Tale Fourteen

The bark Sir C. T. Van Straubenzee was constructed in St. Catharines in 1875. This photograph was taken in the summer of 1908, and shows the ship sailing past the Scarborough Bluffs just east of Toronto.

The ship collided with the City of Erie, a sidewheeler steamboat (one of the fastest boats on the Great Lakes), on September 27th, 1909 near Dunkirk on Lake Erie. The Sir C. T. Van Straubenzee was badly damaged and quickly sank. Two crew members survived, but Captain John Corson and Mate James McCallum were drowned, as was Madeline Connolly, the ship’s cook.