Jack Dyre was jolted awake by an unknown voice he described as “harsh and eerie” hissing at him: “Dyre, leave this ship!” Considering he was alone on the vessel, Jack Dyre was more than a little alarmed.
He looked around the schooner named The Union. It was anchored offshore of St. Martins, New Brunswick, where the rest of the crew was spending time with their families. Because the cook was from Sussex, he got stuck guarding its load of lumber.
With a deep sense of trepidation, he crept around the ship, but found no one aboard.
“Dyre, leave this ship!” the disembodied voice again ordered.
Jack Dyre didn’t know what to do, so he nervously chain-smoked until he fell asleep. Soon, Carol Spray wrote in her New Brunswick folklore book, Will O’ The Wisp, he was awoken by a disembodied shout: “DYRE! LEAVE THIS SHIP!”
Jack Dyre wasn’t going to argue. He grabbed his stuff, hopped in the little boat, and furiously rowed for the safety of St. Martins.
The Union’s Captain John E. Kelly spotted Dyre on the wharf. The fearful cook announced he wasn’t going back aboard, recounting the story of the scary voice.
Kelly dismissed Dyre’s tale as nothing more than a bad dream.
The captain didn’t much care if Dyre quit, either. New Brunswick’s economy was in a slump. He could find a new worker quite literally anywhere — even at the village’s spelling bee, where he met competitor Emma Bradshaw’s father, William, and hired him on the spot to be The Union’s new cook.
The next morning, Monday, August 5th, 1889, at 7 am, The Union set sail, bound for Shulee, Nova Scotia. Aboard were Captain Kelly, first mate Frank McDonough, sailors Nelson Smith and William Bradshaw, and the freshly hired cook replacing Jack Dyne, whose name was also William Bradshaw. (Although both William Bradshaws were from St. Martins, they were not related.)
It was a beautiful, sunny day. Along the shore that afternoon was a young boy named Frederick Maine Cochrane. Half a century later, he sat down with Telegraph-Journal reporter Ian Sclanders and recount what happened that day.
Cochrane remembered counting 40 sails on the Bay of Fundy that afternoon. Then something strange happened.
All forty ships stopped.
The wind had gone comepletely still. Meanwhile, overhead, a storm was brewing.
Without warning, the skies opened up in a fierce rainstorm. Captain Kelly dashed away from The Union’s wheel, venturing below deck for his oil slicks.
In the galley, Captain Kelly passed sailor Nelson Smith and the new cook, William Bradshaw muttering aloud to himself: “I think I’ll put on my boots…”
“The words were no sooner out of his mouth than there was a violent lurch and The Unionseemed to be dropping through space and spinning around!” Cochrane recouted.
Dazed, Kelly watched the surreal scene of Nelson Smith’s “nimble feet carry him … like a lumberjack keeping his balance on a spinning log.” Smith landed on his feet — on the ceiling.
Kelly found himself lying flat on his back on the ceiling. The floor was above him. Everything was upside down.
The Union had flipped over!
The freshly hired cook, William Bradshaw, stood up on the ceiling. He looked around the upside down room. Then, as if in a daze, Bradshaw grabbed the handle of the galley door and pulled.
A rush of water crashed into the room. Kelly could only look on in horror as Bradshaw was sucked into the sea.
Next, Nelson Smith was sucked through the galley door. Kelly watched in dazed amazement as Smith was bounced by the sail like a human pinball, and sent flying through the water into a railing, which he bounced off and out of sight.
“I waited a moment to collect my thoughts,” Kelly told the Daily Telegraph newspaper in an interview three days later, “then swam for the door.”
Kelly swam through the galley door, and promptly banged his head on the boom. He told reporters he “swam on past to the bulwarks, got over the rails, and finally on the run of the vessel where [I remained] till the boat came from the shore.”
St. Martins’ fishermen were already rowing up to rescue the mystriously-upside-down schooner.
After only ten minutes, the storm disappeared. The sun was shining when the rescue-fishermen arrived. They found Smith and Kelly sitting atop The Union’s upside-down hull. Despite being on deck when the ship flipped, Frank McDonough and sailor William Bradshaw were never seen again.
Under the water, the fishermen saw William Bradshaw, the cook who had been hired the night before while attending his daughter Emma’s spelling bee.
His lifeless body was caught on the ship’s upside-down sail.
A tugboat named Lily was nearby. It dragged the upside-down schooner to St. Martins. Hundreds of people lined the shore to gawk and speculate.
No one knew what to make of it. “She is a new schooner, launched only two months ago,” noted the Moncton Daily Times.
F. M. Cochrane said that even the hardened fisherfolk who had spent their lives at sea couldn’t figure out what happened:
“It just couldn’t have happened — there was absolutely nothing to cause her to turn over. … There was no wind, no squall to capsize her. There hadn’t been a ripple on the bay. … And not a sail on her was started; nothing was torn away. … It just couldn’t have happened, they said.”
Captain John E. Kelly believed that lightning had struck the water next to The Union, causing a deep pocket that the ship had rolled into.
“In almost half a century, nobody has been able to think up a better theory,” wrote reporter Ian Sclanders after interviewing F. M. Cochrane. “What happened to The Union still remains as great a mystery as what happened to the better-known Marie Celeste. Even if you accept the lightning theory, there is still this other mystery of the voice that struck terror into [Jack] Dyre and caused him to leave the ship in the middle of the night before the day this strange thing happened. Was some supernatural force at work? Or what?”
