Last Voyage

Her hull, rigging and spars sheathed in ice, the schooner Mary E. O'Hara, of Boston, turned tail to the fishing banks last week and headed for home. On a dark night, in near-zero weather, she thrashed into Boston Channel. A numbed lookout in the bow suddenly shouted. Frantically the helmsman tried to put her over, but she was sluggish with ice, heavy with 50,000 lb. of fish in her hold. Next moment the Mary E. O'Hara crashed into a barge anchored off Finn's Ledge.

Out of her shattered fo'c'sle. men scrambled up on deck. Some, trapped below, drowned amid frozen fish, cluttered gear, shattered planking. After the crash, the schooner sheered off; the barge was swallowed up in the darkness. With the desperate hope of beaching his ship before she sank, Captain Fred Wilson swung her inshore. But the schooner was settling rapidly, nose down; the water was knee deep on the deck. The nested dories, welded together by ice, were useless. As their ship sank under them, Captain Wilson and the survivors swarmed up the icy rigging.

When the Mary E. O'Hara came to rest on the bottom, twelve feet of her mainmast, five feet of her foremast stuck out above the waves. There on slippery, ice-covered halyards clung more than a dozen of her crew. Some of them were dressed only in the underwear in which they had slept. It was about 3:30 of a January morning.

From time to time the lights of other ships passed, but nobody heard the hoarse hails of the men in the schooner's rigging. After a while one man lost his numb hold, dropped into the black water. Another followed--another, and another. When a man dropped, the others heard a brief thrashing in the water, then silence. One who let go was 60-year-old Mandea LeBlanc, who had hoped this would be his last voyage to the banks. Shortly afterward, Captain Wilson followed him.

Just before dawn the trawler North Star, inbound for Boston with a load of fish, caught sight of the Mary E. O'Hara's masts. Five of the crew were still hanging on. One man slipped off even as the North Star hove to alongside, but he was fished out alive. Another, frozen to his perch, had to be pried loose.

One other death was added to the toll of 19 when it was learned later that the watchman on the barge had been knocked into the sea by the collision. For Boston's fishing fleet it was the worst disaster since the foundering of the schooner Eleanor Nicker son, in 1932, when 22 men drowned in the stormy north Atlantic.

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