On the afternoon
of Friday, November 21st, 1902, Captain James McMaugh of the lake freighter Algonquin peered
through his binoculars into the haze that hung over Lake Superior. Despite the low visibility
and mild gusts, the weather was nothing too challenging for the upbound Algonquin.
Around 80 miles off Keweenaw Point, Captain McMaugh sighted the silhouette of another
freighter making her way downbound about 7 miles away. He immediately recognized
the steamer’s three-masted profile. It was a vessel the experienced Captain knew well,
a 245-foot wheat carrier that frequently shared the same route as the Algonquin, the Bannockburn.
This late into the season there were not many vessels left on the lake.
Captain McMaugh noted that the Bannockburn wasn’t towing her two barges, probably due to
the likelihood of rough late November weather on these final runs. He recorded the sighting in his
ship’s log and noted that she seemed to be making good weather with nothing unusual to report.
A minute or so later Captain McMaugh raised his binoculars to take another look
but the Bannockburn was gone. Baffled by the sudden disappearance,
he scanned the horizon over and over. It would have been impossible for any
vessel to sail out of view in just the brief moment in which he looked away.
But the Algonquin was alone in the vastness of Lake Superior.
And there would never be another confirmed sighting of the Bannockburn.
Only the day before, the Canadian registered freighter Bannockburn was loading grain at the
Canadian Northern elevator at Port Arthur. She was preparing to carry
85,000 bushels of wheat to Midland, Ontario in Georgian Bay on Lake Huron.
The SS Bannockburn was a British-built ship, constructed at the Sir Raylton Dixon & Company
shipyard at Middlesbrough, on the Tees Estuary in 1893.
She came in at 1,620 tons, with a length of 245 feet or 74.7 meters and a 40-foot or 12.2-meter
beam. She was powered by a triple expansion three-cylinder engine fired by two boilers.
Not long after her launch, she arrived in Canada to join the Montreal Transportation Company fleet,
based in Ontario. The grain trade at the time involved frequent transiting of the Welland Canal
and the small locks at the St. Lawrence River, which limited the size of vessels in the fleet.
The Bannockburn was just about the maximum size of a vessel capable of operating this route.
On this voyage, she was commanded by 37-year-old Captain George R. Wood from Port Dalhousie,
Ontario. While this was his first season on the Bannockburn, he spent the previous year
commanding another company vessel, the Glengarry and was considered an experienced navigator. In a
strange coincidence, his brother Eugene was chief engineer on the ill-fated car ferry
Marquette & Bessemer No. 2, which was lost in a storm on Lake Erie on December 8, 1909.
The rest of the crew was very young. Of the 20 other men, 33-year-old Chief Engineer George
Booth was the only married man on board. The next oldest crew members were 24-year-old
First Assistant Engineer Charles Selby and 22-year-old Second Mate William Chalkey.
Selby had just been elevated for this voyage after the previous first assistant engineer
abruptly left the ship only a few days before. A new second assistant, Joseph Dawson was brought
on at the last minute. The rest of the crew ranged from ages 17 to 20. Wheelsman Callaghan
was an orphan working onboard to support his 3 younger brothers. He was just 16 years old.
At the time it was very common for Great Lakes shipping companies to employ young
and inexperienced crews so that they could keep wages as low as possible and maximize profits.
It was an extremely lucrative business.
As the Bannockburn finished loading, Captain Wood remarked to the elevator superintendent,
Mr. Sellers that he expected good weather on this run and he thought they might even
be able to get another one in before the end of the season. Mr. Sellers,
a man with many more years of experience, doubted this very much, observing that ice was already
beginning to build out from the shore. He knew that the season was already coming to an end.
The Bannockburn departed Port Arthur on November 21st, 1902, at around 9 in the morning.
She was actually scheduled to leave a day earlier but as she made her way to the open lake,
she briefly ran aground and was forced to turn back. After a thorough examination, it was found
that the damage was minimal and she was declared perfectly sound and cleared to begin the voyage.
After her departure, almost nothing is known about what happened on this final voyage.
Her average speed and departure time would put her right around where she was sighted by
Captain McMaugh of the Algonquin. But aside from suddenly vanishing from view, the Captain didn’t
notice anything out of the ordinary, nothing that even hinted to any trouble on board.
As the Algonquin made her way upbound that evening, she soon encountered a stiff
breeze and heavier seas but she arrived safely in port without much trouble.
As night fell on the 21st, a storm descended over Lake Superior with towering seas and
punishing winds. Captain McMaugh felt lucky that he made it to port before the worst
of the November gale blew in. He pitied any vessel that might still be out on the lake.
That night, the Northern Navigation Company’s passengers steamer Heuronic, a sister ship of the
ill-fated Neuronic, which would burn in Toronto Harbour in September 1949, was sailing upbound to
Port Arthur when heavy snow began to fall. A young waiter onboard, Fred Landon, kept a daily diary
of his experience. He noted on the 21st that the ship encountered the worst storm of the season.
The weather was so intense that the ship’s engines were damaged and had to be repaired the next day.
While he was serving breakfast the next morning, Landon overheard one of the
officers remark that they had sighted the lights of the Bannockburn fighting
through the storm during the night but no one on board thought much more about the freighter.
The Huronic arrived in Port Arthur and departed for another downbound voyage on the 25th.
It wasn’t until they arrived in Sarnia on the 28th that they learned that the ship had gone missing.
