THE LAST OF THE Jones search party returned to Wiarton two weeks after the boat disappeared. They had little to offer the town’s six widows and their sixteen children, or the others in Wiarton and elsewhere who’d lost friends and relatives.
Businessmen had formed the Steamer Jones Disaster Fund to help the Wiarton families through Christmas. The merchants rallied the townspeople, soliciting produce from farmers and money from whomever could spare it. The county council donated $200. But things were tight. There were never enough jobs in the wintertime and the economy had been on a slide since the sugar beet factory failed. People dug in their pockets for coins and hoped the winter would be a short one.
In the harbour beneath the white cliffs and on the red-brick buildings in town flags flew at half-mast. Stores on Berford Street covered their windows in black paper. A memorial service was arranged for the middle of December.
On the day of the service, members of the local fraternal societies gathered at the town hall to wind their way through the streets to the Methodist Church. They brought their banners but walked in silence, the crunch of frozen mud and snow underfoot a kind of rhythmic homage to the dead. Ministers from four of the town’s churches shared the pulpit that day, advising the community to pray for the families of the crew and passengers. Women dressed in black sobbed and hugged their children. The Christmas oranges that had started to arrive at stores on Berford Street did nothing to lift the gloom.
But the wreck brought more than grief to the little town. It brought notoriety, and it wasn’t the kind of national attention Wiarton’s early boosters had once imagined. The Jones was big news—making the front page of all the Toronto newspapers. There were still editors and reporters who remembered the selling potential of the Asia tragedy.
“STEAMER JONES GOES DOWN WITH OVER TWENTY SOULS,” blasted The Globe. A small boxed-off section promised “The Mute Story of Disaster.” Files were dredged up about the wrecks of the Waubuno and the Jane Miller; readers were reminded darkly that both had happened on the same late-November date, twenty-seven and twenty-nine years before to the day.
Not to be outdone, the Toronto News started a collection for the family of a passenger named Daniel McIvor. Merchants in the village of Providence Bay on Manitoulin Island had written a letter to the newspaper, asking if the editors might publicize the case of Mrs. McIvor who was widowed by the disaster, left with six children under the age of eleven to support on her own. The tiny village, the businessmen explained, was already struggling from a poor harvest when the Jones went down, taking both McIvor and a prominent merchant named Thomas Wagg with it. The loss was enormous. The McIvor Fund, as it became known, received an unprecedented response. Bible classes and other sympathetic readers donated nearly $500 to the destitute family.
No one could say exactly how many other passengers were on the Jones. The only record was lost with the steamer. People who’d seen the boat loading talked about seeing a mother and father with their three children, and young men going to work the timber limits at Silverwater on Manitoulin Island, but nobody knew their names. The number of people lost vacillated between twenty and thirty. For a time it seemed as if every missing person in the country had been on the boat. The wife of a Rochester lumberman named Ambrose Majeau claimed that her husband must have been a passenger since he hadn’t written home in weeks. But by the middle of December Mr. Majeau was discovered keeping residence in a Collingwood hotel. The official count was more or less established at eighteen passengers and twelve crew. In the weeks of searching before the ice came in, not one of the victims of the Jones was found.
It was agony, the waiting, the lack of resolution. For the wives who had only absence to mark their loss; for the small children who believed their fathers would still come bursting in the door, all red cheeks and whiskers. The suddenness of their deaths, the awful mystery about what happens to a body lost at sea made it especially hard to bear. As winter buffeted the Bruce Peninsula, the families of the Jones’s passengers and crew began to realize that victims of the wreck might never be found.
Then, just before the ice came in, bubbles of oil were discovered three miles from Cape Croker, marking—some people believed—where the steamer had foundered. There was talk about a renewed search in that location, but nothing could be done until after the spring thaw. The Toronto Daily Star reminded its readers ominously that “The deep waters of Georgian Bay never give up their dead.” Without bodies to wash and dress and mourn, there could be no burials, no proper funerals. No end.
The town entered a state of suspended animation. Some of the lost sailors were members of fraternal orders that paid out life insurance. Thank-you notices from wives and mothers who’d been sent cheques appeared in the Echo. But many other families had no insurance, no savings or means of support once the relief fund ran out. The wife and five children of deckhand James Tilley depended on the goodwill of Wiarton Town Council to supply their home with water. Lillie Crawford and the children were lucky to have the Tyson family and Jack Crawford to help them out or they, too, would have been destitute that winter.
