Amboy Shipwreck
The grey November chill leeches into your bones as you carefully pick your way through junk shrubs along the shore of Lake Superior. At your feet, the treacherous lake stones — dry and loose on one side, shiny and slick on the other.
Halfway between Duluth and the Canada border rests the weathered remains of an unsung shipwreck. She was called the Amboy, and she bore the iron-ore that was the lifeblood of Minnesota at the turn of the last century.
In 1905, in the wounded and wounding month of November, a storm grew big enough to steal a name: Mataafa. The victim of this theft was one of many ships that fell to wind and rain on the 28th, including the Amboy, a schooner-barge under tow of The Spencer, a wooden steamship with two decades on the lakes.
Today is a mild, average November day on Lake Superior. The cold wind buffets you mercilessly and icy droplets hit you, mysteriously from all directions. You see no sign of life, no sign that there ever was something called life on this desolate shore.
Yet there before you is the keelson of the Amboy, for all the world like the spine of a leviathan: beached, rotted, petrified. She ran aground with The Spencer on that November night with the wind shrieking and the rain lashing and nothing to be seen except the dull darkness of the last hours of your life.
Somehow, the crew of both vessels survived; a tale doubtless enlarged by the telling portrays heroic fishermen from nearby Sugar Loaf Cove wading into the hungry dark blue for a desperate rescue attempt. Perhaps the tale is true, but the details, like the rest of the Amboy, have been lost to the wind and rain of history or carried off by men who do not tell their stories.
