The first information coming back home was that the George Ewart had been torpedoed by “the cowardly pirates of the Atlantic, the Huns.” Tragic news indeed, as published in the St. John’s Daily Star for all to read, including the families and loved ones of the crew, all belonging to Fortune and area.
More devastating was a sentence in that September 20, 1917, article which read, “The crew of six including the captain were all Newfoundlanders,” but gave no indication if they were alive or dead. One can only imagine the feelings of grief and devastation the families of the six crew must have felt on hearing or reading that news.
It was certainly not unexpected that a local schooner would meet the enemy on the high seas. Several during World War I had been intercepted and sunk. Some crews were given time to prepare a small boat to row to land (or perish on the ocean). Other vessels had simply disappeared, leading to speculation that all aboard had met with foul play from the enemy.
Constructed in 1913 in Fortune by builder John E. Lake, the 136-ton George Ewart was 100 feet long. Fortune, situated on the toe of the Burin Peninsula, was a viable, enterprising town, founded in the 1700s on the productivity of the inshore fishery of Fortune Bay and later on the prolific Grand Banks. One of the chief merchant houses in the town was the Lake family.
With three masts, thus a greater spread of sail, the George Ewart was built to carry the salt dry fish of Lakes to European markets. And sail they did, despite the Great War raging on land and on the sea between 1914 and 1918.
When this story was first published in Wake of the Schooners (1993), none of the George Ewart’s sailors had been named as the information was not available. Indeed, the captain was mis-identified as Edward Hillier. Now, more than twenty years later, it became known (to this author, for one) that the man in command of the George Ewart was Captain George Lake of Fortune.
George Ewart, a tern schooner, or three-master, as they were termed locally, anchored off, probably at Fortune, its home port. It was named for George Ewart Lake, a Fortune resident.
As well, two of his crew were Charles Skinner and James Caines, whose names, although their place of residence is not given, are certainly associated with the town of Fortune and Fortune Bay.
In fact, the two above-mentioned sailors told the correct tale of the loss of the George Ewart, stating it did not go down from a German torpedo or bomb. Caines and Skinner had met no newspapermen and were mystified at the so-called details, calling the tale “a product of someone’s brain but not fact.” Only one detail was near the truth: the George Ewart was about 100 miles off the Spanish coast when it sank.
The concocted story was that a German submarine torpedoed the George Ewart and had surfaced a few minutes later near the stricken schooner just as the Fortune men had taken to their small boat. Indeed, they had met the enemy—briefly—but not through the results of a torpedo.
A wartime regulation, dictated from the circumstances of the Great War, led to the demise of that fine Fortune schooner. The British Admiralty, in an effort to reduce shipping losses from enemy warfare, mandated all vessels travel the Atlantic under a “lights out” rule. Sailing or steaming in total blackened-out conditions would make Allied vessels more difficult to see by the enemy. And, as it turned out, by friendly ships as well.
For the George Ewart, Captain George Lake, and crew, the last port of call was St. John’s, where it took on a cargo of salt dry fish from merchant George M. Barr’s premises. Lake was to proceed to Gibraltar, there to receive instructions as to the port of discharge.
At 11:00 p.m., on a dark September 11 night while off the Spanish coast, the schooner was “hove to,” lying head to the wind, waiting for a fall gale to diminish. Without warning, an unknown iron steamer, a blackened “lights-out hulk,” ran into the George Ewart.
The darkened vessel sped on, perhaps rushing to avoid hostile submarines, without stopping or slowing to see what damage it had inflicted. In their haste to keep the George Ewart afloat, Captain Lake and crew had no time to figure out which vessel had struck them.
But for three hours the George Ewart settled lower and lower before finally sinking, giving the crew ample time to heave off the lifeboat and to prepare for a long row. According to Caines and Skinner, they had hardly taken to the boat, “when a German submarine came up, studied the sinking schooner and, seeing it was sinking, submerged again.”
The Newfoundlanders battled a typical Atlantic storm, but Captain Lake and his seasoned veteran seamen, merchant marines they were in essence, reached the Spanish coast. Fortunately the wind was favourable, and they made shore in eleven hours.
While in some small Spanish town, they learned that a submarine—believed to be the same one that surfaced near the damaged George Ewart—had sunk a large British steamer the same night.
The castaways were taken to Gibraltar, a British outpost and protectorate at the time, where their chances of contacting a vessel bound for North America would be greater. For thirteen days they waited, and finally the three, Captain Lake, James Caines, and Charles Skinner, boarded an Italian steamer bound for Boston.
They arrived in Boston on October 8. There they refuted a story circulating in some newspaper that while they were at Gibraltar, fourteen shipwrecked crews whose vessels had been torpedoed and sunk by German submarines had been landed there.
This was not true, they said. “Some writer had an imaginative mind, being more eager to hand out sensational dope than to stick to facts.” Such stories only made it more difficult to recruit sailors for ships taking food and supplies overseas.
On October 24, 1917, the three reached St. John’s, where their story was picked by the Daily Star two days later. The remaining three sailors (unidentified) of the George Ewart were sent across the Atlantic via another ship but were expected to reach home in due time.
Thus ended the unique tale of sinking of the George Ewart, which went down while delivering vital supplies during World War I, not from the hands of the enemy as first stated, but from “friendly fire,” a collision with another ship.