Barges and Bargees: Schooner Days CLVI (156)

_____

Sir—When Mr. Snider was attending the Economic Conference at London he intimated his intention of leaving the conference flat and going to witness the Thames sailing barge races. Has he told the the readers of these races, and have I in some way missed it, or is this a pleasure to which I may still look forward? Perhaps barges would not upset me, although they can perform some startling antics.—S.S.

---

EVERYTHING comes to him who waits, and if Ess-Ess hasn't s-s-signed off sailing and gone into S.S. steamships here is a delayed earful and eyeful for him and 149,999 other readers on the subject of barges in general and the Thames barges in particular:

---

A sailor's blessing, "against the sun," on the magnate who had the thought that there were bigger dividends to be made by cutting down the rigs and crews of schooners and sending them out as barges behind smoke-boats! It was one of many factors which brought about the lingering demise of our whitewings of the lakes.

Apparently Hamilton must take the blame for initiating the barge traffic. In the Hamilton Times of April 9th, 1864, appears this;

"We learn that one esteemed fellow townsman, Capt. Thos. Harbottle, has resigned the command of the Passport, of the through line of steamers, he having purchased a large and powerful tugboat, the W. K. Muir, now building at Detroit, of which he will himself take command this season. His intention is to initiate a new branch of marine business on the lake, namely: The carrying of freight in barges towed by steamer."

Tugs were then a novelty. Capt. Robt. Moodie brought the first one to Toronto in 1857, and couldn't get enough business that year to pay his fuel.

---

Lake barges were of several kinds. There was the mastless barge, meant to be towed all the time. She survives in some of the big steel-hulled fellows on the Upper Lakes, who have steam in them for heaving up the anchor or taking in the towlines, or handling mooring hawsers, but no means of propulsion other than the towing steamer.

The commonest form of lake barge was the cut-down schooner, with her topmasts and jibboom removed and lower masts left. She usually degenerated from having a good outfit of lower sails and being capable of looking after herself in a breeze of wind which was too much for the towing steamer, to having nothing left but a foremast, and then losing that.

These cut-down sailing vessels saved 25 cents a day on crew's wages, when men were to be had for $30 a month, because, forsooth, there were no gafftopsails to shift or stow. A much easier job than hauling in a dripping towline!

The first barges were towed by tugs, but the dividend hunter soon discovered that the towing vessel could make money as a carrier, if big enough, and many propellers were converted into steam-barges, carrying a good cargo themselves and snaking along two or three deep-laden schooner hulls.

Then they began to build tow-barges with just enough rig to fly a distress signal, or sail to steady them in heavy weather: and then barges with no sail at all, bald as Barney's sow.

The whalebacks of the upper lakes, for example. The barge seems to be going the way of the vanished schooner. There are lots of them left on the lakes, but few wooden ones.

---

Some very fine wooden barges were built, such as the Ceylon, and Olive Jeannette, and Minnedosa, to mention only three of three hundred, which had three or four masts, completely rigged with topmasts. Sometimes these topmasts were more than ornamental, and spread topsails; but the barges of this class, while qualifying as out-and-out schooners in rig, were not dependent upon their sails, but relied on a big towing steamer to get them along whenever the wind was light or ahead.

---

Nothing like any of these are the Thames barges for which the historic London conference had to be ditched. These Thames barges are out-and-out sailers. They may use a tug occasionally, but not as often as a full-rigged schooner would do so. Their skippers pride themselves on being able to place their vessels anywhere, with the sole assistance of wind and tide.

All our lake barges had centreboards. The Thames barge has none. They are flat-bottomed, so flat that they sometimes plane on the water like a sea-sled, and they are kept from sliding to leeward by two winglike appendages called leeboards. These are hung on either side, outboard, and lee one is lowered and the weather one hove up. They do not make as good time going to windward as a centreboard schooner would, but then their conditions are different. When they have to work to windward they usually wait for the tide to help them, and then they make great licks at it.

---

Their rig is utterly different from anything we have ever had on the lakes. There are several divisions of them, the stumpies, which have no topmasts; the staysail barges, which have no horns, but sport jib-topsails; the bowsprit barges, which have long bowsprits which can be tilted upright, and the sea-barges, which have topmasts, bowsprits, jibtopsails, and sometimes gaffheaded mizzens.

