"Nine Brothers" out of Niagara: Schooner Days CXXVI (126)

An attempt at fathoming a lake legend ninety years old

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"To-morrow is Saint Valentine's day,

All in the morn betime. . ."

Throb! Throb! Throb! sang the fiddles.

Throb! Throb! Throb! echoed the dancing feet.

Throb! Thrcb! Throb! answered the Boy's pounding heart.

What was wrong with him? Why was he all one over-worked pulse? He was in love. It was the thirteenth of February, 1845 and close on midnight. Hearts beat just as fast on St. Valentine's Eve, 1845, as they did on St. Valentine's Eve, 1934. And from the same cause.

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This Boy's sweetheart was Yorkshire Jack's yellow-haired daughter, across ice-choked Lake Ontario, in Port Credit. The Boy was second mate in a coaster, frozen in at the Twelve-Mile Creek, on the south shore. Navigation had been open very late or very early. With the freeze-up at the Twelve, where the little first Welland Canal wriggled into the lake, past Port Dalhousie, the Boy had piled aboard a farmer's sleigh faring to Niagara with other lakesmen, caught like himself far from home. Niagara, they heard, was still open; the old Transit was still running. They'd get home in her, as far as Toronto, anyway. Or in some of the sailing craft.

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The Transit, thirteen years old, Oakville's first steamer, was at Niagara. But Capt. Richardson would not put out. Too much ice in the lake. No, not though the Boy's pockets were full of money, and all the boys' pockets were full of money, after the season's pay-off. Too much ice in the lake.

So the Boy, with dozens of other ice-stranded mariners, crossed over to Lewiston, where the long many-windowed ballroom above the driving-shed of the Cliff House shone like the gun-deck of a frigate a-gleam with battle-lanterns. A St. Valentine's Eve ball was in progress.

But there was no comfort for him in the throb-throb-throb of the fiddles and the dancing feet.

"To-morrow is St. Valentine's day,

All in the morn betime.

"To-morrow is St. Valentine's day,

All in the morn betime. . .

"To -morrow——"

Could he never get away from it?

"To-morrow is St. Valentine's day—"

And Peggy Yorkshire, laughing through her yellow curls, had promised or threatened him, when last they met, that she would be a bride before St. Valentine's was Day was out even if she had to take him for the groom!

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Nuzzling the wharf below the Cliff House, kept clear of ice by the swift Niagara current, lay a little schooner, Nine Brothers, some called her; some Three Brothers; some just the Brothers. Not only was she named the Brothers, but she was sailed by brothers, and their name was Brothers. The Boy could hear them upstairs, Jimmy the captain, and Samson the mate, making the rafters ring with their glad sailor-laughter, "bringing down the house" as they danced the horn-pipe in an interval between these newfangled polkas. Good souls, these; if they did some free-trading who could blame them, with the customs duties that were being piled on such necessities of life as tea, whiskey, and even hard cider?

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"To-morrow is St. Valentine's Day,

All in the morn betime…

Could he never get away from it?

It was Samson Brothers who was roaring it out now, at the top of his deep-sea voice:

"To-morrow is St. Valentine's Day,

All in the morn betime…

Ye, and the Brothers is homeward bound.

But we won't go home 'till morning!"

he improvised.

"Do you mean it?" broke in the Boy.

"Certainly I mean it," boomed Samson. "We wouldn't miss St. Valentine's Day on the north shore for a kingdom. Would we, Jim?"

"We're not going to miss it," roared back Jim. "Blow high, blow low, the Brothers berths on the north shore to-morrow night."

The free-traders were immediately surrounded by would-be passengers. To all comers they promised a passage. They knew them all. Every man a friend.

"And we don't mind putting into the Credit as close as the ice lets us," Capt. Jim promised. "But first we'll have our fun here."

When the ball was over they sailed; borne out swiftly by the river current, her short deck crowded with eager homeward-bounders. But, maddeningly, there was no wind in the lake, and, once the current left her, the schooner idled aimlessly for hours. It was mid-day before she reached the Niagara bar; at three o'clock in the afternoon she was still in sight from the river.

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Of all on board, only the Boy crossed the lake. His frozen body came ashore, almost on Yorkshire Jack's doorstep, at Port Credit, weeks afterwards. None of the others was ever found.

