We had to move away from the wharf. All the crew that were on the jetty just slipped our lines and let us back up to anchor. We went out and anchored. Once we anchored, everybody went down below to relax. Twenty minutes later the ship started to bounce on the bottom. We were right up on a shoal. By now it was midnight.

The bottom was sandy and the anchors didn't hold. She drove right up on what they call Piccadilly Head, a rocky shore. The biggest problem was the loss of power when the engine room got flooded.

In fact, I almost lost an arm in it. We were down in the galley getting a lunch after we anchored, and when she brought up on the bottom the partitions started to move inside. My elbow slipped in between the partition and the side of the ship. I had to wait for it to roll back again in order to get my jacket out of it.

The only way to get ashore was to lower a lifeboat on the capstan. There was enough steam left on the boilers to do that. The first boat went in and smashed up against the big ice wall on the shore.

They lowered the second one and that's how we came ashore. But I had to jump in the water up to my waist and claw at the ice pack. Everyone got ashore, but clear of a few bruises, nothing serious happened.

We were frozen when we got ashore. Of course all these ships carried a little bit of black rum. Everybody went up to a rooming house, the staff house, owned by Haliburton. Most of us stayed in there. Mrs. Duffy was the person looking after the establishment.

The ship didn't really break up that night, but later she started to founder, and fell apart. Afterward, there was an awful lot of pilfering because she was loaded with freight. Of course, it was all insured.

She was a total wreck.