Survive the Savage Sea:Tales from Our Ocean Heritage

Creative Publishers: St. John's, 1998

Chapter One from "Survive the Savage Sea"

S.S. Sandbeach Destroyed by an Explosion Highlands, Heatherton, Fischells, Colliers

The wreck of His Majesty's Ship Raleigh on August 8, 1922, is an often-told story of shipwreck and drowning on Newfoundland's shores. Not so well-known is the disaster surrounding Sandbeach, a tug involved in the salvage of Raleigh's remains in 1932. A Newfoundland seaman from Conception Bay played a final and fatal role.

Raleigh, a twelve-thousand ton cruiser in the British naval squadron, visited Corner Brook in August of 1922 and then proceeded to steam to the Labrador coast. As she travelled north through the Strait of Belle Isle, a combination of the fog, icebergs and faulty navigation put Raleigh on the rocks near the Point Amour lighthouse. At the time of her summer cruise, she carried between six and seven hundred men.

To get a lifeline to shore a number of her crew launched the ship's cutter, but it upset in the choppy waters throwing all occupants into the sea. Eleven drowned, but the survivors attached a rope from the stranded ship to the shore. Using a life raft pulled along the line the remaining crew reached shore.

Raleigh's crew salvaged several small and easily transported items from the wreck; then, she was left for residents of the area to take what they could. Local businesses and schooners salvaged larger and more valuable items, like copper, lead, fixtures and lifeboats. Some fishermen discovered several puncheons of rum in the ship's stores making the winter of 1922 a cheerful one.

In 1926 the vessel Stanhill carried a demolition team to Point Amour to complete the damage begun by the sea. When Stanhill's work was completed and Raleigh's remains were scattered on the seabed, she carried seven of Raleigh's fifteen-inch guns to Halifax.

T.F.& M. Salvaging and Wrecking Company, whose agents were W.A. Murray of New York City, made one of the final attempts at large-scale salvage of H.M.S. Raleigh. It was an ill-prepared undertaking. The ship chartered to do the work was S.S. Sandbeach, based in Halifax. Sandbeach left Halifax on September 25, 1932, went directly to the wreck site, and prepared to gather salvage from the bottom and shoreline.

Built in Thompkins Cove, New York, S.S. Sandbeach was a wooden screw steamer of two hundred forty-eight ton, single decked, and measured one hundred nineteen feet long and 9.3 feet deep. She was owned by Rockaway White Sand Company and registered in New York.

Captain B.M. Moody of New Brunswick was in charge of the ship while Lieutenant J.A. Tardiff, representing the navy, was a British subject. Other crew members were: cook Andrew Berg, Saskatchewan; Rene and Antoine Bouchard, St. Francois, Quebec; chief engineer G.J. (Thomas) Shortt, Oscar Bennett, James McCall, G. Butt all of Halifax; Gus and Wilfred Sampson, Nova Scotia and John Costigan. Costigan, of Colliers, Conception Bay, was the lone Newfoundlander aboard. He had once been employed by the Bell Island Steamship Company and had been a crewman on Pawnee, the Conception Bay passenger/supply ferry that operated from Portugal Cove.

Salvage was great. Using divers, floating platforms and explosives, the professional wreckers aboard Sandbeach took a full load to Corner Brook, a stopover port for fuel as Sandbeach headed for Halifax and New York.

In early December, when Sandbeach arrived in Corner Brook, her owners were slapped with a court summons by the Newfoundland railway. Apparently the salvage company owed for coal, crew's wages and demurrage -- money owed from failure to load or discharge on time. The case came before the Supreme Court in Admiralty in St. John's and, on an order from the court, Sandbeach was released.

Through a twist of fate, the proceedings of the brief court trial cost Captain Moody his life. Both he and R.S. Grant, who represented the Salvage Company, bought tickets at the St. John's railway station and were preparing to leave for Corner Brook. Lawyer R. Gushue, legal counsel for the company, suggested Grant stay over in case he was needed in any further proceedings. Captain Moody used his ticket in a fateful rendezvous with the S.S. Sandbeach <|>awaiting at Corner Brook.

Those who recalled the steamship's departure from Corner Brook remembered her as very heavily laden, not only with material from the hulk of Raleigh, but from wrecking equipment and a considerable quantity of explosives.

At this point, the final tragic scene of the tale of Sandbeach changes to a small uninhabited stretch of shore, Little Friars Cove, about twelve miles west of Highlands and a hundred kilometres southwest of Corner Brook on Newfoundland's west coast. The date: December 5, 1932, and for a few days after that day, clues to a sea mystery had to be pieced together from debris and mutilated bodies.