Meanwhile, as the Bannockburn became seriously overdue at the Soo Locks a period of wild
speculation and uncertainty soon set in. It wasn’t uncommon for ships to get delayed, especially in
rough weather, and at first, the Montreal Transportation Company wasn’t too concerned
about the missing vessel. But as time went on and the families of her missing crew became
more desperate, pressure mounted for the company to explain what happened to the missing sailors.
In the days after the Bannockburn’s scheduled arrival no one seemed to know whether the ship
was actually missing or just stranded somewhere. Engine failures happened somewhat regularly,
especially during storms and every couple of seasons a ship would go well past her scheduled
arrival only to be discovered sitting idle or grounded only a few days later. This was before
ships were equipped with wireless equipment. Communication was limited to as far as the eye
could see. Once a ship passed out of visual range, she was lost until she spotted somewhere else.
On November 26th, a manager of the Montreal Transportation Company, Mr. L. L. Henderson,
under mounting pressure from the families of the crew, claimed that he had received word
from the office of the ship’s underwriter that the Bannockburn was located on the
north shore of Lake Superior opposite Michipicoten Island and her crew was safe.
He said that the report came from a ship called the Germanic.
A large salvage tug called the Favorite was sent to the scene to investigate but after steaming
for miles up and down the bleak shoreline, no trace of the missing ship was found.
The officers of the Georgic were questioned about the report but they were adamant that
no one on board made any such report. They went on to say that if any stranded ship was sighted,
they would have investigated immediately to assist anyone who might need saving. It’s very
unclear where Henderson got his information and when pressed he only became vaguer.
If Captain Wood found himself lost in the storm, it’s likely that he would have searched for the
light at Caribou Island. He might not have known that the light was intentionally shut off for the
season on November 15th. This early shutoff date would cause a good deal of controversy since many
vessels passed through the area sometimes as late as the early weeks of December.
Another tug called the Boynton was sent to search the shoals around Caribou island and
retrace the shoreline searched by the Favorite. Again nothing was found. Even
before the Boynton returned, the Bannockburn was officially declared lost on November 30th, 1902
Almost no trace of the Bannockburn or her crew was ever found. On November 25th,
before the ship was declared missing, a steamer called the John D. Rockefeller sailed through a
debris field near Stannard Rock Light but it was unclear to the crew where the debris came from.
The only confirmed trace of the Bannockburn was discovered on Friday,
December 12th at the Grand Marais Lifesaving Station,
when a cork life preserver and a single oar from the ship were found on the beach.
The total lack of information left few answers to the fate of the Bannockburn
and the 21 men onboard. Captain McMaugh of the Algonquin theorized that she was taken
down by a sudden boiler explosion. That was the only way he could explain her suddenly
vanishing from sight that afternoon. But there’s no evidence to back this theory and
McMaugh himself admitted that he neither saw nor heard any signs of an explosion.
Boiler explosions, though commonly speculated about at the time,
were exceedingly rare, especially in newer, well-maintained vessels like the Bannockburn.
At the end of the season, when the lock at the Canadian Soo was drained, a steel hull plate was
discovered. No one was able to definitively link the plate with Bannockburn but it led credence
to a theory that she sailed into the gale with a weakened hull that failed in the heavy seas.
But there’s little other evidence to support this theory either,
especially given that her hull was inspected just before leaving.
The only credible final sighting of the Bannockburn came from the Algonquin,
having occurred almost exactly where the ship would have been expected to be at that time given
her planned course. The sighting was also properly recorded. While the men in the pilothouse of the
Huronic were adamant that they saw the lights of the Bannockburn that night in the darkness
of the raging storm, it’s not clear that the light they saw was indeed the missing ship.
The Huronic might well have been the last vessel to see the Bannockburn
before she met her final fate. But as the years went on they would prove to
be far from the last sailors on Lake Superior to believe that they spotted
the Bannockburn fighting through a dark storm in the waters around Caribou Island.
Throughout the early half of the 20th century, the Bannockburn mystery sparked
the imaginations of superstitious sailors on the lakes. For years after the disappearance,
on dark and stormy nights, sailors would frequently claim to see the lights of a phantom
ship fighting her way down Lake Superior, searching for the light at Caribou Island.
These strange sightings were almost always attributed to the Bannockburn
and she quickly earned the nickname, the Flying Dutchman of Lake Superior.
But as the years passed and those who sailed the lakes in 1902 aged and eventually passed away, the
mystery of Bannockburn all but faded into memory, replaced by more spectacular and recent disasters.
But it’s easy to see why her story was so captivating. In those days, late-season losses
were common. Tonnage was easy to replace. And there were plenty of young men looking for work.
The term ghost ship gets thrown around a lot and people debate what it actually refers to.
Is it a derelict ship left to drift without a crew? Is it a vessel that vanished in the night
without a trace only to be spotted again and again throughout the years hiding in the mist?
It’s an evocative idea that somewhere in the vastness of the seas and lakes of the world,
phantom vessels lurk just beyond the fog. A romantic notion that the young men who were
sacrificed in the name of commerce somehow live on. The idea that a young sailor can continue
in some ghostly realm lends significance to a life cut short by the pursuit of profits.
Letting us believe that the sacrifice of a loved one was somehow worth it.
Thank you so much for watching. What do you think happened to the Bannockburn?
It’s definitely a strange story with not a lot of answers. If you enjoyed this story,
help the channel grow by liking, commenting, and hitting that old subscribe button.
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They are truly my phantom light in the storm, in a good, comforting way.
All right crew, that’s all I’ve got. Until the next one, be nice to people.