Icebergs and Tidal Waves.
Icebergs and bewildering fogs, as has been already said, are a large element of danger in the St. Lawrence route. The passengers who sailed with me on the Lake Superior, from Montreal on July 1st, 1896, will not soon forget the magnificent display of icebergs which they witnessed on the Sunday following. From early morning until midnight, for a distance of more than 250 miles, the ship’s course lay through an uninterrupted succession of icebergs—a procession, it might be called, on a grand scale of masses of ice in all manner of fantastic shapes and of dazzling whiteness—travelling to their watery graves in the great Gulf Stream of the south. Mountains of ice, some of them might be called. On one of them a grisly bear was alleged to have been seen sulkily moving to and fro, as if meditating how, when and where his romantic voyage was to come to an end. The day was calm and cloudless—a perfect day for such a marvellous exhibition. It might have been otherwise, and how different may be imagined from reading what appeared in the English papers a few weeks later—the account of a ship’s narrow escape from destruction in this identical locality:
H. M. YACHT “VICTORIA AND ALBERT,” 1855.
2,470 tons; 2,980 h. p.: speed. 16.8 knots; armament, 2 six-pounders; crew, 151 men.
“Struck an Iceberg.—The SS. Etolia on her voyage from Montreal to Bristol narrowly escaped destruction from collision with an iceberg twenty-four hours after leaving the eastern end of Belle Isle straits. A dense fog had set in, the lookout was doubled, and the engines slowed; presently the fog lifted, but only to come down again thicker than ever. In a very short time the lookout called out, ‘Ice ahead!’ The engines were promptly stopped, then reversed at full speed. Meanwhile the towering monster bears down on the ship and in a few seconds is on top of it. It was a huge berg, rising high above the masts of the steamer, which it struck with such a crash that some three hundred tons of ice in huge pieces came down on the forecastle. Fortunately most of it rebounded into the sea, but some forty or fifty tons remained on the ship’s deck. The ship trembled under the blow from stem to stern; her bows were smashed in, but the leakage was confined to the fore-peak. In this battered condition the Etolia lay without a movement of the engines for thirty-six hours until the fog cleared, when Captain Evans had the satisfaction of proceeding on his course and bringing his passengers and crew safely into Bristol harbour.”
A still more serious disaster was reported on August 25th of the same year (1896):
“The captain of the steamer Circassia, of the Anchor Line, had a story to tell, on her arrival at quarantine early this morning, of picking up a captain and his twenty-two men on the high seas from three open boats. It was Captain Burnside and the entire crew of the British tramp steamer Moldavia, bound from Cardiff to Halifax with coal, who were rescued by the timely approach of the Circassia. During the dense fog over the sea on last Wednesday, the Moldavia ran into a huge iceberg and stove her bows so badly that she began to fill rapidly. It was 5.30 o’clock in the afternoon. As soon as a hasty examination showed that it would be impossible to save his ship, Captain Burnside ordered the lifeboats provisioned and cleared away, and as soon as it could be done the steamer was abandoned and shortly afterwards sank. The lifeboats kept together and watched for a passing vessel, and thirty-five hours later the Circassia’s lights were seen approaching. Blue lights were at once shown by the occupants of the lifeboats, and the Circassia altered her course. When near enough, Captain Boothby, of the Circassia, hailed the lifeboats and told the men that he would pick up the boats and their occupants. Accordingly the davits’ tackle were lowered, and as each life-boat approached she was hooked on and raised bodily, occupants and all, to the deck of the Circassia.”
The icebergs of the North Atlantic are natives of Greenland or other Arctic regions where glaciers abound. They carry with them evidence of their terrestrial birth in the rocks and debris with which they are frequently ballasted. The glacier, slowly moving over the beds of rivers and ravines, ultimately reaches the seaboard, to be gradually undermined by the action of the waves, and, finally, to fall over into deep water and be carried by winds and currents into the open ocean. In their earlier stages icebergs are constantly being augmented in size by storms of snow and rain, and by the freezing of the water washed over them by the waves. They are of all sizes, from a mere hummock to vast piles of ice half a mile in diameter, and showing an altitude above the sea of two or three hundred feet, sometimes rising to a height of five and even six hundred feet, and that is scarcely more than one-eighth of the whole mass, for a comparatively small portion only of the bulk projects above the surface, as may be plainly seen by dropping a piece of ice in a tumbler full of water. In proof of this, it is by no means uncommon to find icebergs of ordinary dimensions stranded in the straits of Belle Isle in seventy or eighty fathoms of water. Being frequently accompanied by fog—of which they may be the chief cause—they are often met with unawares, though their nearer approach is usually discovered by the effect which they produce on the air and the water surrounding them, suggesting to the careful navigator the frequent use of the thermometer to test the temperature of the water where ice is likely to be encountered. They are seldom met with below the 40th parallel.