These sea-barges are big boys of 400 tons, and they make voyages all the way round from London to Portland on the English Channel, or up into the North Sea, or across to France or Holland or Belgium. They are built of steel and are a big handful for the five men who sail them. They are 110 feet long and 25 feet beam. The bowsprit barges, running from 75 to 80 feet in length, often go to sea, too, with two men and a boy. But the staysail barges and stumpies with two-men crews stick to the rivers, and will go wherever it is moist enough to dampen a handkerchief. That is the great value of the Thames barge —she draws so little, light or loaded, that she can get into any creek-mouth or tidal waterway, and pick up her cargo of bricks or cement or coal or hay or coarse freight where railways and steamships fear to tread.

---

Thames barges are not of beauteous model; bluff-bowed, round or straight stemmed, square sterned like a yawlboat, with their big rudders hanging outboard like a barndoor. They are painted all colors, black predominating, but plenty of relief in blue, grey, green, red, yellow or white trimming. The bulwarks are low, and the hatches high; you will see some of the stumpies swashing upstream with the wakes of steamers sweeping clear across their tarpaulined hatches. Those that go to sea take it the same way. The sea-barges have to have seven feet of freeboard when they are not loaded, but with cargo in they sometimes look like sailing rafts. They batten down hatches and let the sea go across them, tight as bottles.

---

It is the rig which is like nothing else on or off earth. They have two masts, a stout lower and very long topmast for the main, and a short one-piece mizzen, perched well aft. On the mainmast is hung a huge spar called the sprit, rising diagonally, higher than the lowermast itself. The mizzen has a little sprit. These spars extend the four-sided main and mizzen sails. As the mizzen extends outboard it has a boom on the foot of it, sheeting to the rudder. When you put the rudder hard over you also put the mizzen hard over. That helps turn her around.

The mainsail has no boom and no gaff. A big topsail, with a small yard extending the head of it, climbs the high topmast. Forward there are the three headsails usually found in the cutter rig—forestaysail, jib (if the barge has a bowsprit) and jibtopsail. Bargees have queer names for everything; the jib is a spinnaker, the jibtopsail a staysail.

---

The jib is usually white: all the other sails are tanned in rich shades of orange, red oxide, rust-color, yellow, or black. The tanned topsails sometimes have huge circles painted on them, with the name of the barge or the company which owns her. The bargees rely upon the topsail very much, and often sail with the mainsail brailed up and mizzen and headsails furled, while the topsail and the tide give them all the headway they require. Thames barges do not reef, but shorten down by brailing the mainsail partially or completely and then taking in the light sails.

---

In the races I saw they were all very gay, with fresh-tarred topsides, and bulwarks and deckhouses of white, blue, green, gray, red, or bright with varnish. There was much gilt-work about the name scrolls, and the flat of the transom was painted white, blue, green, or orange, in contrast to the black rudder.

Aloft they were gayer still. Each russet-hued mizzen flew a house-flag from the sprit, a square of gay bunting extended by a head-staff. Another gay burgee of bunting fluttered at the topmast truck. Each crew was uniformed throughout, much better dressed than racing yachtsmen. They might have white hats, blue jerseys, and white trousers; or scarlet caps and white jackets; or all-blue outfits.

The races were as lively as the ones for the America's Cup which I left last week. One day, in very light weather, the whole fleet closed in at the finish on the thirty-year-old barge Veronica, which had been leading, and it looked as though her goose was cooked. Her skipper let her go with the tide until she drifted into a nook so far that she turned around and was heading the wrong way. But he didn't worry. He knew exactly where he was at. A final swirl of the tide swung him into an eddy which picked him up and spun him across to where there was some breeze, and off Veronica ambled for the finish line, leaving the others gaping. Veronica seems to be the best barge in the Thames estuary for windward work.

---

Another race, on the Medway, was in a hard breeze, and the barges behaved like Endeavour and Rainbow on a busy day at Newport. The Lord Nelson's jib halliards parted and the white sail went under the bows. When it was dragged aboard it was well tanned with Medway mud. The Queen carried away her bobstay, and lost her jib too, and her topsail. Many of the barges finished the race with topsails down and mainsails brailed, it was blowing so hard.

