Flies and Flags -- and Lord Dufferin's Escape: Schooner Days CCCVI (406)

by C. H. J. Snider

WHEN schooners thronged the lakes their characteristic decoration was a long slim cone of bunting streaming from the main and mizzen trucks.

This was called the fly. It was a wind-finder or vane, to give the helmsman the direction of the wind. Saltwater schooners still use a similar telltale, but smaller in proportion.

Nova Scotian fishing schooners, last of a queenly race, use a different system of masthead garniture. These are highflyers, shortened to highs in common speech. Like our lake flies, they are attached to light staffs, hoisting above the truck, but they are flat flags, sometimes square, sometimes swallow-tailed, and sometimes triangular, and usually of two colors. They are small, about three feet long and half as wide, and they differ from our lake usage in being worn at the foremast and mainmast trucks. We never used a fly at the fore, although some schooners had metal weather-cocks at the fore truck.

A lake schooner a hundred feet over all might have a fly 12 to 18 feet long. The cone of bunting would be attached to a pole as long as itself. It would be opened by a hoop at one end eighteen inches in diameter, and closed at the other by a smaller hoop or ring two or three inches across. Pole and fly would be hoisted to the truck or finial of the topmast in such a way that the pole stood upright with the fly at the top, clear of the topmast. Flies had an annoying habit of wrapping themselves around rigging in a calm.

The fly might be bright red, bright blue or bright green, or two of these colors combined, or any one of them combined with white. Its shape was meant to funnel the wind through. The fly would function with very little wind and in a breeze would stand out firmly as though made of metal. It neither rippled like a flag, nor had the under-stuffed sausage appearance of the wind-socks now seen in flying fields. These wind-sleeves are the nieces and nephews of the old schooner’s fly. Major T. D. Hallam sailed with the writer in schooner days, and when he was placed in charge of the Felixstowe base in the Great War he remembered the flies at the lake schooner’s trucks and installed something like them for the guidance of his aircraft in making landings. So the sock was born.

Flies were for use more than ornament. For decoration on Sundays, holidays, the captain’s birthday, and such high occasions, our schooners used four flags — the union jack, the red ensign, the houseflag, and the burgee.

The latter was utterly unlike a yacht’s burgee, which is a small triangular flag usually bearing the insignia of her club. The schooner’s burgee was from thirty to fifty feet long, ten feet on the hoist, and tapered to a swallowtail. It might be any color, but was usually white, with colored borders, and the name of the vessel in large colored letters streaming down the middle of it. The houseflag was a large oblong flag bearing the emblem of the owner, often an initial, sometimes the captain’s name. It might be of any colors desired.

The union jack was probably used quite improperly, for only King’s ships wear the union jack afloat. The flag commercial vessels may use is the pilot jack, which is the union with a white border. It was never seen on the lakes, unless in yachts, and not often there.

Our schooners sometimes also improperly ran up the union jack to the foretopmast head as a signal that a tug was wanted, but the usual signal for a tug was striking the fly; that is, lowering it half way down the topmast. Then the Frank Jackman or William Wright or Charley Ferris would leave his berth in the shade of the elevator and go snorting up or down the harbor for the customer. Towbills ran from $3 one-way for the little fellows to $25 return-trip-and-docking for big canal-sized vessels, and at that the tugmen made little money.

In a three-masted schooner the houseflag would be flown at the foremast, the burgee at the main, the union jack at the mizzen mast head, and the ensign at the mizzen peak, but the order, as proved by the many colored pictures of schooners which survive, was not very rigidly observed, except that the ensign was flown abaft the other flags.

There is an old portrait of the Sarepta, of Port Hope, extant. In it a big red ensign is flying from the mizzenmast head and a large flag with Captain James Peacock’s name on it from the mizzen peak, that is the end of the mizzen gaff.

Few schooners possessed international code flags. They were seldom seen either for signalling or for decoration, in lake sailing vessels. Usually the builder presented the ship with a set of colors, the four flags above mentioned, at her launching. As the flags were only used on state occasions they sometimes lasted the vessel’s lifetime. But a set of flies, being continually used, would only last a season.

As a distress signal, schooners used the ensign upside down, hoisted half way up the rigging, or anything that would attract attention. Sometimes it was the cabin table cloth. Sometimes the cook’s petticoat. Often the schooner in distress was one that had worn out all her “colors” long before.

