Last Days of the Scotch: Schooner Days CLXll (162)

Including a Very Curious Dream and a Very Short Fight

IT really isn't as bad as it sounds.

There is still a wee deoch-an-doris in the jarrr, but we'll leave it there for luck. There are ever so many more Schooner Days to recount. We really must get through with this endless skein of yarns about the Scotch in sail on the lakes.

Harking back to the Scotch-named schooners listed a fortnight ago - the Heather Belle mentioned was a handsome little fore-and-aft schooner with a clipper bow, which could carry some 300 tons. She was built at Picton, Ont., in 1868, and was 99 feet long, 22 feet beam and 8 feet 6 inches deep in the hold. Who her original Scotch owners and skipper were I do not know, but in 1871 she was chartered by Howland and Co., Toronto, to carry 250 tons of grain to Halifax, from this port, along with the D. M. Foster, and Orion, which took 400 each, and the H. M. Todman, which took 200 tons to Pictou, and the Magdala, which loaded 275 tons for St. John's, Newfoundland. These vessels brought back Nova Scotian coal on their return voyage, and the Toronto Leader of May 6th in this year was highly enthused over the new trade; thus opened between Ontario and the Maritimes.

It was a long voyage for a little vessel like the Heather Belle, but she made it more than once. Later on, when she was owned by J. and J. T. Mathews, of Toronto, she loaded knocked-down locomotives in Kingston or Montreal for Halifax for the Intercolonial Railway. Her master at this time was not a Scotchman, but Capt. Jimmy Morgan, who, from his name, must have been Welsh. Morgan was a slight, active man, quick as a cat, and with a goatee like a hank of oakum. He could leap from the deck and kick the mainboom of the Heather Belle with both heels.

In Pictou, N.S.—very like her Ontario launching place, but not the same—where the Toronto schooner lay alongside the trestle to load coal for the return voyage, the wind got up through the night, and it was necessary to shift the mooring lines of the vessels, lying in a tier, waiting to load. In the darkness some pretty hard language was exchanged, and Capt. Morgan stated emphatically what would be the fate of anyone interfering with the Heather Belle's hempenware.

The following morning the shipping agent hurried aboard and told the Heather Belle's skipper that Tough Tim, the master of one of the vessels loading, was making the rounds of the waterfront, with blood in his eye, threatening to rend "stem from keel" whoever it was had called him whatever he had been called the night before.

"Tell him it was your second mate if you haven't got one. and say he's up town," urged the agent, "for he's a real red onion, and he'll make sausage meat of anybody he starts in on. If you fight him we'll never get you loaded, and you'll never go home alive."

"When can you finish loading us?" asked Capt. Jimmy.

"Three o'clock."

"Well, tell him it was me, and to come around at 3 o'clock and I'll meet him at the end of the trestle."

The agent went away, the loading proceeded, and at 1 minute to three Capt. Morgan stepped ashore and ran to the trestle end. Tough Tim was waiting for him. At 1 minute past three Capt. Morgan walked back on board the Heather Belle, and told the boys to single up the lines, strike the fly for the tug, and get the hatches on. Tough Tim lay a complete wreck under the trestle timbers. He had made one pass at the little lake man, and the latter had jumped and landed with both feet in the pit of Timothy's not-so-tough stomach. It was five hours afterwards when Tough Tim came to, and the Heather Belle was by that time five miles under the horizon, with a fair wind and tide.

The Scotch were just as hard hitters as this fiery Welshman, but they fought with the fist, not the foot. Black whiskered Davy Hunter, mate of the Malta, was known, as the King of the Welland Canal, for the work of his hands. It was he who threw the entire Malta's crew through the windows of the Collingwood courthouse when the magistrate wis about to jug them for a month and the Malta was all ready to sail for Chicago. Their sentence is still unserved, and the fine still stands unpaid, though both were imposed seventy years ago, and King David has long since joined his namesake the son of Jesse.

