Sailing the Sweetwater Seas
by George D. Jepson 25 Nov 2023 20:37 UTC
Leaving Marquette, Abbie expedition followed shorelines of Lake Superior, reaching climax with 8-day circumnavigation of Isle Royal archipelago. A tow from a steamer thence to Keweenaw Peninsula hastened return and spared crew a long open-water crossing © Map by WoodenBoat Magazine
The Great Lakes were America's first superhighway before railroad lines and roads arrived in the late nineteenth century.
This book tells the story of the ships and boats on which the United States, barely decades old, moved to the country's middle and beyond, established a robust industrial base, and became a world power, despite enduring a bloody Civil War.
The "five sisters," as the Great Lakes came to be called, would connect America's far-reaching regions in the century ahead, carrying streams of Irish, German, and Scandinavian settlers to new lives, as the young nation expanded west. Initially, schooner fleets delivered passengers and goods to settlements along the lakes, including Chicago, Milwaukee, and Green Bay, and returned east with grain, lumber, and iron ore.
Steam-driven vessels, including the lavish "palace" passenger steamers, followed, along with those specially designed to carry coal, grain, and iron ore. The era also produced a flourishing shipbuilding industry and saw recreational boating advance. In text and photographs, this book tells the story of a bygone era, of mariners and Mackinaw Boats, schooners and steamboats, all helping to advance the young nation westward.
About the author
George D. Jepson, editorial director for McBooks Press, previously worked as a journalist and corporate communicator. As a freelance writer and editor, he was a regular contributor to WoodenBoat magazine and various other publications, and is the co-author of Crash Boat: Rescue and Peril in the Pacific During World War II. Jepson worked in the maritime book trade for more than two decades and founded Quarterdeck, a journal dedicated to celebrating maritime literature and art. He holds degrees in English and history, as well as an MBA. Jepson and his wife, Amy, live in Kalamazoo, Michigan.
Cruise of the Abbie - An 1889 Lake Superior Adventure
On a midsummer's morning in 1889, a zephyr rippled across the harbor in Marquette, Michigan, stirring the long skirts of ladies on the dock, and the Stars and Stripes flying on a stern staff stepped on the fantail of the launch Abbie. The diminutive craft—30' LOA, with a 5'6" beam, a draft of 21"—was about to embark on a month's coastal cruise around Lake Superior with a six-man crew, including owner John Munro Longyear.
The sleek launch, propelled by a 4-hp naphtha engine (see sidebar, page 111), was the latest thing for amateur motorboaters. She was capable of reaching 6 mph in quiet waters. Abbie's white, carvel-planked hull was packed to the gunwales with provisions and gear. Between her 5'-long foredeck and 4'-long after deck, the cockpit was open. The engine was mounted well aft, as in all naphtha launches, and had a signature burnished brass boiler and integral stack. A seventy-gallon fuel tank was fitted under the foredeck, and amidships a one-hundred-gallon drum containing additional fuel was mounted on blocks. Bench seats extended 17' along each side, with one thwart in the bow and another forward of the engine. The white oak, ash, cedar, and mahogany of the gunwales, coaming, decks, and inside trim were finished with shellac. Small sprit-rigged sails could be raised on each mast—one far forward and the other abaft the spare naphtha drum. These provided alternative power in favorable conditions and stabilized the boat in a blow. A pair of ruby-striped canvas awnings—a flat one for a sunshade and a peaked one for wet weather—could be folded or rolled for easy stowage. The crew took their meals at a table that could be knocked down for stowage.
Other than a sendoff from a few well-wishers, there was little fanfare as the hands stepped aboard. At precisely 10:45, Longyear ordered the mooring lines cast off and the engine engaged. Final farewells were shouted as the sleek craft cleared the dock and gained headway toward the south end of the breakwater and the open lake. Abbie—named for Longyear's daughter, Abby, though spelled differently—was outward bound on a journey that would cover nearly seven hundred miles. Longyear believed she was the first recreational motorboat on Lake Superior. Up until Abbie's arrival, schooners, bulk freighters, passenger steamers, Mackinaw boats, and canoes had dominated the world's largest freshwater lake.
Naptha engines and launches
Gas Engine & Power Company in Morris Heights, New York City, began manufacturing naphtha engines and launches along the Harlem River in 1886. Autumn leaves were falling that October when Longyear (see sidebar, page 109) visited the plant to look at the new boats. Obviously impressed, he ordered a 30' model the following March.
