Death at the Helm.

Cromwell Argus, Volume V, Issue 237, 26 May 1874, Page 7

Death at the Helm.

The Detroit Free Press says:—On Sunday morning, December 14, two farmers and their families who were driving to Maiden to attend church, when about eight miles below, or east of the town, saw a ship's yawl on the lake heading toward the beach about a half mile away. They could plainly make out a man in the stern sheets steering the boat with an oar, and although there were no vessels in sight the morning was so pleasant and the aea so smooth, that it was supposed he had put off from shore to pick up something, and but little attention was paid to the yawl. Passing the same spot on their return the men found the yawl hard on the beach, and the man sitting stiff and motionless in her stern, lifeless, and frozen hard as a rock. He sat bolt upright on the seat, the oar out behind and both hands clasping the handle, and it required hard work to wrench it from his death grip. There was about a foot of water in the boat, but the craft did not show rough usage. The man's legs were almost covered with ice as far up as his knees, and the spray had dashed over his back and shoulders and frozen there. There was no name on the boat, and the person who brought the information to Windsor could not say that anything was found on the person of the man to reveal his identity, nor to show how he had been cast adrift. He must have been dead at least three days or more. There was neither sail nor mast to the boat, and nothing in it but one oar, showing that the poor fellow had not intended a long trip anywhere, and that he must have been blown off the shore. He had used his oar to keep before the wind, and had frozen to death on his seat, where he was so firmly held by the ice that it had to be broken with stones before he could be pulled off.