Abolitionists found it desirable to have waterway extensions of their secret lines. Boats, the captains of which were favorable, were therefore drafted into the service when running on convenient routes. Boats plying between Portland, Maine, and St. John, New Brunswick, or other Canadian ports, often took these passengers free of charge.[225] Thomas Garrett, of Wilmington, Delaware, sometimes sent negroes by steamboat to Philadelphia to be cared for by the Vigilance Committee.[226] It happened on several occasions that fugitives at Portland and Boston were put aboard ocean steamers bound for England.[227] William and Ellen Craft were sent to England after having narrowly escaped capture in Boston.[228]
[225] Letters of Brown Thurston, Portland, Me., Jan. 13, 1893, and Oct. 21, 1895.
[226] For letters from Mr. Garrett to William Still, of the Acting Committee of Vigilance of Philadelphia, notifying him that fugitives had been sent by boat, see Still's _Underground Railroad Records_, pp. 380, 387.
[227] Letter of S. T. Pickard, Portland, Me., Nov. 18, 1893.
[228] Still, _Underground Railroad Records_, p. 368; Wilson, _Rise and Fall of the Slave Power_, Vol. II, p. 325; _New England Magazine_, January, 1890, p. 580.
On the great lakes the boat service was extensive. The boats of General Reed touching at Racine, Wisconsin, received fugitives without fare. Among these were the _Sultana_ (Captain Appleby), the _Madison_, the _Missouri_, the _Niagara_ and the _Keystone State_. Captain Steele of the propeller _Galena_ was a friend of fugitives, as was also Captain Kelsey of the _Chesapeake_. Mr. A. P. Dutton was familiar with these vessels and their officers, and for twenty years or more shipped runaway slaves as well as cargoes of grain from his dock in Racine.[229] The _Illinois_ (Captain Blake), running between Chicago and Detroit, was a safe boat on which to place passengers whose destination was Canada.[230] John G. Weiblen navigated the lakes in 1855 and 1856, and took many refugees from Chicago to Collingwood, Ontario.[231] The _Arrow_,[232] the _United States_,[233] the _Bay City_ and the _Mayflower_ plying between Sandusky and Detroit, were boats the officers of which were always willing to help negroes reach Canadian ports. The _Forest Queen_, the _Morning Star_ and the _May Queen_, running between Cleveland and Detroit, the _Phœbus_, a little boat plying between Toledo and Detroit, and, finally, some scows and sail-boats, are among the old craft of the great lakes that carried many slaves to their land of promise.[234] A clue to the number of refugees thus transported to Canada is perhaps given by the record of the boat upon which the fugitive, William Wells Brown, found employment. This boat ran from Cleveland to Buffalo and to Detroit. It quickly became known at Cleveland that Mr. Brown would take escaped slaves under his protection without charge, hence he rarely failed to find a little company ready to sail when he started out from Cleveland. "In the year 1842," he says, "I conveyed, from the first of May to the first of December, sixty-nine fugitives over Lake Erie to Canada."[235]