Every once in a while I put one of these up, It’s a midweek motivator e-mail that I get from Tim Moore managing partner for Audience Development Group.
On the Northwestern University campus near the shore of Lake Michigan, an unobtrusive bronze plaque memorializes an incredible act of heroism on the part of one of the university’s divinity students. In the tintype of time, Edward Spencer’s actions on a late summer night in 1860 have all but faded, excepting those who find interest in Chicago’s little known maritime history.
The Great Lakes have swallowed over 2,000 vessels since record keeping began. Those who only fly over the Great Lakes but never sail them want to view these bodies of water as “lakes,” ignoring Melville’s acknowledgement, “These inland seas have drowned many a midnight ship and their shrieking crews.” On a late summer night in 1860 when excursion boats were popular for Chicago residents and their families to escape the city’s heat, The Lady Elgin was a mile off shore when a sudden squall roared up pushing waves to 6 feet. Then disaster struck as the Elgin collided with another ship, collapsing bulkheads and filling the doomed ship with water.
Recognizing his passenger manifest and crew were in grave danger, Captain Jack Wilson threw himself into saving as many families as possible. Life jackets were tossed to desperate passengers in the darkness, and rafts were thrown over the side as the Elgin sank lower in turbulent Lake Michigan seas. The captain perished, last seen lifting a child onto a raft.
On shore, spectators along the Evanston coastline gathered to watch the tragedy unfold. Among them, Northwestern student Edward Spencer, transfixed at first, began swimming out into the storm to rescue anyone he might grasp midst the building seas. With no regard for his own life, Spencer’s dauntless swimming rescued one, then another, then two children alone on a raft. Fifteen times he plunged into the water, and fifteen times he saved whomever he could reach from the cold clutches of the Lake.
When Spencer collapsed from exhaustion and exposure, spectators built a fire on the sand, dragging Spencer to warmth and shelter. Stiff and weak, he huddled around the fire until he saw a man drifting toward the shore grasping something. The sight inspired one last effort, and Spencer plunged back into the foaming surf for the sixteenth time. The final people he saved were husband and wife. Spencer’s body was bruised and bloodied and the young divinity student was delirious. Over and over, obsessed after watching so many go to their deaths he asked, “Did I do my best–did I do my best?”
Edward Spencer saved 18 people from the surf, and years ago when considering graduate school at Northwestern, I stopped to see the small monument erected in Spencer’s honor. What does this account have to do with today’s state of the American condition? “Little,” you may answer, and you might be right. Still, somewhere embedded in most of us is the long simmering sinew that in an instant of moral, professional, or life-threatening crisis, the existential rises to consciousness and we ask ourselves, “Did I do my best?”
