12 White Hurricane of 1913

GULL ROCK, LAKE SUPERIOR - When people talk in awed tones about the Great Storm of 1913 that exploded over the Great Lakes like a four-day “meteorological bomb,” their words are often laced with death.

They tell of the giant waves that rolled huge ships before sucking them underwater, sinking at least a dozen. They describe the snow squalls whipped up by cyclone-force winds that pushed other ships right out of the lakes, leaving them stranded on rocky beaches. They talk of the 250 sailors and crew believed lost in our inland seas while this storm raged.

This famous "White Hurricane" would go down in the books as the worst natural disaster in the Great Lakes.

But looking back more than a century ago, perhaps what stands apart is a nail-biting drama that played out just off the tip of Michigan's northernmost peninsula. It's the story of a shipwrecked crew who refused to die - and the stubborn determination of men from two U.S. Life-Saving stations in the Upper Peninsula who overcame nearly impossible odds to save them.

"When you look at the Waldo rescue, that crew was stuck on that ship for over 90 hours, not knowing whether they were going to be rescued or not," said Mark Rowe, trustee and maritime chairman of the Keweenaw County Historical Society who has done presentations on the wreck.

"I think a lot of people were amazed that they were rescued, and what the rescuers went through."

The Waldo up on the rocks in 1913, her distress flag flying. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

"AN INSANE WIND SCREAMING MURDER IN THE DARKNESS"

The story of the freighter L.C. Waldo made international headlines 106 years ago this week.

She had started out the trip with some unseasonably warm temperatures, according to the National Weather Service. At that time, the Great Lakes were busy with big freighters and a mix of smaller boats making late-season shipping runs.

The Waldo, a 470-foot steamer, was loaded with iron ore. She'd left Minnesota on Lake Superior's western end and planned to cross the lake, downbound for Ohio. She had 22 crew on board, two women and the ship's dog.

She was on the initial leg of that journey on Nov. 7, 1913 when the first of two colliding storm fronts struck the big lake. Gale and storm warning flags were hoisted in harbor towns. A nasty cold front turned violent. Big waves began to roil Lake Superior. The squalls came mixed with snow and icy spray.

At that point, Captain J. W. Duddleson was just trying to find someplace the Waldo could get a break from the winds, estimated to be howling at 60 mph.

In his book "Great Lakes Shipwrecks and Survivals," author William Ratigan gives a dramatic account of the scant hours the Waldo had left to remain afloat. And lest you think this sounds a bit too dramatic, remember this was about the time that the Great Lakes began swallowing other ships and conditions were becoming more hurricane-like by the minute - a chaos that would last for the next four days.

"Huge waves broke over the Waldo's bow and raked her decks with spray that froze and encased her with tons of ice. At nine o'clock that night, Captain John Duddleson, a real blue-water sailor, born at the Soo, stood in the pilothouse whose windows were blind with frost. It was like being in the solitary cell of a madhouse, with an insane wind screaming murder in the darkness. At visibility zero, he steered by compass alone and prayed for his guardian angel to keep a sharp lookout."

"At midnight Captain Duddleson bent over his chart, laying a compass course for Manitou Island, off the Indian arrow-point of Keweenaw Peninsula, hoping to gain the island's shelter before the wind blew the Waldo off the map."

Early in this maritime battle, the Waldo had suffered a crippling blow.

As the steamer approached Michigan's Keweenaw Peninsula, a monster wave had broken over the stern and smashed down on the full length of the ship, reportedly damaging the pilot house. The ships' navigational equipment also was lost.

"Supposedly there was some type of compass in a lifeboat," Rowe said. "A mate went to get the compass, crossed the icy deck, and set that compass on a stool. With a lantern light, that's what they were steering by."

Now the Waldo was headed for Manitou Island, a 1,000-acre expanse off the tip of the Keweenaw. But before it could reach that windbreak, it smashed into Gull Rock, a tiny islet just west of the island. Some have described it as the tip of an underwater mountain peak, jutting up from the lake and likely invisible overnight in a furious storm.

The Waldo wrecked on the rocks in the wee hours of Saturday, Nov. 8, starting the clock ticking on a life-or-death struggle for the sailors - and for the rescuers who were duty-bound to try and save them.

Gull Rock, next to Manitou Island, off Michigan's Keweenaw Peninsula.

A CLEVER ENGINEER, A BATHTUB AND A FROZEN TOMB

"When they ran aground, they kept the engines running. The only safe place to shelter was the very front of the ship, below the pilot house level," Rowe explained.

"While they were up there, the ship broke in two and it flooded out the engines, so they had no heat."

The ship's engineer came up with an ingenious solution for a temporary stove.

"He came up with the bright idea of taking the captain's bathtub," Rowel said. "They ripped it out of the captain's quarters and brought it into this room."

Huddled together in a small space in the bow of the ship, the survivors turned the tub upside down, kicked the bottoms out of some metal fire buckets, stacking them together to make a stovepipe out of one of the portholes. Then they lit a fire.

The captain directed them to start burning up the wood off the ship's walls and door casings.

"He had part of the crew tearing out the wood, and the others doing exercises to keep warm," Rowe said.