Field-ice, covering a surface of many square miles, with a thickness of from ten to twenty feet, is frequently fallen in with off the coasts of Labrador and Newfoundland. Though less dangerous to navigation than the iceberg, it is often a serious obstruction. Vessels that incautiously run into a pack of ice of this kind, or have drifted into it, have often found themselves in a maze, and have been detained for weeks at a time, and not without some risk to their safety in heavy weather.
Tidal Waves.—Notwithstanding elaborate treatment of the subject by hydrographers, stories about ocean tidal waves are most frequently relegated by landsmen into the same category with tales of the great sea-serpent. Sailors, however, have no manner of doubt as to their existence and their force. During violent storms it has been noticed that ocean waves of more than average height succeed each other at intervals—some allege that every seventh wave towers above the rest. Be that as it may, there is no doubt that a sudden change of wind when the sea is strongly agitated frequently produces a wave of surpassing magnitude. Other causes, not so obvious, may bring about the same result, producing what in common parlance is called a “tidal wave.” This is quite different from the tidal wave proper, which periodically rushes up the estuaries of rivers like the Severn, the Solway, the Garonne, the Hoogly and the Amazon. In the upper inlets of the Bay of Fundy, where the spring-tides rise as high as seventy feet, the incoming tide rushes up over naked sands in the form of a perpendicular white-crested wave with great velocity. The tidal wave of the Severn comes up from the Bristol Channel in a “bore” nine feet high and with the speed of a race-horse, while the great bore of the Tsien-Tang-Kiang in China is said to advance up that river like a wall of water thirty feet in height, at the rate of twenty-five miles an hour, sweeping all before it.[33] The ocean tidal wave dwarfs these and all other waves by its huge size and tremendous energy. The effective pressure of such a wave being estimated at 6,000 pounds to the square foot, it is easy to understand how completely it becomes master of the situation when it topples over on the deck of a ship. Only once in the course of a good many voyages has the writer been an eye-witness of its tremendous force. The occasion was thus noticed in the New York papers of the 2nd and 3rd of August, 1896:
“The American liner Paris and the Cunarder Etruria, which arrived on Saturday, had a rough-and-tumble battle before daylight on Tuesday morning with a summer gale that had an autumn chill and a winter force in it. The wind blew a whole gale and combed the seas as high as they are usually seen in the cyclonic season. The crest of a huge wave tumbled over the port bow of the Etruria with a crash that shook the ship from stem to stern, and momentarily checked her speed; a rent was made in the forward hatch through which the water poured into the hold, flooding the lower tier of staterooms ankle-deep. The ship’s bell was unshipped, and it carried away the iron railing in front of it, snapping iron stanchions two inches in diameter as if they had been pipe-stems. The Paris, about the same hour and in the same locality, shipped just such a sea as that which hit the Etruria, but received less damage. It fared much worse, however, with the sailing ship Ernest, from Havre, which was fallen in with on the morning of the gale showing signals of distress. The French liner La Bourgogne, came to her rescue and gallantly took off the captain and his crew of eleven men, abandoning the shattered ship to her fate with ten feet of water in her hold.”
It is not often that a tidal wave visits the St. Lawrence, but in October, 1896, the SS. Durham City, of the Furness Line, when off Anticosti, was struck by a big wave which carried away her deck-load, including sixty eight head of cattle and everything movable. It was only one sea that did the damage, but it made a clean sweep.
By a figure of speech, ocean waves are frequently spoken of as running “mountains high,” and the popular tendency is doubtless towards exaggeration. The estimate of experts is that storm waves frequently rise to forty feet, and sometimes even to sixty or seventy feet in height from the wave’s base to crest.
H. M. SS. “CRESCENT.”
Presented by publishers of the “Star Almanac,” Montreal, 1896.
