Was this story from the 19th century of Canada’s first superhero?

It was while enjoying a Walk ’n Talk presentation on the geological features of Saint John’s Reversing Falls that I first heard retired geologist Bill Gardiner speak of the fable of the Sturgeon Man, and ponder on the fact that he might well be Canada’s first superhero.

The topic came up as Bill was explaining how deep shafts and long tunnels had been quarried into the 30-metre solid limestone walls that hem the St. John River as it enters Saint John harbour under the two remaining of the four steel 200-metre steel bridges that have crossed this point since 1853. Bill explained that anciently, the St. John River had entered the Fundy via the Manawagonish Marsh, about 2 kilometers to the west of where we were standing. After the last ice age, about 10,000 years ago, the river channel changed to its present location and the falls were created.

While this seemed incredible to most, the fact that some of the rock formations are believed to have originated in Africa was even more improbable. Bill explained that in some of the rocks, graphite was found which led to the exploratory tunnel and shafts cut into the stone walls on the east side of the falls, about 30 metres in depth and well under the present Douglas Avenue. While it might have been the tunnels, (widely believed at the time to connect to Howes’ caves 5 kms across the city in Rockwood Park) that led to the story of the Sturgeon Man, that topic did not come up in the talk.

 

Enter the Sturgeon Man

As much as I enjoyed the geological aspect of the presentation, it was the fictional tale of the Saint John lad named Magnus Magure, the Sturgeon Man, that intrigued me the most, and I immediately asked Bill to sit down and share it as best he could. Where did such a tale come from?

Bill explained, “When preparing for the walk, I decided to see what the newspapers of the late 1800s when the graphite mines were being worked would reveal about the geology of the falls area. That is when the story of the Sturgeon Man was found. It was a series of six articles that appeared in the Daily Record newspaper in June and July of 1894, written by Alex Heron. What first caught my eye was a headline, ‘Queer Find in Tunnels Under the St. John Falls.’ I really expected the ‘queer find’ to be some mention of minerals located there that I had not previously known about, but the sub headline that followed, ‘The strange history of Magnus Magure—a man yet a sturgeon.’ was a flabbergasting find.”

Magnus Magure was (again, fictitiously) born in Portland, Maine in 1803 and moved with his family to north end Saint John in 1807. His father fished in the harbour and young Magnus often accompanied him as they drifted for shad and salmon. At age eight, the family noted he had developed unusual layers of skin growth on his neck and took him to a Boston doctor for examination. His condition intrigued the doctor, who published a paper on the matter as Magnus had gills on his neck as well as lungs in his chest for breathing. The doctor could offer no explanation but assured the parents the boy would probably live an ordinary life. When word of his condition got out, Magnus was offered a position with the circus as a sideshow curiosity, but instead chose to return to Saint John.

 

Fabled man’s fabled powers

When he reached his teen years Magure often went out fishing with his dad, and on one occasion fell overboard mid-harbour. The family was sure he’d drowned, but as the tale goes, his gills allowed him to spend hours cavorting with the sturgeon swimming in the harbour. Magnus swam with them upriver as far as the Grand Lakes and Oromocto. To avoid the Reversing Falls, he dove deep into the Devil’s Hole, a whirlpool just opposite Navy Island. The fish preferred this as it led to a tunnel which emerged upriver above the falls near Goat Island. It was in this tunnel that Magnus found four chests on a dry ledge. Each was marked with a symbol, which seemed to portray the stern of a rowboat on which was engraved a woman’s hand with the third finger cut off at the joint; and a dagger seeming to be flying from that hand. The first two chests contained gold, Spanish doubloons, and silks of all kinds. The third contained a short dagger knife atop a Spanish flag, and under these, bars of gold, lying on several items of women’s apparel, within which was a locket with the image of a young girl named Felitia.

Box four proved most interesting of all. Though it was the most difficult to open, it eventually yielded to a pry bar, and inside was “very delicate skin or parchment” on which was written the complete story that Magnus was to use to guide him in returning the treasure to its rightful owner.

It told him that a young woman named Felitia and her mother, along with the four chests, had hired Captain Pietro Alvarez to convey them from Spain to New York on his ship. Unknown to them Alvarez was a pirate who fell in love with the mother—and likely the treasure, as well! Alvaraz refused to take her to her husband in New York. When the ship was off Nova Scotia, Felitia escaped in a rowboat with the first mate as they passed Halifax. From there they sailed to Saint John and hid the chests which Magnus
later found. 

It then became Magnus’s mission to find Felitia and attempt to reunite her with her mother and father. Heron’s last three chapters illustrate how Magnus’ ability to “swim with the sturgeons,” (his “superhero powers!”) made this possible.

 

The story’s origins?

I asked Bill where he thought Alex Heron had gotten his ideas for the story. The tunnels he’d shown us at the falls were, of course, one of the elements at the forefront. Bill said. “I did some digging on Heron and found that through the 1890s he worked for the Progress and the Daily Record newspapers, and later became editor of the Daily Telegraph in Saint John. In these positions, he would have known the city’s stories and geography intimately. He sprinkled his fictional story with names of sites that are true to the maps of the era and area, like Navy Island, Devil’s Hole; of swimming off Round Reef, and laying on the mud flats of Courtney Bay. Readers of the time would have been well acquainted with the sites he used in the story.

The mine operations and the tunnels had been worked for years right under the suspension bridge that everyone used to cross the harbour. Heron also worked in the names of ships that would have been familiar locally, and a connection with Boston and New York to which the city was linked by rail and sea. The papers of the era were full of stories of pirate treasure hidden around the Fundy shores. There were regular reports of the treasures of Captain Kidd, Ned Lowe and Pirate Hall being found here and there, or of pirate ghosts scaring off treasure seekers. The idea he incorporated that the pirate captain refused to take the Sanchez family to New York might have been based on Lady LaTour’s mishaps of the 1640s—a well-known story in the city at the time of a ship’s captain who refused to take her from France to her husband in Boston.”

Though no public reaction to the story appears in the newspapers of the time, it begs the question of whether this was Heron’s only story of this type. Bill commented: “He left Saint John in 1899 and took a job with a Wisconsin newspaper.  I found nothing else of similar nature in the local papers in the years he had remained in Saint John. I was able to trace some of his writing when he moved to Minnesota where he worked for the St. Paul Globe. He wrote some controversial items there but nothing like the fantasy of the “Sturgeon Man.”

My final question was of the initial claim I’d heard Bill make on that Walk’n Talk tour on the embankments of the Reversing Falls. “Does the Magnus Maqure story of the Sturgeon Man qualify him as the first appearance of a Canadian superhero?” Bill’s response was “I would think so, but maybe it depends of your idea of a superhero.

“Through time, there have been many instances of men being considered superheros. This goes back to Gilgamesh, the hero-king of ancient Mesopotamia who undertook a series of dangerous quests. In English history, we have Beowulf, King Arthur, and later, Robin Hood of Sherwood Forest. If you ask most people, though, they will tell you our first superhero was Superman, written by Jerry Siegel and drawn by Toronto artist Joe Shuster. He first appears in Action Comics in 1938 and spawned the comic book genre of superheros.”

One final thought. What became of Magure after his rescue exploits on the high seas between Boston and New York and in the Caribbean? Heron connects his story with another well-known legend, the Lake Utopia Monster, for as the story ends he has Magure saying that, “… after my adventures…I got into Lake Utopia…was fired upon as a sea serpent…but have not since gone into the tunnels under the St. John falls.”