Accompanying KATE: Schooner Days CXXII (122)

By C. H. J. Snider

KATE CHISHOLM was as sweet a girl as ever crossed the Sixteen Mile Creek; but the Kate of Oakville, called after her was as cross and cantankerous as though she had been named for the Katharine who was the subject of Petrucchio's experiment in the Taming of the Shrew.

How come?

My own guess is that her design was to blame. Syndicated sawdust about jinxes never rouses me to anything more vigorous than a yawn. It is sixty-five years since the Kate was launched, and I only made her acquaintance when she was "going on for thirty" and the worse for wear. She looked then as though the builder had crowded too much cargo space into her - which was a common fault with lake schooners.

While known to this deponent the schooner was always clad in a faded white shirt-waist and bluish-grey petticoat, with a faded grey belt at the covering-board and a faded red grey rail; that is, until she changed her name. Then she came out in smart white-and-green.

Capt. George Brock Chisholm was the first master and owner of the Kate. She was launched in 1865, two years before the White Oak. The very best wood in Trafalgar Township went into her, as indeed, it did in all the Chisholm vessels. Nothing but the best satisfied the sons and nephews of old "White Oak", as the Mississaugas christened Col. Chisholm, the veteran of 1812 who founded the port of Oakville. George Brock Chisholm commemorated, in his middle name, the hero under whom his father and his uncle served at Queenston Heights and through the war.

Information is not to had as to whether the Simpson brothers, John and Melancthon, had the building of the Kate. Possibly; but her model was unlike the beautiful one they employed for such schooners as the Sea Gull, White Oak or Coquette, commanded by Capt. Chisholm and recently illustrated in "Schooner Days." The Kate was rather straight in sheer, plumb in the stem, full in the bows, hard in the bilges, and heavy in the quarters; all characteristic of the "old canallers," which used to fit the locks of the Welland so tight they had to be dubbed down with adzes to pas through. But the Kate was not of full canal size, as the term went, but only one-quarter as big. She was 78 feet long, 18 feet, 9 inches beam, and 7 feet, 9 inches deep in the hold, but she packed a great cargo for her dimensions. She registered an even 100 tons, but could carry 200 tons of coal or 6,000 bushels of grain.

Perhaps it was this carrying capacity that made her so "touchy" about other vessels, the bottom, the lake, or anything that came in her path. Here is the account of one trip she made, fifty or sixty years ago.

ONE DAY early in October she left Oakville on a 1,500-mile lake voyage with Capt. Chisholm in command; a short ship on a long cruise. Tom Fisher was the mate, and her crew consisted of Tom Clark of Oakville, Isaac Pickard of Bronte, Sam Kelso of St. Catharines. The 1,500-mile voyage was the round trip which the Kate would take before she saw Oakville again.

The wind was light from the northwest. Outside, in the lake, the schooner Ella Murton was coming down from Hamilton. She was bound northeast for Toronto. The Kate was bound for Fair Haven first, towards the southeast corner of the lake, a distance of some hundred and forty miles. The courses of the two vessels naturally intersected, but there was no reason in the world why they should bump. Nevertheless they came so close together that the Murton's main boom struck the main rigging of the Kate on the port or landward side. It was not from negligence, either, on board the Kate, for Capt. Chisholm had first hauled her up to the wind and then hasted away the main sheet, while Tom Fisher hove up the centreboard, so as to let the vessel off. Otherwise the touch would have been more serious. The Kate's crew blamed the Murton for steering an erratic course, and they may have been right, but most vessels steered erratic courses in the Kate's company. She was like that.

That night the wind went to the northward and northeast and blew fresh in squalls of rain on about midnight, so that the jib topsail and gaff topsails had to be snowed. With the morning light the wind lulled away, and they started to get the kites on her again. In doing so, the man at the foremast head discovered hat the fore topmast had cracked through at the cap. The job topsail had already been set, and before the downhaul could be manned to it get off her the fore topmast went over the side, dragging in the water with the jib topsail, stays and gear.

By noon they had sent the shortened topmast aloft again and had all sails set, when it thickened. They kept a good lookout, but suddenly, out of the fog, loomed the bow of the big green propeller Shickluna, and next moment the Shickluna's fenders were rasping along the rail of the Kate. The vessels separated with great loss of paint and profanity.

The Kate reached Fair Haven that night and loaded coal the following day for Southampton, five hundred miles away on Lake Huron.

Going through the Welland Canal, near the town of Thorold, they sighted the American steamer Iron King in the level above, bound down. The schooner had just cleared the gate of her lock, and the driver had got the order to go ahead with his horses on the bank, when a crash was heard and the Iron King was seen looming over the lower gate of the upper lock. Her propeller had not been reversed soon though. She did not smash the lock gate, but she so damaged it that it could not be opened, so the Kate had to moor beside the bank in her level, while, while the lock above her was drained and the gate was repaired. Capt. Chisholm ordered the mate to hang lights in both the fore and the main rigging, and all hands turned in.

Through the night he heard the Iron King whistle, and knew that repairs had been effected and that the steamer was on the way down. He went on deck and seeing the lights of the Iron King approaching menacingly, called the mate from the cabin and ran forward to light the flare or torch kept in the fore rigging, and call the crew. All hands tumbled out by the light of the blazing flare, just in time to see the bow of the Iron King looming over them as closely as the Shickluna's had done earlier in the week. They heard the bells in the Iron King's engine room ring full speed astern, and with thrashing propeller the great steamer oozed past them, missing them by inches.

The Kate got up Lake Erie, the Detroit river and Lake St. Clair without further adventure, but on the Lime Kiln crossing of the River St. Clair she grounded on the American side, and it took half a day to reflect her. However, they got into Lake Huron, and pushed by a southwest gale, reached Southampton harbor with no cloth showing but the forestaysail and the peak of the foresail, and both anchors hanging over the bows ready to let go.

