Marysburgh Vortex

The Bavaria is the case the legend rests on, and it has a paper trail. Marine inspectors sat at Kingston in November 1889 under Captain Thomas Donnelly, with R. T. Walkem QC appearing for the Calvin Company, and the Daily British Whig printed the evidence. James Burlingham, fourteen years the keeper at Point Petre, testified that he saw several men in the Bavaria's yawl boat, two of them pulling oars, heading for his lighthouse; that a squall capsized her; that he then saw two or three men clinging to the hull and others clinging to floating sticks of timber; that before the squall he had watched a crewman climb the Bavaria's rigging, as he thought to show a distress signal; and that he went to the nearest station to telegraph Kingston for help. William Burlingham watched the men on the overturned yawl for an hour and three quarters, until the wind shifted westward and carried them out of sight. Alexander Anderson, mate of the steam barge Tecumseh, testified that the man on the yawl “got up and waved his hat”; the engineer Joseph Dawson described him raising his arm to shoulder height and letting it drop, and gave his colouring. The Tecumseh did not turn: with three barges in tow she would not come head to wind. The story that reaches us says the men in the boat made no effort to assist in their own rescue and seemed to be in a catatonic state. The record says they rowed for a lighthouse, waved, climbed the rigging, and were watched for the better part of two hours by people who could not reach them. The rest of the mystery decays the same way. The empty, waterlogged yawl boat was picked up the following day between Main Duck and Cape Vincent by George Bongard of Picton, in Simon Davis's fish tug. The Whig of 1 June 1889 reported that Captain Marshall's body had drifted ashore at Reed's Bay on Wolfe Island. The Bavaria herself was pumped out, towed to Garden Island, sold, and spent years carrying lumber on Lake Huron under an Irish master out of Southampton, Ontario. And the eight were not an “eight-man crew”: one of them was Bella Hauffman, the cook. The Eliza Quinlan is where the errors can be dated. The line about an unknown force is genuine, but it is one sentence in a family memoir: Willis Metcalfe's Canvas & Steam on Quinte Waters (1965) prints Captain VanVlack's account as told to his grandson, and it reads “It was supposed that her compass, through some attraction, led her off her course” - a supposition, decades later, by the man who had the helm. By the time it reached this website it had become a consensus of survivors about “some odd attraction”. The same memoir dates the stranding to 1883; it was 1882, and the Naval Marine Archive notes that the error survived into the second edition of 1968 and the reprints, with no correction in the author's papers. That typo is why every retelling, Cochrane's included, keeps the wreck in the wrong year. Nor did the crew die: they were all saved, and the earlier text on this page had them “sucked back into the storm and lost”. The archive's reconstruction needs nothing unusual - a thirty-year-old vessel with a reputation for being hard to steer, uninsured, on a late-season run in snow and fog, with no patent log aboard and about two degrees of compass course between the landfall she wanted and the one she got. The statistic has an origin too. “More than two thirds of the sinkings on Lake Ontario” is not, as this file used to say, something shipping and insurance records indicate. It is a single unsourced sentence on the companion website of the television series Great Canadian Lakes: “At least 2/3 of the shipwrecks that occurred on Lake Ontario during the schooner and early steam era took place between Point Petre and the Main Duck Islands.” The same page counts “over 50 known wreck sites” off the county's southern shore. Modern counts are of the same order: the Naval Marine Archive documents twenty-five wreck sites in Canadian waters from Presqu'ile to the Upper Gap, and the Lake Ontario National Marine Sanctuary lists forty-one on the American side. The magnetic anomaly is real, and it is a hole in the lakebed rather than a vortex. Charity Shoal, at the mouth of the St Lawrence Channel, is a bedrock-rimmed circular basin about a kilometre across. Armour and colleagues, surveying it in 2024, measured a magnetic low of roughly 570 nT over the centre and an annular high above 600 nT, and read the structure as a buried simple impact crater older than the Ordovician rock that covers it. Against a background field of about 600,000 nT over Lake Ontario that is some two parts in a thousand - enough, the Naval Marine Archive judges, for a few degrees of compass deviation in the immediate vicinity, which is why the shoal was given a lighted buoy in 1900 and a lighthouse in 1935. Canada's Sailing Directions for the Great Lakes warn of magnetic disturbance in two places on this lake: a six-mile stretch outside Kingston harbour, and the water near Tibbetts Point. Neither of them is the vortex. Cochrane's book has been read page by page by the archive that holds the region's records. It gives the lake's deepest point as almost 850 feet “from which nothing returns”; the deepest point is 802 feet and lies more than 100 km from the St Lawrence Channel. It has the freighter Protostatis vanish on her way to the sea; she grounded twice, and was broken up at Valencia, in Spain, in July 1966. By page 160 it has reached for the Edmund Fitzgerald, which sank in Lake Superior. Kenn Feigelman, the Kingston marine archaeologist working these wrecks, told the Picton Gazette in May 2022: “The Marysburgh Vortex doesn't exist. It's a figment of someone's imagination.” The Ontario historian Marc Seguin told Global News in 2021 that the loss of every ship on Lake Ontario could be explained by natural causes. One last thing, about where this article came from. English Wikipedia nominated its “Marysburgh vortex” article for deletion in August 2014 as “completely unreferenced”. The discussion closed as keep, but only after an editor cut the text by five sixths, writing that he had “removed all the cruft propagated by UFO/paranormal/sensational books/websites and original research (i.e. a detailed list of ships, the sinkings of many of them dubiously attributed to the so-called vortex)”. The Spanish article was never cut: it is a complete translation of the English text as it stood in January 2012, and it still carries Spanish Wikipedia's own banners for sourcing, neutrality and geography. The earlier text on this page was a paraphrase of that Spanish lead, and it inherited one of the geography errors: it placed the “Sophiasburgh Triangle” at the western end of Prince Edward County, at the entrance to Presqu'ile Bay. Sophiasburgh is on the Bay of Quinte, at the county's north-eastern edge. Presqu'ile Bay is in Northumberland County, further west again. The source both articles were paraphrasing had put the phrase where it belongs, near Brighton and Cobourg.