Fresh-water superstition
Even before the new skipper came aboard the Chippewa in the flour-covered pier in Superior, I knew that this trip was not going to be like other trips. During all the seasons that I had been a radio operator on the Great Lakes I had been hearing a strange tale about him. Rumors, like Lake Erie squalls, are stirred up in a hurry, and usually die down as quickly, but this one was different. It didn’t die. It drifted about with the wind from one end of the Lakes to the other, and windlike, it came first from one direction, then another.
The first time I heard it was one fine day near the beginning of my first summer on the Lakes. We had been coasting down Lake Huron ahead of a stiff breeze and were about to enter the river at Port Huron. My eyes were on the tall, straight spruce poles of the Canadian radio station at Sarnia, but, as we came near the lightship which guards the entrance of the river, I noticed a marker and, as we passed it, I thought I could see the masts of a ship a foot or two under water.
I could not be sure—I was young and romantic, and thought maybe I was imagining things—and so the next time I had a chance I asked the chief about it.
“Oh, yes,” he said. “That’s the Herman Masterson that sank in that big November blizzard last year. The oldest captain in the line lost his grandson then. He had shipped as a cabin boy. He lost his wife in pretty much the same way about twenty years ago.”
“Not in the same place, I hope,” I couldn’t help saying.
“No, she was lost at the west entrance to the Portage Lake Canal through Keeweenaw. They say that’s why old man Trinder never became skipper of one of the company’s passenger boats—he didn’t want to go near the canal again, and our package carriers don’t make that passage. Trinder and his wife were sailing the old Betsy B. They had been married about ten years, but this was their first voyage together. The old Betsy went ashore in a fog while Trinder was hunting the west entrance to the canal. I reckon he’s had enough to make him queer.”
I asked him what he meant by queer, but that was all the satisfaction I could get, and no one else I asked ever said anything more definite. It seemed almost as if they didn’t want to betray the old man’s weakness, whatever it was. They did agree that if ever a man had had enough to make him queer, it was old Captain Trinder. To lose a wife in Lake Superior on his own schooner on their first trip together, and to lose his grandson in Huron, and both of them so close to land they could have swum ashore if the weather had been clear, was enough to unhinge any man.
In spite of it his men liked him. He was a straightforward sailor. He knew his lights from Port Colborne to Two Harbors. He did not drive his men, and his company trusted him. Long ago, if he had cared for it, he might have been given one of the passenger runs. And now he was about to do the thing he had dreaded for many years, the thing that was the ambition of all the other company skippers. He was to take charge of their crack passenger boat for the trip from Superior and Duluth down to Buffalo. Once more he was to go through the river where his wife was lost. Once more he was to pass within a heavin’ line’s length of the spot where his grandson followed the plunging Masterson to the bottom when she turned turtle.
Captain Trinder certainly did not look queer as he came aboard that day in Superior while we were taking on the last few bags of flour. He was a typical Great Lakes skipper, tall and straight in spite of his sixty years. He looked like an old dog who had held the bones of all Great Lakes waters in his teeth many times, and who knew what the St. Mary’s was like in a blizzard.
We had arrived in Duluth the day before on our usual schedule, had dumped ashore the passengers, some of whom were on their way to the Yellowstone Park. Others were on a round trip on the “greatest inland water voyage of the world,” as it was put in the advertisements sent to the big eastern magazines. As soon as we got rid of the passengers we crossed to Superior to take on our cargo for the trip down. Three hours before sailing, the skipper had been carried back across into a hospital in Duluth.
We had to have a new master. Fortunately Trinder’s carrier was in port. No one else was within a day’s steam of us, and so Trinder brought himself aboard.
By the time the last passenger had come on and the black gang had hoisted their allotment of ice up the after decks and into the galley ice boxes for iced water and tea and other stuff the fancy passengers might need, the wind had chased the last of the high, white cumulus clouds away and had brought up black ones in their place. The wind came off the lake at such an angle that the narrow entrance to the harbor was a most difficult opening to hit, and the waves broke on the long spit that connects Duluth and Superior with vicious snaps that seemed to punctuate the more sustained and higher notes of the wind. The sun went down in a black and angry west, the whistle blew its departure blast, the none-too-good orchestra struck up a brave air, and we backed out into the harbor waters.