Two men of the town of Highlands, John Flynn and Richard McEachern, who knew nothing of Sandbeach nor her activities, discovered a lifeboat and the body of a dead man on the beach in Little Friars Cove on Monday evening of December fifth. Two life belts were also found, one considerably blood stained. The dead body bore no scars and the men assumed the blood belonged to another seaman. They reported that the name on the lifeboat was "S.S. Sandbeach" and it had drifted in sometime Sunday night or Monday morning.

The seventeen-foot boat was bottom up in the landwash and the body nearby, face down on the sand. The dead man was around one hundred seventy-five pounds in weight, around thirty-five years of age and evidently had been in a hurry to leave the ship. He was dressed in an ordinary lounge suit with a white shirt, low shoes and rubbers. It seemed as if he had died on the shore.

One oar, but no food, was found in the lifeboat and it seemed as if others might have been in the lifeboat as the row-locks had been used. The grisly discovery was found in a gulch surrounded by towering cliffs and scarcely any beach. The nearest law authority, Constable Dawe at St. Fintan's who had been told of the gruesome find, ordered no one to touch the evidence despite the fact that a high tide or waves might wash the body out to sea.

News spread through the West Coast towns of Highlands, St. Fintan's, Maidstones and Heatherton, but no one knew of a missing ship nor of the identity of the seaman.

That same evening at seven o'clock another man's body was picked up at Fischells. He seemed about sixty years of age and the only identification items within his clothes were a knife, a key-wind watch and personal papers, one a letter addressed to Captain B.M. Moody. On December 9, it was determined the remains were those of Captain Moody and his body was sent to New Brunswick for burial.

>From that evidence the ship and crew were soon positively identified. In the next days more proof that the S.S. Sandbeach and her crew had come to a quick and lethal end appeared at Heatherton, a small town a few miles northeast of Highlands: shattered wreckage found along the shore, broken parts of a wheel, pieces of decking and part of a cabin stranded near the shore. As well two more bodies with the marks of scalding apparently from steam on the arms and faces. Several lifebuoys also drifted in to the beaches.

In the following weeks the Newfoundland Justice Department initiated an enquiry headed by Magistrate O'Rielly of St. George's. By December 23, 1932, the report of the loss of Sandbeach concluded:

"It is the opinion of the Court the Sandbeach was destroyed by an explosion. The shattered wreckage...point to the conclusion. In addition there were marks of scalding from steam on the corpses... but death was due from drowning." (Note: the more graphic details of mutilation have been deleted.)

Richard Grase, the supercargo of S.S. Sandbeach, who supervised the cargo and loading but had not sailed on the missing vessel, identified the ship, her cargo and the bodies. In his evidence Grase thought that the clothing indicated the men had left the ship in a hurry. Abrasions, cuts, scalds and broken bones signified that some of the crew had been struck with flying objects and steam.

According to Grase's testimony, the steamship had been carrying nine full cases and three broken cases of dynamite. This was stored near the engine room in the lazarette, or the afterpart of a ship's hold used for stores. No concrete proof could be established as to exactly where or when an explosion destroyed the S.S. Sandbeach and her crew.

The body found on the shore at Fischells was that of the captain; the two at Heatherton were Shortt and Sampson. The boat which drifted in at Little Friars Cove had contained the body of the cook, Andrew Berg. Presumably the body of Costigan, the Newfoundland sailor aboard Sandbeach, was not found.

At the enquiry, McEachern and Flynn, farmers of the Highlands, described the difficulty they had in recovering Berg's body and in getting it to St. George's. They enlisted the help of six other men.

On Wednesday, two days after discovery, using ropes they lifted Berg's remains up over a seven hundred-foot cliff, then tied the body in canvas and brought it on their shoulders to Paul's Gulch, a distance of eight miles. From there the corpse was transported by boat to the Highlands, then carried by horse and cart to St. Fintan's and finally put on a train for transportation to St. George's.

Their work took from Wednesday to Saturday with the most difficult section from Little Friars Cove to Paul's Gulch, a wild and remote section of the coast. They had to blaze and practically make a trail through virgin woods and brush sleeping in improvised shelters as they went.

Thus, after the enquiry report, the snippets of a sea disaster and bits of news surrounding the mysterious end of steamship Sandbeach faded from the Newfoundland papers. Today her remains, as well as the valuable fittings, brass, copper and salvage of His Majesty's Ship Raleigh lie somewhere on the bottom between Highlands and Fischells.