"I care more for strength and utility than for ornament," he wrote in a letter to the company. "It will frequently be necessary in my cruising about the great lakes [sic] to draw the boat out on the beach. She should therefore be rigged with a strongly anchored ring in her stem to which tackle blocks may be attached and she should also be so strongly built that she will not be racked by being frequently beached."
Abbie was finished by mid-May. Longyear and three companions, including his brother Howard, traveled to New York by railroad before the end of the month to take possession. Rather than shipping the boat by train to Marquette, he planned to run her up the Hudson River, through the Erie Canal, into the Great Lakes, and ultimately to her home port on the south shore of Lake Superior. After being launched in the Harlem River, Abbie passed into the Hudson River and headed north.
The journey ended unexpectedly in Albany, New York, however, when a telegram summoned Longyear to Ashland, Wisconsin, on important business. Abbie completed her maiden voyage aboard a flatcar. Lake Superior was still very much a wilderness at that time, and over the ensuing two summers, Longyear cruised its rugged coastline and sugarsand beaches within fifty miles of Marquette.
Describing this period in his memoirs, he recalled: "fishing for large speckled-trout on the reefs and wherever large broken rocks could be found on or near the shore." He and a group of cronies were eager to extend Abbie's range with an expedition that would follow the shoreline west and north, and by 1889 they were ready. The long-awaited day came on Monday, July 22.
Northward bound
After rounding the head of the breakwater in Marquette harbor, Abbie headed north, leaving to port the prominent yellow-brick, story-anda-half, forty-foot-tall, square lighthouse with its fourth-order Fresnel lens. The crew was a patchwork of characters, including two physicians, an engineer, a Norwegian sailor, a banker, and Longyear. An accomplished writer despite his limited formal education, Longyear kept a detailed journal during the cruise. He also documented events with his Kodak camera.
As civilization slowly receded in Abbie's wake, the crew set about loosely organizing themselves. One physician was appointed "surgeon" and the other "steward." The engineer naturally took responsibility for operating and maintaining the engine. The Norwegian sailor, called "Mox" by the crew, was assigned several titles, among them cook, able seaman, and "crew of the captain's gig," the small skiff towed along as a means for reaching shore when they could not beach the launch. Longyear himself, called the "bushwhacker" for unknown reasons, was named "captain." The banker, whose "nautical experience was confined to cruising in a flat-bottomed skiff on a millpond... was a problem until one of the crew in a moment of inspiration nominated him for chaplain, and he was immediately elected by acclamation. And a very good chaplain he made—not too severe in dealing with the erring mortals composing the crew...."
Abbie pushed through the swells off Presque Isle, once a Native American settlement, "with its cliffs of banded red and white sandstone." Passing a cave, the captain suspended election proceedings to point out favored fishing spots among the black rocks, including where "the big one got away!" Others piped up with similar tales, causing the steward to suggest stowing fish stories for the duration.
Finally, approaching a beautiful, lush-green archipelago overlooked by Sugarloaf, the most easterly of the Huron Mountains, a hungry crew consumed a meager meal prepared by the steward and Mox.
A magnificent panorama
Cutting across Big Bay late that afternoon, the Huron Mountains, backlit by the sun, spilled purple shadows in diminishing hues into the valleys below, while peaks were flooded with radiant rays, illuminating "shades of green foliage... except where an occasional granite cliff rears its barren head above the sea of verdure." Spread before them was a magnificent panorama of natural beauty, which they savored with each passing day.
As Abbie closed with the southwest corner of the bay, a settlement consisting of small log huts was visible on the shore. Among the fishermen who were there were several Indians, "looked at with much interest by some of the crew whose acquaintance with the fast-disappearing aborigines was limited," especially the engineer, who had never seen Indians before. After a brief respite on shore, Abbie headed north again, seeking the low sand dunes at the mouth of the Pine River, where the group planned to set up camp for the night.
Upon reaching the Pine, the launch ran "into the center of the narrow, coffee-colored current flowing into the clear water of the lake... the engine checked down to sufficient speed for 'steerage-way' only." Although Longyear had been assured by fishermen at Big Bay that the Pine was deep enough for Abbie, the captain had good reason to be cautious. Sandbars stretched across the river, and the launch grounded on one but sustained no damage. Rather than entering the river, the captain decided to anchor Abbie offshore. The crew set up camp on the upper part of a wide beach, "where the heavy seas of last autumn's gales had leveled it." The tent, blankets, canvas cots, oil cookstove, and food were ferried ashore in the skiff. The crew soon learned they were not alone.
