CHAPTER XIV

The Storm of 1912

from THE HUME DYNASTY: AN AMERICAN SAGA by Percival Reeves. Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, 1924.

Of the griefs that came to Edmund Hume in the middle years of his stewardship, none was graver, and none more nobly borne, than the loss of the passenger steamer Iphigenia on the night of the seventh of November, 1912.

The Iphigenia — a four-hundred-and-eighty-foot vessel of the new generation, commissioned by William Hume in 1891 and rebuilt in 1906 — was under the command of Captain Raleigh Hume, a first cousin of Edmund's father's line and a seaman of twenty-five years' service. Captain Hume had risen through the Company by the purest merit; Edmund had been particular, in confirming his appointment in 1906, that the connection of blood should have no bearing upon the thing. "I would rather have the best man," Edmund said at the time, "than the nearest kinsman; but where, by the providence of Almighty God, the best man is also the kinsman, one takes the gift as it is given."

That providence was, in 1912, withdrawn.

The gale that struck the lakes on the sixth and seventh of November was of a severity that the old pilots could not remember equalled in forty years. Wind at sustained forty knots, with gusts to sixty; seas of twenty feet taken over the quarter; rain and sleet that closed the night upon those who were in it as with a curtain. The Iphigenia was one of eleven vessels caught between Cleveland and the Canadian lee. She was, alone among them, lost.

The proximate cause was boiler failure, induced by mechanical stress under extraordinary weather. So the Coroner found, having heard the testimony of the Company's underwriter, of independent survey, and of the crew who survived. Captain Hume went down with his ship. He was forty-two years old. He left no wife, no child, no sister. His mother, who had outlived her husband, outlived her son by six years and died blind, in Edmund's house, in 1918.

Edmund's own grief — "the heaviest thing," he said to this writer, "that I have had laid upon me in this life" — expressed itself not in the tones of public sorrow, to which he was not given, but in the quiet of his work. In the months following the loss, he met personally with fourteen of the bereaved families. He commissioned, at the Company's sole expense, the bronze memorial that now stands at the foot of Quay Three and bears, in the simple lettering he insisted upon, the names of the forty-seven dead. At its unveiling on the first anniversary of the sinking he spoke only the names.

Of the Company's conduct in the aftermath the record speaks for itself. Charles Reddick, the Company's long counsel, discharged every obligation of settlement with the generosity and the discretion that had marked his practice for two decades. No claim pressed upon the Company was denied. No widow, to this writer's knowledge, has made complaint against the Company's treatment of her.

It is given to few men to stand unshaken in the face of such a loss. Edmund Hume so stood. The Iphigenia is, and will remain, the Iphigenia — a name that will always bring the taste of salt and weather to those of his generation. But the Company stood. The Line stood. And in the generation that has followed, Hume Shipping has added to her fleet three new steamers of the modern class, each of them sound, each of them well-commanded, each of them bearing the Hume name down the lakes as it has been borne now for nearly a century.