The empty church pews that Sunday were the first clue that something big was happening near St. Martin’s. The second clue came as bewildered ministers saw their missing parishioners pass the empty churches “travelling in different directions with rounds of pork on their shoulders.”
A storm had battered the region on Saturday, January 20th, 1884. The following day, a ship was found grounded on a beach in the Quaco district. Its crew had mysteriously disappeared.
“The news of the affair spread like wildfire and brought people to the scene of the wreck from all directions,” remembered F. M. Cochrane, then just a young boy.
They headed to Quaco. The name derives from a linguistic misstep attempting to pronounce the Mi’kmaq name for the place: Goolwaakw (pronounced Gool-wah-gah’-kwek), which means “haunt of the hooded seal.”
For the people of St. Martin’s, the ship stranded on a beach near their little fishing village offered a lifeline in hard times. The local mill had recently shut down, leaving the community reeling. The mystery ship was source of not only food, but hope.
Barrels of pork, flour, raisins, and currants lay scattered across the beach.
Young Cochrane and his friends ran around the beach eating currents right off the sand. The problem was, Cochrane explained, that “the currents were salty from the salt water and that made the boys thirsty and we drank a great deal of water and the currents started to swell inside us and there were a fine lot of stomach aches all around.”
The adults turned their attention to the ship itself, a single-masted schooner. Despite being beached, her hull was intact. As they gathered round, they noted her name — Anna Currier.
They called out to the crew, but the Anna Currier was eerily still.
Climbing aboard, they found no signs of recent human activity on the deck. They did, however, find a remarkable quantity of salt pork. They also found numerous large sealed barrels. When they opened the casks, they found something extremely valuable: oil.
“The whole community seems to have … desired to obtain a free supply of provisions for a long time to come, which eclipsed the supposed regard men had for the injunction THOU SHALT NOT STEAL,” huffed the outraged Daily Telegraphnewspaper from Saint John.
Cochrane drily commented that the ensuing scene “would have done credit to Key West, the home of the pirates.”
As some villagers prepared to offload the goods, others ventured below the ship’s deck.
According to Ian Sclanders, who later interviewed witnesses for an article in the Evening Times-Globe:
“When the residents of the Quaco district went aboard the Ann Currier, they found that the inside of the cabin had been wrecked with an axe. The panelling had been chopped from the walls and the boards and splinters lay all over. Why had this been done? Well, nobody knew except those who did it, and they never came back to tell. The cabin had not, certainly, been like that when the schooner left.”
If the villagers were disturbed by the Anna Currier’s crew having disappeared six weeks earlier without a trace and her cabin having been deliberately destroyed with an axe, it didn’t show.
They offloaded the oil into small dories, working in teams to lower the heavy barrels with rope. The dories then rowed the oil up to St. Martins, offloaded onto carts, and transported to homes and farms, where it was hidden.
The Daily Telegraph wailed, “a tramp would not attack a free lunch with more freedom than the people began to appropriate the vessel’s cargo.”
On Tuesday, a ship appeared on the horizon. The authorities had arrived.
Aboard the new vessel, captained by W. Hamlin, were customs officers, a justice of the peace and representatives from H. R. Ramsy, an insurance company based in Saint John.
There are three wildly different versions of what happened next.
The first version came from W. E. Skillen, the justice of the peace. He told the Daily Telegraph a dramatic tale of how the locals continued to brazenly load up and carry off the barrels of oil, simply ignoring the lawmen’s demands to halt.
He boasted that “With more mettle than the lot of them, I climbed on the deck and plainly informed them that I would shoot the first man who entered the hold of the vessel. A thunderbolt would not have suspended operations more quickly than this.”
In Skillen’s version, the locals stood down, and the Anna Currier was recovered.
However, the villagers vehemently disputed Skillen’s story to Ian Sclanders. They stated that while Skillen had indeed pulled a gun on them, they certainly did not retreat. Far from it; they’d laughed in his face and threatened to “tear him apart” if he didn’t back off.
In the villagers’ version, it was Skillen who stood down.
Then came the insurance men’s version of events. William Hamlyn and George Parker dismissed the gun-toting lawman as irrelevant, saying: “As far as Mr. Skillen is concerned, he was not noticed.”
The insurance men denied any hostilities ever occurred. Instead, they denounced the Daily Telegraph for running inflammatory and inaccurate stories. Reminding people that “there is a good deal of selflessness in man,” they stated that they had permitted the people of St Martin’s to take the cargo.
“Pork is indispensable in the woods,” they reasoned, “and besides, there was no opposition to bid, so we could not see the point.”
The insurers said they wanted the oil offloaded to lighten the Anna Currier. With the oil gone and the villagers’ help, they were able to float the boat and tow it back to Saint John.
Whatever the reality of what occurred, the people of St. Martin’s made off with a small fortune. The insurance company’s final accounting showed that the Anna Currier had set off with $12,000 worth of goods. By the time she made it to Saint John, only $2000 remained.
Yet the biggest mystery remained — what had happened to the missing crew of the Anna Currier? Next week, we’ll find out!
