Beaten, starved and abandoned to the bitter Arctic ice, the young Scottish stowaways who lived to see their tormentors jailed
THE Arctic light was failing fast when a scream came from the brooding seas that stopped the old woman in her tracks. Staring back at her from the inky blackness was the terrifying vision of a pale-faced wraith in ragged clothes who appeared to be hovering above the water and waving a club around his head, begging for help.
Fighting the strong instinct to flee from this diabolical apparition, Catherine Ann MacInnis suddenly recognised in those hoarse cries an echo of the Scots accent she had left behind when her family emigrated from Loch Morar in Inverness-shire to this remote spit of Newfoundland.
This was no ghost, she quickly surmised, but the survivor of some terrible tragedy at sea. Tragedy it was, but certainly no accident. Making out other voices in the darkness, she shouted back that help was on its way.
For 16-year-old Davie Brand and his stricken friends, it seemed their long nightmare was finally at an end. They had endured torture and starvation at the hands of merciless sailors before trekking more than ten miles across ice floes punctuated by huge ‘lanes’ of open water in the hope of salvation.
Frozen and snow-blind, they faced certain death on the Canadian wastes until Mrs MacInnis spotted young Davie as he stood on a tiny iceberg trying to paddle it into the safe haven of St George’s Bay.
Six lads had set out on the perilous journey after being put over the side of a cargo ship named the Arran, which had become embedded in the offshore ice. Two of the boys died – one drowned and the other succumbed to sub-zero temperatures.
Within hours, the rescue vessels launched as a result of the woman’s alarm had plucked the remaining four to safety.
Within weeks, the boys who had stowed away on the vessel in Greenock a month earlier, would begin the 3,000-mile journey back to the Clydeside port, where their testimony would put their tormentors in the dock, to face charges of murder and unspeakable cruelty.
This year marks the 150th anniversary of this shameful chapter in Britain’s maritime history, and commemorations are taking place on both sides of the Atlantic while a new memorial recounting the boys’ tale of misadventure has been unveiled at the point where Catherine Ann MacInnis came to the aid of the ‘Arran Stowaways’.
Her great-great-grandson, Don MacInnis, was present at the unveiling ceremony in St George’s Bay, where he admitted he was ignorant of the tale until a descendant of the stowaways knocked on his door 25 years ago looking for relatives of the MacInnis family.
‘I didn’t know anything about this horrendous story – that six boys had been thrown off a ship here and that two of them had perished on the ice,’ he said.
‘The story had been lost to our family. It was quite a shock.’
Mr MacInnis added: ‘It’s not easy to see four little boys from a mile away especially at 7.30pm. If they’d arrived, say, a half hour later, they probably wouldn’t have been seen at all – they were really, really fortunate to survive.’
News of the scandal broke in July 1868 when disturbing news reached the people of Greenock concerning the fate of the boys who had vanished when the Arran set sail three months earlier with a cargo of coal and oakum bound for Quebec.
Stowaways were regarded by mariners as a ‘plague’ and two had already been discovered and removed from the ship during a routine search while it was still in the Firth of Clyde.
It was only when it was out at sea and beyond recall that a further seven stowaways emerged from their hiding places.
The seven – John Paul, 11; Davie Brand, 16; James Bryson, 16, Bernard ‘Barney’ Reilly, 22; Hugh McEwan, ten, Hugh McGinnes and Peter Currie, both aged 12 – had no food and no spare clothes. Two of them – Paul and McGinnes – were barefoot.
ACCORDING to a detailed account of the affair, written in 1928 by Greenock historian John Donald and entitled The Boys on the Ice, all they wanted was to escape their povertystricken lives, with only a vague notion of where their escapade might take them.
The wooden trading vessel was under the command of Captain Robert Watt and First Mate James Kerr – two ‘kind church-going men’, according to character witnesses at their trial – who would later be revealed as monsters.
The men were brothers-in-law and Watt was said to be easily swayed by Kerr’s coarse, unfeeling, and dominating nature.
They would manacle the boys, starve them and flog their naked bodies until their skin looked red and raw – like ‘tartan’.
They would force them to sleep on the coal, exposed to the elements of the Atlantic.
Finally, they would dump them overboard, with nothing but a ship’s biscuit each for sustenance, and compel them to make a journey which none of them should have survived.
Initially, it seemed, the boys would be treated humanely. They were set to work and fed in return but when they became seasick and were laid up for four days, their unhygienic state proved the catalyst for the officers’ wickedness.
Bryson was the first to suffer Kerr’s brutality after the first mate decided to ‘clean’ him. ‘I was stripped of everything but my semmit (vest) and lashed with a half-inch leadline,’ Bryson later recalled, adding: ‘The captain had his turn.’
When the boy ran screaming from his ordeal, he was forced to lie naked on the deck in Arctic weather and doused with buckets of freezing water.
Captain Watt ordered that the boys should not be fed, declaring if they couldn’t hold meat down, he would not waste it on them.