Peggy Yorkshire had waited for the Boy. She was not a bride by St. Valentine's night. She was never a bride.

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ALL this is just a yarn, if you choose. There is no chapter and verse for it. But it is one of the many tales of schooner days which have long teased the compiler of this series.

Zero dip of the second week of February this year revived speculation as to what might be the basis for this lake myth.

To begin with, what was the probability of navigation being open so early or so late as the middle of February, in 1845, long before car ferries and ice-breaking tugs were developed? It seemed scant; and yet there was, in the John Ross Robertson collection of Canadian Historical Pictures, the well-known one by the late Wm. Armstrong, showing the steamer Chief Justice Robinson landing her passengers on the ice of Toronto Bay eighty years ago. She apparently maintained a schedule between Toronto and Niagara all winter.

Then there was recollection of the last talk with that grand old man of Port Credit, Capt. Abram Block, J.P. It was just before the Atlantic Ocean and the sea of eternity separated us. Capt. Block was on the other shore of time before I returned, from England. He died on July 10th, last summer, in his 83rd year.

We had chatted in the clean and comfortable home overlooking the lake at Port Credit, to which Abram Block had brought his bride sixty years before. He explained that at that time the house did not overlook the lake. When it was built there was a street—Lake street its name—south of it, and between it and the water; and south of this street again were two more houses with their gardens, and a foreshore extending into the lake forming the base of Goose Point. In the little harbour-bay behind hundreds of geese used to feed; the five hotels which then flourished in the Credit were famous for their goose suppers; and stonehookers rode in among the floating fowl.

The bay is dry land now, Goose Point has vanished, taking even its name with it, the houses have been torn down or moved back—one, twice moved, still stands in the town - Only when a line of cribwork was built was the inroad of the lake halted and the bank saved.

Abram Block could not confirm the story of the Valentine of the ice floes whose tryst persists in lake legend. Whatever it was had happened five years before he was born. But he remembered that "away out on the Point" lived a fisherman known only as Yorkshire Jack, and he had a daughter. Their house and garden had disappeared fifty years ago; and the family had gone before that. If a body washed ashore at the Credit in the very early days it would, very probably, come in at Yorkshire Jack's door, for his house was the nearest to the lake of all.

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After that, looking over Robertson's Landmarks of Toronto, were found these entries:

"Other sailing vessels that are mentioned include the Three Brothers; so called after the McIntosh brothers:, John, who commanded her; Charles, who had charge of another lake schooner, the Superior; and Robert, the master of the Eunice . . . Charles and James McIntosh, two brothers, also owned the steamer Great Britain. They died on board her of cholera in the year 1834. . . . Early in 1820 a schooner known as The Brothers, built for a joint stock company, of which Mr. Oates was one of the principal shareholders, was launched at York. No such event had taken place for a number of years previously."

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So far, so good. In the words of Coleridge's Ancient A. B. "There WAS a ship."

There had been, before the far-off forties of last century, one or more vessels named the Brothers, though neither of these named in the Landmarks may have been the Valentine vessel. Brothers, with varying numericals, is a fairly common name in marine registers. There were, for further examples, the Two Brothers of Port Hope, and the Two Brothers of Picton and the schooner scow, Brothers of Bronte. The three Williams boys sailed her sixty years ago or more and she was blown up at the Exhibition, in 1898, to represent the Maine.

Recollection of her suggested consultation with the eldest of the "Williams boys," Capt. Joseph Williams, now a vigorous youth of eighty-three at Simcoe Point, near Pickering. Amazingly, he knew the very vessel which we may call the Valentine Brothers, to distinguish her, although} he did not know her by that name and his recollection of her story had nothing to do with St. Valentine's Day.

His father had owned this vessel— afterwards.

And his mother had been at the Cliff House ball that night!

"I've seen that vessel," said Capt; Joseph. "She was named the Empire when I knew her, and she was named that when my father bought her, which was before I was born. But Empire was not the first name she bore. He sold her about 1850. I saw her eight or nine years afterwards.

"She was a fore-and-aft rigged little schooner with a standing keel-— an old-timer from the days before centreboards, and she only carried about forty tons deadweight. It has been said that she was originally named the Nine Brothers, or after some number of brothers, and had been built by a family when Toronto was York, and intended for the whiskey trade between Niagara and the north shore. Distilling was, then as now, a recognized industry. But if she was the Nine Brothers and a whiskey carrier that was before father got her. He used her in the cordwood trade, and her name, as I said, was the 'Empire' then and afterwards. She was a trim little seaboat and in good shape when I saw her.

