How the Phoenix sank: an Achterhoek myth

The story of the Phoenix disaster is a family myth, lovingly passed on by my father, now stripped of all decorations and bare. The myth briefly ran like this: once in America a ship carrying Achterhoek emigrants was wrecked and most of the passengers drowned or burned, including distant relatives of ours. The ship was called the Phoenix or the Phoenix, as ships are called in myths.

The where and when were missing, and there were no details other than the name of the ship, except one: the emigrants were almost there when things went wrong.

The myth is not interested in an exact representation of the facts – what matters is only the message, the deeper wisdom that the myth aims to convey. The myth is a guide to life and not bound by time or place. It is a recipe for happiness, or for avoiding misfortune.

What my father, a full-blooded Achterhoeker, wanted to say with the story of the disaster ship – I think now, because I never asked him and he is no longer alive:

1. It is unwise to leave home and hearth.

2. The quest for happiness can easily end in tears, so it’s better not to start.

3. The moment happiness is within reach, it can still slip away, so never celebrate too early.

Destiny

Underneath this myth lay a view of life that can be summed up like this: Life is uncertain. You can trust either God or your destiny, but neither of these you can be sure of having some nasty surprises in store for you, so you better prepare for the worst.

The myth of the disaster ship made a big impression on me. When my father later turned out to have plans to emigrate to New Zealand, I hoped two things: that it wouldn’t go through and, if it did, that we wouldn’t travel by boat. My mother put an end to all doubt: we didn’t go.

Many years later, I learned that the Phoenix myth had firm roots in reality, and that a long chain of oral tradition had stripped away much of the facts, but not the truth.

The disaster really happened, on November 23, 1847 to be precise. The place where it happened was also known: Lake Michigan, about 6 miles from the town of Sheboygan, north of Chicago in Wisconsin, the final destination of the emigrants. A large number of people had died in the disaster, mainly from the Achterhoek; estimates ranged from well over 160 to 250.

Indeed, the name of the ship of misfortune was ‘Phoenix’.

mass psychosis

In the mid-1940s, emigration to the United States spread like a contagious disease in eastern Gelderland, and mainly in the region around Winterswijk. Of all Dutch emigrants to the US in 1846, 32 percent came from Winterswijk and the surrounding hamlets. The area was literally depopulated and employers complained about a shortage of workers.

In 1845 the Gelderse Maatschappij van Landbouw investigated the question and concluded: ‘The urge to relocate will certainly have to be regarded as one of those diseases of the mind which have often set large masses of people in motion.’ There was indeed a kind of mass psychosis. There was intensive correspondence between those who had already left and those who stayed behind, with the central message: come too, it’s better here. That led to emigrant fever; those who could afford the trip left.

But there was more. In the hot, wet summer of 1845, farmers noticed, not only in the Achterhoek but in large parts of the country, that the foliage of their potato plants showed brown spots: Phytophthora – the potato blight – had struck. In the Achterhoek it also turned out that the rye was affected by a fungus that causes ‘rust’. To make matters worse that summer, there was a plague of mice, millions of mice plunging into the wheat stocks.

Three plagues

Potato disease, rust and mice: ‘the three plagues of the Achterhoek’ caused hunger. In the whole of the Netherlands, 53 thousand people died from lack of food. In the Achterhoek, the death rate exceeded the birth rate, for the first time since the medieval plague.

The government was laissez-faire and did nothing. A ‘general day of prayer’ was organized on May 4, but it did not help.

There was another explanation for the exodus. In 1834 the so-called Afgescheidenen had detached themselves from the Dutch Reformed Church. In the area around Winterswijk, the later Reformed had many supporters – presumably because the state church sided with the established order that had little to offer the ‘small people’. The government saw the religious revolt as a threat and introduced numerous discriminatory measures and fines.

Pastor Anthony Brummelkamp (1811-1888) was very active in the Achterhoek. Brummelkamp would nowadays be called a socially critical pastor. In pamphlets he ranted against the inequitable division between wealth, property, for example, and labour. In America, he wrote, it was different: there labor was highly valued and land cost next to nothing.

Many dissenters decided to leave in search of freedom in the New Jerusalem: the US.

goodbye forever

At the end of September 1847, a group of emigrants gathered next to the Jacobskerk on the Markt in Winterswijk. When the caravan of horse-drawn carriages left, everyone, leavers and partiers, knew it was a separation forever.

