Wreck of the Julia Dean, The

DESCRIPTION: "Nigh forty years have passed away... since the wreck of the Julia Dean." A heavy storm in the Straits [of Mackinac] drives her onto an island. The songs of birds and the sound of the waves are heard by the wreck, "meet requiem for the Julia Dean."
AUTHOR: (Words:) Daniel Webster Whittle (1840-1901)?
EARLIEST DATE: 1887 (published by Whittle, according to Walton/Grimm-Windjammers-SongsOfTheGreatLakesSailors)
KEYWORDS: wreck
FOUND IN: US(MW)
REFERENCES (1 citation):
Walton/Grimm-Windjammers-SongsOfTheGreatLakesSailors, pp. 219-220, "The Wreck of the Julia Dean" (1 text)
Roud #19868
NOTES [261 words]: The notes in Walton/Grimm-Windjammers-SongsOfTheGreatLakesSailors connect this with an 1855 wreck. This is a bit problematic, since Whittle published the poem in 1887, which is hardly "nigh forty years" after 1855. (And I have verified the 1887 publication date from pp. 83-84 of Marion Harland's 1901 book With the Best of Intentions: A Midsummer Episode, available on Google Books.) Adding to the confusion, at least two other boats named Julia Dean were wrecked in the 1850s in the Upper Midwest, though both of these were apparently on the Mississippi, not the Great Lakes. I suspect there has been some confusion of details.
I must confess to some concern about the validity of Walton's "collection," too -- did the informant, Mrs. Bonner, actually have this from tradition? Whittle's poem, as published in Harland, has a line of asterisks just where Walton/Grimm-Windjammers-SongsOfTheGreatLakesSailors prints a line of dots, as if to imply an omission.
Daniel Webster Whittle was a Civil War veteran who became a modestly successful publisher of hymns, many of them offered under the name "El Nathan." I must confess that the only one of his compositions I've ever heard of is "Neither Do I Condemn Thee," and even that was much more staid than the Black Evangelical version I've heard. He did edit the memoirs of Philip Paul Bliss, who according to W. K. McNeil, editor, Encyclopedia of American Gospel Music, Routledge, 2005, p. 423, had worked as Whittle's musical assistant. The entry in McNeil does not mention Whittle writing secular pieces. - RBW
Last updated in version 6.5
File: WGM219

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