WHEN MY AUNT sent me the package of my grandmother’s poems and letters, it seemed clear to me that I was to do something with it. In the stories my mother had spun, my grandmother was a person whose life was self-evidently worthy of note. It seemed obvious that I should write about her.
I quickly discovered that there is nothing obvious about family stories. There is much passed down, but important things are left out, other bits polished and refined in the telling, dramas created, stories edited for glamour or glory or shame. Whenever I think I know something for certain, I discover a new detail that alters the picture entirely. Things go in and out of focus, are illuminated, then disappear into the darkness before I can clutch them, make them my own.
Hoping to strip away these conflicting demands, the muddled self-interest, the pride and censure—and knowing, finally, that it was the closest I would get to that pirate on my family tree—I decided that I would go out on the water of Georgian Bay and track the final journey of the J. H. Jones for myself.
The fall light was golden when I set out from Owen Sound with my husband, my father and a family friend, the trees flickering red and orange, the shoreline fuzzy in movement like the edges of a dream. From the stern of our little fishing boat, we could see the grain elevator and oil storage tanks that mark opposite sides of the harbour entrance, the red-brick town just beyond. The Chi-Cheemaun car ferry, which winters at the mouth of the Sydenham River, was docked there, laid up for the season. In summer, the 365-foot ship travels The Gap between Tobermory at the tip of the Bruce and South Baymouth on Manitoulin Island, carrying tourists and their vehicles. It is the last holdout of nearly two centuries of passenger boats on this side of Georgian Bay.
The wind on the water in the sound was fresh, stirring up brisk whitecaps that rose and fell with artillery precision. It was still warm. The Arctic winds of fall had yet to blow into Georgian Bay.
Our boat was outfitted with GPS and a depth sounder; we also had the latest charts installed on a laptop plugged into the cigarette lighter on the dashboard. But we didn’t really need any of it. The trip out Owen Sound, past Colpoy’s Bay and on to Cape Croker is straightforward. We would stay offshore a bit to avoid any shallow parts, but the water is generally quite deep and clear.
The sound is twelve miles long but motoring along in our small boat it seemed longer. I’d been staring at a map of this passage for months by then, measuring the progress of the Jones in inches and shades of pink and blue. It was exhilarating to be out on the water, to see with my own eyes what my great-grandfather had seen, to feel the wind and roll of the waves.
I was also just a bit uneasy about the morbid journey we were on, even slightly superstitious, as though our pilgrimage might stir the wrath of the bay that still hasn’t “given up” the Jones.
We hugged the northwest shore of the sound as we headed toward the open. There was a spectacular view of the southeast coast: the army firing range and tank exercise area on the hill just west of Cape Rich; the eerie mound of Coffin Hill; the Claybanks, with its dun-coloured cliffs, just beyond.
Halfway to the mouth of the sound we passed Presqu’ile, where a lighthouse once guided mariners into a tiny village. I remembered as we motored by that the Asia stopped there on its tragic final journey, stocking up on cordwood to feed her hungry boilers. Today, the village’s store and telegraph company, the temperance hotel, post office, blacksmith shop, cooperage and tin smithy are all gone. Near the old lighthouse there are the modern-looking buildings of a youth camp.
As the bay widened and we emerged from the shelter of the shore, the wind began to pick up. It was there at Cape Commodore that Jim Crawford and his crew would have had their first inkling of the storm’s strength.
We were faced with only a warm west wind. The lull of the waves was hypnotic, reminding me of long summer days with my parents on our sailboat, Peacetrain. I loved heading to the open water, watching the shore drop out of sight, seeing the water stretch blue and grey into the horizon. If it wasn’t too windy, I’d perch myself on the metal bowspit that poked out in front of the boat, hooking my legs around the rail, feet dangling over the water. Sitting there with the sound of crashing water, the wind pushing my hair off my forehead, nothing to see but water and the occasional arc of a seagull’s wing, I imagined I was alone in the world.
The water that is my consolation was my grandmother’s nightmare. I have often thought about the irony in the fact that after all Eleanor did to leave this place—this water—her daughter not only returned to it, she fell in love with a man, my father, whose passion is sailing, a man whose own family story is intimately tied to Georgian Bay. It’s probably mostly coincidence, partly the pull of demography and economics, but, I wondered as we charged through the growing waves, if it’s also the force of the past moving in the present, dragging and tugging, aching like a phantom limb.