It was a mean night, and I knew that the steward’s boys would be busy answering bells from the passengers before an hour was over. I stood below the bridge deck, glorying in the coolness of the day after roasting in our smelly Superior slip, and did not get the full thrust of the wind until the captain had backed out into the harbor and turned the Chippewa’s nose toward the tiny traveling bridge that carries pedestrians across the cut. Then I knew in an idle manner—wireless operators don’t take much responsibility for such things—that the old man might have trouble in poking the ship’s nose out into the black night beyond.
Just as we were about to make the opening, a blunt-nosed ore carrier, far down in the water, hove in sight, coming up swiftly with the wind on her back. She headed for the opening to get out of the dusk into quieter waters, just in time to prevent Trinder from making it.
He rang down the engines and then called for reverse so that we would be out of the way of the “tin stack.” When she got through in her lubberly manner, the Chippewa was again aimed at the opening, but this time the wind carried her so far off we threatened to pile up on the breakwater.
The skipper again rang for reverse, and we backed out and tried again. I remember him facing the wind and trying, I suppose, to get the feel of his ship. He was used to heavier vessels, and his first trip out with a boatload of passengers was not starting auspiciously. He heaved over the anchor, reversed the engines slowly, pulling against the hook until the nose of the Chippewa was pointed straight at the center of the cut. At the proper moment he called for half speed ahead, the deck gang turned steam into the anchor winch, and as the chain came slowly aboard, the Chippewa eased out into the open Superior waters which the wind had by this time lashed into fury.
It was a neat maneuver, but there was nothing queer about it. It was straight seamanship, and a nasty problem had been solved as another skipper in the same position might have solved it. The passengers laughed and marveled, thinking this a part of every trip out. The pitching of the ship in the long Superior rollers soon drove most of them below, and after a whirl or two around the boat deck, I went to the radio cabin to fill out what remained of the six-to-twelve watch.
When we got away from the shallower waters near the western end of the lake the surface rollers quieted down into those long swells that mark deep water. The ship steadied herself and assumed a comfortable heave and fall that was pleasant rather than otherwise.
I sent the second operator to bed to wait his twelve-to-six watch, and settled myself into the chair with the earphones on my head. There was the usual amount of July static rolling in, and the usual lack of radio traffic to bother my ears. I heard the Duluth station ask some one what the weather was like near the Apostles. Two Canadians on their way to Port Arthur passed the time of day, and that was about all.
It was around ten o’clock that there was a tap on the door. Expecting some curious passenger I answered without much enthusiasm.
“Do you mind if I come in?” It was Captain Trinder.
“Not at all, sir, please do,” and I scrambled to my feet.
It was unusual, I thought, for a captain to be so polite.
He sat down in the dilapidated chair that had once had arms and looked curiously about. I realized that he had never seen a radio before. The package freighters were not compelled to carry wireless equipment—the few dollars a month the operator got plus the rental of the apparatus was enough to prevent the company from furnishing their skippers with them.
The old man did not seem comfortable. I guessed that the clothes he wore now were not those in which he commanded the package boats. He wasn’t quite at home. But he was a kind old man, I thought, and I could talk to him without any feeling of self-consciousness because I was in the presence of a superior officer.
“Well, sir, it’s a bad night out, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” he said slowly, steadying himself against the heave of the ship. “But it will quiet down before morning. Have you any weather reports?”
The junior had hauled something out of the ether, and I gave it to him. It was the usual “moderate to strong southeast winds, overcast,” which, of course, was confirmed by the weather we were going through. There was nothing exciting or disturbing about it.
I explained that if the static wasn’t too bad I would get further reports on the Upper Lakes from Arlington before I went off watch.
“Static?” he asked. He was very much interested in the radio, and the thought occurred to me that he was leading up to something he wanted to know about it.
When I let him listen to the intermittent crashes and rasps of summer static, he was greatly impressed, and wanted to know if we ever heard any one talk.
“You mean the human voice?” I asked.
“Yes,” he nodded. “I—I have heard that voices sometimes come in. Voices of dead people.”
There it was. Out like a bolt from the blue! I froze to my chair, and could think of nothing to say. This was what he wanted to know. He looked very strange. The men had been right. He was queer.
I tried to laugh it off with a remark that I didn’t see how dead people could talk, but more and more it seemed to him that the radio might be the place where old friends could get together.
“Well, sir,” and I laughed out of nervousness, “if you have any one in particular you would like to talk to, say, Napoleon or Julius Cæsar, I’ll give them a buzz.”
