Mary Jane of Bergen: Schooner Days CVII (107)

Though improvements have transformed it from a wide basin crystal clear to a turbid tank, concrete lined narrow, with ice and iceboating gone galley-west in the wake of smashing tugs and channel currents - still, what a wonder-port we have in Toronto Harbor!

What flags have visited it in this prosaic year of 1933!

The Elsa Eseberger, of Hamburg, with peanut oil from Denmark under hatches and the Nazi swastika and German black-and-red at the taffrail; the Luksefjell (wouldn’t that smash the typewriter!) out of Oslo, with chinaware from Antwerp, and the white-fringed blue cross of Norway in a red field aloft; the Wilhelmine, third oldest tanker in the world, with her stern bitten off to fit Montreal-bossed canals, and the double-crossed gild-crowned red flag of the Free City of Danzig flying.

There have been dozens of other ocean freighters - to be accurate, one dozen and a half - flying the red duster of the British mercantile marine, or German, Norwegian, or Panamese flags, beside the hundreds of lakers under the Stars and Stripes or red ensign of Canada; and yachts of note, flying the blue, such as Herrick Duggan’s Kingarvie, fresh from Nova Scotia, and F.M. Ellis’ Chimon, ranging to racing triumphs in Lake Michigan and the straits of Mackinaw, under Henry Hill’s enterprising skippership; and the deep sea fishing schooner, Bluenose, queen of the North Atlantic.

A port to paint and dream in, if ever there was one, for the discerning eye of the patient haunter of waterfronts. And among its gulls of passage consider this:

If a 36-foot yacht had ribs two inches square she would be considered overbuilt and too heavy to sail. Mary Jane’s ribs, displayed with all the frankness of the operating table, are six inches wide and seven inches deep. Great Baulks of yellow Norway pine, spaced widely, on 24-inch centres.

Our style is to have small ribs, close together; the 36-foot yacht mentioned might have ribs only an inch thick, spaced four inches apart, and she would be planked with half inch mahogany in two layers.

But everything in Mary Jane was on the generous plan of her frames. Her deck beams were three and four inches through, her solid oak planking was two inches thick. Her keel 24 feet long, was ten inches thick, tapering to six. Her pine mast, 38 feet long, was a foot through at the deck. A yacht may have used a six-inch spar.

That mast set Capt. Hansen back a good $250 in Chicago. After he had towed up the Mississippi from the Gulf of Mexico he found Mary Jane’s mast was rotting, so he set about replacing it. Such a stick might be bought for a few dollars in Norway, but Chicago - another story. They know how to charge there. Even though he did all his own work, Hansen left the price of two thousand five hundred picture postcards in the Windy City before he got his new spar, and I doubt if he sold as many as that. Hope so, anyway.

Looking at this thousand-pound tree-trunk I bethought me of the thirteen-pound bean-poles I had been handling in Oyster Bay the week before, in the English racing dinghies. The hollow 25-foot mast of those babies are only 2 1/2 inches through!

Mary Jane’s sails and gear were in proportion to that mast, heavy No. 1 ship’s canvas, tanned and tarred in the boltropes, and thick wire shrouds and heavy manila running rigging. Of course, when you are at sea alone whatever goes up has to stay up till you are ready to take it down; you might lose your life through a light halliard parting or a slender spar buckling.

Mary Jane’s whole sail area is only 800 square feet, not much more than that of our little 6-metres. She could stow a couple of 6-metres inside without bulging. Yet she only measures 2.57 tons. Registered tonnage, of course, has nothing to do with weight. Mary Jane, for example, has two tons of cast iron ballast on her keel and other ton under her floorboards, and shew would easily float 25 tons of dead weight.

The sail area mentioned is divided among an ugly long-headed gaff mainsail, a big foretstaysail (her mast is nearly amidships, like the old Viking vessels, and a small jib, set on a regular weaver’s beam of a bowsprit, which is run out and run in as occasion demands. Besides these she has a storm trysail, a three-cornered sail of enormous thickness, to take the place of the mainsail in gales.

In a way this masterpiece of Norwegian woodcarving reminded one of the little Ann Brown, long a unit of the Port Credit stonehooker fleet. She was a topsail schooner originally, quite different from the sloop-rigged Mary Jane, but she was 36 feet overall, 11 feet beam, and drew 6 feet loaded. Some of her timbering was very heavy; there were 6 by 6-inch frames in her. Her sides were inch-and-a-half oak. She lasted a very long time. She was built at the corner of Front and York streets, supposedly in 1836, and traded to Manitoulin Island with the Indians for furs; and she lived until 1904 when she sank in the ice off Centre Island.

Nothing that ever floated in Toronto Harbor - not even the wooden walls of the warships of 1812 - could surpass the Mary Jane of Bergen for stoutness.

“Stoutness” is chosen deliberately. It applies alike to the lady’s figure and her furbelows. But, being a sea-going lady, or as our fiends the Finns call it, a merenneito, Mary Jane won’t object. Slimming and slinkiness are abhorrences to the salt seafarer.

The tan-sailed Norwegian pilot-boat Mary Jane of Bergen, which Capt. Al Hanson sailed up to the Terminal Warehouse on Sunday on his voyage round the world, and sailed away on Wednesday, is modelled in exact accord with the old time formula for dimensions: Length, three times the breadth; depth half the breadth. She is 36 feet over all and 12 feet in the beam, and her draught is 6 feet. She was piloting twenty years or more before Capt. Hansen picked her up, and she is built so stoutly she should be good for piloting twenty years after Capt. Hansen retires from sea and scene.

In shape the Mary Jane looked like a cantaloupe melon split down the middle. She is “sharp,” or perhaps rounded, at each end, so that her rudder hangs outboard, like a rowboat’s, and it is curved so as to fit the curve of her sternpost. Her stem, at the opposite end, has a corresponding curve.

Her great breadth gives her a good wide deck, even after the area of her cabin and cockpit is deducted. Around this deck runs a heavy wooden rail, not very high, but immensely thick. It is curved down at either end before reaching the stem or sternpost.

This leaves a bare and unprotected triangle of deck at each end. Across the after one runs a curved bar or “comb,” full of holes at close intervals. Steering is done by a long tiller, crossing the deck and this comb, from the head of the rudder to the deep well or cockpit just abaft the cabin. When the lone mariner wants to leave the tiller he pegs it with two pins in the comb in such a position that it will correct the tendency Mary Jane may show to range from her course.

It was when one went below in the Mary Jane, to play with Mate the black dog (whom Capt. Hansen’s Danish friend insisted was “Maid,” - and Sailor the Second, the grey kitten whose mother lost her ninth life in Detroit, and to talk with Capt. Hansen - it was then that the excessive stoutness of Mary Jane became apparent. On deck it was merely embonpoint; below it was elephantiasis.