This outline represents one of the smaller types of British warships, known as first-class cruisers. The Crescent was launched at Portsmouth in 1892, and cost £383,068. She is 360 feet long and 60 feet beam. Her tonnage is 7,700 tons; her indicated horse-power 12,000, and her speed 19.7 knots an hour. Her armament consists of one 22-ton gun, twelve 6-inch quick-firing, twelve 6-pounder do., five 3-pounder do., seven machine guns and two light guns. The Crescent was for several years the flagship of Vice-Admiral James Elphinstone Erskine, on the North American and West Indies Station, and is consequently well known in Canadian waters. She visited Quebec several times.
CHAPTER VII.
THE ST. LAWRENCE ROUTE.
The Allan, Dominion, Beaver, and other Canadian Lines of Ocean Steamships—Sir Hugh Allan—A Fast Line Service, etc., etc.
WERE it not that the St. Lawrence is hermetically sealed for five months of the year, it would undoubtedly be a more formidable rival to the Hudson than it now is. That great drawback, however, is not the only one. The navigation of the St. Lawrence has always been somewhat difficult and hazardous. The seven hundred and fifty miles of land-locked water from Quebec to Belle Isle is notorious for swift and uncertain tides and currents, for treacherous submerged reefs and rocks, and shoals in long stretches of the river, for blinding snow-storms and fields of floating ice in the lower reaches at certain seasons of the year, for icebergs which abound on the coasts of Labrador and Newfoundland, and for bewildering fogs. With such a combination of difficulties it is not to be wondered at that shipwrecks have been frequent; that they have not been more numerous must be mainly attributed to good seamanship and an intimate knowledge of the route. Nautical appliances and charts are very much better than they were thirty or forty years ago. The efficiency of the lighthouse system has been greatly increased, and, what is vastly important, the masters of mail steamers are no longer restricted to time, but on the contrary are instructed that whenever the risk of life or of the ship is involved, speed must be sacrificed to safety.
The St. Lawrence route has some advantages over the other. It is nearly five hundred miles shorter from Quebec to Liverpool than from New York. Other things being equal, passengers by this route have the advantage of 750 miles of smooth water at the beginning or end of their voyage, as the case may be. For these and other reasons many prefer the St. Lawrence route. It has become popular even with a good many Americans, especially from the Western States, and will certainly become more so if the contemplated “fast service” is realized, by which the ocean voyage—from land to land—would be curtailed to three days and a half!
In the discussions that have arisen on the subject, the danger of running fast steamers on this route has, in many instances, been unduly magnified. Past experience tends to show that the actual risk is not necessarily increased by fast steaming. Shipwrecks in the Gulf of St. Lawrence during later years have been confined to cargo and cattle steamers. Not one of the faster mail boats has been lost during the last sixteen years. The chief difficulty in the way of establishing a twenty-knot service for the St. Lawrence is that of the ways and means. Would it pay? Certainly not by private enterprise alone, but the favour with which the project is regarded by the Imperial and Dominion Governments leaves little doubt that it will be accomplished in the near future.
CAPTAIN W. H. SMITH, R.N.R.
Captain W. H. Smith, formerly Commodore of the Allan Line, in command of the Parisian, and who, from long service on this route, is well qualified to express an opinion, states in his report to the Government that he sees no reason why there should not be a fast line of steamers to the St. Lawrence. “If,” he says, “the St. Lawrence route is selected for the proposed fast line, there should be no racing in competition with other large steamers, and the same amount of caution must be taken which has been exercised of late years by senior officers of the Allan and other lines trading to Canada; and it will be absolutely necessary for the safety of navigation that the commanders and officers of any new company should be selected from the most experienced officers of existing lines.”
In 1853 a Liverpool firm, Messrs. McKean, McLarty and Lamont, contracted with the Canadian Government to run a line of screw steamers, to carry Her Majesty’s mails, twice a month to Quebec in summer, and once a month to Portland during the winter, for which the company was to receive £1,238 currency per trip, under certain conditions, one of which was that the ships should average not more than fourteen days on the outward, nor more than thirteen days on the voyage eastward. The ships of the first year were the Genova, 350 tons; Lady Eglinton, 335 tons; and Sarah Sands, 931 tons. Their average passages were wide of the mark. Next year the Cleopatra, Ottawa and Charity were added to the line. The Cleopatra made her first trip to Quebec in forty-three days; the Ottawa never reached Quebec at all, but after dodging about some time among the ice at the mouth of the St. Lawrence, made for Portland. The Charity reached Quebec in twenty-seven days. As a matter of course the contract was cancelled.