The cause of the wreck remained the subject of intense speculation on the streets of Wiarton. People tried on theories like new hats. The boiler exploded. The steering failed. The oil barrels smashed through the gangway doors. The waves bashed the little steamer to pieces. The passengers and crew were trapped like rats in a cage. The captain was drunk. The steamer was overloaded. Too small. Too old. Too slow.
The Echo had proclaimed it “the saddest calamity that has ever befallen Wiarton,” saying, “How the accident occurred is a mere matter of conjecture….” But, perhaps mindful of the fact that other newspapers would take its lead, several paragraphs later, the Echo described the captain and crew as “old mariners, thoroughly competent,” adding the more pointed disclaimer, “The wreck was not due to any want of competency upon the part of any of those on board.”
It didn’t stop the rumours. It didn’t stop the Owen Sound Sun from publishing a letter to the editor suggesting that “a painful impression is gaining general ground around town” that the Jones had been overloaded, that the owners were greedy, that the captain had bad judgment going out in a little boat that couldn’t handle the fall gales. The Parry Sound North Star on the other side of the bay claimed “there was only one safe thing for the captain of the Jones to do and that was to lie safe in the harbor of Owen Sound until the gale … had blown over…. Captain Crawford pulled out … in a small steamer with a big load of freight, badly loaded and stowed … and risked the lives of himself and his helpless passengers and crew.”
As time passed, the differing views about what had happened to the Jones formed into factions. Middleton Crawford told the family’s version to a newspaperman from the Toronto News. He explained that the steamer was likely wrecked by waves beating against her broadside when she turned at Cape Croker toward Lion’s Head. With a heavy load of cargo she wouldn’t have been able to recover from the force of the waves.
But it was John Macaulay’s growing conviction about the role of the improperly loaded coal-oil barrels that hardened into fact in many Wiarton homes. Though there was some dispute about the number—Macaulay said twenty-five, while others claimed as few as seven barrels had been rolled onto the boat—most sailors on the Bruce agreed that big waves alone could not have toppled the staunch steamer Jones. The storm had definitely been bad, but as Macaulay later explained to a newspaper reporter, if the barrels hadn’t been bashing back and forth “perhaps one or two to begin with and then the others adding and piling up their weight,” the boat would have made it to Lion’s Head.
In the weeks and years that followed, Wiarton’s newspaper was cautious not to assign blame or champion any view about the cause of the disaster. Maybe the editors felt the need to protect the families of the dead from accusations. The fact that by the early 1900s, the Crawford and Tyson families were related to a large number of people in town through marriage or birth—including an uncle who was a newspaper editor—might also have helped. Or perhaps they were simply being circumspect, given the lack of facts. But, as my grandmother Eleanor would later understand as clearly as a brand on her forehead, there were many people in Wiarton who believed that her father, Captain Crawford—ultimately responsible for the badly loaded coal-oil barrels and for leaving Owen Sound in a storm—was to blame.
From the beginning there had been rumours that the captain was spotted in an Owen Sound hotel just before leaving port. He’d thrown back his head to drink a shot of whisky and announce, “Bah! We’ve been through worse storms than this!” As public opinion began to harden on the captain’s role in the disaster—as families began to feel the effect of a winter with no paycheque, as weeks passed with no more news of debris or bodies—people also remembered other stories about Jim Crawford. Crew members recounted near misses on his steamers; they recalled the suspicious drowning of Harry Varco, the steward from the Joe Milton; some said they had always suspected he was a drinker and womanizer. Jim Crawford’s admired tenacity became stubbornness, his sailor’s courage flagrant risk taking with the lives of others—perhaps even murder.
That winter, empty factory buildings on the edge of Colpoy’s Bay taunted people with their promise. Houses lay vacant; more farms were abandoned. “The 20th century belongs to Canada,” the newspaper reminded the people of Wiarton, recalling Prime Minister Sir Wilfrid Laurier’s famous phrase. But it always felt hollow, even threatening, as if the Canada Laurier was talking about was not the old country of Confederation, not the former frontier lands of Ontario. The Canada he spoke of had moved west and north, south to the industrialized cities, leaving ghost towns in its wake, villages populated by old people and overgrown farms. In the still, low light of winter it became harder and harder to remember which came first—the wreck of the Jones or the wreck of the town.
