Great Gardenia is No More: Schooner Days CCCC (400)

SHE was the last queen of a proud line, the cutters of the Royal Canadian Yacht Club fleet. Gardenia was her name.

Long and noble was the succes­sion. The old iron Rivet, built be­ fore the days of steel, built before the club was organized eighty-seven years ago, was the first.

The followers included the first Canada, which raced before the Prince of Wales, our King’s grandfather, who saw the regatta here in 1860 — Clyde-built cutters such as the great Madge and the Toronto Verve and the Chicago Verve, the little Cyprus, the Yama and the steel-hulled Vreda—Gloria from the Solent, winner of the Coupe de France in the Mediterranean— the grand Aileen and the Dinah and Zelma and Vedette and Chinook and Aggie and Merrythought—the second Canada, which won the Can ada’s Cup, and the Strathcona, which lost it, apparently irretrievably. A noble line, mostly slim-flanked, long- legged, long-horned, with topsails tall as the stovepipe hats which were the style in the good old days of Queen Victoria.

Chief characteristics of the cutter rig were the three-piece plan of her headsails, spread by a long straight bowsprit which could be “reefed” or shortened by running inboard, and the high topsail, stretched above the low wide gaff­ headed mainsail by a jackyard and lady-yard or “club,” which ex tended its area far beyond the gaff and above the topmast. Gardenia had them all.

Gardenia, launched in 1907, was the last yacht to sport the clubtopsail on the Great Lakes. She kept hers high till the last race of the club in 1938. She kept it aloft after her last war-worn mainsail split from leach to luff and cost her that race and closed her career. Gardenia died game.

Now, with all the modern tumlaren and metre-yachts and marconis, rigged as sloops, ketches, schooners and yawls, preening themselves for the opening races of the season to-day, Gardenia lies in the Royal Canadian Yacht Club marine yard, two little heaps of chips.

That is all that is left of her, ex­cept her cabin-top, suspended from the uprights of the carriage upon which, as in a tumbril, she went to her death; and the nine-ton lead-mine of her ballast, which lies like a huge hammer head ten feet below. The long tapering sixty-foot hull, with its double skin of mahogany, its delicate ribs, its finely moulded keel, stempiece, horntimber and deadwood, and its sweep of holy­ stoned mahogany-trimmed brass-cleated deck, has vanished as completely as though it were made of invisible glass.

This illusion is encouraged by the chance position of the cabin top, exactly where it was in relation to the ballast when she was hauled out for winter storage.

“She was no that bad,” commented Jock, of the Vision, “that she wad a-gane oot under they lads in a blaw. She was a weel-built boatie, and ther was life in her yet. But she was wearin’ awa.” He silently selected one of the long bronze bolts that had fastened her nine tons of lead ballast to her deadwood. It had snapped in two under the wringing of the rudder and its share of the weight of eighteen thousand pounds. The other bronze bolts, sticking up from the leadmine like dandelion stalks, were as good as the day they were cast. “They cost $200 when put in,” said an owner. “And the lead cost $2,000.”

Gardenia was the fine flower of William Gardner’s genius, blooming after he designed the great three-master Atlantic, holder of the ocean record. Atlantic’s 12 days, 4 hours, 1 minute from Sandy Hook to the Lizard, 3,013 miles, in the race for the German Emperor’s Cup in 1905 has yet to be beaten. Gardenia was a sketch or study for Gardner’s America’s Cup aspirant Vanitie, but she was a masterpiece.

She raced with varying fortune on Long Island Sound from 1907 to 1910, and perhaps onwards, and was brought to Lake Ontario by M. A. Kennedy of Toronto in 1913.

The mild-mannered flaxen-bearded “Matt” Kennedy was not a hard driver, but he won hosts of friends and many races. Aemilius Jarvis took her to Lake Erie for him that same year and cleaned up at Put­ in Bay.

A blue pendant inscribed “Winton Trophy” hung in the skipper’s state­ room until Gardenia was broken up. It was one of four bags full of rac­ing flags which Gardenia had won, yellows, reds and blues. She had so many there was not room to string them all when dressing ship. This one, from Lake Erie in 1913, was the only one on permanent exhibition. The Winton Trophy is still sailed for by the Cleveland Yacht Club.

