Marine Disasters and Shipwrecks
by J. P. Andrieux

The 370-ton Welsh brigantine Queen from Swansea left St. John’s, Newfoundland in December of 1867, under command of Captain John Ownes. She was headed for Tilt Cove, which was at that time a mining facility, producing copper.

This was the last time that the Queen was seen. Some days later, wreckage, including a trunk that was positively identified as being owned by Patrick Duggan, the pilot of the Queen, was found in the Twillingate area.

Searches were made along the coast for survivors, but to no avail.

Four months later, a sealing schooner from Leading Tickles was becalmed near Gull Island. Two sealers decided to visit the island in a dory to shoot birds. They made a horrifying discovery. Initially, they discovered the skeletons of two men. Upon further investigation, the sealers discovered a piece of canvas from a vessel’s sails so frozen into a bank of ice that they couldn’t budge it. They cut it open and found beneath a grisly pile of frozen bodies. The captain of the schooner was summoned to the scene and immediately concluded that the mystery of the Queen had been solved.

The sealers rushed to nearby Tilt Cove, where they recruited several volunteers. They returned to the island with axes, crowbars and hastily made coffins – they gave the bodies a decent burial.

The finding of the bodies did not in itself tell the complete story of this tragedy. One of the men on the doomed vessel had kept a diary, giving details of their agony.

Some six days after having sailed from St. John’s, the Queen was in Notre Dame Bay, close to her destination. Suddenly, a violent gale sprang up and the heavy snow reduced visibility to zero. In the early morning hours, the vessel crashed head on into a gulch at Gull Island, beaching herself on a sloping rock. A sailor scrambled ashore and fixed a rope around a rock to keep the Queen from sliding back into the sea. Ropes tied to each crew member enabled everyone to get safely ashore to a high ledge beyond the waves.

At daylight, four men volunteered to return to the vessel in the hope of salvaging food supplies and other materials required for shelter. The four brave men reached the vessel by means of a rope, but no sooner were they on deck, than a wave of unusual size ripped the ship, and the people on the island gazed at each other as the Queen, slowly sinking, drifted out of sight.

The survivors were in a desperate situation; they had no shelter, no food, no water. The diarist described the dreadful misery they were in. He wrote that he would give all the money he ever saw for one drink of water.

He knew that they wouldn’t be rescued, and he wrote instructions to his wife, suggesting that she would have better prospects in the United States than in Newfoundland. He made affectionate farewells to his wife, Margaret, and his children.

It was a long slow death. On Christmas Eve, he wrote, “what a sad Christmas it is for me—snow had come and at last there was some measure of relief from thirst.” To his wife he wrote, “You know I was never robust—I very much fear that I shall be the first victim. If so, you will not have the gratification of getting my body as they will use it for food.”

A day later, he wrote of his terrible thirst and said he was going under the canvas to die. But he didn’t die then, though others were perishing. One by one, they suffered the agonies of Hades and died on their god-forsaken granite prison.

The diary also described how flesh from dead crew members had been consumed. This was the most awful story of cannibalism ever recorded in Newfoundland.