A fishing party from Houghton—sailing a Mackinaw boat—was camped farther upstream, and an Indian family traveling by bark canoe from L'Anse was in the vicinity, harvesting birch bark. Although scarce, traffic on the lake along the undeveloped shore included an occasional packet steamer trailing smoke from her stack and carrying freight and passengers between Duluth, Minnesota, and the Lower Great Lakes.
The crew bedded down in the tent, with the exception of Mox, who slept soundly aboard Abbie until 3:00 a.m., when "a swell, rolling in from the lake pitched the launch about." At 6:00 a.m., the others awoke to the strong aroma of ham sizzling on the cookstove, as Mox, now wide awake, prepared breakfast in the fresh morning air. During the meal, "the captain amused himself by taking kodak [sic] photographs of the members of the crew in unconscious attitudes." By 8:45 a.m., with the camp dismantled and gear stowed aboard
Abbie, the cruise continued westward.
To port, vertical cliffs with red sandstone-carved arches and pillars, accented the rugged coastline between bronze beaches leading inland to virgin forests. To starboard, the vast lake—in its many moods, with shades of blue and gray, depending on cloud cover—reached the far horizon. The crisp, clear, shoal waters near shore were often too inviting for the fishermen aboard, who were eager "to stop and 'wet a line.'" Fishing, a favorite recreation, was also a practical means of stocking the larder.
Superior's open waters
As the voyage continued to the west and north, "the Abbies," as they came to be known, encountered Mackinaw boats with Indian crews, among whom the launch and its brass stack elicited stares of surprise and wonder. Chippewa bands for three centuries had lived off the forests and the "Big-Sea-Water" celebrated in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's The Song of Hiawatha, and they were reluctantly sharing nature's bounty and the lake that had once been theirs alone.
Conditions dictated the prevailing spirit of the crew. As Abbie crossed the Keweenaw Peninsula via the Portage River, Portage Lake, and the Keweenaw ship canal, the "persistent buzzing songs of the first mosquitoes" intruded on a shoreside supper. Thick fog and heavy dew greeted the Abbies on some mornings, meaning they had to stow the tent aboard while it was still wet. On Superior's open waters southwest of the Keweenaw, black clouds announced the coming of a squall, and seas built as the crew struck sail, rigged the canvas cover over the cockpit, and donned foul weather gear, even as sheets of rain swept over the launch. On wet days, the burner under the engine's boiler was the only dry spot in the boat. Despite avalanches of water, the little engine purred steadily along, with the blue-gas naphtha flame maintaining a gentle roar.
A fire ashore was an absolute necessity at day's end to warm and cheer the weary mariners. The fire dried their tent canvas and their soaked clothing. Driftwood piled high on beaches—a gift of the previous autumn's gales—provided abundant fuel, seating, and places to hang gear to dry. Lake Superior's storms were a constant threat, with conditions often shifting rapidly from dead calm to a violent tempest, followed by relative calm again.
Cruising southwest of Ontonagon, Michigan, Abbie was close to shore when a strong wind, "a furious wild beast," roared out of the northwest, bringing with it "a purple darkness and an opaque sheet of descending water." Buckets of hail came next, causing a terrific "din and racket" with "an inspirational, grand cadence in it not at all unmusical." Twigs, leaves, and branches torn from trees filled the air near the beach as the launch ran along in calm waters under the lee of a headland. A hundred yards farther out, "the lake was milkywhite with foam and spray torn from the surging [seas] and hurled about in white sheets and jets often fifty feet in height."
The violence ended within minutes, and in steady rain, Abbie and her crew steered to an anchorage, pitched the wet tent, and settled in with a large driftwood fire near its opening to play a card game called Crazy Pedro.
Exploration island
Exploring inland on foot or rowing the skiff up rivers revealed more of the pristine natural charm of the virtually untouched wilderness. The captain and his companions were captivated by cascading waterfalls, rushing rapids, high red-clay banks alternating with sand-rock cliffs, and deep ravines with small streams flowing into larger rivers. Up close-and-personal encounters with wildlife—including gray wolves, which the crew did not consider dangerous—were common.