Caribbean cruise position ship teacher

Dennis McCann

Sailing ship pays tribute to another that sank

By DENNIS MCCANN of the Journal Sentinel staff

Sunday, August 1, 2004

Aboard the Denis Sullivan -- No one had to ask for whom the bell tolled.

After each clapper's call echoed over Lake Superior's gently rocking surface -- once, twice, then seven more times -- volunteers who rang the bell of Milwaukee's sailing schooner called out the names of the nine who died when the schooner Lucerne sank off Long Island in 1886, just yards from where we had stopped our cruise.

Robert Jeffreys -- gong.

Unknown seaman, a boy -- gong.

Lyons -- gong.

On and on, through the names of the captain and crew of one of the better-known events in Superior's long litany of such tragic matters, until the last name had been called and the last bell tolled, until David Dawes, the Australian captain of the Denis Sullivan who is better known as Chipper, stepped forward.

"It's goose bump time," he said, impossible for a man in his position not to reflect on all the captains who had sailed Superior's challenging waters through the years with the lives of sailors and passengers in their hands. Chipper leaned down and rang the bell a final time then, for all those captains who had shown the way, and finally a wreath of roses and carnations was passed for all to touch before it was cast upon the water at the wreck site, still a watery grave for five bodies never recovered.

It took a while for someone to break the silence. But all agreed the Denis Sullivan, so much like a modern Lucerne in many ways, had done its duty.

Doing double duty

It was the three-masted Sullivan's first voyage to Lake Superior, though it has sailed on all the other Great Lakes and from Milwaukee to the Caribbean numerous times since it was launched as Wisconsin's flagship in 2000. During its days on Superior last week, the schooner was put to it usual tasks, in part just through its distinctive presence.

"She teaches kids and she raises freshwater awareness wherever she goes," as skipper Chipper put it. On this cruise, the ship hosted both a documentation team from Washburn High School and a group of teachers from throughout northern Wisconsin working on a summer lake education project.

On another day, the Denis Sullivan was used as a set for shooting scenes from a video version of "30th Star," Lake Superior Big Top Chautauqua's musical history of Wisconsin written for the state's sesquicentennial in 1998. Through the help of a Department of Education grant, the video and an accompanying teacher's guide will be ready by early 2005 for use in teaching Wisconsin history in schools across the state.

But aside from such academic concerns, it was a day for the Lucerne as much as for the Denis Sullivan, at least after we recovered from a temporary grounding in Bayfield's too-shallow harbor and set off across Chequamegon Bay to the wreck site.

Era of schooners

When the Lucerne was built and launched from New York in 1873, it joined a fleet of thousands of such schooners that gave commercial life to the Great Lakes. Large by schooner standards at 195 feet long, it was said to have a "sharp, elegant clipper bow" and a square stern. The Lucerne carried grain at first but later carried coal and iron ore as well, which was its mission in November 1886 when it arrived in Washburn and Ashland near the end of the cargo season. Loaded with 1,256 tons of iron ore, it left Ashland on the evening of Nov. 15, its captain, George Lloyd, expressing no concerns about its safety.

If Gordon Lightfoot had been around then, he might have written a song about that night, too, because Lloyd unwittingly launched the Lucerne into what accounts call "a vicious northeaster." The Lucerne was out of Chequamegon Bay's shelter and heading toward the Keweenaw Peninsula when the storm struck and was last seen 60 miles off Ontonagon. It is thought the captain turned back toward Chequamegon Bay's relative safety then, but much about what happened has never been learned.

What happened?

"It's a ship with a lot of mystery attached to it," said Bob Mackreth, park historian for the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore. Why and how it foundered isn't known, for one, and even the exact day it went down for another. Four of the bodies were recovered -- in a macabre note, three were found hanging from the rigging, wrapped in coats of ice from one to six inches thick -- but the other victims, some never identified, were not found.

"One thing that we do know for sure," he said in the little ceremony on board at the Lucerne's wreck site, "is that nine men lost their lives out here."

The ceremony was special to Bruce Bowers of Washburn, who has dived at the site more than a dozen times and found eerie similarities between the look of the Lucerne and that of the smaller Sullivan.

Seeing the similarities

"These boats are so connected. Every time I look at this boat I see the one that's lying down there," he said.

Earlier, Chipper had made the same connection in describing the Denis Sullivan's first days on Lake Superior. "It's so much the roots of this ship in this harbor," he said. "This is (still) just so much a wilderness up here. When you see this boat in a historical setting . . . you really turn the clock back a hundred years."

And then it was, as he had put it, goose bump time. When the wreath splashed onto Superior's surface, a dozen or so carnations separated and went their own way, forming a flowered archipelago not unlike that of the Apostles themselves, if you give imagination room to roam.

And then we motored back to Ashland, safe and sound on a calm and sunny Superior day. For any similarities between our ship and the one we had visited, the ending was altogether more agreeable.

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For more on the Lucerne and other lake lore, visit www.wisconsinshipwrecks.com. The wreck site, one of about a half dozen in Lake Superior that are on the National Register of Historic Places, is in about 20 feet of water off the northeast side of Long Island. A buoy marks the spot.

E-mail dmccann@journalsentinel.com.