On a bitterly cold and icy night in the final hours of 1896, the people of Grand Manan were getting ready to ring in the New Year. But instead of fireworks or fiddles, what kicked off the greatest party in island history was a shipwreck.
At around 9 o’clock on December 30th, the SS Warwick, a steamship bound from Glasgow, Scotland to Saint John, New Brunswick, drifted dangerously close to Grand Manan. This raised eyebrows almost immediately.
“Why should a vessel bound up the Bay of Fundy to St. John be sailing so close to Grand Manan?” wondered the Daily Telegraph.
A reporter tracked down Warwick’s Captain R.N. Smith to ask him. Smith explained that he had “mistook the Gannet Rock light for the Briar Island light.”
A dangerous error.
Just before the wreck, 17-year-old lookout Peter McLean was posted at the bow. “I spotted a fixed bright light … on the portside bow about five minutes to 10 o’clock,” he later testified. “I reported a fixed bright light to the officer on the bridge. The second mate answered saying, ‘That’s alright, mate.’”
Right then, McLean was relieved by 18-year-old John McEwen, who the later inquest found had “an almost entire ignorance of seamanship.”
That’s because McEwen wasn’t a sailor at all — he was a stowaway. He’d been discovered living in the hold with the ship’s passengers’ baggage, so the crew put him to work as the lookout.
“I knew nothing of a compass,” McEwen admitted.
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