The wind off Cape Chignecto on the evening of October 19, 1908, was steady from the southwest at around twenty-five knots. The Olympia, a wooden-hulled steam ferry built in Saint John in 1893, was running her usual late-season route between Halifax and Saint John with a hold of dry goods, two horses, and seventeen paying passengers.
She never arrived.
The Nova Scotia Archives in Halifax holds three slim folders on the wreck. The largest, filed under Marine Casualties 1908-1910, contains the inquiry report compiled by the Department of Marine and Fisheries the following January. The smallest contains a single telegram from the lighthouse keeper at Cape d'Or, sent at 11:42 p.m. on the night of the sinking. It reads, in full, Lights gone off Spencer's Island stop.
The Olympia was not a large ship. At 142 feet and 312 gross tons, she was modest even by the standards of the coastal trade. Her captain, Hiram Lockhart of Parrsboro, had commanded her for eleven years.
Lockhart died in the wreck, along with fourteen of the seventeen passengers and eight of his eleven crew. Three survivors made shore at Advocate Harbour on a piece of decking. One, a Saint John schoolteacher named Eliza Whitcomb, gave the only first-person account on record.
Whitcomb's statement, taken in a Parrsboro boarding house on October 24, runs to four pages of cramped longhand. She described a sudden list to starboard around ten o'clock, no explosion, no fire, and what she called a long groaning sound, like a tree giving up. The vessel went down in less than twelve minutes.
The inquiry, chaired by Captain Louis Demers of the steamship inspection branch, concluded in March 1909 that the loss was attributable to shifting cargo in heavy weather. No fault was assigned. The file was closed.
“The inquiry, chaired by Captain Louis Demers of the steamship inspection branch, concluded in March 1909 that the loss was attributable to shifting cargo in heavy weather.”
What the inquiry did not mention, and what the archives reveal only obliquely, is that the Olympia had been refused insurance renewal in July of that year. The Halifax firm of Pickford and Black had declined coverage on the grounds of hull condition. A second firm in Saint John issued a partial policy at elevated premium. The underwriting correspondence survives in the business records of Pickford and Black, donated to Dalhousie University in 1971.
Cargo manifests for the final voyage are missing.
The historian Janet Guildford, in her 1994 monograph on Bay of Fundy coastal shipping, raised the question of why no salvage attempt was ever made. The Olympia went down in roughly forty fathoms, well within reach of the diving equipment available in 1908. Two other wrecks in similar depths were salvaged that decade. The Olympia was not.
Guildford suggested, without elaborating, that the answer might lie in the cargo nobody listed.
The two horses on the manifest belonged to a Halifax merchant named Cyrus Brenton, who shipped them to Saint John for sale at the Maritime Stock Exchange. Brenton filed an insurance claim, which was paid. He filed no other claim.
Brenton's name appears, however, in a separate set of records held at the Provincial Archives of New Brunswick. He was named in 1907 in connection with a customs investigation into undeclared imports of American whisky through the port of Saint John. The investigation was dropped in early 1909.
The connection is suggestive rather than conclusive. There is no document linking Brenton's customs trouble to the Olympia. There is only the absence of a salvage attempt on a known wreck in accessible water, and the absence of a manifest, and the closure of an investigation.
The three survivors gave varying accounts of what was below decks. Whitcomb spoke of crates she could not identify. A deckhand named Arthur Coade mentioned barrels lashed forward, not on the list. The third survivor, a commercial traveller named Joseph Wynn, said only that the hold was fuller than he had expected.
Coade's statement was not entered into the inquiry record. It survives because the Parrsboro newspaper, the Leader, printed it in full on October 30, 1908. The microfilm copy at the Cumberland County Museum is the only known record.
The Olympia lies, presumably, where she went down. No diver has reported finding her. The seabed off Spencer's Island is silty and the currents are strong. She may be buried, or she may have broken up entirely.
In 1962, a Saint John amateur historian named Walter Crombie applied for a permit to attempt a survey of the wreck site. The permit was granted but the survey never took place. Crombie died in 1964, and his notes, deposited at the New Brunswick Museum, contain a hand-drawn chart with a small X and the words not sure why they let it go.
Some wrecks close because there is nothing left to ask. Others close because the people who might have asked have stopped wanting answers. The Olympia belongs to the second kind. She sank once in 1908 and a second time in the slow years that followed, when the people who knew what was in her hold died one by one in Parrsboro and Saint John and Halifax, and the question went down with them.
The folder in the Nova Scotia Archives is still open to readers. Most weeks, no one asks for it.