After unloading her coal, the Kate loaded wheat in Southampton for Kingston, at the foot of Lake Ontario. She sailed out with the wind at west-northwest, and a considerable sea running. By dark the waves were spilling over the rail on both sides, and her decks were full of water continuously. To save her from swamping, the crew had to go to work with axes, hammers, hand spikes and planks to knock out all the bulwarks from the inside, between the cabin and the fore rigging.

This let the seas run off the deck as fast as they came aboard, although the crew were up to their knees in water out of the time. The Kate wallowed down the lake and reached Sarnia the next afternoon. Here Capt. Chisholm bought lumber, and set the crew to work replacing the stove-out bulwarks. He paid his men carpenters' wages for their work, in addition to their sailor's pay. By the second evening the vessel, with new bulwarks freshly painted, was ready to resume her voyage.

Leaving Sarnia at the well-known "Southeast Bend" she met a tow coming up, and a steam barge overhauled her coming down. The eddy of the barge's propeller put the Kate on to the mud, and there she stuck until late at night. Next day she had the same bad luck on the Lime Kiln crossing - this was long before that menace to navigation was deepened and widened - and in this second mix-up with a tow she again went aground.

After hours of labor backing the sails out against the wind, and getting the assistance of a tug, she got off and slid down past Amherstburg and entered Lake Erie. The wind here was strong behind them from the sou'west and they had to take in the jib topsail and get a reef in the mainsail. In the meantime they left the fore gafftopsail on her, to keep her stepping.

Ike Pickard was on the end of the jib boom, to stow the jib topsail, when the spar snapped off at the cap of the bowsprit. Isaac and his sail and the broken jibboom went into the water. The spar was held by its gear, and Ike clung to it, although he was being dragged through Lake Erie at ten miles an hour. It took a long time to haul him and the wreck on board. This could only be done when they clewed up the vessel's fore gafftopsail and luffed her to the wind.

The Kate's decks were again flooded knee deep all the way down Lake Erie, but it was not necessary to knock out the new bulwarks; and she was again filled to the rail running down Lake Ontario. But so staunchly was she built that in spite of this treble flooding on the three lakes not a bushel of grain above or below was found to be damaged when the shovellers took the hatches off at Kingston.

Captain Chisholm, tiring of catching rheumatism in his knee joints while the wheat below his feet remained dry as the corn in Joseph's Egyptian granaries, sold the Kate to W. Ostrander, of Marysburg, in Prince Edward County.

But the change of venue did not improve her manners. Capt. Will Wakeley, of Port Hope, sailed her when he was only nineteen, her owner going along as supercargo. William wearied of keeping her out of the lake shore farm yards, and soon left the owner in complete command. The latter made a couple of voyages, and took her to Oshawa, to load grain at the old wooden pier that used to project into the lake there. By the time he had her full to the fore hatch the wind went to the southward. Oshawa was no place to lie in those days, unless the wind was light or offshore. The owner telegraphed for tugs from Toronto, but none came, and in desperation he put the foresail on her and cast off the lines. But she wouldn't go out for him. You could hardly blame her, loaded by the head, with her stern cocked up like a pig's going to war. She was just sidled off without gathering steerage way, and struck the beach west of the pier. The crew left her in the yawl boat. They had not had time even to hoist it up.

The Kate was too well built to break up, but was sold as a wreck, and someone in Trenton bought her. Capt. Nelson Palmateer, of Picton, made one voyage in her which he will never forget, for it was the only time in his sixty years of lake sailing that he came near death and starvation. The Kate was laden almost to the covering-board with door frames, window sashes, shutters, doors, shingles and other products of the Gilmour mills of Trenton. She was crank and topheavy with a deck load so high that her sails had to be reefed to swing across it. Most lake schooners made a poor fist at working to windward with reefed sails, and the Kate was no exception; and she had calms and headwinds all the way up Lake Ontario.

She was bound for Oakville. After ten days they passed outside Toronto Island. By this time there was nothing left to eat on board but potatoes, but they sailed on, hoping to be in Oakville in a few hours. The north wind hauled to northwest and west, and she couldn't fetch Oakville, with her reefed sails and deckload like a haystack. So they tried for Hamilton. By the time they were looking into the piers the wind blew out of Burlington Bay and they wore her around for Oakville again. Then the wind hauled north and carried them well back to Toronto, and left them becalmed in the lake.

They were days baffling about this way, and finally crept into Oakville with the potato bin as empty as the crew's stomachs.

After that she carried stone to the foot of Westmarket street while the City Hall was building, and Toronto was developing a great appetite for crushed granite and limestone.

In 1895, while the Kate was still owned in the Bay of Quinte, she was struck by a summer squall one night, coming over the high land without warning, while she was becalmed in Hay Bay. She went over and filled, and the cook in the cabin and one sailor who was in the forecastle asleep, were drowned. The captain and the men on deck climbed up on her side and saved their lives.

In the end, Capt. George Plunkett, of Cobourg, bought the Kate and rebuilt her, about 1905. She was rechristened the Wilfrid Plunkett, after a son of the owner, but her second incarnation was brief. She ended her days in the Belleville boneyard, where like the charred hulls of the Ned Hanlan, the Dundee, the W. J. Suffel, and other old-timers whose finish was cremation. The Plunketts had sold her, and she was owned by Capt. A. A. Smith, of Belleville, when she was accidentally burned about the year 1910.

Capt. George Brock Chisholm

And His Sextant--a navigation instrument seldom used by the schooner captains. This one is in the possession of Capt. Chisholm's grand-daughter, Mrs. A. M. Dill, of Oakville, who also possesses the daguerreotype from which the portrait is reproduced.