THAIN, JOHN MOUNT (1818-1881)

THAIN, JOHN MOUNT, non-resident sea captain; b. Saint John, c1818, s/o John Mount Thain Sr and Harriet Eilley; m. 1845, Mercy Jones, of Saint John; d. Burrard Inlet, B.C., 19 Feb 1881.

At sundown on 4 June 1847 a boat rowed by four men approached Henderson's wharf in Chatham. A fifth man seated in the stern of the boat hailed people on the wharf and asked to be put in communication with the public authorities. A crowd gathered which included several magistrates. The man said his name was Thain and that he was commander of the 600-ton barque Looshtauk, which lay at anchor twenty miles below the town. He had departed Liverpool, England, seven weeks previously with 467 emigrants bound for Quebec. While at sea 117 passengers had died. Another 100 were too sick to stand, and the members of the crew who were still alive were not well enough to work the ship. He called for medical attendance and fresh provisions.

Supplies were promptly gathered and brought to the wharf. Joseph Cunard offered his steam-powered tugboat to tow the ship to the quarantine ground on Middle Island. The county magistrates met in emergency session near midnight and designated John T. Williston and William Letson as a committee of two to make all necessary arrangements. Cunard agreed to deploy 400 men to the island to erect temporary shelters at no cost to the public. All this and more was done, but there were many problems and tensions. Public health officials refused to board the ship. Three days passed, during which another forty passengers died, but the living were not yet landed. Thain returned to Chatham and warned that if there were any more delays he would run the ship ashore to release the living and bury the dead. He was then allowed to dock. Meanwhile, Dr John Vondy agreed to attend the afflicted on the island. The disease was diagnosed as typhus.

Thain later reported that symptoms of fever appeared in two passengers five days after the ship left Liverpool. By the seventh day eight passengers were affected. After seventeen days eleven of his crew of twenty-four were dead, and all the others except him and his mate were too sick to work. No vessel encountered at sea would lend replacements. In late May he arrived at Sydney, N.S., but the pilot boat pushed off when the sick and dying were seen on the deck, and he could not land. So he sailed on to the Miramichi.

Once the ship was emptied of its passengers and corpses Thain set about with three recovered crewmen to scour and decontaminate it. Soon, however, he too came down with the fever. He was "twenty-seven days on the island, during fifteen of which he was insane." His date of discharge was 23 July 1847. On that date forty-four of the passengers were still in quarantine. Of the 467 passengers, only 220 survived, and only fifty-three were willing to continue the voyage to Quebec in the Looshtauk. The rest were discharged at Chatham.

In 1850 Thain left his home in Saint John and went to California, where he may have taken part in the gold rush. He was living in San Francisco in 1854. In 1858 he and his family settled permanently in Victoria, B.C., as did his parents and several of his brothers and sisters. "His active, burly figure was one of the most familiar features on Wharf Street in the younger days of [Victoria]." He continued to work as a ship captain but not exclusively. In 1862 he and two of his brothers were members of a mining party at Lightning Creek in the Cariboo district. In 1871 a petition was circulated for his appointment as harbormaster of the ports of Victoria, Esquimalt, and Nanaimo.

On 19 February 1881 Thain was found dead in his berth on the barque Princess Royal, which was being loaded with spars at Burrard Inlet. Two days later his brother James M. Thain dropped dead in Victoria, at age fifty-nine. A double funeral was conducted, with a service at the Reformed Episcopal Church, and they were buried side by side. John M. Thain's widow, Mercy Jones, died in Victoria in 1906.