Remember the Rough-And-Ready?: Schooner Days CCCCVII (407)

By C. H. J. Snider

We were talking about this and that, "this" being the Nettie Woodward, and "that" being Capt John Williams' recollections of her before she went to Lake Huron to be wrecked at Southampton, as told in Schooner Days a couple of weeks ago.

As a youngster, Capt. Williams saw the Nettie Woodward lying at Sydney Hamilton's wharf; a pretty little thing, like the Heather Bell, but sharper lined and smarter looking, with a clipper bow and a nice sheerline. She was all in white, except for a couple of green trimming stripes at her rail and coveringboard. She could carry eight or nine thousand bushels of grain, or a little less than 300 tons of coal, and yet was looked on as a good-sized vessel at the time. Think of the Lemoyne now, with her 600,000-bushel capacity.

It was in November Capt. Williams had seen her loading at Hamilton's Wharf, over sixty, nearly seventy, years ago.

"I remember," said he, "I was asking an old fellow if it was true he had shipped in her. 'Yes, ' said he, 'I've shipped in her, late and all as it is in the year. But I've only shipped in her forward of the davits and aft of the windlass. No more monkey shines for me up the rigging or out on the jibboom end. Let younger fellows do it.'"

The waterfront was full of "characters" then, old sailors who were good at this or that, and who would pick their berths with captains whom they knew, and who would humor them by not calling on them to do certain things, such as going aloft, knowing that they would make up for it in other ways—cooking, knotting and splicing, carpentering, or something.

Capt. Tom Horn got a complete new outfit of sails one season by carrying one of these old lads, who never had to go aloft, but spent his watches below sewing, sewing, sewing with his palm-and-needle, or cutting bolts of canvas for the rest of the crew to sew on in their spare time—as if there ever was any spare time aboard a vessel.

Hamilton's Wharf? As lost as Atlantis now. Young old-timers may remember Milloy's Wharf at the foot of Yonge street, with Paddy Burns' Scott street slip next to it east. Across Scott street was the old Toronto Electric Light wharf, and beyond that, before you get to Church street and Sylvester Brothers' slip, was Capt. Hamilton's wharf.

Successive improvements have overflowed them all, and circus elephants were trampling last week over the spot where the Nettie Woodward loaded her grain and shipped her man "before the davits and abaft the windlass." Harbor Commission fills cover a quarter of a mile of territory below the railway viaduct which once was waterfront.

Hamilton's wharf was a great grain shipping depot and an emporium for the cordwood which fed the furnaces of the wood-burning lake steamers. It had disappeared by the early 1890's, for the "new" Electric Light wharf, now far inland, and filled over, was then the most daring projection out to the old Windmill Line. But boyhood's recollections of a row of stables with incongruous gabled fronts, decorated with scroll-saw work, probably preserve the geographical location of the old place. It had clubhouses and boathouses on it or beside it, and the scrollwork had belonged to some of these.

"Yes, " said Capt. Williams, "Mrs. Reeve, a widow woman, had a boathouse business there, and she was a smart woman, and ran it well. She owned a scow-schooner in the stone and cordwood trade from Port Credit, called the Rough-And-Ready. A man named McClusky sailed it for her. I remember once father protesting against him crowding him in the Gap with the Rough-And-Ready. Father had the little Empire then. She was supposed to have been sunk once with a cargo of liquor, and all of her crew lost except one boy. For a joke later, when I was a captain, I tried to get old Capt. Hagarty to think I was that boy, but the old gentleman was sharp as a steel trap.

" 'Then you're much older than you claim to be,' said he, 'for she was sunk at such and such a time,' giving a date years before I was born. 'But seeing you are so venerable,' he went on, 'would you recall a little vessel named the Rough-And-Ready?'

" 'Yes, ' said I promptly, 'she was square-rigged fore-and-aft;' making a joke out of her being scow built and square across the bow and stern.

" 'Not so far out,' said he, 'for she did have a square topsail forward.'"