About six weeks before she mysteriously washed up on a St. Martin’s beach, the Anna Currier had departed New York City for Saint John on December 5th, 1883. While the ship eventually arrived, her crew was never seen again.
Six days after leaving port, the ship was spotted drifting aimlessly near Nantucket, Massachusetts.
Her captain, 35-year-old William W. Vanwart, had been at the helm. Also aboard had been his youngest brother, 20-year-old Leonard. Their other brother, 30-year-old Ferris, had remained behind on the family farm in Wickham, NB. Rounding out the crew was George Peck, from Saint John, Leslie Brown, from Yarmouth, NS, and one unidentified sailor.
Assuming that something had gone horribly wrong aboard the listless ship, Nantucket fishermen rowed out to investigate.
The night was falling, the weather was getting colder and the wind was picking up. The ship kept blowing down the coast. The fishermen had to row ten miles before they caught up.
The Nantucketians boarded the Anna Currier but found no one aboard.
According to the Boston Globe, “the davits at the stern gave evidence of the boat being hurriedly cast adrift.” The crew had taken the lifeboat, but no one understood why. The ship itself was “first-class condition,” and everything seemed to be in order.
The men explored the dark cabin and found it heavily damaged, with an axe, and “the trunks of the officers showed that they had been hastily rifled through.” The ship’s log, made at midnight two days earlier, didn’t hint at anything having been amiss.
The wind shifted. Fearing the ship would be dashed against a rock, the Nantucketians retreated to their rowboat.
The fishermen rowed back to Nantucket and telegraphed the authorities. When they learned the nearest ship was in Boston, they groaned. The Anna Currier would be long gone by then.
They got back in their rowboat, paddled back out to the ship, took control, and brought her into port themselves.
The Boston Globe reported:
“The vessel is very little damaged, except for the rigging, which is now being repaired. … Nothing has yet been learned about the crew who abandoned the vessel. It is evident that they left in a hurry. The contents of the captain’s trunk in the cabin were tossed around as if he had made a hurried search for some valuables. It is known that he usually kept his gold watch in his trunk. There are several theories as to the abandonment of the schooner but nothing definite is as yet known.”
After Christmas, a team of New Brunswickers comprising customs agents, a justice of the peace and two men working for H.R. Ramsy, the Saint John insurance company now responsible for the Anna Currier, were dispatched to Nantucket to retrieve the ship.
They departed Nantucket on January 18th, towing the Anna Currier back towards Saint John. They’d gotten as far as the Bay of Fundy when a storm hit.
While attempting to find shelter in a cove, the tow rope snapped and the Anna Currier floated away.
When they found her days later, washed up on a Quaco beach, about 200 people from St. Martin’s were offloading her cargo.
The New England authorities’ investigation into what happened to the missing crew of the Anna Currier ended with a simple ruling: “The fate of the crew cannot be determined.”
They offered a theory: “The vessel shipped a sea that scared them and they abandoned the vessel in a fright to lose their lives in the dangerous rips.” The suggestion was that the ship was too close to a hazardous area in high winds, causing the crew to lose control.
This echoed the experience of the Nantucket fishermen, who had been so worried about the ship getting out of control that they had rowed to safety. The report’s implication was that the Anna Currier‘s crew had not made it to the beach.
The Boston Globe was dissatisfied with the investigators’ report, though, pointing out that Captain Vanwart “had been in command of her for a number of years, although a young man.”
The report also failed to explain why the cabin’s walls had been destroyed with an axe.
The Anna Currier was repaired and sold to new owners, continuing to trade for another decade.
“The tale goes,” wrote Ian Sclanders “that the men who sailed her always felt a little uneasy. And no wonder. For a crew of five had vanished from her as completely as though they had dropped off the world. Even the lifeboat in which they had apparently left was never found.”
It was only later that the press realized there had been one additional death associated with the Anna Currier — not aboard the ship, but far away in Wickham, where the last remaining Vanwart brother, Ferris, lived.
As the Anna Currier was being towed back toward Saint John, Ferris Vanwart worked in the woods, his horse-drawn sled nearby.
When the storm rolled in and the Anna Currier was being guided into the sheltered cove, Ferris was deep in the forest, chopping wood.
At the very moment the Anna Currier’s tow rope snapped, a branch broke loose from a towering tree.
It struck Ferris Vanwart, killing him instantly.
As the Anna Currier drifted aimlessly through the Bay of Fundy, Ferris’ horse set off alone, pulling the empty sled behind it. The horse plodded miles through the snow until it arrived at the Vanwart boys’ mother’s house.
The moment Anabel Vanwart saw the riderless horse approaching, she knew that the last of her sons was gone.
Years earlier, her brother Daniel had lent her three sons money to build the ship at his little Gagetown shipyard. But there had been one condition: he would decide the name.
The sons had already known who they wanted to honour. But Daniel had been firm — if the ship was to bear her name, it would not be her married name, Vanwart. It would be the last name she had been born with.
And so, the ship that took her sons’ lives was christened “Anna Currier.”
