Wreck
On November 6, 1918, the Congdon departed from Thunder Bay, Ontario with 380,000 bushels of wheat aboard. Later that day, the Congdon ran aground in the fog at Canoe Rocks, near Isle Royale, which were subsequently renamed Congdon Shoal. The captain immediately dispatched a boat to nearby Passage Island to request assistance and sent a second boat back to Thunder Bay.
All crew members were rescued, and an attempt to salvage the cargo resulted in only about 20% being saved. A storm on November 8 broke the freighter in two, and it sank. Although another salvage operation was mounted later in 1918, nothing more was recovered from the wreck. The Congdon is significant in that her wreck was the first on Lake Superior to be valued at over a million dollars, and was the largest loss up to that time in both dollar value and net tonnage.
Read more about this topic: Chester A. Congdon (ship)
Famous quotes containing the word wreck:
“A pseudo-event ... comes about because someone has planned it, planted, or incited it. Typically, it is not a train wreck or an earthquake, but an interview.”
—Daniel J. Boorstin (b. 1914)
“And such the trust that still were mine,
Though stormy winds swept o’er the brine,
Or though the tempest’s fiery breath
Roused me from sleep to wreck and death.
In ocean cave, still safe with Thee
The germ of immortality!
And calm and peaceful shall I sleep,
Rocked in the cradle of the deep.”
—Emma Hart Willard (1787–1870)
“Our children will not survive our habits of thinking, our failures of the spirit, our wreck of the universe into which we bring new life as blithely as we do. Mostly, our children will resemble our own misery and spite and anger, because we give them no choice about it. In the name of motherhood and fatherhood and education and good manners, we threaten and suffocate and bind and ensnare and bribe and trick children into wholesale emulation of our ways.”
—June Jordan (b. 1939)