They sleep ‘neath ocean afar from home…”

Don Jardine has been posting stories about Island shipwrecks on his Island Climate blog, and this morning it was the tale of Schooner Emeline, wrecked at Broad Cove in 1870:

The schooner, Emeline left Charlottetown for Bay of Islands, near Corner Brook, in Western  Newfoundland on December 10th, 1870 with Captain Edward Saville of Grand River, PEI  (born on Feb. 22, 1829 in Gloucester, MA, USA) in control. The Emeline appears to have been sailing back to Charlottetown when she wrecked during a storm off Broad Cove Marsh in Cape Breton on January 9th to 12th, 1871.

Don references a poem by A. Currie in the February 20, 1871 edition of The Examiner, and I tracked it down.

It is beautiful.

They sleep ‘neath ocean afar from home.
Friendship may not raise
A monument above them, nor
Strew flowers o’er their grave;
But gentle zephyrs as they sweep
The raging billow o’er,
Shall sing a requiem for the brave,
“The brave who are no more.”

Shall we all have the favour of being memorialized so.

Scan from The Examiner, February 20, 1871, with a poem.

Comments

Ton Zijlstra's picture
Ton Zijlstra on December 23, 2021 - 14:51 Permalink

Before reading this I came across a newly launched project by the Dutch institute for cultural heritage that maps 1600 Dutch shipwrecks worldwide, plus the stories known about them: https://mass.cultureelerfgoed.nl/