From the archives of the Sault Ste. Marie Public Library:
In November of 1919, the steamship SS Myron sank in the frigid waters of Lake Superior.
As the days passed, the news reports were grim. While some still held out hope that sailors would wash ashore and could be found and revived by the coast guard, the general consensus was that all eighteen crewmembers aboard had perished. The lake was strewn with pieces of steamer, and with the lumber the Myron carried.
Then, a glimmer of hope. The captain of another steamer, the W.C. Franz, had just passed through the locks at Sault Ste. Marie. While on his way past Ile Parisienne, the captain caught sight of a body. It was Captain Neal from the Myron, frozen but alive. He had been blown off the Myron in his pilothouse and somehow survived.
He’d stayed afloat, rigging up a flag and shining a flashlight to try to draw attention until he could no longer hold it in his frozen hands. He clung to the roof of his pilothouse in the middle of a gale. He survived adrift in the wintery conditions for anywhere from 20 to almost 40 hours. By the time he was found, according to the Globe, he was “almost dead and unable to speak.” The Sault Daily Star noted that he was “not frost bitten but … in a bad state.”
He had all but lost the use of his legs to the cold, and believed he would have frozen to death had he not continually submerged his legs in the frigid water to thaw. His jaw was clenched shut, and he credited the fact it wasn’t paralyzed to the “large chew of tobacco” he’d taken just before the ship sank thinking it would be his last treat. His hands had swollen enough to hide his rings.
He was the only survivor found. After three days, people began to give up hope and it became clear that everyone else had perished. A submarine chaser didn’t find so much as a body. The newspapers repeated a familiar adage: “Lake Superior seldom gives up its dead.”
Several days in, many of the crew were found dead, frozen in Whitefish Bay — their bodies had to be thawed out in front of a fire at a Sault Michigan funeral home. Others were found in the ice and had to be cut out; with all of the added ice, each body weighed as much as 700 pounds, making recovery a logistical challenge. While some of the crew was identified, others could not be, and newspapers ran descriptions of the victims: a man with tattoos on his arm and body, another with the initials E.R.D. on his cigar cutter, and another with a gold tooth and a ring bearing the letter B or R.
At least five of the crew weren’t found until the following spring: they were chopped out of the ice and buried in Bay Mills. They were found with a lifeboat next to them. Presumably, they had nearly made it to shore before capsizing and succumbing to the elements.
But it wasn’t the end of the story. Captain Neal, remembering how the Adriatic and the H.P. McIntosh had pulled away, levelled charges against their captains. “I was clinging to the roof of the pilothouse,” he said. “‘I will have a boat sent for you,’ the captain of the McIntosh called. And he drew away. I have never seen him since, nor do I ever want to see him by the great hokey pokey.”
He felt that the captains had needlessly left him and his crew to die and, as the Globe described, “thereby committed a crime, then which there is no greater in the code of the seas.”
In 1920, the licenses of the captains of both the Adriatic and the H.P. McIntosh were revoked on the grounds of “gross negligence and misconduct.” The inspectors felt that the captains could have signaled for more help by sounding the whistle or could have given the crew more of a chance to be rescued. Specifically, the captain of the McIntosh “failed to even try to attract the attention of the coast guards by sounding his steamer’s whistle,” while the captain of the Adriatic “failed to maneuver and stop the headway of his steamer so that the crew of a lifeboat from the sinking steamer could reach the Adriatic and be rescued.” It was a controversial decision, particularly since the captains of the Adriatic and the McIntosh had risked their ships and their crew by attempting to help as much as they had.
The captains appealed the ruling, and their licenses were restored shortly after: “These masters were right in not risking the lives of their crews in attempting to stand by for an unlimited time near the wreck of the Myron.”
Captain Neal continued to work on the waters of the Great Lakes, passing through Whitefish Bay on the C.H. Bradley in spring of 1920. If the Myron’s sinking left him with any fear of the water, it didn’t show. In 1934, he was even charged with speeding on his way through a channel in the Detroit River while captaining a steamship. And as for the Myron, she remains at the bottom of Lake Superior. The Miztec sank nearby on Friday May 13, 1921.
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