This first-hand account of an 1869 shipwreck and the waterspout that caused it was originally published in the Iowa Register around 1890, and later in the Belfast, Maine Republican Journal. It was dictated by Oliver Winslow Park, second mate on the bark TROVATORE, commanded by Captain James M. Blanchard. Oliver was the son of a Searsport captain, Oliver Crary Park, who died in 1865 leaving a wife and five children, and forcing Oliver, the oldest son, to ship as a cabin boy to help support the family back in Searsport.
Captain Oliver Winslow Park (Ship Captains Collection, LB2008.3.258.)
“One summer day, the year I was nineteen, while I was spending a few days at home in Searsport Harbor, Maine, after a voyage, I was in my mother’s hayfield getting in her crop when a telegram came from Captain James M. Blanchard in Boston, asking me to ship with him as second mate on board the barque TROVATORE.
“Captain and Mrs. Blanchard (Emma W. Pendleton Blanchard of Searsport) were young married people with their first baby, a little girl three or four months old. The baby had taken sick in New York with cholera infantum. The doctor said the only way to save the baby’s life was to buy a milk goat and take it aboard. So they made a little place in the forward house and put the goat in it. Not a sailor aboard knew how to milk. Captain Blanchard knew I had milked mother’s cows from the time I was a little shaver, and he asked me to milk the goat. When the baby needed to be fed I took a cup and went and milked enough for the occasion.”
The journey was mostly uneventful until they encountered severe storms in the Adriatic Sea, including a violent gale and later a devastating waterspout.
“Then I was submerged in water, and knew that the vessel was blown over on her side. The water was coming over me in such torrents that I thought the vessel was upside down and I was under her. But I happened to be on the upper side, and having to catch my breath I found I got a little air, and I hung on. Almost instantly the downpour of water stopped, and it stopped all at once.
“A waterspout is like a tornado that picks up houses, only on the ocean it sucks up water into a big balloon-shaped body of water on a neck. When that neck hits something the water in the balloon comes down.”
Bark TROVATORE (Robert B. Applebee Collection, LB1980.222.465.)
The waterspout struck the ship, capsizing and destroying it. Amid the chaos, Oliver tried to help the captain’s wife and baby, but they tragically died as the ship went down. Thrown into the sea, Oliver narrowly escaped drowning, managed to stay afloat using hatch covers, and survived the night. By morning, an Italian ship rescued him after hearing his calls.
One of only three survivors of the waterspout disaster, Oliver Park shipped back to New York aboard an American brig. His mother had heard the report that the TROVATORE had been lost, and only one officer and two sailors were saved. Captain Greene Park, a captain with whom Oliver had served in the past, had reassured her and the whole neighborhood that “if swimming had anything to do with it I was the officer saved, for I was like a duck in water.”