This boat was coming down from Isle La Motte, the northern island of Lake Champlain with many marble quarries on it and it was coming down with a load of Isle La Motte cut marble stone from the Fisk Quarry. It was coming down in December of the year. So instantly it tells you that this business of freighting goods on Lake Champlain and through the canal was marginal because nobody's going to be out on the lake in December unless they have to be.

So these guys are out there with a boatload of stone, heading for Burlington, on board is the captain, William Montgomery, from Isle La Motte, his crewman, a man by the name of Elijah Goodsall who was a quarry operator and was injured with an eye accident and being taken to a physician, and Montgomery's teenage daughter Cora and her girlfriend from school. We think they were coming to do Christmas shopping. And so they're all coming down the lake, obviously thinking that the passage would be routine when they got engulfed by the 100 year storm.

And that 100 year storm kicked up the winds on the lake to a gale, I mean Lake Champlain in the summertime when it's blowing like that is terrifying. In December its 'your life is about to end'. Eight foot seas smashing this boat which was already fourteen years old and un-insurable. And as they approach Burlington, the stress of the water, the stress of the wind literally cause the boat to break and so the steering mechanism literally failed.

So we know from the record that captain Montgomery ordered his crewmen to throw off the big storm anchor to hold the boat in place while they tried to jerry rig a tiller bar to get some level of control back. And they did that being held by this anchor in the teeth of the storm, they did that. And actually when the boat was found there was this tiller bar with a piece of chain wrapped around it on the steering gear which you know was done in the height of that storm.

Then the crewman presumably crawled forward to the bow of the boat, took an ax, because there was no way to retrieve that anchor, and he smashed through the anchor line with his ax, which we found also on deck, and then that boat turned in the waves and tried to make it to the safety of behind the Burlington breakwater which is what breakwaters are for.

Unfortunately, it just missed. And instead of getting around the southern end of the Burlington breakwater, by several eye-witness accounts, it was lifted by the force of the waves on top of the breakwater and dropped. And it fell back into the trough, got lifted again, and dropped on those ice-covered stones of the breakwater.

And Montgomery realized there's no way we're gonna survive this. This boat cannot get to land. I've got to do something else. I've got my daughter here, I've got these people who are my charge and as the true captain in charge, unlike some of the more modern captains we've seen in a couple of embarrassing situations, this captain took charge of the situation and ordered everybody off the ship when she struck the breakwater next.

And so as she continued to strike the breakwater, knowing that she could not sustain that. Knowing that he had just enough time, hopefully, to get his people on board one at a time they get dropped off the boat onto these ice covered stones. Elijah Goodsall, the wounded man coming from Isle La Motte actually struck his head and was laid unconscious on this site and then by all accounts, captain Montgomery, last to leave the ship, and as he does, that boat settles back in the trough, and sinks.

Now you have five souls on the Burlington breakwater in December, in the 100-year winter gale dying of hypothermia. And they would have all died had not James Wakefield, the ship channeler of Burlington whose business at that time was where the Shanty on the Shore is today, commandeered a 14 foot rowboat used to service the Burlington lighthouses on the breakwater at the time. And he rowed out with his teenage son and he saved all their lives.

I think its a great story, so I tell it a lot.