Wake of the Schooners: From Placentia to Port aux Basques

Creative Publishers, St. John's: 1993

Excerpt from "Wake of the Schooners" Section of Chapter 4

FALCON Wrecked on the Dune Sands In 1919 Lakes business had their tern schooner, the EILEEN LAKE, under construction in Fortune with John Lake as master builder. Seeing the work could not be finished without more material, in November the company sent the FALCON, an 80-ton two masted schooner, to Shelburne, Nova Scotia, for timber.

With her crew of Captain Tom Murphy, his son Ambrose, of Grand Bank; cook Harry Evans and two other Fortune sailors, the FALCON left Nova Scotia laden with hardwood pine planks. By December 11, Captain Murphy intended to head down Langlade Reach to Fortune, but a strong inset of northerly tide combined with strong wind pushed the schooner onto the treacherous western Dune Sands.

Not many schooners unlucky enough to strike the Dune Sands withstood the damage inflicted by its shores; so as with many others, the FALCON broke up. In the mishap Evans, a crippled, heavyset man, lost his life. After an heroic rescue by the Larranaga family of Langlade who pulled the remaining crew to shore from the freezing waters, the exhausted men were cared for in the Larranaga farm home. As the FALCON went to pieces, much of pine plank cargo drifted ashore.

Not wanting to lose their valuable cargo, Lakes sent the schooner ALICE LAKE, skippered at this time by George `Ki' Noseworthy of Fortune, to help salvage it. Pine planks were taken from the stormy western side of Dune Sands across to the eastern side, a more sheltered shore. Noseworthy's crew and the men from the FALCON hired a team of horses from the Larranagas, hauled the timber across the narrow strip of sand and loaded it on the ALICE LAKE, anchored offshore. A small tern, the ALICE LAKE could not accommodate the long, heavy planks in her holds and the cargo was stacked on deck. After several trips from Langlade to Fortune, the hard pine was finally landed in Fortune and construction of the 164-ton EILEEN LAKE was completed.

EILEEN LAKE's life was short; on January 19, 1922, leaking and sinking, she was abandoned in the Atlantic. Captain Ki Noseworthy and his crew -- Silas Blagdon, George Buffett, Reuben Galton and cook George Forsey -- on a bitterly cold winter's night, took to the lifeboats and rowed for the nearest land, St. Pierre, over sixty miles away.

Wet, cold and hungry, the shipwrecked men rowed for three days and nights in an open boat until they were sighted by the Belgian steamer PERSIAN. By that time it was already too late for Forsey who had died of exposure the night before.