Oshawa's Big Anchor: Schooner Days CLVII (157)

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THEY'RE all agog, whatever that may be -- for my part, I have seen Gog and Magog, but have yet to meet agog face to face—but they're all agog in Oshawa over a huge anchor which came to light last August. I almost said came to the surface, but it was the surface that came to the anchor, the enormous mudhook being revealed by the dropping lake level. Old Ontario has "gone down" further than it has ever dropped before, as far as we know.

"And now with shouts and clapping,

And noise of cheering loud" . . .

the great mass of old iron has been hove out by Earl Sharp and Al. Talbot and other members of the Oshawa Yacht Club and dragged ashore near the clubhouse.

How the boys did it would fill a book on engineering, for the thing weighs some three tons, and would defy the ordinary windlass and cathead. The shank or shaft is ten feet long, and it is seven feet six inches across the flukes. The stock, which the landsman calls the crossbar, is nine feet ten inches long, and the flukes are forty inches wide in the palms.

This anchor is smaller than the great anchor at Holland Landing, destined for a never-completed frigate commenced at Penetanguishene in the War of 1812, but it is still a grand-daddy among lake anchors. The Holland Landing anchor, forged at Chatham, in England, is sixteen feet long and nine feet across, and weighs over two tons, but the Oshawa one is thicker in its members and probably weighs more.

It needs only a glance to understand that this is no ordinary mooring anchor. There is a peak-shackle through the crown. Anchors wear their crowns not at the top but on the bottom. This peak-shackle is a large iron loop, like the handle of a bucket. Ordinary anchors do not use this appendage. It is intended for hooking on a trip-line when the big fellow has to be lifted.

The palms of the flukes have been reinforced with huge iron plates, doubling the original area, rivetted through with seven rivets on each side of the bills, or points of the arms. Manifestly, this anchor was intended to stay put, once it was down; it was a permanent mooring, like the car-wheels yachtsmen sink to hold their mooring buoys.

The shape of the anchor, the roundness of its arms, and the presence of the big iron stock, all indicate that its age is much less than that of the venerable Holland Landing anchor.

On the lakes wooden stocks were used exclusively up to about 1850, and they continued to be used, but not exclusively, as long as schooners plied the lakes. The wooden stock was either a solid log, fitted over the iron head of the shank of the anchor, or two-squared and tapered timbers, fitted over it and clamped together with iron bands. The oldest anchors show an ingenious tapering of the four sides of the shank, so as to key this squared stock and prevent it slipping up or down. The rounded shank of this more modern anchor is not tapered in this way. It did not have to be. The iron stock went through, not over, the head of the shank.

In the absence of any better information my guess is that this Oshawa anchor is under rather than over eighty years of age.

But how did it get where it appeared, near the breakwater of the new harbor of Oshawa?

William Turnbull, of Oshawa, has told of one anchor that sojourned on the bottom for a long time, and may be there yet.

"My wife," said he, "was Miss Lydia Fox, a daughter of Capt. Thos. Fox of Port Hope, of the schooner Flora Emma of Picton. She remembers how over fifty years ago, when Jack Smith used to be harbormaster in Oshawa, the Flora Emma came in one time with a load of coal from Oswego. After unloading they swept the hold clean and took on a load of barley for the same port. Ontario was a great barley shipping county then, and considerable trade was done out of Oshawa, although there was no harbor. There was one pier, running out into the lake, with warehouses and an elevator at the shore end. Vessels would lie on the lee side of the pier to load or unload, and haul around to the other side if the wind changed. If it blew at all fresh on shore, they had to get out, for it was too rough lying at the pier. They usually dropped an anchor in deep water outside, before docking at the pier, and kept a line on it, ready to haul out and get away once the wind came in.

"On this occasion the wind came in from the southward on the Flora Emma, so hot and heavy that she had no time to weigh the anchor she had left. Instead, she slipped her cable as soon as she could get sail on, and beat out offshore, and went on her way to Oswego, leaving her anchor on the bottom, with a buoy marking it.

