by Jean Elford for the Sarnia Gazette
(1971) When a small ship flounders in a Great Lakes storm, there is generally not a sailor left to tell what happened. In a tragic loss of the Kate Bully on October 4, 1869, however, four of the crew of ten survived the terror that overtook them.
John Bully built the schooner Kate Bully in the summer of 1869. To finance the venture he sold his farm and steam saw and grist mill, located on the south bank of Talfourd Creek at the point it enters the St. Clair River. He bought property further south where highway 40 bends east from the river.
There Bully built a dock and stocks for the construction of the ship. In consultation with, and the services of, experienced shipbuilders, he built a large schooner at a cost estimated at $18,000. Bully insured her for $12,000, but at the value the dollar had then, the $6,000 he lost when she sank ruined him financially.
The ship proved a good one and fast. She made a run across Lake Ontario between Kingston and the mouth of the Welland Canal on one of her early trips, in twenty hours.
On September 28 she sailed out of Sarnia under Captain Henry L. MacGlashan of Corunna. She carried a load of railway tiles and piles for Chicago. Her crew consisted of nine men and one cook, Mrs. Maria Wilson. On the east side of Lake Michigan, fifteen miles off shore, the schooner ran into heavy weather and a head wind.
On Monday, October 4th at about eight-thirty in the evening, Captain MacGlashan found she was taking water rapidly. Evidently, she had sprung a leak. He called up the watch, and all hands began to throw the deck cargo overboard. The weather grew rougher, and around nine o’clock a sudden gust of wind threw the schooner on her beam ends. George Canada of Froomfield, the first mate who had been at the wheel, was thrown overboard and drowned. A Kingston man suffered a like fate.
The rest of the crew including the cook managed to hang on to the bulwark or to get back to it after falling in the water. The rolling of the vessel and the waves continually breaking over her made it difficult for the men to keep their grasp. Captain MacGlashan encouraged them to fasten themselves to the belaying pins with ropes. As he looked after the safety of his crew, a great wave loosened his hand and swept him off to drown. A Nova Scotia crewman hung on to the cook, but the boom had struck his arm, and he had finally to let her go.
Six men remained tied to the wreck through the wild, cold night. Tuesday passed with them in the same position and the endless waves rolling over them. During Tuesday night, the man who had been struck with the boom and Merritt, son of the builder, died of cold and exposure. Their mates untied their bodies and let them sink. The four survivors went through Wednesday until five in the afternoon when the tug Black Hawk came upon them. She carried them to Manistee to recover from their prolonged ordeal. Two of the survivors were local men: John Stone of Froomfield and William Mitchell of Mooretown.
The stocks for the Kate Bully and the piles of the dock from which she had sailed long survived her. There were remnants of both to be seen off the south end of Guthrie Park until the 1940s. A grandson of Captain McGlashan, who left a widow and five children, lives on the MacGlashan homestead south of Corunna.