Next year was the war, and Gardenia’s lead ballast went to make bullets to beat the Germans. She was out of commission for eleven years, until 1925. Then, in order to rehabili­tate the First Division of the club, Commodore George H. Gooderham, into whose hands she had passed, restored her, ballast and all, to her original state. He found purchasers in a syndicate headed by the late Frank Brentnall, Honor­ary Treasurer of the club. E. K. M. Wedd, then Fleet Captain, and one of the new owners, was unanimously chosen as racing skipper, and he sailed Gardenia in all but two of the hundred and fifty races she sailed in the fourteen seasons the Wedd-Brentnall syndicate had her. Gardenia only missed two races in all that time. She stayed at her moorings twice as a mark of respect when death entered the circle of the syndicate.

That syndicate, rising to eleven members at one time, had shrunk to five through death and removals when Mr. Brentnall died in 1937. A serious operation prevented another member from sailing the following year, and at the end of 1938 another member had to drop out. The five survivors, Messrs. E. K. M. Wedd, A. F. R. Sowdon, B. E. Howard, T. F. Livingstone and C. H. J. Snider, had to decide between completely re-rigging and re­ building the outworn Gardenia and carrying on with three active members, or winding up. They had too much affection for the craft which had served them so gal­lantly for fourteen seasons to turn her over as a houseboat or tow­ barge, and they did not feel like making a Sunnyside spectacle of her. So they stripped her carefully of sails, spars, rigging and all moveable fittings, stored these in a “show room” at the club, and before the 1939 season opened rapidly and methodically reduced her hull to chips, burning these as the piles grew.

They are receiving much more for the salvage of the hull and gear than they would have been able to get for the whole assembled, or as a gutted hull and junked outfit.

The full-rigged cutter’s mast is a large and desirable flagpole; the twenty-seven racing sails—all but the two torn mainsails—are useful for all sorts of craft; the cabin fit­tings find ready purchasers. One member of the National Yacht Club has already bought $250 worth of material for a yacht he is outfitting. The lead and the bronze can wait until the price is right. In fact, the major item left to be sold is the cabin-top, which will save the right man hundreds of dollars. Gardenia was built for racing, and the cabin trunk, although usually kept in position, could be lifted off and replaced by a racing hatch.

No yacht ever had greater capa­city for making friends than Gar­denia. It seemed inherent in the ship. Her keenest rivals were her greatest admirers. Commodore Norman Gooderham, nine times defeated by Gardenia for the season’s championship, was always pulling for her, right up to the minute she blew out her last racing mainsail and retired. He had the more satisfaction in winning the championship three times from her himself, with his fine schooner Yolanda.

If Gardenia’s owners raced hard they always tried to win on the water and not under a protest flag, and to put up a good fight whether they had any chance of winning or not.

She was also an hospitable ship. Few members of the Royal Canadian Yacht Club, whether juniors or sen­iors failed to be taken out again and again in her either, both in races and cruises. She always had a racing crew of ten, sometimes fourteen, and there were seldom more than six owners aboard. The remainder of the crew would be guests. Gardenia never had difficulty in finding a volunteer crew. Skipper Wedd’s only trouble was in holding the number within the prescribed limit, And in fourteen seasons of fluctuating membership in the syndicate there was never a hard word.

Forty people have been entertained aboard her for an afternoon sail, and that was certainly twice too many for any one occasion. But there was room in Gardenia’s heart for all, however crowded her hull might become. She had berths for seven in her saloon and stateroom, but ten could sleep aboard in comfort, by using the cabin floor and cockpit. That left the forecastle free for the two paid men she carried on cruises.

There was only one Ontario trophy open to her which Gardenia failed to win, and that was the Freeman Cup, for the long-distance race in the Lake Yacht Racing As­sociation program. It was not for lack of trying, for, like the dog Aemilius Jarvis once sold, she was a “diligent hunter.” Year after year she would race the length of Lake Ontario for that Cup, to be baulked by some lucky little yacht finishing hours after her with a fat time allowance, or some sturdier contender profiting by her increasing years. She had two permanent pumps and one portable and towards the last she used them all and often.

But every other available trophy she won again and again. Her crew were proudest of the Prince of Wales Cup, raced for annually by the whole Royal Canadian Yacht Club fleet. Gardenia won it twice in her old age. She also won Queen’s Cup thrice, and the Boswell Trophy, another long-distance free-for-all, in the club on two occasions.

Other “rotating cups” she won several times, almost as often as they were offered for her division—the Lorne Cup and the Cosgrave Cup and the Marlatt Trophy and the Mackinac Trophy and the C. A. B. Brown Trophy, and the Smith Cup and the Olcott Cup. She was champion in her division—the First—in the Royal Canadian Yacht Club in 1925, ’26, ’27, ’28, ’29, 1930, 1934, 1935, 1936, and three times champion in her division in the Lake Yachting Racing Association.