This was too much for the old gentleman.
“Young man,” he said as he rose to leave me, “I don’t think you have the proper respect for ship’s officers. When you are as old as I am you may think differently.”
I was honestly sorry I had made light of his remark, and said so.
“It was somewhat startling to have such a question put to you right off the bat, sir.”
“Yes, yes,” he said, “I know. I—I had hoped you might help me. I’ve never been on board ship with wireless before,” and then his manner became that of the captain of a vessel with several hundred passengers aboard. “Let me know what the weather report says when it comes in.”
With that he was off. My emotions were somewhat mixed. I wished I had not been alone with him, and wished I had not made light of his remark. Now that he was gone, I wished that some one else were with me in that stuffy, careening radio cabin on the aft end of the Chippewa.
After a while the nervousness wore off, and I made an entry or two in the log book to show that I had not been asleep. It was soon time for Arlington’s weather reports and time signals, and when the first dots and dashes came through I knew that I would have no trouble in taking down what he was sending. There was, as usual, a lot of stuff about the weather in the Gulf and up and down from Hatteras and other places that we didn’t care anything about, and finally came the report for the Upper and Lower Lakes. There was nothing to indicate bad weather. In fact, the report mentioned only moderate winds for the following day. I rang the wheelhouse with the report and found the captain still up. When I offered to read him the report, he said he would come and get it himself. I had a feeling that he wanted to resume the conversation about the dead and the radio, and wished that he would choose some bright, sunshiny afternoon instead of the middle of the night.
He soon came in, however, and after perusing the report, asked the meaning of upper and lower lakes. Like most operators, I had never thought of it, and told him so, suggesting Upper Lakes meant Superior and the upper parts of Michigan and Huron.
“I don’t like the sound of ‘Lower Lakes,’” he said, smiling not a bit.
There didn’t seem to be any answer to that, so I suggested that he listen in for Arlington’s signals calling shipping board vessels with orders. He jumped at the suggestion, and I plugged in another pair of phones for him. To keep him interested until midnight, when the junior came on watch, I started to put down what Arlington was saying. He was immensely interested, and after Arlington signed off I dug up some complicated weather reports he had sent in code and translated them for the “Old Man.” I showed him how Arlington had sent out the wind velocity, the barometer readings, the direction of wind, the precipitation at many Great Lakes points such as Alpena, Marquette, and others. This impressed him a lot, but he was a man of the old school, and didn’t see how fellows in Washington could dope out what the weather of Keeweenaw was going to be on the following day. He could tell more by a sniff of the air and a look at the sky than a dozen barometric charts of the United States would tell him.
He wanted to know how the radio signals got to our cabin, whether they went through the air or the water, what happened if two ships listened in at the same time, and a lot of other questions. When I tuned in the station at the Canadian Soo he was struck by the difference in pitch.
“It’s just like a person,” he said, as though making a discovery. “These different stations have different kinds of voices.”
Of course this was true, and I told him how we could tell one ship from another by the tone of its signals, and how, sometimes, we could tell which operator was at the key by the “fist” he had.
Finally he wanted to know why the weather report had not mentioned fog, and I had to admit that I didn’t know.
“I never remember hearing a radio report mention fog,” I told him. “Maybe it’s because fog is such a local affair and rather unpredictable.”
“Maybe so,” he replied, “but I think we will run into fog before morning. At the entrance to the Portage River Canal we’ll get it.”
“That’s a bad place for fog,” I said without thinking.
“Yes, I lost my wife there in a fog.” And then he told me the story of how he had run on shore during a fog twenty years before, and how his wife had been drowned. It was not a long story, but it cost him considerable effort to tell it.
“That’s why I have never been near Houghton and Hancock since,” he said, and I could agree that it was sufficient reason.
With that he was gone, and as it was near midnight, I went to the bunk room and woke the junior operator.
Some time after daylight I became aware of the intermittent three blasts of the fog whistle. When the junior woke me at the end of his watch he said we had been going through fog for about an hour, and that it seemed to be getting thicker each minute. He remarked that the captain was looking for a message from some one. The first mate came into the mess room as I was downing a stack of flapjacks, and seemed rather the worse for wear. The Old Man had had him up all night, he said, either looking for fog or trying to get out of it.