In Arnhem, the emigrants boarded a paddle steamer that would take them to Rotterdam. There lay the France, an American barque, which transported coffee from America and emigrants from Rotterdam.

On October 27, 1847, the France arrived in New York harbor.

The story is increasingly stripped of its mysteries, the facts take over. In New York, a Protestant minister, Thomas De Witt, was waiting for the emigrants. He put them on the Alida, the boat that carried travelers up the Hudson to Albany, still the state capital of New York. There the next pastor, Isaac Newton Wyckoff, accompanied them further west. From Albany, the emigrants took a barge that would take them through the 384-mile Erie Canal to Buffalo.

In Buffalo, what remained of my father’s myth was bobbing on ropes on the waves: there the Phoenix waited.

The epitome of ingenuity

The Phoenix was a so-called ‘propeller’, a steamer propelled by two screws. It had been built two years earlier at the George Washington Jones yard in Cleveland. The ship surpassed all previous propellers in terms of new materials and inventions. It was an example of human ingenuity, about 50 meters long and 7 meters wide. The steam engines delivered 100 horsepower to the propellers. Operator David Hall said the boiler could withstand greater pressures than any other on the Great Lakes.

The journey from Buffalo to Chicago would take twelve days.

When the Phoenix left on November 11, 1847 with most of the Achterhoek emigrants on board, a storm was in the air. It flared up as the ship sailed up Lake Huron and increased in strength as Lake Michigan stretched beyond the Straits of Macinaw. There, the Phoenix found shelter from the hurricane, on Beaver Island.

After two days the storm had abated and they sailed on for the last leg to Sheboygan.

There is nothing left of the myth here. Much has been written about the Phoenix disaster – although the true course of events has always remained a mystery. The emigrants were on the wrong boat, but why? Who was responsible for their downfall?

Bucket Brigade

The water was as smooth as glass, the night was clear, and the Phoenix was sailing at full speed toward Sheboygan when panic broke out below. The boiler that failed to explode had exploded anyway. A fire started and quickly spread. A bucket brigade was organized, but it had no chance against the fire. It was still 6 miles to Sheboygan.

Heavenly scenes played out on deck. Burning people jumped overboard and drowned helplessly. Others waited for death in prayer. There were two lifeboats—maybe three, there’s uncertainty about that. A merchant by the name of David Blish tried to allay the panic and helped where he could. In a book written 75 years later by amateur historian William O. Van Eyck, also director of the Sheboygan Post Office, The Story of the Propeller PhoenixBlish was described as a ‘shining example of love and sacrifice’.

Once the myth has been reduced to cruel history, the need apparently arises to restore some of its old sanctity to it, in an attempt to make sense of the terrible. David Blish sacrificed himself and ended up jumping overboard with two little girls. the ‘angel of mercy‘ drowned in the icy water. His death was long doubted in Sheboygan: could so much goodness die?

Two lifeboats with 43 survivors on board rowed to the beach north of Sheboygan. The ship the Delaware had taken four survivors on board and towed the wreckage of the Phoenix to Sheboygan Harbor.

Romantic edge

After the horrors, the magic did what it’s supposed to do: add a romantic edge to reality. The Delaware, one of the ships that had set out to rescue the doomed on the Phoenix, passed the site of the disaster a few days later. There Captain Tuttle counted about thirty corpses floating in the water. He noticed that the men seemed to be standing upright in the water, the women floating on their sides and the children on their stomachs. But the strangest thing was that all the bodies were in the water facing north.

Coroner James Berry, who had boarded the wreck the morning after the disaster, was suddenly rich. It was rumored that he had found and taken with him a fortune in gold. With this he bought valuable cows in the east, the first Frisian Holsteins of Wisconsin. The Achterhoek gold would thus have formed the basis of the most important dairy state in the US, with its millions of Holsteins and its renowned cheddar.

The news of the disaster reached the Netherlands and Winterswijk a few days before Christmas 1847. A collection was held there for the victims, which raised 70.35 guilders. They sang Psalm 66: ‘God made way through the wild waves† And broad streams give us a path† There rose his praise on voice and strings/ After he secured us†

The grieving relatives of the victims told each other the story of the Phoenix over and over, omitting more and more details. That mythologizing would continue, from generation to generation; it became a story that kept singing around, also at the counter of the taproom of the Burgerhotel on Stationsstraat in Winterswijk, where my great-grandfather patiently poured beer and listened. And passed the story on to his grandson, my father. Who passed it on to me, his son, who turned it into a novel.