"When she came back for the next load of barley she picked up the buoy, but when she tried to raise the anchor it defied all the power of her windlass and capstan. It had taken hold of a ledge, or had jammed between boulders, and could not be budged. Rather than go to the expense of divers to clear it, Capt. Fox abandoned the anchor and replaced it with another when the schooner again reached Oswego."

This anchor is three or four times too big for the Flora Emma, although the latter was a good sized lake schooner. She was lost at Oswego in the fall of 1892 or 3. breaking away from her moorings in a westerly gale and getting swept out of the harbor and on to the beach. The tug that tried to save her burst a steampipe and had a man killed, and went in with the schooner. The lumber with which the Flora Emma was loaded was washed over both of them as they lay on the beach.

Gordon D. Conant, K. C., offered the suggestion that this monster was a draw-anchor or great kedge used for heaving vessels off at Oshawa, and this seems probable. Perhaps the anchor, reinforced with extra large fluke plates and the peak-shackle, was placed permanently at a convenient distance from the old pier, so that any vessel caught with the wind on-shore could run a line to it. heave off from the pier, and slip her cable as soon as sail was made. The anchor would always be marked with a buoy and buoy-rope.

Or perhaps the anchor was provided for the specific purpose of getting new ships off the beach and into the water during Oshawa's short vessel building era. It is a curious fact that this port, without any harbor—until the modern one was built three years ago—was not only a shipping point of considerable importance, but was the birthplace of a number of lake schooners about the time of the Crimean War or earlier.

Against this solution is the information from Mr. Edward Guy of Toronto, whose father was harbormaster at Oshawa for many years, that the building beach for the vessels was half a mile east of the spot where the anchor was found.

A less picturesque theory is that the anchor was used by the Canadian Stuart Co., or the John E. Russell Co., while engaged in building the breakwater at Oshawa within the past seventeen years, or by the sandsucker which provided the sand for the construction work in the General Motors plant. It is pointed out that the reinforcements attached to the original flukes are of more recent date, having been machine rivetted. The shank and arms and flukes of the anchor look to have been hammered or hand-finished, while the stock appears to have been cast, as is the modern practice. The presence of the iron stock, and the opening in the shank for shipping it, are arguments against any great antiquity for the anchor.

The first vessels of which I have records as being launched at Oshawa were the Omar Pacha and the Paragon, built in 1853. The Omar Pacha, 220 tons, was owned by Gooderham and Co. of Toronto, and Capt. Frank Jackman, who sailed her. She was lost on Stony Point, about 1860. The Paragon, like the Omar Pacha, was a two-masted schooner, 95 feet long, 20 feet six inches beam and nine feet two inches deep in the hold. She was sold, as the port records in the hands of Mr. J. A. Moore, chief clerk of Customs, Oshawa, show, to Martin F. Hayes and Finbar Hayes, merchants, Toronto, for £2,120, in 1854. Later Capt. J. Kemot of Oshawa owned her and sailed her. She was bought by Archibald Campbell, M.P., of Colborne, in 1880, and rebuilt as the Keewatin, being lengthened and given a third mast. As the Keewatin she made her way to the Gulf of Mexico during the Great War, and there she was lost in a hurricane in 1918.

Proudest progeny of the Port of Oshawa were the barque Allies, built in 1855 by Savilton S. Smith, while the world was still ringing with the names Alma, Crimea, Sebastapol and Balaclava and the allied arms of England, France and Sardinia were arrayed against the ragged Russian bear; and the schooner Joshua George Beard, built at the port in the following year. The Beard was owned by the Mayor of Toronto and bore his name. She had an Indian warrior for a figurehead, life-sized, from the waist up, with raised tomahawk and streaming headdress. She was wrecked at Niagara in 1867.

The Allies was of similar size, 400 tons as measurements then went, 127 feet 6 inches long, 23 feet 6 inches beam and 10 feet 5 inches depth of hold. She was really three-masted schooner with square foretopsail, although registered as "barque-rigged." Her early owners were Capt. Abram Farewell, Jr., of Kingston, later of Chicago, and Capt. James Farewell, of Oshawa, and his brother or cousin, Jonathan.