Few bothered the vessels over what flags they were flying or how they were flying them, unless some misguided patriot tried to tear a national flag down. That’s what they did in Charlotte once to the Fleetwing, when out of courtesy she hoisted the Canadian red ensign on the Fourth of July. The Old Man stood off the crowd of raging dock-wallopers with his revolver, and kept his colors flying till sunset. “Red Onion” Desmond once brought on another riot by flying a green flag in the Cornelia in a Canadian port on the Twelfth-of-July. But official interference for flying improper flags was rare.

Not so in the olden days. In the 1820’s a new schooner, the John Watkins, celebrated a holiday at Kingston by flying the set of colors presented to her for her launching by a Mr. Harris of York, a friend of her owner in Toronto. Navy Bay was still the base for the Royal Navy, and an armed gig promptly put forth from Point Frederick, boarded the schooner, hauled down the flags, and took them away. The owner and the master, Capt. Thew, protested to headquarters and then ate very humble pie indeed. It appeared that he had been flying naval colors, not mercantile ones, through his own ignorance and that of the donor of the launching set. Commodore Barrie or whoever was in command at the station threatened him with fine and imprisonment. The owner and the master humbly apologized for their awful crime, and the flags were handsomely returned by the navy— but they were never again worn by the John Watkins.

An incident somewhat similar and ending in a fine and confiscation is said to have occurred in Toronto harbor, one of the early steamers being the offender.

One would expect the one and only Royal Yacht Squadron to be sticklers for flag etiquette, but it may be news to members of our premier yacht club, the Royal Canadian, as well as the public, that the improper use of certain flags on a yacht here renders (a) the man who hoists one, (b) the master, and (c) the owner if on board, liable to fines of $2,500 each.

You may laugh, but that’s the law.

The blue ensign, of which we are so proud, does not come as a matter of course with membership in any yacht club, nor in a yacht club with the prefix “royal" to its name. To use that ensign the owner of the yacht must obtain an Admiralty warrant, and these are obtainable only on certain strict terms. They used to be issued from Whitehall, but Whitehall refers you to Ottawa since the statute of Westminster. Without such warrant club membership of itself is of no avail, and the warrant is only effective while the owner to whom it is issued is on board or in effective control of his ship.

To take a concrete example, when Mr. Duggan takes his ketch Kingarvie down the lake, he properly flies the blue ensign. But when he leaves her at her summer station at Collins Bay, in charge of her professional crew, she flies the red ensign, as a properly registered vessel under the Merchant Shipping Act, until he returns to her from Montreal or wherever he has gone.

Once when Queen Victoria was at Cowes in the Royal Yacht, and the guardship was in the Roads, there appeared a small yawl, sailing about with the flag of the Warden of the Cinque Ports at the main, the standard of the Vice-Admiral of Ulster at the mizzen, and the White Ensign (which is the distinctive badge both of the Royal Navy and of the Royal Yacht Squadron) at the peak. You have seen the cartoon of "The Man Who Bathed From the Steps of the Royal Yacht Squadron” and the havoc he caused? Flagpoles tying themselves in knots, signal guns going off by spontaneous combustion, yachting caps popping up like corks from commodoreal heads? Well, something like it happened on this occasion.

The signalman in the guardship reported to the lieutenant of the watch, the lieutenant reported to the captain, the captain began to call away the starboard cutter to sink, burn or capture the offender against the lawful use of flags, when someone consulted the signal book and cried: “Avast! ”-

Although one of the flags resembled the Royal Standard itself, the book said there was one yachtsman entitled to fly them all. This was the Marquis of Dufferin and Ava, Governor-General of Canada, Viceroy of India, Ambassador to Constantinople? Vice-Admiral of Ulster and Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, all at one or several times.

And he was out there in the Solent in his little yawl, single-handed, having a good time in his diplomatic holidays. He could do everything from the cockpit of that yawl alone, even cat the anchor. “He was an unwearying theatre goer, and would sail from Cowes to the mainland, see a play and afterwards sail back to Cowes, by moonlight or not, ” writes J. B. Atkins in his Further Memorials of the Royal Yacht Squadron. He would heave his yawl to on the starboard tack and go to sleep, knowing his tides and winds: and right-of-way so well that he had little concern about collision or stranding.

Lord Dufferin died in 1902. His countess, for whom America’s Cup challenger, Countess of Dufferin, from Cobourg, was named, lived until 1936.