We were due at the entrance to the channel at about eleven o’clock. This meant several hours of running through the fog. The skipper might have anchored and waited until it lifted, but he naturally enough chose to go ahead, hoping that as he neared the end of the five-hour run the fog would have thinned enough to enable him to find the breakwater and thence the entrance to the river. Above all things, he would want to be on time on this, his first trip as captain of a passenger ship. If we ran into anything in the fog—well, we’d better not. There was little chance of our meeting anything except a tug or some other small boat. Ore carriers went outside. No other passenger vessel of any size was scheduled to be coming out of the Portage Lake Canal, and the small twin towns which straddled it would be as somnolent under the sticky, warm fog as two cats in the sun.
At eight o’clock the wheelhouse phone rang, and the skipper wanted to know what the weather was in the canal. Of course. I could not tell him, for there was no radio station there, but I told him I would try to find out.
Starting up the old transmitter, I jerked out a few calls for any one in the vicinity of the mouth of the canal, but no one answered. It was as I thought, no ship large enough to carry wireless was anywhere near the point toward which we were heading. The Jenkins, out in the lake, reported no fog, and after a call or two, Duluth answered sleepily and said no fog. So we were in for it. It might last an hour and it might last the rest of the day.
As I was about to phone up this information the mate blustered in.
“Well, bud, what’s the news?” he roared at me. He was that way, roaring at every one and everything. I suspected that he was some way miffed because a new man had come aboard over his head and kept him from taking the Chippewa down on his own ticket.
“No news is good news,” I answered glibly enough. The fog didn’t bother me. I was in no hurry. Houghton was a warm place in July, and since we usually stayed there long enough for the passengers to go down a copper mine but not long enough for the officers to have a spree on shore, I saw no reason why an hour’s delay would prove anything but a gift.
“Never mind the bright remarks, bud. The Old Man wants a report on this damn fog. What have you got?”
“Not a thing. The Jenkins off Keeweenaw is in fair weather, and Duluth reports sun and moderate breezes from the northwest.”
“All right. If that breeze gets us we’ll be O. K. And say, bud, keep an ear out for some ship the old man thinks he’s going to get a message from, will you?”
“I reckon it’s a message from the dead,” I said cryptically, but the mate was gone.
Within an hour Captain Trinder came down. He looked rather bleary about the eyes because of his long night’s vigil. If he had turned in when leaving Duluth he would have at least got some sleep, because we didn’t run into the fog until about five o’clock. But the watchman told me he had gone all over the ship—he had never been on her before—from the chain locker forward to the fan tail aft.
“Any news?” he said at once, just as though he fully expected me to hand him a nice printed radiogram from the bottom of the lake.
“No, sir. Do you think the fog will hold on, sir?”
He didn’t answer my foolish question. How could any one tell how long a fog would last?
“How near are we, captain?”
“Oh, we’ve got plenty of time yet. I’ve been keeping up speed, and we ought to be within range of the foghorn in about an hour. But I’d like to have word, though.”
With that he tore out, and I could hear him thumping across the deck above as he went back to his point of vantage over the wheelhouse.
We slid along at our regular speed of between twelve and fifteen knots. The fog clung almost to the water’s edge, and the small waves seemed trying to dissolve it by lapping it up. There was not a breath of wind except what went past us due to the steamer’s motion. This was wet and warm, as though the weather were perspiring. I kept very close watch on the radio signals that came along. They were few and far between. In those days the range of a ship’s signals was not very great, and when we neared the copper-laden hills around Calumet what signals there were seemed to be swallowed up and reached us only as little, disconnected blurbs of noise. There was no static, and if it had not been for the fog, the day would have been perfect. The sun rose higher and higher, and seemed trying its best to break through. At ten o’clock I picked up a Canadian report indicating “fine weather, moderate variable winds.”
I was sorry for the skipper. For twenty years he had avoided this passage, and now here he was near the spot where the end of his first voyage with his wife had so tragically come. He was in a fog, and he had the responsibility of three hundred passengers on his shoulders in addition to other worries.
Suddenly the decreased throb of the engines told me that we were slowing down. We must be near the entrance. I rushed to the deck above to see what, if anything, had happened, in time to hear the gong below stop the engines completely. We slowly came to rest, and the only sound was the gentle lapping of the fog-laden waves against the sides of the vessel, and the rhythmic push-push of the water pouring from the engine-room vent into the lake. I could see the Old Man with his quartermaster up on the canvas-covered deck above the wheelhouse. Trinder’s hair was standing on end. He had taken off his white collar, put on for the benefit of passenger traffic, and now looked like the skipper of any ore or freight carrier. His attitude was one of excitement. He was listening for something, and I thought it was for the foghorn at the entrance to the river.
