The Lake Michigan Triangle by Gayle Soucek

Author:Gayle Soucek [Soucek, Gayle]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781467148399
Goodreads: 60797215
Publisher: The History Press
Published: 2022-08-28T18:30:00+00:00

THE J.H. HARTZELL AND THE LADY TIED TO THE MAST

Sometimes the unspeakable horrors that face us are not caused by something supernatural, but rather by the fears and frailties of our fellow humans when they are confronted with life-or-death choices. Such was the fate of Lydia Dale.

Lydia was a hardworking and sturdy woman with a kindly nature and a talent for the culinary arts. For many years, she was employed by S.W. Flowers, a Toledo merchant, as a cook and housekeeper. Eventually, she moved on to Buffalo, New York, where she was later hired as a cook aboard the J.H. Hartzell, a 130-foot wooden cargo schooner that carried ore from the iron ranges of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula to smelters and factories around the Great Lakes. The Hartzell was built in 1863 by shipbuilder H.J. Williams of Buffalo, and it’d already had some bad luck on the lakes. In April 1868, the schooner mysteriously caught fire while in dry dock in Detroit, leaving it and several other nearby ships severely damaged. After being towed to Toledo, it was rebuilt at Bailey’s shipyard and returned to service.

On Monday, October 11, 1880, the Hartzell sailed from port at L’Anse in Lake Superior, at the base of the Keweenaw Peninsula. It was loaded with 495 tons of iron ore bound for the Frankfort Furnace Company, located in its namesake town on the eastern Lake Michigan coast. The five-day trip through the lakes was uneventful. The weather remained pleasant and calm with favorable wind, and Lydia kept the crew well fed. When the ship reached its destination several hours before sunrise on October 16, Captain William A. Jones signaled that he would wait until daylight to enter the harbor so that he could more safely navigate through the many nearby sandbars that might trap his heavily laden ship. The crew dropped anchor and settled down for a few hours’ rest. That rest, however, would be short-lived.

Around 6:00 a.m., well before the autumn sun would begin to streak orange across the sky, the winds shifted suddenly to the southwest and began to blow in earnest. Soon, a wintry mix of rain, snow, hail and sleet started pounding the decks as the waves grew in intensity. In what seemed like barely a heartbeat, the Hartzell found itself trapped in the tempest of a full-blown gale. Unable to raise the anchors in the violent waves, Captain Jones ordered the crew to release them so that he could safely turn head into the wind, but it was too late. A giant wave tossed the ship bow-first into a sandbar, where it sank into what would soon become its grave. Although it was only about three hundred feet from shore and in just a little more than a dozen feet of water, the roaring wind and ravaging waves began to tear the ship apart. As hatches ripped away and the hull began to fill with water, the crew huddled on deck in the fierce maelstrom of ice and turbulence, praying for rescue.

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