The story of another John Love
It’s amazing how powerful names can be. My namesakes are my maternal grandfather, Ernest Huntley Clarke, and my great-uncle “Jack” (John Edward Marks).
My surname, Love, goes way back to antiquity, apparently first appearing in Anglo-Saxon records around 1066. I’ve also read some speculation that the name Love may pre-date that time, and come from earlier French or Northern European names that mean “Wolf”.
As a kid, I got a little bit of teasing over my surname, but not that much. As an adult, I became very proud of my interesting name. I chose to try and use it as a reflection of the kind of person I wanted to be: loving.
In my family searches on Ancestry.ca, I learned about an ancestor of mine who was also named John Love. He was born in Perthshire, Scotland, in 1793.
On Aug. 13, 1808, John married Isabella Crammer, not long after his arrival in Prince Edward Island. He was 15 years old then, and his new wife Isabella was 22. (I don’t know why John came across to Canada, or which ship he arrived on.) Isabella was a newcomer to PEI herself, having been born in the American state of Maine.
John made his living as a carpenter, and I couldn’t imagine that he’d have had a lot of money to his name. At the age of thirty, he received a letter informing him of an inheritance from a relative in Scotland, and he booked passage on a tall ship to sail back to Scotland to claim it. He’d sail to Liverpool in England, and then travel on from there to Perthshire in Scotland.
He set sail from Charlottetown on December 24th, 1824, but never even got out into the Atlantic before tragedy struck. The ship he was travelling on, “The Jessie”, was wrecked on St. Paul Island during a severe snowstorm.
“The Jessie, a three masted barque, left Charlottetown on December 24, 1824, setting sail for Liverpool, England. She got caught in a blinding snowstorm sending her straight into St. Paul Island on January 1, 1825. Of the 27 passengers and crew aboard, 23 fought their way through stormy conditions in icy waters and somehow managed the steep climbs up the cliffs onto St. Paul Island. They salvaged whatever supplies they could from the ship and they made a makeshift shelter possibly out of pieces of the wreck. They made fires to keep warm and conceivably to signal to Cape Breton or passing vessels that they were stranded. Winter conditions on this isolated island can be harsh and callous. There are no animals to hunt for food, no plants to eat at this time of year and very little shelter from the wind and snow in the stunted trees. The survivors were left to their own devices. They endured 11 gruelling weeks during the bitter and bleakest time of year on the island. The captain, Donald MacKay, kept a journal of the hardships and their fight to survive. Unfortunately, all 23 lost that fight to survive. MacKay’s final entry was March 17, 1825, in which he states that he is the last living survivor. One can only imagine how gruelling and painful those weeks were.”
“Jessies Cove”, near the Southwest Point on St. Paul Island, took its name from the wreck of The Jessie. Apparently, that shipwreck was the last of the dozens of frequent wrecks at that desolate little island. Not long after the tragedy of The Jessie, a lighthouse was finally built there, after which shipwrecks there were much rarer.
John Love was a relatively young man of 30 when he died from starvation and exposure with his shipmates on St. Paul Island. His widow Isabella lived on in Charlottetowen, PEI, raising his children. She died in 1881 at the ripe old age of 95.
