what's in a picture BY JOSHUA F. MOORE High and Dry A liner's captain underestimated Frenchman's Bay in 1936. V isitors to Bar Harbor are used to seeing passenger minesweeper USS Owl had already begun building a wooden liners, whether it's the stately Queen Victoria, which cribwork, at left, to help the ship float free when the tide rose. will visit this fall, or one of the less glitzy cruise (They also constructed a wooden patch for the eight-foot-long ships that drop by each summer. But rarely do peo- gash that the grounding had created in the bow.) A local skip- ple get as up-close a look at a big boat as when the Eastern per's launch, Narmada, sits tied to the ship's gangplank, having Steamship Company's 408-foot-long Iroquois ran aground on removed Iroquois' 144 passengers, most of whom slept through Bald Porcupine Island early on the morning of July 13, 1936. the accident and awoke to this surprising spectacle. Everything had been going like clockwork for Captain Walter For those who remained aboard and for the spectators on the Hammond when he weighed anchor at 3:30 A.M., believing his shore, however, the liner's predicament was great fun. In addi- ten thousand-ton ship could handle the strong ebb tide that tion to the crewmen (one of whom appears to be quaffing a drink) would whisk it out of Frenchman's Bay and on its way back to gathered just below Iroquois' painted load lines are several chil- New York. But amid a thick fog Iroquois ran hard aground before dren and a couple of well-dressed rusticators. A rope dangles from it could gain momentum. Soon the rapidly falling tide put the the bow, probably used to lower tools to the crew below. Above ship high and dry just a half-mile from downtown Bar Harbor, them, nearly two-dozen people lean over the railing, among them despite Hammond's desperate blasts for help on his foghorn. a bonneted woman, third from the bow, and a uniformed gent Among the many locals who ventured out to see the stranded who might be Captain Hammond himself. We will never know steamer was local photographer Sewall Wesley Brown. By the the nature of their conversation, though it might well have time Brown had set up his camera the navy sailors from the involved the need to take somewhat better care when driving. 136 WWW.DOWNEAST.COM Apr'09