Thomas Bolt, Jacob Penwell and William Keating managed to drag their injured captain into a lifeboat with them. Two of the crewmen -Leslie Rogers of Grand Bank and Arthur Bond of Frenchman's Cove - were killed and Ralph was seriously injured. The first shell struck the schooner, quickly followed by another. It was just at daybreak when, without warning, they were fired on repeatedly. 514 was lying in wait 1,900 kilometres east of Bermuda. On his second trip coming back from the Caribbean that year, with a load of molasses, Ralph was not so lucky. The crew of the Helen Forsey fed and cared for the ship's enlarged company of fifty for seven days, while dodging and avoiding other enemy submarines, before they arrived at Burin. While being observed through a U-boat periscope, the captain altered course, stopped his ship and rescued 44 of the 47 crew members. It was 80 years ago - at daybreak on Ap- on a return trip from the Caribbean, about 1,600 kilometres south of Newfoundland, that Ralph spotted wreckage and lifeboats of a recently torpedoed British merchant ship, the S.S. The years of the Second World War, with German U-boats prowling the North Atlantic, were exceptionally dangerous for Newfoundland mariners manning the small wooden schooners carrying salt fish to Caribbean and European markets.Ĭaptain John Ralph and his six-man crew of Grand Bank, in the 167-gross-ton schooner Helen Forsey, had two encounters with enemy submarines within a six-month period of 1942. The vessel's wreckage was found scattered over a wide area on Nov.

3, 1955, along with her seven-man crew, after leaving Roddickton on the Northern Peninsula en route to North Sydney, N.S. The 95-ton Grand Bank schooner Mabel Dorothy was mysteriously lost on Nov.

Schooner or later