Many of Wiarton’s young men had already headed to Cobalt, in the north, where a blacksmith had thrown his hammer at a fox and hit a rich vein of silver instead. To Alberta and Saskatchewan, newly minted provinces carved out of the old boundaries of the Northwest Territories. To Winnipeg, where Eaton’s had opened a shimmering new department store, complete with a fine dining establishment, attendants in the washroom and a sea of crisp merchandise.
Fifteen-year-old Bert was the first of the Crawford children to leave Wiarton. He was still a boy, but after his father’s death he was told he would have to be the man of the family. He’d always been a happy-go-lucky child, a pack of friends by his side, hunting and fishing with his grandpa Tyson. He’d worked on the boats, hauling fish from the stations down to the plant in Wiarton, but now Lillie begged him not to go on the bay. What really interested him, anyway, was automobiles. By the end of December, he’d found an apprenticeship in Brantford at the locomotive works. He told his friends and family he thought he’d work for Henry Ford himself one day. He sent home what he could spare after paying for food and rent.
Tyson was next. He was thirteen and intellectually precocious, a member of the high school Shakespearean society. Lillie arranged for him to stay with her younger brother and his wife in Manitoba. They were childless then. Lillie knew it was the only way the boy would ever get an education.
He left a little more than a month after his father’s death, taking the train westward, tracing the edge of Lake Superior, on to a little village called Holland on a twisty stretch of the Assiniboine River in Manitoba. Lillie’s brother had moved there soon after he graduated from the pharmacy program at the University of Toronto. He’d married a girl named Clara Belle Beach. Tyson became like a son to the two of them, insulated from his father’s shame, from the tragedy of the Jones.
January 8, 1907, Wiarton
It’s a relief that the children are out of the house. The two boys are coasting on Greenlees hill; Madge is with little Eleanor, who still walks headlong, like a runaway wagon. She needs to be watched constantly. Lillie warned Madge that with the older boys gone she’ll have to watch out for the young ones and not get into any scrapes.
Lillie closes her eyes and leans back in her rocking chair. She can feel the bones in her shoulders against the carved wood. Someone in town will be sure to report that her children are behaving like savages. She doesn’t care. Not today. Not right now. They’ve been cooped up together for too long. She needs some time by herself. Time to think.
It’s been six weeks since the Jones disappeared. At first when she realized that the steamer was definitely lost, she fainted. People had thought she’d had another stroke. All the strength she had imagined she possessed seemed to melt into a puddle at her feet. Now, most of the time, she doesn’t feel anything at all.
It was a few days before her father finally told her what people were saying about Jim, about how the wreck was his fault. He advised her to keep the children out of school until the talk blew over. Their presence would only feed the rumours, he said. But her father was wrong. The stories persisted despite their silence. Lillie tried to shield the children against it, but Whitney had come home just the other day, his shirt in tatters. He had his head down when he pushed through the kitchen door. He didn’t look at her, didn’t even say hello, just skulked upstairs to the room he shared with Dick. Lillie made Madge tell her what happened in the schoolyard. She said Whitney had the tar beaten out of him after he’d swung at someone who’d called their father names.
Lillie misses the older boys. It was difficult to say goodbye. But it was the right thing—for their own sakes. Bert will be fine, he’s just that sort of boy. But Tyson is so sensitive. A letter came from him yesterday. He told her all about the train trip out there and about the big house where they live. How his uncle got fed up with Clara always out playing the organ for the church choir and tied her to the pump in the backyard! He said to say hello to the others. He seems happy, though he asked in the postscript when he’d be coming home.
Lillie gets up to put the kettle on for some tea and sits back down again. She gets tired so easily these days. She doesn’t even have the energy to read most of the time. All she can think about is how they will make ends meet this year. Her family helped tide them over the last while but she’ll have to come up with something else soon. Jack says there won’t be much for anyone from the sale of Crawford Tug.
She hadn’t wanted to take anything from the disaster relief fund, not with others suffering so much more. But they’ll soon need something. Madge is growing and will have to have new clothes this spring. The others can make do with hand-me-downs but there are also medical bills and repairs to the house and the wagon. She gave away Phelix—though the children weren’t happy about it. Her father said people in town think he drowned out by Cape Croker. But she just couldn’t afford to keep him. His droopy eyes and disappointment each time the door opened were too much to bear.
