Excel, The

DESCRIPTION: "Being on a Sunday morning when the wind did roar and rage There was twenty-two of the Excel crew met with a watery grave; There was men, women and children stood on her quarter deck, When a heavy sea broke over her and swept them from the wreck"
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: 1977 (Lehr/Best-ComeAndIWillSingYou)
KEYWORDS: death sea ship storm wreck
HISTORICAL REFERENCES:
Oct 11, 1885 - Excel is wrecked at Black Island, Labrador, "with a loss of about twenty-two men, women and children" (Lehr/Best-ComeAndIWillSingYou, Northern Shipwrecks Database)
FOUND IN: Canada(Newf)
REFERENCES (1 citation):
Lehr/Best-ComeAndIWillSingYou 34, "The Excel" (1 text, 1 tune)
Roud #26121
NOTES [78 words]: Lehr/Best-ComeAndIWillSingYou quotes a news story describing the loss - BS
According to Shannon Ryan, The Ice Hunters: A History of Newfoundland Sealing to 1914, Breakwater Books, 1994, p. 318, the gale of October 10-12, 1885, was ""Probably the greatest recorded disaster" in the Newfoundland fisheries; it "wrecked between 70 and 80 vessels on the Labrador coast, taking the lives of about 70 men, women and children and leaving 1,500 to 2,000 people destitute." - RBW
Last updated in version 6.1
File: LeBe034

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