Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/985



the life-savers put off through the winter seas. During two days the crew and the life-saving men remained upon the ship. In the mean time the underwriters had learned of the wreck; and the Hutchinson being abandoned by the owners, Captain Charles M. Davis—a lake veteran of seventy, a famous wrecker—was sent to take charge. Wrecking outfits were summoned from the "Soo," and a working party engaged. At once the work of jettisoning the cargo began. Six-inch centrifugal pumps poured water into the holds filled with flaxseed, until fourteen-inch pumps could suck up the valuable stuff and force it overboard. Fifty thousand bushels, worth fifty thousand dollars, were pumped into the lake in thirty-two hours. A wrecking-tug then started to pull the Hutchinson off, but so violent a storm came on that the immediate breaking up of the vessel seemed unavoidable. With this apparently inevitable, the crew and the wreckers left her. Before leaving, the heavy anchor was let go. On the following day, however, with the subsidence of the tempest the astonished wreckers found that the waves instead of destroying the Hutchinson had lifted the boat off the rock and that she was riding in safety.

Then began one of the runs to be celebrated in lake history. Nineteen feet of water was in one compartment and fourteen in another. The remaining cargo had to be stowed so that it would not shift in the heaviest seas. The pumps were kept going the entire time. In this condition the vessel ploughed steadily through the heavy waves, the thickening ice. At one time in zero weather and with a blinding snow-storm a fifty-mile gale blew about the boat. She rolled heavily, and because she was so weighted down with the thick coating of ice the water broke over her at every plunge. Two ferry-boats opening a way were needed to help her to make Pointe au Pelée.

At the port of destination the appearance of the battered warrior of the waters aroused the greatest enthusiasm. The whistle of everything that had steam up was set going. The wailing sirens of the great boats, the tooting of the smaller, welcomed the arrival in a cacophonous chorus. Three hundred and fifty thousand dollars were saved to the under-writers by the exploit—and the last boat of the year was "in."

Notwithstanding the happy termina-