Lillie’s father has advised her to sell the house. But she can’t bring herself to contemplate leaving behind the garden she dug with her own hands, the rooms she carefully wallpapered with Jim when they were first married.
It is her anger that still surprises her. She imagines it as a small black tumour at the base of her throat—sometimes it just sits there, benign, other times it grows, spreading like a cancer, choking her.
The other day her sister Susie set her off. She brought God into it, said all that had happened was His will. A test of Faith. That it must be for the Best. Lillie snapped. Pointing to the children playing on the floor, she asked angrily if leaving those babies without a father was part of some grand plan? If all the suffering in town was “meant to be”? Lillie had rarely seen her unflappable younger sister get roused, but Susie’s ears flamed and blotchy marks appeared on her neck. She left the house without saying a word, letting the screen door slam on her way out.
After the service on Sunday morning Mother had insisted they speak to one another. They talked quietly, about the sermon and the cost of milk, dancing around the subject of their disagreement.
When they parted, Susie had smiled at her, a flicker of pity animating her eyes. Lillie felt her stomach lurch like a sailboat in a sudden gust. She resolved not to say another word to her sister about how she felt. It took all her willpower to smile back and nod goodbye, her mouth dry, her throat constricted.
It was the middle of January 1907—the crepe paper recently removed from store windows in Wiarton, flags tugged back to the top of flagpoles—when a Native boy made a grisly discovery about three miles northwest of the Christian Island lighthouse. The beach is sandy there, big white dunes blown up from the water’s edge, low-lying cedar trees and twisted white pine growing a safe distance from the crashing waves. It’s almost always windy, barren and deserted in the winter.
The boy was out for a walk—hoping perhaps to find more evidence of the shipwreck, or looking to escape from winter in the close little village—when he came across a body of a young man dressed in a dark serge suit and lace-up boots, a life preserver stencilled with the words J. H. Jones tied around his waist. The body was partly caught in the ice and the boy struggled to drag the heavy bloated corpse onto shore. He was sweating when he finally managed to get it clear of the water’s frozen grip and turn it over. He sat beside the body to catch his breath and saw for the first time that the young man’s face was gone, from his chin to the back of his head, worn off by rocks and ice.
When Jack Crawford heard the news he left Wiarton immediately and headed to Penetang where the corpse had been transported. Fred Lyons caught another train from Owen Sound, convinced it was his brother, Alex.
At the undertaker’s, the man’s jacket pockets were emptied and the items carefully noted: a gold fob watch, $1.25 in silver and five cents in coppers, a jackknife, a handkerchief, an aluminum comb and a small Webster’s dictionary.
The dead man was young, with reddish hair, but it wasn’t Alexander Lyons. The contents of the man’s pockets were carefully repeated in newspaper accounts so that his family might recognize him by his belongings. It took several weeks before two brothers came forward to claim the body of Richard Addison.
People in Wiarton prepared themselves to hear about more bodies. In May when the ice pushed another corpse up on White Cloud Island at the mouth of Colpoy’s Bay, Jack Crawford rushed to the scene again. But this time it wasn’t a victim of the Jones, but a man from Cape Croker who’d drowned with four others soon after the Jones went down. It was the final straw for Jack. He was frayed and tired. In desperation he offered a cash reward for recovery of the bodies of Jim Crawford, engineer Charles Shaw and two other crew members. Quietly, he tried to sell the Crawford Tug Company. The new Wiarton concern, Peninsula Tug & Towing, was a possible buyer. Will Tyson, Lillie’s brother and a former Crawford Tug Company master, said he’d like to buy the Crawford.
By the summer, Jack had decided that continuing the search was fruitless. Isaac Lennox and Dr. McEwan went to Christian Island twice in July and August, combing the rocks and water for evidence of the Jones. And some of the other families hired a man who spent a week dragging an anchor along the bottom near Cape Croker. Nothing was found.
In August 1907, the two waterlogged and battered wooden cutters that had been stowed on the Jones were returned to Wiarton carriage maker James Flett. He wondered loudly if they were even worth the $16 the Christian Island Indians charged him for transporting them back to the mainland. He placed one outside his shop. A souvenir. People stood around the sleigh, running their hands over the splintered wood, trying to imagine its terrible voyage.
On one side of my family, Georgian Bay meant work and sacrifice; on the other it was lazy days spent swimming and fishing.