Within a minute or two the lazy rasp of the horn floated in on the fog from a point or two off the starboard bow. It seemed to me that once we had heard the horn we ought to know where we were, but still the Chippewa did not move. Then the horn’s rasp came again, this time from a wider angle to the starboard, and the next rasp came from astern. Clearly the fog was varying the direction from which the sound came to us. We could not rely on it. It was a fact, however, that we were within a few thousand feet of the shore. The Old Man did not care to risk the second ship he had taken to the mouth of the Portage Lake Canal, let alone the three hundred pleasure seekers who lined the rail and commented idly on the situation. They were mildly amused at the disheveled appearance of the man who held their lives and a million dollars’ worth of ship and cargo in his hand.
Finally he signalled the engine room, and we pushed ahead slowly. Almost immediately, however, the engine-room gong clanged for stop, and then reverse. Dead ahead I could see the lighthouse at the channel end of the south breakwater slowly come into view and approach us as the steamer pressed forward. But as I watched, the lighthouse receded from us as quietly and stealthily as though it had come up to take a look at us, the intruders.
For a few minutes we lay motionless outside in the fog. Then I heard the horn again, now from our port quarter. It was eerie how that foghorn followed us around. Then I heard the bell in the radio room jangle, and I hurried below.
It was the skipper calling.
“Keep sharp lookout for word now,” he said.
“Who from, sir?” I asked.
“From her,” he answered curtly, and hung up. I hoped fervently that he would either find the entrance by himself without dashing us all on the breakwater to follow his wife to the bottom, or that the fog would suddenly lift and reveal to us the heavily wooded shores paralleling the narrow, sandy beach. There was nothing I could do but listen in, but I got nothing. Then I sneaked out for another look into the fog.
We were going ahead again, and I could feel that our nose was turned so that we would land farther out along the point. Suddenly the engine-room bell clanged again. Again I saw the breakwater approach us and recede, this time coming much closer than before, too close for the comfort of some of the passengers near me. They were asking me about the advisability of protesting to the skipper when he looked aft and caught sight of me.
“Go below,” he roared at me, “and get that message. She’s calling.”
I knew there was no one calling, but there was nothing to do but go down again. And then the unexpected happened. There was some one calling!
“SSE, SSE, SSE,” it said over and over again in dots and dashes. It was a strange signal, and the tone was unlike any I had ever heard on the Lakes. Perhaps in my amazement the unfamiliarity of it was exaggerated, but it was a queer signal.
“SSE, SSE, SSE,” it went on, and finally, after a whining crescendo, it said, “SSE, Anna.” And that was all.
I wrote it out on a piece of paper and took it up on the bridge. The captain looked at it, and a strange light came into his eyes. He dashed into the wheelhouse, and pushing aside the quartermaster, slowly swung the ship until her nose pointed south southeast. Then he rang for more speed ahead. Once again the shore line came into view. We could see both sides of the breakwater this time. We were aimed directly at the center of the opening.
As we passed the crib at the end of the north breakwater I noticed a small craft tied to it. Dimly I could see that on the stern was painted the one word “Anna.”
This explained the strange signals and the bearing we had secured. I suppose that from her position near the breakwater the Anna could see our masts sticking up in the air. This explanation was not so satisfactory later on when I called the Anna again but got no word from her.
Within five minutes we were steaming toward Houghton, where we arrived not over half an hour late and with plenty of time for the passengers to buy copper doodads and for me to learn through one of the men at the railroad station that the Anna was a Swedish boat that some foolhardy youth from Stockholm had crossed the Atlantic in. He had relatives in Minnesota. There was nothing strange about this—Swedish youths are always doing foolish things—except the fact that Swedish vessels have radio call letters beginning with S, so that the call “SSE” which I heard was probably the call signal of the craft. It was apparently just coincidence that the letters I had picked up gave us the bearing we needed.
At six that night I went on watch, and later the skipper came in.
“Well, young man, I must thank you for getting that message this morning. I always thought that if I ever got into trouble with fog I would get a message from Anna.”
“Anna?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said simply. “My wife sent the message. Her name was Anna.”