Capt. John Miller, Port Credit lighthouse keeper, often told how McClusky poled the Rough-And-Ready down the creek one squally morning in the fall, loaded with cordwood for Toronto, and began hoisting sail. A snowflurry swept over, and he rounded-to, caught the pier, and lowered away. It was gone before he had his lines well out, and in the clearing he saw the other hookers making the best of a fair wind for Toronto. So he cast off, and began to make canvas. Before he was outside the lighthouse it darkened over for snow and he lowered away again and got a line out and hauled the Rough-And-Ready back into the piers. This went on all forenoon, with six false starts before dinnertime. McClusky knocked off to eat, grumbling that the other boys were now having dinner in Toronto. When he came out of the cabin after the meal it was snowing again, so he kept on waiting, and he waited so long the Rough-And-Ready froze in at the piers and lay there with her load of cordwood till spring. Moral, make up your mind.

But Capt. Williams went on to tell about Capt. Hamilton and how he took to wharfingering.

"He was a pious old man, and he wouldn't start out on a Saturday night even if he had a fair wind, because he might miss going to church on Sunday. He had a little vessel named the Doll, after his daughter. She was dismasted once, and had to be picked up and towed in by tugs. Capt. Hamilton nearly drowned three men, trying to save every scrap and ropeyarn of the wreckage, to keep the insurable damage down. His reward was to find that the damage did not come up to 'particular average' and so he got nothing. Then he gave up vessel owning and kept a wharf.

"Some captains made sure their owners did not fire them for failing to earn insurance. I was mate with a man once who had pumped three days and three nights to bring a vessel into port, and got no thanks for it from the insurance companies and the sack from the owners. They were unable to collect insurance because the actual damage to the vessel was small, although they had to spend a lot on her afterwards. They would have cleaned up handsomely; had she sunk and been a total loss. So the captain had to find another job.

"In this vessel where we were together we never had to pump her when light. With grain in her we pumped every half hour so the water never had a chance to rise and damage the cargo. We took a load of grain to Kingston without a dollar's damage, and went across to Oswego and loaded coal for Toronto and towed out with a nice southerly breeze. I was surprised the way she lay down, as though she was carrying sail in a breeze of twice the strength. Sometimes it blows harder aloft than on the surface, so I went up the rigging. Same breeze upstairs as down—and yet the schooner was heeled over, water choking her scuppers and splashing the rail.

"'Take a sounding in that pump-well,' I told the lookout. He showed me the sounding rod wet over its head, and some of the line, too. 'Four feet if there's an inch,' said he.

" 'If there's four feet in the well there's nine feet under her covering-board, the way she's listing, ' said I. 'Get the gafftopsails off her and let her come round.'

"There was so much water in her she listed to windward on the other tack, before it got a chance to flow down to the lee side. We had both pumps going by the time the Old Man came out of the cabin and learned what the trouble was and why we were running back.

"'Can't you get them jibs trimmed?' asked he. 'She won't steer with the sheets not down! Get 'em down!'

"I had pinned them flat when we came round, and nobody could do more, but I clapped a messenger on to the fall of the jibtopsail sheet and led it to the capstan, and made all hands heave on it. Of course the clew tore out of the sail, and it flogged itself to pieces while we were downhauling it.

"'Trim the others down then!' yelled the Old Man, and I did the same thing with the flying jib, and tore it out of her, and then the standing jib, and then the fore staysail, until we hadn't a jib left. Before the last one went the man at the wheel joined us. He said the Old Man had sent him forward to help. I knew what he had been sent forward for, because while we were wrecking the staysail there was a great flogging aft, and the mizzen tore along the foot and went to ribbons. The Old Man had slashed across the clew cringle with his knife while there was no one to see.

"This left us only the foresail and mainsail, and we managed to sail her back into port with what remained of them after some manhandling. She looked a ninety per cent, complete wreck.

"'There,' said the Old Man, as he arranged to get her on the drydock, 'we'll see whether this is an insurance job or not.'

"It was. That schooner emerged two weeks later with her hull caulked all over and newly painted and a complete new set of sails and gear at the insurance companies' expense."

Model of the HEATHER BELL in possession of Mr. Ernest Mathews, whose father owned her when she hailed from Toronto. She ended her days in Port Elgin on Lake Huron.