Editor’s note: Mark Bushnell is a Vermont journalist and historian. He is the author of “Hidden History of Vermont” and “It Happened in Vermont.”
The small flicker of light might have seemed innocuous, pretty even, set against the darkness of Lake Champlain during the early morning of Sept. 5, 1819. But the flickering soon became the spark that would ignite the worst maritime accident in the lake’s history.
John Howard was the first to notice the light and realize it meant trouble. Howard was one of 45 passengers and crew aboard the Phoenix, a steamboat headed from Burlington to Plattsburgh, New York. A little after midnight, when Howard saw the first sign of flames, the boat was far from land.
Howard may have been the first to see the glow, because he had reason to be especially vigilant. He was carrying a valuable package that night. The Bank of Burlington had asked him to carry $8,000 to Montreal. Burlington bankers knew him as the 50-year-old proprietor of the city’s Howard Hotel and entrusted him with what was a vital but seemingly simple errand. Suddenly, it was becoming much more challenging.
Howard rushed to wake the other passengers, who were segregated into a gentlemen’s and a ladies’ cabin. Men and women poured out on deck in their nightclothes with whatever other clothing they managed to pull on in their haste.
Among those awakened was Richard Sherman. Like Howard, Sherman had added reason for concern. The Phoenix was normally captained by Sherman’s father, Jehaziel. But he was at home, sick in bed. Tonight, the Phoenix was Richard’s responsibility. He was only 21 years old.
The fire apparently started in the pantry, at the center of the boat. Crewmembers had just finished a meal and one of them had evidently left a burning candle untended on a shelf. To make matters worse, the pantry sat near the boiler. In the four years since the Phoenix’s launch, heat from the boiler had dried the pantry’s woodwork. When it ignited, it burned like kindling. Flames soon reached oil from the engine and the whole center of the boat burst into flames.
Howard stood on deck, clutching the carpetbag containing the bank’s funds, while his 18-year-old son Daniel, known as D.D., helped Sherman try to recover other money that had been stowed in the captain’s office. They managed to climb over the wheelhouse, but found the office enveloped in flames. A steady breeze from the northeast fed the fire. The boat was clearly doomed.
Within about five minutes, 20 people, including all the women passengers, had been lowered into the starboard lifeboat. As they were boarding the lifeboat, the stewardess, a Mrs. Wilson, hurried back to the ladies’ cabin to fetch their belongings. As the lifeboat shoved off, Wilson chose to stay on board to help load the portside lifeboat, which was large enough to hold the remaining passengers and crew.
People immediately began boarding the port lifeboat and Wilson ran downstairs, this time to gather her own things. After only 14 people had made it into the lifeboat, someone cut the line securing it to the Phoenix, stranding 11 others aboard the burning steamer. Elias Hall of Rutland was in that lifeboat and later said it was John Pierson of Shelburne who cut the line. Others claimed it was the engineer, identified only as MacVane.
The nearest land was Providence Island just off South Hero, two miles away. When people aboard the lifeboat demanded that they return to rescue the others, MacVane allegedly threatened to “knock the first man overboard who should rise to make the attempt.”
Those left on the Phoenix knew the water was their only chance. John Howard, who had sent D.D. in one of the lifeboats with the moneybag, remained onboard with the young Capt. Sherman. The two began throwing benches, tables, boards, anything that would float, into the water. One by one, the stranded passengers and crew jumped or were lowered into the water, climbed aboard one of the makeshift rafts and prayed for salvation. Someone helped Mrs. Wilson onto a pair of settees.
Sherman was the last one onboard. Three-quarters of the 146-foot-long boat was on fire when he jumped into the water and climbed atop a table leaf. Sherman saw another survivor, Austin Wright, floating in the distance and shouted to him that he was trying to paddle to nearby Stave Island.
Meanwhile, the passengers and crew in the two lifeboats were rowing for Providence Island. Once they reached it, most of the passengers spilled out onto the land. D.D. led one of the lifeboats back toward the burning Phoenix in search of survivors, leaving the moneybag on the island. Col. Harry Thomas of Burlington led the other boat back. Soon, they pulled John Howard and three other survivors into their boats. When they located Austin Wright, he told them where Sherman was heading. They found the captain floating on his table leaf about 500 feet from Stave Island. He had been in the water a little more than two hours and was only partly conscious.
“When I came to my senses,” he said later, “I found myself in the bottom of the boat, and at once ordered my men to put about and go to the wreck in hopes of saving others.” They rowed once around the blazing Phoenix and found no one. Swimming was far from a universal skill in the 19th century. Even many sailors couldn’t swim. Nor could Mrs. Wilson. Waves knocked her into the water and she drowned, as did five others that night.
In the hours after the fire started, the abandoned Phoenix drifted for miles and finally ran aground on Colchester Reef, where it burned to the waterline. (Today it rests on a slope in 60 feet of water at the bow and 110 feet at the stern.)
People in Burlington had seen the burning boat. Residents gathered clothing and provisions for the survivors and took them to the wharves. In the early light of morning, several boat captains sailed their sloops in search of survivors, finding them on Providence Island. Learning of the tragedy, Grand Isle residents also ferried supplies to the island.
One of the passengers, described in accounts merely as “an Irishman,” was particularly eager to catch a ride back to Grand Isle. (Whether the man truly was Irish or the description was the result of the pervasive anti-Irish sentiment at the time is unclear.)
The man had taken advantage of the chaos that prevailed on Providence Island that night to steal the bank’s money. Once he reached Grand Isle, he planned to catch a ferry to New York State and disappear.
Despite his harrowing experience, John Howard hadn’t forgotten about the money. He dispatched another son, Sion, to fetch it. Learning that it and one of the passengers were missing, Sion set off in pursuit. He caught up with the thief near the Grand Isle ferry. The man allegedly pulled two knives and threatened Sion, who grabbed a nearby fence stake and told the man to surrender. On this day, for some reason, one fence stake trumped two knives. The thief returned the money to Sion.
In the days after the disaster, rumors spread that the blaze had been no accident. The Phoenix, some claimed, had been sabotaged by competing shipping interests. Relations between the owners of sailing ships and the steamers were not good. Gideon King, a Burlington shipping magnate, had been known to sail one of his several boats around the Phoenix and yell insults to its crew about how slow their steamboat was. But King’s taunts belied his worries. The new steam-driven boats, of which the Phoenix was only the second on Lake Champlain, were a true threat to sailboats. They were larger and more dependable, since they did not rely on the wind to move.
Like the fire aboard the Phoenix, rumors about the cause of its demise eventually died down. Today, historians generally believe the fire was the cause of nothing more sinister than a candle.
