A Tale of Three Ships

The H. J. Logan

To the eye of a seaman and to many stay ashores as well, there is nothing built by man more beautiful than a windship under full sail--be it a tiny sloop, a full rigged clipper or any of dozens of other rigs. Of the hundreds of sailing ships built on the Parrsborough Shore, one of the most impressive was the four-masted schooner, H. J. Logan.

Built at Parrsborough in 1902, she was named for Hance Logan, the M.P. for Cumberland County, and was captained by D. S.Howard of Port Greville, Logan’s political rival. The H. J. Logan, at nearly 800 tons, was one of the largest Canadian schooners of her time and was designed for ocean work.

In late fall of 1910 she was loaded with lumber at Chatham, NB, and bound for New York. This was basically a routine voyage, but once into the Atlantic she encountered a succession of gales from the west and northwest and was driven far to the east. Then she lost her rudder and ran out of food. Some provisions were obtained from passing steamships but none would attempt to tow the disabled ship.

After the first couple of weeks, the crew began asking the captain to abandon ship. Finally, after seven weeks of almost continual gales, with the Captain and his mate both exhausted, they hailed a passing steamer and left the disabled but otherwise sound ship and its cargo to the merciless winter storms of the mid-Atlantic.

Many seafarers considered the Governor Parr, over 900 tons when completed at Parrsborough in 1919, to be the handsomest schooner ever built in Atlantic Canada. This was high praise indeed considering the many beautiful vessels constructed here. Painted a gleaming white, with her four towering masts and her sails bleached almost white by salt and sun, she made an impressive picture as she cleared Ingramport, NS, bound for Argentina and packed with over a million board feet of lumber.

After only a week at sea, she hit very severe weather and lost her two aftermasts, along with much of her deckload. She finally became unnavigable and was abandoned; her officers and crew being picked up by an American steamer.

With her load of lumber, she could not sink and, being of staunch and sound construction, she did not break up either, but drifted to and fro across the Atlantic for more than a year. All attempts to salvage or sink her failed and, nearly fourteen months after she left Nova Scotia, she was reported ashore on the Canary Islands, more than twenty-five hundred miles away. She was sighted and charted at least forty times and likely travelled close to five thousand miles. The Governor Parr was only five years old and overloading, especially her huge deckload, was blamed for her loss.

The Cumberland Queen, a four-masted schooner of more than six hundred tons, was built at Diligent River in 1919 and has been called the finest-looking vessel to be built there.

She was employed in the West Indies trade for most of her short career. In May of 1922, she was returning from the Turks Islands, bound for New York with a cargo of salt, when she came to grief. Many sandbars run seaward for miles off Cape Hatteras and the ship struck one of these during a violent storm.

While she was stuck there, she was overwhelmed by huge waves, but finally worked free. However, she had taken on so much water that, combined with her heavy cargo, she quickly sank and her officers and crew were very lucky to be rescued.

About ten months later, a group of fishermen were shocked and astonished to see masts breaking the surface of the water. Soon an entire schooner was floating before their eyes. The ship's cargo of salt had finally dissolved and the ship, being fairly new and sound, had enough buoyancy to float to the surface.

She was soon boarded and towed ashore, refitted, renamed and reregistered. She had recovered to sail again, a credit to the skill of her Parrsborough Shore builders.