Fortunately, they had a friend in the cook, William Saltoun, who secretly supplied them with scraps of food, but few other crewmen were prepared to defy the captain and first mate.
For a month, Watt and Kerr vented their anger on the stowaways until the vessel became locked in desolate icefields off the coast of Newfoundland.
IT was thought too far distant to consider trekking to the nearest landfall at St George’s Bay. The ice was broken and pitted with large holes. One of the crew would later declare that he had found a walk of quarter-of-an-hour to be ‘pretty hard’.
The greatest danger, however, was that the ice did not stretch to the shore. There was a mile-wide lane of open water between the land and the edge of the floe.
Nevertheless, on a clear, freezing cold May morning, Watt and Kerr decided they had had enough of the stowaways. Only Paul Currie, whose family was known to the mate, was allowed to remain (he would die of consumption two years after he returned home). The others were ordered off.
While Barney Reilly and James Bryson were willing to risk their lives to improve their hellish situation, the younger boys were almost hysterical with fright. Paul begged to be allowed to stay and clung to the rail until Captain Watt struck him a heavy blow and he fell to the ice below.
All appeals for mercy were met with the brutal reply: ‘You may as well die on the ice as on the ship.’
The ship’s crew of 24 all felt the boys were being sent to their doom, but none stepped in to prevent it. They only intervened to ask if the condemned stowaways could be given something to eat.
Each received some coffee, a small piece of bread and a biscuit. The trial of Watt and Kerr would hear that the ship had been provisioned for three to four months and carried a sizeable quantity of grain.
The journey became a nightmare. Paul and McGinnes, who had no shoes, suffered dreadfully and it was only a matter for time before someone died.
McEwan was the first to perish. Three times he fell into the water. On the third occasion, he did not resurface. His widowed mother in Glasgow had sent him on an errand; he had run away to sea, and this was how it had ended.
For his companions, there was no time for grief. Worn out and starving, they toiled on for hours until McGinnes lay down on the ice and declared he could go no further.
His friends urged him to go on, but his legs were too swollen to walk. The dying boy begged his friends to stay with him, but if they had, they would have died.
They left him lying on the ice. ‘We heard him greetin’ when we were a
long way off,’ one told the trial of Watt and Kerr.
By the time they reached the mile-wide expanse of open water that still separated them from the shore, their clothes were ‘frozen on their bodies like boards of wood’.
Reilly offered to swim across but was persuaded otherwise. Instead, Brand clambered onto a piece of ice with a club for a paddle and made for land.
Finally, more than 12 hours after being put off the ship, he was spotted by Mrs MacInnis, who raised the alarm.
The survivors were all frostbitten to varying degrees and snow-blind for almost a week.
Tales of the horrors on board the Arran swept like wildfire around the Canadian fishing communities. Once recovered, the Arran Stowaways were given free passage home on the brigantine Hannah and Bennie, owned by Provost James Johnston Grieve, MP for Greenock, who gave the captain strict instructions that they were to be treated royally.
Barney Reilly elected to stay behind, travelling to Halifax, Nova Scotia, to work on the railroads. The other three arrived back in Greenock on October 1 to a heroes’ welcome. Watt and Kerr, by contrast, had been met by an angry mob on their return on July 30 and were immediately arrested.
They were initially charged with murder and the stowaways appeared as key prosecution witnesses at their trial on November 23, 1868, at the High Court in Edinburgh.
In the end, Kerr pleaded guilty to assault while Watt was convicted of culpable homicide.
Shown leniency because of ‘previous good character’, Watt was jailed for 18 months and Kerr for only four months. The sentences were met with hisses from the public gallery.
Both men would resume their careers after serving their sentences, although Watt is said to have died at Pensacola, Florida, a year or two after his release.
And what of the surviving stowaways whose lives they deemed so unworthy of saving?
James Bryson emigrated to the United States, where he worked as a street car conductor; John Paul became a foreman riveter and father to 12 children, who eventually moved to work at Southampton docks; and Davie Brand, who saved his friends’ lives by risking his own that dark May night, emigrated to Australia where he founded a successful engineering firm.
WHEN he died in 1897, the North Queensland Herald paid fulsome tribute: ‘Energetic, foresighted, and shrewd in business and public affairs, Mr Brand was true as steel, large-hearted, and affable in private life.’
The boys’ remarkable story has already been turned into a graphic novel for schoolchildren and a special exhibition has been mounted at the Inverclyde Heritage Hub in Greenock.
And last month a piper led a 100-strong crowd down to the spot at St George’s Bay where Catherine Ann MacInnis is said to have first spotted the boys.
Davie Brand’s great-grandson, also David, a retired Presbyterian minister from New South Wales, was present and made a speech before three new information kiosks telling the story of the stowaways and their miraculous rescue were unveiled.
He told reporters: ‘What a great day. The sun shone into every heart. We are so glad we came from Australia to share in this. The memories will last forever.’