhaps with one
exception, ever taken by an American vessel.” Ill-luck continued to dog the
Ames. She ran aground again in 1899, this time in the warm waters off Key West
while en route from Philadelphia to Galveston. To re- float her, the crew had to
throw 200 tons of coal overboard. This time, she suffered minimal damage.
After the Key West grounding, the
curse on the Ames lifted. When Captain King guided his vessel up the stormy
Atlantic Coast in December 1909, the Ames and been accident-free for almost a
decade. She had even survived a few brutal trips around stormy Cape Horn,
hauling New England lumber to Australia. Although the air was frigid and the
iron seas menacing, this run to New York would be a routine trip by comparison
to battling Cape Horn westerlies. The Governor Ames was a twenty-year-old
veteran.
The sailing ship did not die out
with the coming of the deep water steamer in the mid-19th century. Well into
the 1900s, soaring masts were a common sight along the Delaware River. Big,
steam-powered craft did wipe out the clipper ships and North Atlantic packets
on the ocean routes, but the versatile schooner remained popular for hauling
basic, low-cost bulk cargoes such as coal, timber, gravel, railroad ties, and
ice, especially to and from smaller ports that did not have railroad access.
The name of this three-masted
schooner depicted at Race Street and Delaware Avenue hasn't been lost to history.
There was little concept of tall ship “romance” when this photograph was taken.
People took these ships for granted. It was only after the schooners vanished —
supplanted first by the railroad and the Mack truck — did people lament their
disappearance. As singer-songwriter Stan Rogers said about the Nova Scotian
schooner Bluenose, she “knew hard work in her time. Hard work in every line.”
For two centuries, the schooner was
the served as the humble workhorse of the American mercantile marine, a common
sight in big harbors and small ports all along the Eastern Seaboard. They were
relatively cheap to build out of abundant native timber, especially in Maine.
According to naval historian Howard Chappelle, “in spite of the fact that ships
and square riggers have monopolized certain important trades, such as the
packet and East Indian, and though they handled large and valued cargoes
individually, the total tonnage and value of such cargoes were small compared
to that carried by the schooners engaged in the coasting and foreign trades.”
On December 25, 1909, as
Philadelphians gathered in warm, pine-festooned churches to celebrate
Christmas, a battered, badly-shaken Joseph Speering arrived in Philadelphia on
the steamship Shawmut. He was the sole survivor of the Governor Ames, which had
sunk off North Carolina’s Cape Hatteras in a gale twelve days earlier. He told
the press that everyone else on board had either been drowned or crushed to
death by collapsing masts, including the captain’s wife, who the crew had
lashed to the rigging in an attempt to protect her from the boiling seas
crashing over the schooner’s bulwarks. As the Ames’s wooden keel bounced up and
down against the rocky shoals, Speering jumped overboard and clung to a
floating hatch cover. He then watched the Governor Ames break up and sink.
All alone, Speering clung to the
hatch cover for over twelve hours before the crew of the passing Shawmut
lowered a lifeboat and plucked him from the frigid seas.
This information found at ClassicSailboats.org.
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