"As I heard the story, on Christmas Eve about the year '44 or '45 she had left Lewiston, in the Niagara River. There had been a ball at the Cliff House at the top of the bank. My mother was there at the time. There were supposed to be nine or ten lake captains aboard, getting a passage home for Toronto, after laying up their own vessels in Port Dalhousie or the Niagara River for navigation had kept open late that season and the steamers had run until they were frozen in.

"Nothing more was heard of her till she was picked up near Port Dalhousie, lying on her beam ends, covered with ice,with her double-reefed mainsail and double-reefed foresail frozen to the booms, and her crew and passengers all gone. After they righted her and got her out of the ice she must have been towed into Port Dalhousie, for there father bought her at a bargain.

"In the forties the Niagara steamers ran all winter to Toronto. They would fetch up in the ice west of Toronto Island, and unload the passengers and freight on sleighs, and up cordwood for fuel which they all burned.

"The old steamer Chief Justice Robinson was built with a bow like a plough-share, in the mistaken idea that this facilitated her work as an ice breaker. Eighty years ago she used to run all winter between Toronto and Niagara, landing her passengers here on the ice of the harbor when she could not get into the wharf.

"As a matter of fact the sharp hollow-ground shape of a plough-share is less efficient in making a passage through ice than the blunt shovel-nosed bow which allows the vessel to ride out upon the ice field and crush the ice under with the pressure of her weight. This is how the modern car ferries succeed in breaking channels. The Ontario runs continuously between Cobourg and Rochester, and seldom stops for weather and never for winter. Her thirty hours in the ice last week was the only interference she had had in her career for a long time.

"The ice of Toronto Bay was in practice, the "industrial area" of the old-time waterfront. Grain-laden schooners were frozen in at their anchors and unloaded by sleigh teams as the Gooderham and Worts' elevator found room for their cargoes. Little hookers carried cordwood from all the ports that were open or from the lake shore and unloaded it on the ice of Toronto bay, where sleighs, creaking and squeaking through the frost, carried it to the snowbound woodyards on the wharves and waterfront where the locomotives devoured it."

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Finally, let me submit this extract from an old file of the Toronto Examiner, dated Feb. 26th, 1845:

"The schooner Brothers, a small vessel of about ten or twenty tons, which had been running occasionally across the lake during the winter, and had made two or three trips as far down as the Genesee after the close of the ordinary navigation, has, we lament to learn, been lost with all hands on board. On Friday, the 14th inst., she left Niagara with a cargo of cedar (cider), etc., and about twelve or fifteen passengers. The day was stormy and the sea ran so high, and there was so much drift ice on the lake that the steam packet Transit would not venture to cross, having returned to port after she left. The schooner was preparing after this to put off, when Capt. Richardson advised the master to avoid the danger, to which, by venturing out, he would be inevitably exposed. Regardless of the caution, however, the vessel sailed about ten o'clock in the forenoon, and during the day was frequently observed the distance until about three in the afternoon, when a haze passing over the lake she was no more seen.

"Not reaching this or any of the neighboring ports a day or two afterwards, fears began to be entertained as to her safety, and these have since been sadly realized. On the Sabbath following, two farmers living on the lake shore in Niagara County, on the American side, came to the frontier with the intelligence that they had described a small schooner, dismantled and keel upper- most, driven ashore among the ice about twenty miles to the eastward of the Niagara river, a total wreck, not one soul being saved to tell the sad tale of suffering and death. The names of all the sufferers we have not been able to learn, but among them we learn was the engineer (Mr. Bicket), the second mate, and three of the firemen, of the City of Toronto; Mitchell, the second engineer of the steamer America; a person named Martin, a trader; James Brothers, the captain of the schooner, and his brother Samson; and, it is supposed are James Morris, the captain of some vessel on the lake, with four or five others.

The "CHIEF JUSTICE ROBINSON" landing her passengers on the ice in Toronto Bay in 1852

--From the Armstrong watercolor in the John Ross Robertson Collection of Canadian Historical Pictures