Loss of the S. S. Algerine

DESCRIPTION: "Attention all ye sailor boys And hark to what I say And hear about the Algerine Was lost in Hudson Bay." The old sealing boat, loaded with Americans but with a Newfoundland crew, is destroyed by ice. The Neptune rescues the remaining crew
AUTHOR: presumably Johnny Burke (1851-1930)
EARLIEST DATE: 1912 (Burke's Ballads)
KEYWORDS: ship wreck rescue
HISTORICAL REFERENCES:
1912 - the Algerine wreck
FOUND IN:
REFERENCES (1 citation):
Ryan/Small-HaulinRopeAndGaff, p. 92, "Loss of the S.S. Algerine" (1 text)
Roud #V44585
NOTES [527 words]: The Algerine (238 tons, according to Winsor, p. 30) first served as a sealer under H. Bartlett in 1893, and made her last voyage in 1912. Although she had been a sealer for every one of those twenty years, she was on an arctic exploration voyage in Hudson Bay, not a sealing trip, when she was lost (Ryan, pp. 195, 197; Winsor, p. 30, says her captain was John Bartlett when she was lost). She had been rebuilt as recently as 1910 (Evans, p. 45). According to Greene, p. 275, she was lost "4 miles off Cape Weld, Ponds Inlet, Baffin Land"; this is on the north side of Baffin Island, across from Bylot Island.
The Algerine had one other brush with fame in her last year. After the Titanic disaster, the White Star line hired ships to try to find bodies of the dead. The first of these was the Mackay-Bennett, which brought in most of the recovered bodies; the Minia and the Montmagny found more. The last ship chartered was the Algerine; she found only one body (Barczewski, p. 42), but that was remembered because unlike the other recovery vessels, she was a Newfoundland ship.
Although she had the biggest engine of any wooden-walled sealer (180 nominal horsepower; Candow, p. 55), she wasn't a spectacular success as a sealer; only once did she take more than 20,000 seals in a season (in 1898 under Job Knee, when she took 23,698); her average haul per season was a little over 10,000. Perhaps that helps explain why she had eight different captains in her twenty years.... (Chafe, p. 98).
In 1908, she had a near-disaster, running out of coal and needing help from other ships. Ironically, she was carrying dozens of refugees from other ships that had sunk in that year's bad conditions (Winsor, p. 30).
In addition to its mention in this song, the Algerine is mentioned in mentioned in "Captains and Ships," "The Sealer's Song (II)," "Success to the Hardy Sealers," and "Ballad of Captain Bob Bartlett, Arctic Explorer," An Algerine is also mentioned in "A Noble Fleet of Sealers," although this appears to be a reference to the MV Algerine, not the SS Algerine. Apart from the special case of the Greenland, which was mentioned a lot because of the infamous "Greenland Disaster," no other ship is mentioned more often in the sealing "songs" in Ryan/Small-HaulinRopeAndGaff.
Perhaps ironically, the only other ship mentioned equally often is the Neptune, which rescued the Algerine's crew. For her, see "Neptune, Ruler of the Sea."
Ryan, p. 308, has another poem mentioning the Algerine and the Neptune, in the context of a bad voyage which left her sealers stuck without transportation home.
There is a photo of the Algerine on p. 30 of Winsor.
Although most sources attribute this to Johnny Burke, it is not in his most extensive collection, Johnny Burke (William J. Kirwin, editor), John White's Collection of Johnny Burke Songs, Harry Cuff Publications, St. John's, 1981. But Burke wrote a lot of songs starting "Attention..."; it seems to have been his personal alternative to "Come all ye..." (which he also used several times). For a brief biography of Johnny Burke, see the notes to "The Kelligrew's Soiree." - RBW
Bibliography

Barczewski: Stephanie Barczewski, Titanic: A Night Remembered, Hambledon Continuum, 2004
Candow: James E. Candow, Of Men and Seals: A History of the Newfoundland Seal Hunt, Canadian Parks Service, Environment Canada, 1989
Chafe: Levi George Chafe, Chafe's Sealing Book: A History of the Newfoundland Sealfishery from the Earliest Available Records Down To and Including the Voyage of 1923, third edition, Trade Printers and Publishers, Ltd., 1923 (PDF scan available from Memorial University of Newfoundland)
Evans: Calvin D. Evans, Master Shipbuilders of Newfoundland and Labrador, Volume One: Cape Spear to Boyd's Cove, Breakwater Books, 2013
Greene: William Howe Greene, The Wooden Walls among the Ice Floes: Telling the Romance of the Newfoundland Seal Fishery, Hutchinson & Co, London (PDF available on the Memorial University of Newfoundland web site)
Ryan: Shannon Ryan, The Ice Hunters: A History of Newfoundland Sealing to 1914, Breakwater Books, 1994
Winsor: Naboth Winsor, Stalwart Men and Sturdy Ships: A History of the Prosecution of the Seal Fishery by the Sealers of Bonavista Bay North, Newfoundland, Economy Printing Limited, 1985

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