Jon Paul’s Maritime Diaries

(ACII1)
The Alvin Clark at Marinette Marine with Cleo’s Barge after the blessing of the fleet in August of 1969. Photo from the Bernard Bloom Collection.

The Alvin Clark at Marinette Marine with Cleo’s Barge after the blessing of the fleet in August of 1969. (ACII1)
The Alvin Clark at Marinette Marine with Cleo’s Barge after the blessing of the fleet in August of 1969. Photo from the Bernard Bloom Collection.

I left off in part one with the Clark attending the annual blessing of the fleet on Sunday, August 3, 1969. After the ceremony it was back to Marinette Marine; the masts would be removed and she would be placed in a large building for the steam process to begin. The steaming of the entire ship for eight months was a preservation process designed by engineers of various wood preservative companies working with Marinette Marine on their wooden minesweepers. The divers, who had taken on the dangerous and remarkable job of raising the ship, were heralded as the best there were. Completing over 3,000 dives in deep, cold, dark water using dive gear that by today’s standards would be crude at best had done a job that professional dive companies had said was impossible – and they had done so with a clean accident record as well. Howard I. Chapelle, Senior Historian at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington D.C., commented, “This is a true treasure of the Great Lakes. Your recovery of the schooner is of far greater importance than a few gold coins and a hull fragment from some supposed ‘treasure ship’. In your find we will now be able to put together in great part the real, work-a-day craft of the past.” The divers now would go back to their families and day jobs and a few of the younger ones would stay to help put the seaport and museum together.

While the steaming was taking place, Frank Hoffman would be getting ready the new home for the ship across the Menominee River from Marinette Marine, dubbed the Mystery Ship Seaport. Jim Quinn, Director of the Neville Public Museum, was conserving the hundreds of artifacts from the ship and looking into the history of the Clark. At this time the identity of the ship was not confirmed; there were no name boards or any other identifying marks such as an enrollment number carved in the main beam under the forward hatch coaming. At first, the only evidence that this was the Clark was the location, size and the fact that she was a topsail schooner. Then Jim found a metal label in the forward chain locker that said “Mich. Cray, Toronto, C.W.” This would turn out to be the only finite evidence that the ship was the Alvin Clark. The forward chain locker, or forecastle, would be where lower members of the crew’s hierarchy would sleep and store personal belongings. This would be a small void between the forward bulkhead and the bow. Access to this was from a small companionway located just behind the anchor windlass. There could be room for as many as four sailors in this dark, damp space accompanied by the ship’s anchor chain, spare rigging and the constant spay of the bow cutting the water and dripping from overhead. The cabin of the ship would be where the captain and first mate would share a stateroom and the cook and highest ranking member of the sailors would share a second stateroom. Going over newspaper articles of the time, Jim would learn that Michael J. Cray was an able-bodied seaman aboard the Clark and one of only two survivors of the sinking.

The history of the Clark would be pieced together using newspaper accounts, enrollment records, harbor master records, a logbook which was located at the Dossin Museum in Detroit and, of course, the ship and artifacts, making it what would be the most complete archaeological and historical record of an early Great Lakes sail craft.

The Alvin Clark was built for John Pearson Clark of Detroit in 1846 at Truago (now Trenton), Michigan near Detroit. She was 105.66 feet in length, with a 25.33-foot beam and a 9.33-foot depth of hold at 218.35 gross tons. The vessel was named after John Clark’s son and would carry 8,000 feet of canvas on her two masts. The topsail schooner was a transitional sailing craft of her day, bridging the span between square-rigged barques and brigs and the fore and aft schooner rigs common after the Civil War. The Clark would carry three large rectangular sails on her fore mast but would carry traditional schooner rig aft.

She was first registered at Michilimackinac, Michigan on April 20, 1847 and her first years on the lakes she would carry salt down-bound and salted fish up-bound. She was sold to C.L. Bissell of Detroit in the spring of 1850 and it was the logbook of expenses from when Mr. Bissell operated the vessel, from 1850 to 1853, that has survived and is at the Dossin Museum. In this expense log, details of crew wages, freight rates and costs of provisions and other expenditures are recorded. In 1850, freight on 1,150 barrels of fish from Detroit to Cleveland and Sandusky was $247.50. The cost to feed a member of the crew was under $1 a day with commodity prices low in the mid-19th century, one hog $3, half a barrel of whitefish $4, three bushels of potatoes $1.31, 6 dozen eggs $.88. Crew wages were also recorded, with an average sailor making about $13 a month. Vessel expenses for 1852 were $5,142.03, while total freights earned that year was $6,841.15 leaving a net profit of $1,699.12.

Raising the anchor with the anchor windlass could have taken up to three hours of hand winching. Below the windlass is the forecastle companionway; the lowest crewmembers would berth here with the anchor chain clanging and wash from the bow dripping inside. Photo from the Bernard Bloom Collection.

After the 1853 sailing season Mr. Bissell sold the Alvin Clark to Captain William M. Higgie of Racine, Wisconsin. Captain Higgie was in the lumber business and it was during this period (1853-1864), the Clark was believed to be involved with the timber pirate trade. The trade involved logging wood on federal lands in northern Michigan in unsettled areas and selling it on the Chicago market. Being part of this illegal trade could be the reason no name boards were found on the ship.

The Clark left from Chicago to Oconto, Wisconsin on June 27, 1864 with Captain Durnin, first mate Mr. Dunn, and seaman Michael Cray, along with another seaman and a man working for passage whose names are lost in time. Two days out of Chicago they were about to enter Death’s Door Passage and should have made Oconto by nightfall. The ship was light (no cargo) and the captain wanted the hold cleaned, so the hatches were stowed and the crew swept out the hold and let it air out. Just north of Chambers Island the Clark was hit by a summer squall; the fore topgallant snapped in the gale force winds. Next the fore topmast would topple and the Clark would lay on her beam ends with the starboard side dipping in the water. With the cargo hatches off, the vessel would fill quickly and sink. Captain Durnin, first mate Mr. Dunn and the man working for passage would drown. The schooner Dewitt witnessed the accident and came to rescue Michael Cray and another seaman who survived. The captain of the Dewitt, Francis Higgie, was from the same family of William Higgie that owned the Clark and was part owner at one time. The Oconto Pioneer newspaper reported that the Clark was in nine fathoms of water with the stern out of the water. William would send for a salvage tug from Buffalo, but by the time it arrived the Clark had disappeared beneath the surface. There she would rest until a fisherman would entangle his nets on her some 103 years later. In the next issue the conclusion: “The Fall of the Alvin Clark.”