The Sunday-Keeper: Schooner Days CXXXII (132)

THAT grand old Scottish mariner, Capt. Alexander Ure, now navigating here in Toronto in the serene sunset glow of his eighty-eighth year, had his share of the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. He owned 13 vessels at different times. Four of these were totally wrecked and two others proved disastrous. But he took this all without whimpering. With sturdy Presbyterian patience he extracted a moral from it all.

"For years and years I prayed the Lord to be delivered from this Sabbath sailing, and in the end He heard me," he told the writer.

Alexander Ure was one of two lake captains—Capt. Baird, of the Baltic, was the other—who never sailed on Sunday if they could help it. But often they could not help it. They might be on passage; they could not anchor in mid-lake from Saturday night till Monday morning. Many a fair wind they missed, and many an extra day's wages they had to pay, because they would not start out on a Sunday. Even so, it often fell that they had to work, and work their crews, on the Sabbath day, in port and out. Sailing is like that. But if they "bowed themselves unto Rimmon" they never consented in their hearts to desecrating the Lord's Day; and Alexander Ure, for 40 years an elder in Chalmers Church, Toronto, hailed that hour with joy which finally retired him from the schooner trade; though it was a hard blow to his purse and his proper pride.

It came about thus:

After losing the Augusta, when the brooming of her rudderhead left her unmanageable in a November gale, Capt. Ure went about replacing her, both for himself and for the Conger Coal Co., joint owners and joint losers with him. There was no insurance on her.

That same fall the American schooner Reuben Doud, was dismasted on Lake Erie, got ashore on the Middle Ground, and at length was towed into Detroit, a wreck above decks but sound as a nut below. She was built in Wolf River or Fox River, in Green Bay, Wisconsin, and had to be towed by ox-teams to deep water. This gave her the nickname "Bull of the Woods," and her subsequent career proved that it was not improperly bestowed.

The wounded bull was offered for sale after reaching Detroit, and Capt. Ure got her at a bargain price. But getting her was one thing and being able to use her another. He had to re-rig her from the deck up; and by the year 1901 sailors who knew how to mast and rig a three-'n'-after were mostly in the old folks' home or the cemetery. Old "Nosey" O'Brien, of Toronto, who had sailed with Capt. Ure in the Augusta, accompanied him to Detroit, and, according to his relation, the ladies of the late St. John's Ward knew as much about fidding and head-ropes and shroud knots and wire-splicing as the cream of the lumpers and riggers of the Detroit River. However, Capt. Ure got her over to Windsor and re-registered there and brought her down to Lake Ontario sporting such a novelty as a three-cornered squaresail. She could sail well, could the Doud, though her bows were as round as an apple, and she was a grand carrier. In every way she was an improvement upon the lost Augusta.

But she was not nicknamed Bull-of-the-Woods just for a harmless tow down the river behind the ox-teams. She could be ugly as any bush bovine, and one of her mean tricks was griping, or trying to turn around and look at the wind behind her. It was through this that she ran hard and fast aground on the south shore of Lake Ontario, when coming up the lake with the wind off the land; the greatest disgrace that could befall any schooner; the equivalent to a steamboat's "climbing the bank and robbing the back yards."

Well, there she was aground again, Just as she had been in Lake Erie, and Capt. Ure's most heroic measures could not budge her. He sent to Oswego for a wrecking tug and what the wreckers did to him in the way of salvage bills would make angels weep. They did get her afloat and towed her into Rochester, leaking badly from the straining she had had. Of all places in the world they chose the deep hole in the bank of the Genesee River, dredged out to let the steamer North King turn around ,to moor her. Anywhere else almost she could have tied up to the bank and rested on the bottom comfortably while her seams filled; but down she went in the deep hole until the river water was flowing around her cabin top. Another call for steam pumps and salvors; and another batch of wreckers' bills which looked like the consolidated debts of the combined cities of Rochester and Toronto. The black bull emerged from the mud-bath in the Genesee caked to her gleaming white topgallant rail with terra cotta clay that wouldn't wash off; she looked more dismal than the ship of the Ancient Mariner.

That finished Capt. Ure with her, and with sailing after forty years of it. The bills wiped out his share of the ownership. Capt. Joyce, of Bronte, took the Doud over, but she lived up to her reputation, and got ashore with him in 1906 at Ward's Island, and broke up completely.

For Capt. Ure his disaster with the Doud was a blessing in disguise. It is very true that the Lord never closes one door without opening another. All his active life Capt. Ure had wanted to get away from the sailing, with its unavoidable Sabbath-breaking. Although a master mariner for 20 years at the time he lost the Doud—and a good one—he was also a graduate ship's carpenter of 30 years' experience—and a better one. Carpentry was his true calling. He must have felt that, vaguely, long before, for during the winters he had kept himself employed at house-building in Toronto, when there was no work to be done at the waterside. It so befell that at the very time when things looked blackest on the lake they were brightening ashore. Toronto was on the threshold of a building boom which spread like the tide on the sands with the development of the York Loan district. Capt. Ure "laid the keel" of house after house in the growing west end of the city, selling wisely and reinvesting carefully. He continued to look after the repairs of the other vessels in the Conger fleet, and his real estate and housebuilding enterprise prospered as it deserved.

And there was no work on Sundays!

End of the "Bull of the Woods" Off Ward's Island, August 1906. Photograph by Messrs. Pringle and Booth.