It’s the sort of thinking that can come easily out on the water, free of the peculiar weight of land: the buildings and pavement, the urgent press of human need. It must have been something like this feeling that my great-grandfather and other sailors longed for in the early spring after the boredom and closeness of winter on shore. A lightness and sense of possibility, of being untethered by earthbound expectations.
Up ahead, I spotted the lighthouse at Griffith Island. It’s one of six so-called Imperial Towers on the Bruce, constructed in the 1850s out of enormous limestone blocks quarried near Owen Sound. There’s a small abandoned-looking stone house nearby.
When the Jones passed by there in November 1906, William Boyd was the keeper. In newspaper accounts of the wreck, Boyd noted that when the Jones steamed by the tower she was making good time. He said that because it was cloudy and blowing, he couldn’t actually see the boat very well.
For us, too, the wind began to pick up more once we passed the Griffith Island lighthouse. We were no longer protected by the peninsula, and the waves were growing. They were steeper and closer together than before. Our little boat was getting pitched around. As we crashed down off a wave, cold spray hit us like shrapnel.
There had been another sighting of the Jones nearby. Some local fishermen saw her making her way north of the island. In the tense days after the wreck, they told newspaper reporters and everyone else that though she was buffeted by the waves, when the Jones passed them she was riding the storm as well as she usually did. They watched as Captain Jim and his men steered the steamer through the narrow troughs of the increasingly heavy seas, white spray dashing over the hurricane deck and breaking around the pilothouse.
Not far in the distance, I could see the wooded thickness of Hay Island and then Cape Croker. The cape is a finger that pokes vehemently out into the bay. From our boat it looked dark and cold, like a sheer rock fortress. I’ve been to the lighthouse that sits at its bitter end, the place where the Jones was last seen. It’s a lonely spot, a grey rocky beach below the tower and nothing but water into the sky. There wasn’t even a road out there in 1906. The keeper, Richard Chapman, and his family would arrive by boat in April and leave the same way in December.
Our trip was taking much longer than I had imagined. We’d been going for several hours by then and we were only a bit more than halfway to our destination around the north side of Cape Croker. The waves were slowing us down. We were wet and beginning to get tired from bracing our bodies against the smash as our boat slammed down off the peak of a wave. I began to realize that it wouldn’t take a lot for something to go wrong and flip us over or swamp the boat. There was no one else out there and the water was cold. I imagined the newspaper headlines describing the hubris of our demise in pursuit of a long-lost shipwreck.
The howling wind began to sound like voices to me. It didn’t help that the previous few nights I’d had dreams about my grandmother. I’d wake up and struggle in the half-light of morning to make sense of them, to untangle what was real and what was imagined, what was about her and what was really about me. During the day I’d found myself making guesses about something or other that she or someone else had done, and then, in my research, find that I was actually, uncannily correct. It was exciting to be so absorbed in something that everything felt connected, to discover that my intuition was right. But out on the bay, with the wind whipping the water into tangled sheets of barbed wire, the dreams and connections began to feel more like a warning.
I struggled momentarily with the siren call of the open bay, then suggested we head for shelter. I didn’t think we needed to risk our lives for this task. I have tried to map my grandmother’s life, negotiating the shoals of falseness and fabrication. I have tried to make sense of what her father and the Jones meant in her life, of her legacy to me. But I have never thought I was a captive of this history.
Heading south, away from Cape Croker and the water that swallowed the J. H. Jones, the wind was behind us, the waves mellow. We turned in behind the islands and came out at the village of Big Bay on the shore near Oxenden. Jumping out onto the dock, it felt like I was still in motion, bouncing on the waves, as if my body hadn’t yet caught up with gravity. I was relieved to be there. We ate our picnic lunch and dried off in the warm sun. We could see the waves out on the open water, the flash of whitecaps like thousands of jagged teeth bared in a grimace.
In our little bay, the water was calm; a rocky beach with pebbles the size of a sparrow stretched out beside the dock. I picked up a stone and skipped it. One, two, three times it skimmed across the water, bouncing into the air, the white rock catching the light of the sun, then dropping silently, heavily into the dark water.