Steamboats carried tourists and other visitors on Lake George between places including Ticonderoga, Hague, and Caldwell, but on the evening of July 29, 1856, the John Jay left Cook's Landing at 6:00 p.m. with 80 passengers and soon caught fire near Friend's Point when its woodpile ignited. Flames and suffocating smoke spread from the fireroom, the tiller ropes burned away and made steering impossible, and Captain E.S. Harris tried to reach shore before the vessel struck rocks just south of Harbor Islands and nearly capsized. Passengers leaped overboard and clung to floating objects, then the wrecked hull slid back into deeper water and sank. Six people drowned, with rumors of others never found, and in the confusion no one aboard realized the shoreline was only yards away and could have been reached by planks to a nearby rock ledge afterward known as Calamity Rock. Named for John Jay, the steamboat had been built in 1850; it was 142 feet long, weighed 250 tons, and had a 75 horsepower engine that could drive it at up to 13 miles per hour.