The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #172056   Message #4163686
Posted By: GUEST,Wm
27-Jan-23 - 02:28 PM
Thread Name: Reuben Ranzo
Subject: RE: Reuben Ranzo
This seems like another independent reference: VEINS OF IRON: THE PICKANDS MATHER STORY, Walter Havighurst, 1958, page 41. Link at archive.org.

Down the lakes went the rich Gogebic cargoes. They averaged 60–65 per cent iron, with 2 per cent silica and .03–.04 per cent phosphorous—all well within the Bessemer limit, and the furnacemen were clamoring for Bessemer ore. To carry the tonnage Pickands Mather bought additional shares in the Ketchum and new interest in the steamers Robert. R. Rhodes and Samuel Mather, both of them wooden vessels, 246 feet long, built in Cleveland in 1887. The Rhodes had a roomy forward cabin with a large square pilothouse and square portholes; she had a clear cargo deck with masts fore and aft and a tall black stack at her stern. The Samuel Mather, the first of four vessels to bear this name, had three masts and topmasts for auxiliary sail and twin black stacks for her twin boilers. She had cabins fore and aft and a deckhouse amidships, housing the lamproom and quarters for the firemen. She towed the barges Red Wing and Newcomb, under canvas. On the Mather they ran the halyards to steam winches and made sail with a clatter, but the barges used manpower. Over the water came the old halyard chantey:

They paid us off in Liverpool,
Ronzo, boys, Ronzo—

In those years the fo'c's'les were full of shellback sailors from the coast. The first Samuel Mather had a short life. In a thick fog in 1891 off Port Iroquois in Lake Superior she collided with the steamer Brazil loaded deep with iron ore. She sank like a stone.