I can remember, quite vividly, my grandmother in Greenspond telling me about the wreck of the Ella M Rudolph. She would sit at the kitchen table a recite from memory:

There were seven ship’s members lost that fateful night, including:
- Skipper Eleazer Blackwood;
- Bertram Blackwood (the Skipper’s eldest son);
- Harry Blackwood (the Skipper’s middle son);
- Walter Attwood;
- Joseph Vivian;
- Samuel Carter (uncle of Bertram, Harry and Duke);
- Noah Vivian; and
- Mary Jane Abbott, who was the ship’s cook.
Carter’s and Vivian’s bodies were never found.
Blackwood’s third son, Duke, age 20, was the only survivor.
The Bay Roberts Guardian reported the news of the sinking this way:
Friday, December 10, 1926: The Schooner Ella M Rudolph, Captain Eleazer Blackwood, met disaster Dec. 6th, near Catalina, in the southeast blizzard which raged in that section. The vessel with the Captain, his sons, Henry, Albert and Duke, four other men and a woman, left St. John’s for Greenspond at 6:30 Monday. The following morning the news of the disaster was learned from Duke Blackwood, the sole survivor. The sturdy ship was dashed to pieces on the rocks, Mrs. Blackwood, the captain’s wife, and child, who were in St. John’s, left by train the morning the vessel left. This is another terrible tragedy of the sea which has befallen the citizens of Greenspond and which has cast a gloom over the whole country.
Just to add a little surrealism to this story, the night that the Ella M. Rudolph went down, Elias Burry, a lay reader in the local church, was lying in bed.
“Suddenly my door opened and in walked a soaking wet Samuel Carter, my good friend. He (Carter) stood in the middle of the room for a few seconds and then departed without saying a word.”
Little Catalina was first settled in the late 1700s or the early 1800s to cut wood for boat building. By 1845 it was a well established inshore fishing community of 195 people. Being so close to Catalina, Little Catalina depended a lot on the economic and social sphere of the larger community. Like many other small communities, Little Catalina suffered severe loss of life to marine disasters. The Great Labrador Disaster and a series of shipwrecks claimed the lives of many causing widows to run 26 percent of the households in the community by 1891.
Kenneth Rogers
Thank you so much for your rendition of the Blackwood Schooner. Eleazear Blackwood is my Great Grandfather. Carrie Standfield is my Grandmother
Kenneth Rogers