The big Will Everard, a steel sea-barge of 400 tons, walked right into the Greenhithe, catching her on the weather quarter and putting her bowsprit through her mainsail, splitting it to the headrope. The two big iron pots swung together, head to wind, with sails flogging and gear flying. And the language! Nothing milder than tut-tut, I assure you.

One thing our lake barges have never done. They never raced. There is, of course, the classic instance of Captain Hugh Kelly, who sailed the schooner John Bentley. After she was cut down and reduced to barge status he still sailed her, in tow of the tug W T. Robb, with other unfortunates which had seen better days. In a blow the Robb had to signal the Bentley, at the end of the string, to cast off. The old hooker still had some sails in her, and hoisting them to a favorable slant, she came on faster than her tug and wallowing consorts, and entered Toronto harbor ahead of them.

"Yachts don't wait for barges," quoth Hughie, and his pronouncement became a waterfront maxim.

---

But these Thames barges have been racing in regattas for the last seventy years. It was an enterprising contractor named Henry Dodd who started the institution, and it has resulted in great improvements in the sailing barges, both in rig and handling. They now all use spinnakers like yachts, but the sail they boom out on the side opposite the mainsail, when the wind is over the transom, is usually a large spare reaching forestaysail. or else the jibtopsail, shifted over. Earlier sailing barges used square sails on long yards for running, but the square-sail has vanished.

Down at Newport, R.I., last week, I saw a very smart black schooner yacht named the Cleopatra's Barge. She commemorates the first seagoing American yacht, a brigantine, which Capt. Crowninshield, retired privateersman, built and took to the Mediterranean on a pleasure cruise in 1816. He had her dolled up gorgeously, each side painted differently, with diagonal ports and all the frills, and called her Cleopatra's Barge, following Shakespeare's line:

"The barge she sat in,

like a burnished throne.

Burned on the water."

But the 1934 Cleopatra's Barge, also owned by a Crowninshield, was distinctly garbed in shining black enamel.

ENDEAVORING TO MAKE "ENDEAVOUR."

Sir,—I would like to make a model of the Cup challenger, Endeavour. Would you please answer some wuestions that I should like to know about the dimensions of Endeavour? The length, beam, depth, length of boom, length of spinnaker boom, dimensions of the spinnaker. How the mains'l can come down the mast when the spreaders stick out on either side? How the mains'l can swing outward when the preventer backstays and runners come down seemingly in the way of it?

Thanking you. I remain.

ROBERT W. DUNNING,

42 Northcliffe boulevard.

____

Dimensions of Endeavour are here repeated: Length 129 feet, beam 22 feet, draught 15 feet, mainboom 65 feet, spinnaker boom 54 feet. Endeavour's "depth," from deck to bottom of lead ballast, is almost 23 feet. Spinnaker area. 15.000 square feet. The mainsail travels on a track down the afterside of the mast, clearing spreaders and rigging, and it swings out in the ordinary way, through the runners and backstays on the lee side being cast off.

Mr. Dunning and all other ambitious Endeavour model makers are referred to September issues of The Telegram for any further information.

DURING THE BARGE ERA ON THE LAKES - The barge era began during Schooner Days on the lakes and this picture, by the Billings Laboratory in Racine, Wis., shows it in the late 1880's. Some of the earlier barges, like the Zapotec, the largest one shown in the picture, had quite large schooner rigs, with bowsprits and topmasts. Others, like the Ida Keith, shown in the foreground, lying outside of the Zapotec, were fine schooners, cut down to half their original crews and canvas. The Ida Keith was one of the finest of the Upper Lakers, built at Saugatuck, in 1873. She was originally a three-masted schooner, square-rigged forward. She was 163 feet 3 inches long, 30 feet 6 inches beam and 13 feet 3 inches draught, and measured 489.54 tons gross and 466.07 net. She could carry over a thousand tons dead weight.

(Caption) BARGE VERONICA, five times champion of the Thames and twice winner of the or the company which owns her Mersey championship

(Caption) Those Thames barges in their light-weather race - Acme Photo.

(Caption) One of the 400-ton sea-barges that trade to the Netherlands