This tiny space was all the survivors had. As each wave battered the broken ship, the Waldo became encased in ice. The crew could not risk going to other parts of the ship to search for supplies. The food they had with them was nearly non-existent. Someone had managed to grab a one-gallon container of either peaches or tomatoes, depending on the account you read.

They were left to wait in these hellish conditions, wondering if anyone even knew they were missing - or how to find them.

"THOSE BOYS ARE NEVER COMING BACK"

It was late Saturday by the time the Waldo's rescuers got word that she was in trouble. It's unclear if the first details reached the peninsula's U.S. Life Saving stations via crew from a ship that had passed her wreck site, then made it to harbor, or from locals who spotted her.

Surfmen from the Eagle Harbor and Portgage stations both were alerted to the ship's plight.

The Eagle Harbor station, which had opened the year before because of the number of calls for help near the tip of the peninsula, was the closest to the Waldo. Their surfmen got underway early Sunday, taking their smaller 26-foot motorized boat because their larger one was being repaired.

They pushed off into the storm, propelled by the U.S. Life Saving motto: "You have to go out but you don't have to come back."

By now the storm had ramped into a fury, the wind and blizzard-like conditions even worse than when it had dashed the Waldo against the rocks.

Watching them leave, local resident Dave Kingston of Agate Harbor made a grim prediction: "You better wire Washington. Those boys are never coming back."

On this first try, the Eagle Harbor rescuers made it only eight miles out into the storm. Ice began to encrust the small boat. The storm was coming out of the northwest, with winds topping 70 mph at their stern. The rescue boat's captain decided to turn around, fearing for the safety of his crew.

They went back to get the 34-foot boat, which was being repaired for them. When they arrived back at Eagle Harbor, they had frozen to their seats and had to be freed with small axes, according to reports.

At the Portage Life-Saving Station on the other side of the Keweenaw, that crew tried to set out on the north side of the peninsula, also to be turned back by the gale. Instead, they used the inland waterway that cuts across the peninsula to reach the south side.

The Portage crew traveled over 80 miles to reach the wreck site, while the Eagle Harbor crew's trip was just over 30 miles.

Within hours of each other, both Life Saving crews eventually made it to where the Waldo lay wrecked, Rowe said. By then it was Tuesday, and the ship's survivors had been on the edge of survival for days.

The boathouse at the U.S. Coast Guard Station at Eagle Harbor, which replaced the original Life-Saving station.

A TRICKY RESCUE, THE SHIP GETS A NEW NAME

Once rescuers arrived, there was no safe way to tie their smaller boat to the Waldo.

The Portage crew feared their rescue boat had already scraped bottom and might be taking on water.

Eagle Harbor's crew was able to maneuver their boat next to the Waldo, and a surfman named John Beck took off his boots and prepared to climb aboard the wreck in his wool socks.

"He knew he'd have a better chance of sticking to the icy deck in his socks," Rowe said.

Once the surfmen located the Waldo's survivors, they had to free them from their White Hurricane tomb in the ship's small windlass room.

"With the waves and spray, it encased (that part of the ship) in ice," Rowe said. "When the rescuers got there, they had to chop from the outside and the crew was chopping from the inside, so they could get off the ship."

The Portage station rescue boat ended up taking about 10 of the people, with the rest going with the Eagle Harbor crew.

Not one life was lost in this incredible rescue. Their heroics became part of Great Lakes lore.

The Life-Saving stations even got some national recognition. Both the Eagle Harbor and Portage crews were awarded Gold Medals, the service's highest honor, for their work saving those aboard the Waldo.

And what of the freighter? She stayed hung up on Gull Rock until the next spring, when a May 1914 blurb in the Detroit Free Press mentioned she'd been towed into the Peninsula's Portage Lake area.

But that wasn't the end of her. Even though insurance underwriters later listed the $300,000 ship a total loss, records show she was salvaged and rebuilt by American Ship Building in Ohio and sold in 1915 to Canadian company that renamed her the Riverton.

In 1943, she reportedly wrecked on Lottie Wolf Shoal off Hope Island in the Georgian Bay and again was listed on insurance forms as a total loss.

Refloated and resold the next year, she was renamed the Mohawk Deer.

In 1967, she was finally sold for scrap and was to be towed to Europe. On Nov. 5, nearly 54 years to the day she ran aground Gull Rock as the Waldo, the Mohawk Deer broke loose from her Yougoslavian tugboat escort.

She "grounded on the rocks off Portofino, Italy in the Gulf of Genoa just short of her destination," according to a profile of the ship on BoatNerd.com. "She broke up during the night of November 6-7. Parts of her were salvaged and was taken to La Spezia on December 31, 1967."

"She eventually slipped off and sank with the bow in 80 feet of water and the stern deeper at 170'. The wreck has become a popular dive site in the Portofino Marine Park."

Want to know more about the wreck of the Waldo and the heroic efforts of two Life-Saving crews? Visit the Eagle Harbor Lifesaving Station, part of the Keweenaw County Historical Society. You'll find a display and artifacts that have been shared by the surfmen's families.

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