The "Schooner Alliance," mentioned as being built at Oshawa at the same time as the Beard, and of the same tonnage, may be a mistake for the Barque Allies. There was a schooner Alliance, built at Oakville in 1856, but she was of 130 tons, not 400.

The schooner Belle, of Oshawa, 89 feet 6 inches long, 20 feet beam, 7 feet 6 inches depth of hold, and 101 tons register, was not built at Oshawa, but at Oakville, where the Alliance came from. John Simpson built the Belle in Oakville in 1859, and she was first owned by Capt. J. B. Malcolmson, of Hamilton. She was bought from him by George Farewell, of Oshawa, for $4,000 in 1862.

All of these vessels mentioned, except the Belle, were built on the Oshawa beach at Oshawa, and had to be launched into the open lake. Skids would be built down to the water's edge and continued out for a short distance, and well greased. Then a big anchor, such as has been recovered, or a number of smaller ones, would be dropped, and lines would be carried to the windlass and capstan of the newly built vessel. With wedges and pries she would be inched down the sloping ways until she struck at the water's edge. Then, with vast heavings and grunting of crews on capstan bars and more men hauling on tackles made fast to the hawsers leading to the anchors, the vessel would be warped off the ways and out to the mooring.

Of course a smooth day would be chosen for such a job. and as soon as the new vessel was afloat she would be towed to the wharf, or up to Whitby or down to Port Hope, for rigging.

That was possibly the purpose for which the big anchor with the big palms or flukes was buried in the lake bed—heaving off some new vessel, drawing three or four feet of water "light," and without her spars, but an important addition to the lake commerce of her time.

FOUNDERING CAPTAIN SENT WILL ASHORE

Sir.—It's a long time since Lyall Island has been mentioned in despatches. Your reference to the loss of the Africa, and the H. M. Stanley going ashore there makes me think of it. I loaded lumber there in the Straubenzee thirty years ago. It is in Stokes Bay, 35 miles southeast of Cove Island; not on the Georgian Bay side of the Bruce Peninsula, but on the Lake Huron one, although within ten miles or so of Georgian Bay as the gull flies. The master of the Africa was Capt. Larkins, and he lived on Pape Avenue here in Toronto. As I remember it, his will, properly made out and attested, came ashore on Lyall Island in a bottle, with a last message, thrown overboard when the Africa was foundering.

—SPEEDWELL

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SAID THE LANCER TO THE GANDER—

Sir.—No, Mr. Snider. I have not s-s-signed off sailing, but I do like a good S.S. steamship story sometimes.

However, I like sailing best. I do a lot of it—vicariously—while seated in my old morris chair.

Your story of the Thames barge took me back in memory to a time, 50 years ago, when I played around the barge-building slips of a small tidal creek in Kent.

I well remember the "tawps'l" barges, and the "stumpies" with their "spreet" reaching high above the mast head; and the "looboards" hung on chains. What a nice job for the cap'n and mate to lower all the top hamper by main strength on a winch when passing through a low bridge, and then to raise it again. Of course the crew was augmented 50 per cent, by hiring a "hoveller" to help through the bridge. Then you would hear "tut-tut" or words to that effect.

I recall the passing of the dangerous old tiller, which was replaced with a wheel, and I saw considerable improvement in barges when iron replaced some of the wood, in the hatch coamings for example.

Thank you for your article CLVI and for the many times I have read with the greatest interest your other writings, including several of your books. I cannot answer for other 149,999 readers of The Tely, but the writing of C. H. J. Snider will always interest Ess-Ess.

Yours truly.

S. SMITH.

30 Shannon Street.

P S. The skipper of the barge Red Lancer once hailed the barge Gander, whose name he couldn't remember, in these words "Something like a goose, but not a goose. Ahoy!"

Mammoth mudhook salvaged by members of Oshawa Yacht Club - Ralph Schofield, the member of the club leaning against the shank, is no pigmy, but he cannot touch the top of the stock, no matter how he stretches.