A life well lived - Captain Dan Seavey

From Classic Wisconsin:

The Life & Crimes of Dan Seavey
Dan Seavey stepped ashore the docks of Grand Haven, Michigan, armed with two of the most dangerous weapons known to man: booze and bad intentions.

It was night of June 11, 1908, and by daybreak �Roaring Dan� was sailing into maritime history as the pirate of the Great Lakes.

Stealing a 40-ton ship and doing battle with a federal cutter will earn you that reputation.

Shanghaied in Grand Haven
Like all Great Lake ports, Grand Haven�s harborside nightlife was ripe for a guy like Seavey, a sailor not above switching buoy lights to send ships aground so he could �salvage� the cargos after the crews departed. Nor was he opposed to running boatloads of poached deer, or using his ship as a floating whorehouse, or dropping a piano on an adversary�s head.

With a fully stocked jug, Seavey easily befriended three marks that fateful June night - the crew of the Nellie Johnson.

One thing about sharing a jug: You never know how much other guy is drinking.

Seavey allowed his companions to incapacitate themselves, likely faking his own swigs from the jug. With the crew literally under the table, Seavey commandeered the forty-ton Nellie Johnson, fully loaded with cargo, and set sail across Lake Michigan.

It took a day or so for the Nellie Johnson�s skipper to convince authorities he hadn�t merely lost track of the ship in his drunken stupor.

Meanwhile Seavey was shopping his ill-gotten booty in Chicago, where the big city harbor was teaming with folks who would buy his goods no questions asked.

The harbormaster, however, had his suspicions. Maybe it was Seavey�s assertion he had won the ship and its expensive cargo of cedar posts in a poker game. Perhaps it was Seavey�s companion, a known counterfeiter with an outstanding arrest warrant in his name. Either way, Seavey ran up the Nellie Johnson�s sails and departed Chicago rather hastily. With that, the alarm went up and down the Lake Michigan shore: That reprobate Dan Seavey had pirated the Nellie Johnson.

Piracy was a capital offense in 1908.

Capt. Preston Ueberroth of the U.S. Revenue Cutter Service in Milwaukee took the call, telling reporters, �I was asked to set out on a hunt for the man.�

With a federal marshal on board, Ueberroth ordered the steamer Tuscarora loaded with coal and prepared for a chase.

A chase he got.

A great story -- they do not make them like they used to (see here). My only nit is this line towards the end:

At his core Seavey was a master of the lakes, and it�s not a stretch to picture the land-bound old sailor gazing from a nursing home window, looking east toward the waters of Green Bay, imagining the roll of the waves and the snap of the sail, the luminescent Milky Way overhead, a dependable schooner underfoot, the humid summer night heavy with scent of kelp, and through the mystic, the distant clang of a channel buoy calling him home.

Kelp is a salt water brown alga. The foul-smelling fresh water green alga that plagues Lake Michigan is Cladophora(PDF).