Any Listers working on the Stevan Catlay (1609) of Normanton family tree should be aware
of John Potter Cattley and that the family papers indicate that he "died en route to
Quebec" in 1853.
John was the 4th of 9 children to Stephen Robert Cattley (1807-1880) of Stillington,
Yorkshire and his wife Mary Ann nee Potter and born 27/01/1840 at Terrington Yorks yet at
the tender age of 13y 9m he appears on the passenger list of the brand new Canadian
clipper-built 3 masted sailing ship Annie Jane about to commence her first commercial
passenger and cargo passage from Liverpool to Montreal. He was a cabin passenger and
placed under the charge of Jean Francois Cornau age 30 French/Swiss speaker who was one of
a number of a Swiss Missionary Group delegation invited to Canada by the French Canadian
Missionary Society.
The ship was carrying some 430 emigrants in steerage mostly Scots and Irish many of the
former being tradesmen especially carpenters promised employment by The Canadian Pacific
Railway and departed Liverpool on 23rd August 1853 but two days later she encountered
stormy weather which carried away parts of the fore and missen masts and the captain was
forced to head about and regain Liverpool for repairs which he did. It is not reported
how good the repairs were, only that Annie Jane set sail for the second time on September
9th but two days later she again was met with very heavy weather which carried away much
of her bowsprit,fore and mizzen spars and rigging forcing her to heave to for 48 hours
whilst the crew attempted to jury rig a foremast in order to gain steerage control again.
From the 14th until the 28th of September all the time in very heavy
weather the ship continued to drift out of control until in the early hours of that
morning she struck rocks in hugh seas on a lee shore (West beach) on the island if
Vatersay, South of Bara Island in The Outer Hebrides and began to break up almost
immediately with no possibility of launching lifeboats, all were tossed into the sea. Of
the passengers, only 102 got ashore alive as did just 28 of the crew (the Captain was not
one of them) leaving dawn to expose some 350 bodies strewn on West beach.
Those drowned were buried in two mass graves in the grass covered sand dunes above the
beach and it was not until 1881 that a stone memorial to the disaster was erected on their
burial site.
Who knows what horrors those terrified passengers felt in the 17 days between the ship
loosing most of its masts and spars and finally being wrecked in pitch darkness having
drifted out of control for most of the time in mountainous seas. To make the disaster
even more sorrowful is the fact that many of the migrants consisted of whole families with
numerous infants and young children being amongst them.
I note from the the list of cabin passengers who survived, that Jean F Corneau and the
majority of the missionary group were amongst them.
Now, some 162 years later I understand that those who died are now at risk once more of
being exposed by coastal erosion.
Tim Cattley
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Tim Cattley <t.cattley(a)mypostoffice.co.uk>