Loss of the Bruce, The

DESCRIPTION: "The Bruce was bound for Louisburg, the night being dark and drear ... Captain Drake stood on the bridge ... the Bruce with mail and passengers she ran upon a reef." All except "young Pike" are saved.
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: 1960 (Peacock)
KEYWORDS: drowning sea ship wreck rescue
HISTORICAL REFERENCES:
Mar 1911 - The wreck of the Bruce
FOUND IN: Canada(Newf)
REFERENCES (1 citation):
Peacock, pp. 939-940, "The Loss of the Bruce" (1 text, 1 tune)
Roud #9937
RECORDINGS:
Jim Dalton, "The Loss of the Bruce" (on PeacockCDROM)
NOTES [1163 words]: The Bruce was stranded on Port Nova Reef off Cape Breton Point and crushed in the ice on March 24, 1911 going from Port aux Basques, Newfoundland to Louisbourg Nova Scotia, A steamship ferry, it had 123 passengers (Northern Shipwrecks Database). - BS
The Bruce was one of the first members of the "Alphabet Fleet" (for which see "The Wreck of the Steamship Ethie"); they were Newfoundland vessels given names alphabetically after places in Scotland (so Argyle, Bruce, Clyde, Dundee, etc.) and intended to bring steam ferry service to coastal outports. The service was set up along with the Newfoundland railway, a government-sponsored but privately-owned service intended to improve internal communications and industry on the island. (It was not a financial or economic success, but that's another story.)
The Bruce, although not the first ship on the alphabetical list, actually went into service before the railroad contract was finalized and the rest of the fleet completed, (Penney/Kennedy, p. 94), yet was one of the most closely connected to the railroad. (For more on the Newfoundland Railroad in general, see the notes to "The Wreck of the Steamship Ethie," "The Bonavist Line," "Downey's Our Member," and "Drill, Ye Heroes, Drill!") The ship was put in service once the Newfoundland railway reached Port-aux-Basques in southwest Newfoundland; built in Scotland, it was to supply sea cargo for the train (DictNewfLabrador, p. 287), and in fact was beat the train into service, arriving in Newfoundland on Oct. 13, 1897 (Penney, p. 63) and being present when the first train reached the coast on June 30, 1898 (Bruce, p. 13; Penney, p. 63; Lingard, p. 53, says she left at 11:50 p.m.; Harding, p. 138, says this was 65 minutes after the train arrived). She was the first regular connection between Newfoundland and the mainland (recall that Newfoundland was still an independent dominion at this time), and Sydney, Nova Scotia, at the far end of the link, became a boom town as a result, tripling in size (Bruce, pp. 12-13).
The Bruce also carried the mail; it is ironic to note that the trains had an on-board post office to prepare mail for shipping (Harding, p. 134), given that the Bruce kept its schedule pretty well and the train rarely did.
According to Connors, p. 6, the Bruce was built by A. & J. Inglis of Glasgow; she was 237 feet long and of 1155 gross tons. Cook, p. 20, reports that she had "two decks, two masts -- schooner rigged -- four steel boilers, three water tanks, five water-tight bulkheads" and space for 70 first and 90 second class passengers. She developed about 2100 horsepower, good for a speed of 15 knots.
The Bruce kept such a regular schedule that she became a byword. England, p. 249, recounts that sealers reckoned short periods of time based on her schedule: "Sometimes for short periods, however, they count by 'Bruces'; i.e. trips by the steamship Bruce.... As for example: 'I come over six bruces ago.'" (There was a second Bruce built after the first was lost, which perhaps helped maintain this tradition even in the years after she was lost.) She became such an institution that, "In fond rememberance, her likeness appeared on the labels of the whiskey, Old Bruce, sold in government liquor stores" (O'Neill, p. 976).
According to Hanrahan, p. 2, the Bruce was designed to use both steam and sail. On her first voyage, she managed an impressive 15.5 knots (comfortably more than the ten knots she is credited with in the song). She was strengthened to deal with Newfoundland's icy conditions (she was the first ship to sail in and out of Sydney all year rather than shutting down for the winter; Bruce, p. 33), but still was considered a luxurious liner.
It was estimated that, in her career, she made two thousand round trips and carried about 350,000 passengers. She also carried most of the mail between Newfoundland and Canada. It appears she had only two captains in her career, Patrick Delaney, who had overseen her construction and stayed with her until her last year (Bruce, p. 32; Cook, p. 20) and Richard Drake, who obviously is the "Captain Drake" of the first verse..
The Bruce had a hard time setting out on her final voyage; the weather in 1911 had been very bad (as the song says, it was "dark and drear,"), and passengers reported a lot of water in the ship. Apparently it was some time before Captain Drake was given his orders to sail from Port aux Basques. But visibility was very poor because of heavy snow, and a lookout had mistaken one lighthouse for another. Captain Drake thought he knew where he was, but he was wrong, and he ran the Bruce on a reef and tore out her bottom (Hanrahan, p. 141; Cook, p. 21).
She was only about 150 feet from shore, on the east coast of Nova Scotia (the nearest town of any size, Main-a-Dieu, was about two miles away; Hanrahan, p. 142). But it was hard to get the passengers off the ship in the storm and heavy seas. The good news is that casualties were light -- William Pike drowned (the "Young Pike" of the song), and initially there were reports that a fellow named "Shea" was also lost, but "Shea" seems not to have actually existed; he was reported as a casualty based on confused accounts by the passengers (Hanrahan, pp. 142-143; Connors, p. 6; COok, p. 21; and Harding, p. 139, nonetheless report that two people were lost). But it took quite a while to get the survivors out of the horrid conditions; indeed, it took the lifeboats several trips just to get all the people to shore (Hanrahan, pp. 145-146), and of course most of the cargo was lost.
Hanrahan, pp. 178-179, has a full list of the passengers who were on the Bruce on her final voyage.
A new Bruce (which looked surprisingly similar to the old one) was put into service in 1912 but was sold to Russia in 1915 (Connors, p. 10), presumably because she was well-built and would make a good icebreaker; Russia -- with its Baltic and Black Sea ports closed off by Gemany and Turkey respectively, leaving them only the icy ports on the White Sea as a way to receive shipments from the western allies -- bought at least eight Newfoundland ships in that period for this purpose (Candow, p. 45).
There is a photo of the Bruce in her wrecked state on p. 8 of Connors, and photos of the intact ship in the photo insert following p. 79 of Bruce, on p. 53 of Lingard, on p. 51 of Penney, and on p. 94 of Hanrahan (a larger version of which is on p. 6 of Connors), with a note saying that it was taken from one of Gerald Doyle's postcards. I'm surprised this piece didn't go into one of his songbooks. Harding has that same publicity photo on p. 133, plus photos on pp. 138-139 of her waiting for the trains. Cook, pp. 20-21, has the standard picture of the old Bruce and a picture of the new on as well.
It's interesting to note that the third ship to take up the Sydney/Port-aux-Basques route, the Caribou, also has a song; see "The Loss of the Caribou." - RBW
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