Job Done

The Sainte Marie, ice-breaking car ferry, tucked up her gear last week, flirted a rudder at the mush of ice coming down St. Mary's River from Lake Superior, and swaggered back to her winter's work of hauling railroad cars across the Strait of Mackinac. Under her Captain F. A. Bailey and with the aid of tugs she had broken up the river ice and thus released the worst traffic jam in Great Lakes' shipping history.

The freeze on St. Mary's River began the last days of November (TIME, Dec. 13). That was the first time since 1880 that this channel between Lake Superior and the lower lakes had so frozen in November. Vessel owners considered they were taking no undue risks by the late voyages. Underwriters issued regular insurance until midnight of Nov. 30 and special insurance to midnight of Dec. 12, to endure until vessels reached their ports. The Government did not officially close the river locks at the "Soo" until Dec. 16. As the Sainte Marie smashed the ice, sailors aboard the freighters* enjoyed themselves. Some went hunting, walking across the surface ice. Others played pinochle in the warm quarters provided for them. All fed well, said their masters. They were drawing two weeks' extra pay for doing nothing. A fortnight of this and the channel jam was cleared. It would freeze again immediately and block some dozen boats still en route. But the Lake Carriers Association, which had ordered out the ice relief tugs and the Sainte Marie considered the job done. It costs thousands of dollars daily for such work. The pro rata cost is insignificant where there are 200 boats, as there were in the original jam. For merely twelve, the cost is prohibitive.

*Great Lakes freighters are long, na-row-beamed, flattish-decked vessels, modifications of the original roundish-decked "whalebacks." The "whalebacks" were so eminently fitted for transporting bulk cargoes like ore, coal and grain that they became world-famed. So now, in popular usage, "whaleback" is often wrongly applied to any lake carrier. Sculptor Daniel Chester French (designer of the Lincoln at Washington, the John Harvard at Cambridge) followed this popular conception when, in his symbolic group before the unwashed Cleveland postoffice, he placed a whaleback on the arm of Commerce to typify modern lake traffic.