Ye Olden Times in Catalina by Ernest Tilley

The Newfoundland Quarterly December 1958 pg 18

He begins by talking about the mail system in the 1880s about how there was no post office in Bird Islands, the nearest one was in Bonavista. During the summer months a small coastal steamer named “the Plover” brought the mail from St. John’s along the east coast stopping in at Trinity and Catalina. From Christmas until May the mail was brought by Mail Carrier via Shoal Harbour, the last lap being from Trinity via Catalina to Bonavista once every two weeks. Tom White and his son Charles of Trinity, Mail Carriers, then would bring the mail down from Trinity and would come to Bird Islands. As there was no post office on Bird Island they would leave the mail with his mother and would stay to chat awhile as his mother was born in Trinity.

The story goes as follows:

I was not far to the house and the Mailman seemed to be thoughtful for he said no more to me. I went into the kitchen with him. He slipped off the big mail pouch, placed it on a small back table and sat down.

“Hungry?” asked mother. “No,” he said.

“Well, here is a good hot cup of coffee that will do you good and something light to eat. When you have finished I want you to tell me all you know about the loss of the Lion and how she was lost.”

“No one seems to know,” he said. “She must have sunk at the southern end of Baccalieu Tickle. The wreckage, only a little bit of loose stuff from the deck, and the body of one woman (who would never go below if going anywhere on shipboard) was found on the shore side of the Tickle near Bay de Verde. The Lion never went through the Tickle, that is certain. It was a happy ship that left St. John’s. She was still happy when she passed a schooner about the middle of the bay. The schooner crew watched her plough ahead, and saw nothing happen, nor heard anything. In fact she just vanished in the haze which hung low over the water even with the stars out. That is really all we know. Captain Fowlow was a good captain, and seaman. True the ship was loaded very heavy; yet there was no storm or apparently any reason why she should not have reached Catalina by midnight. Her boilers might have exploded, yes, but would not someone have heard, and surely some large piece of wreckage would be found. Then, might the helmsman have been careless? Perhaps. They knew the shore so well that possibly they kept too close so that she struck a pinnacle rock deep in the water and upset but if she did some of the deck watch would have got clear, but even the deck boats went down with the ship. Whatever happened came in the twinkling of an eye. There was not a second’s time to do anything and that is all we know – nothing.”

He continued, “Captain Fowlow’s sister is the wife of the keeper of the light on Baccalieu. But they heard no noise: saw nothing. Yet they knew that the Lion was bound north at this time too. The older and wiser captains and fishermen said it was not her boilers for there would have been more wreckage. It was not a big swell, as there was no sea; it was smooth water. The only reasonable thing, they say, is she must have struck a deep tidewater rock or a high steep cliff, hung up for a minute, upset, filled and sank at once. We will never know for sure what happened now.”

But it puzzled me, a boy, how a well built sealing steamer like the Lion, which had been to sea for years, and in the ice in so many storms could vanish so completely and in such a place as the Tickle and on such a calm night. But this is as I remember it as I sat there and heard mother and the mailman discuss it. No one knows any more than this even now, nigh seventy years later.


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