Kate Doupe did not want to go. She was filled with dread, certain that the ship she was on would soon be going down. But the decision to disembark was not hers alone to make.

Years later, her pleas to her new husband to leave the vessel would be one of the most vivid stories surrounding the horrendous loss of the steamer Waubuno and all aboard her on Lake Huron's Georgian Bay in 1879.

Kate was a Scottish-born schoolteacher. On October 29, 1879, at age thirty, she married a twenty-nine-year-old physician William Doupe, in the southwestern Ontario farming centre of Mitchell. A few weeks later the newlyweds arrived in the southern Georgian Bay port of Collingwood, Ontario, with all their possessions. They were to board the 135-foot sidewheel steamer for a passage of some sixty nautical miles up the bay to Parry Sound. From there, they would travel overland to the village of McKellar, where Doupe would set up practice.

George Plumpton Burkitt, the thirty-two-year-old captain of the "Waub," had been trying to leave Collingwood since Tuesday, November 18, but the passage was repeatedly scrubbed by bad weather, including snow and fierce winds.

Holding over in Collingwood was costing Burkitt's employer money, and this only increased the pressure on Burkitt to get on with it. The Waubuno was owned by the Collingwood-based Georgian Bay Transportation Company. Its president was Charles Cameron of Collingwood, a self-made man who owned much of the property in the town. The ship, which had been built in 1865 by the prominent Beatty family of Parry Sound, was already slated for replacement. And it was being challenged on the Parry Sound run by the new propeller-driven Magnettawan, owned by the Georgian Bay Lumber Company of Port Severn. The Magnettawan too was in Collingwood, waiting out the weather.

The Waubuno left Collingwood on Friday, November 21, only to be forced back into port by the weather. Three scheduled sailings would now have to be served by one, on Saturday. The season was rapidly drawing to a close. Any further delays would mean absolute losses in the number of revenue-generating passages before Collingwood's harbour closed on December 7. To delay her departure yet another day would be unthinkable.

Newlyweds Kate and William Doupe spent at least two nights on board the ship in Collingwood harbour. At some point during the extended layover, Kate was traumatized by a vivid nightmare. In it, the...