The Eastland (February/March 1997 | Volume: 48, Issue: 1)

The Eastland

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February/March 1997 | Volume 48, Issue 1

After dinner on winter Sunday evenings, the women sat in the parlor. The men lingered in the kitchen, Standing in a wide half-circle around the white enameled stove. They sipped coffee, smoked cigars, and talked about the ships and lore of the Great Lakes. They spoke of sailing ships, side-wheelers, and steam tugs, of ice and fog, storms and collisions, of vessels lost without a trace. They were, as I recall, good storytellers. It was the middle years of the 1930s.

Among sailors all across the inland sea, she was known as a difficult ship to manage.

My brother and I sat quietly on green ladder-back chairs and listened. At my grandfather’s house the notion that children should be seen and not heard was not just a maxim; it was one of the commandments.

My grandfather James Mulholland led the discussion as if it were a seminar. He had been raised around the Cuyahoga harbor, worked on the Great Lakes, and eventually operated passenger vessels. His sons knew the region, and his son-in-law, my father, had frequented Cleveland Harbor since childhood because his father operated a tug out of the Cuyahoga River.

I remember my grandfather’s stories best. He told of the Flying Dutchman of Lake Superior, the steamship Bannockburn , which disappeared with no survivors off Eagle Harbor in 1902. Thereafter in bad storms she reappeared to sailors, a ghost ship with a ghost crew rolling in the seas and calling for help.

“Do you remember the Big Blow of 1913?” my grandfather would ask my father and uncles. Of course they did. That six-day November gale remains the most destructive storm in the history of inland navigation. Two hundred and forty-eight mariners were lost, nineteen freighters destroyed. Eight ships disappeared with all hands, “under monstrous and malevolent thirty-five-foot waves,” my grandfather would add. He himself had seen the SS Howard M. Hanna, Jr. , leave Lorain Harbor on a calm Saturday morning, and by Sunday night she had broken in half in the howling winds, fetching up on Port Austin Reef.

The men would spin yarns until well into the evening, when inevitably someone would bring up the Eastland . They should have known better. An ominous quiet would descend upon the kitchen gathering, and when the conversation resumed, my grandfather hardly joined in. He would stand looking at his shoes, his cigar long since extinguished. “She was a seaworthy ship when she was handled right,” he might say. We all knew it was time to start searching for the coats and boots, that the evening had come to an end.

Just after the turn of the century, the steamer Eastland was the fastest passenger steamship on the Great Lakes. She went down the ways at Port Huron in 1903 and entered the Chicago and Lake