Capt. Joseph Williams writes from his home at Simcoe Point, down Pickering way: "In your account of Scotch schooners on the lakes you started with the Jessie McDonald-"

Right, Capt. Williams. The Jessie McDonald was the first of the Mac's we saw, and that was forty-four years ago, when Tommy O'Brien and Johnny Murphy, who were themselves anything but Scotch, had her. She was lying in Sylvester's slip, at the foot of Church street. She had reached that stage that she was still tight enough when light, but when she was loaded she leaked so badly that many a trip between here and Oswego Tommy never left the wheel at all, and Johnny and the two men forward never left the pumps. Tommy once told me a heart-scalding tale of lying off Deseronto in her in a hard gale of wind, with both anchors down and destruction menacing her from the rocks a hundred yards to leeward: and he unable to slip his cable and run down the Long Reach for shelter because both anchors were on two ends of one long chain, and the bight of it crossed under her deck forward, and he had no cold chisel on board to cut it. She wound up on the wrong side of the west pier at Whitby soon afterwards, trying to go in under the mistaken idea that the light was on the east pier instead of the west.

But listen to Capt. Williams:

"There was also a Lady Macdonald and a John A. Macdonald, the last owned by Capt. Taylor. I knew him well.

"The Belle McPhee was built by Sandy McPhee at Collingwood. I was well acquainted with him. His son was captain, and his daughter cooked, on the Belle McPhee. The old gentleman had been head ship's carpenter on a Cunarder.

"The Caledonia was built in Port Credit in the '50's. I came near shipping on her on, her last trip, when she was lost off the point east of Oshawa, loaded with coal. If I had shipped on her she would never have got on that point. She was then owned by the Rooney brothers of Cobourg.

"The Garryowen was owned by Capt. Myles. I passed her in December of 1878, sunk to the east of Long Point, on Lake Erie. Only her top-mast head and fore topgallant yard were visible above water. Before this she had been the propeller Inkerman which blew up at the old Yonge st. dock, in the late '50's. I knew the machinist who cut the boilers out of her. They had been blown from one end of her to the other, and lodged in the bows. I have been told that before this time, when she first came out as a barquentine (christened the Stork) on her first or second trip, with corn from Chicago, she was lost in a snow storm at the lower end of Lake Ontario. The grain swelled and burst open her deck and hatches. She was picked up the next spring and rebuilt, and came out as the propeller Inkerman. This is what I have gathered from sailormen I have sailed with.

"The William Wallace was a 60-ton schooner, and was too small a hull to remain any length of time on that point opposite the lighthouse on Toronto Island. The wreck lying there still, which has been the subject of comment and inquiry for many years is more likely that of the old Admiral, lost there 60 years ago or more.

"I lightened the Liza Quinlon of 3,000 bushels of barley when she got on that point, and Frank Jackman pulled her off.

"There were three Thistles among the lake schooners. I lightened one of them of coal in the Eastern Channel. She carried 175 tons.

"The Highland Chief, under Capt. Cuthbert was wrecked, as you have told, on the boilers of the steamer Monarch, near the Eastern Gap. The night before she was wrecked I dreamed I saw her strike that boiler. I told my crew about it at breakfast, and 24 hours later, when we came up the lake, we passed the poor old Highland Chief in exactly the same position as I saw her in my dream.

"When I rounded Toronto Point I and entered the Queen's Wharf channel there was another wreck. The schooner Baltic, of Oakville, lay sunk across the old Western Gap. She had struck the pierhead when trying to enter port and had filled and gone down in the channel with her deck awash. She was afterwards raised and rebuilt.

"The Highland Beauty was built in the Oakville River. She was first built for a steam yacht. Her frame stood for two years without being finished. She was built of chestnut. She was taken over then by someone whom I cannot recall, and 30 feet was cut off her, and she was made into a schooner. I don't remember the Chisholms ever having anything to do with her."

FISHING FLEET AT SQUAW ISLAND, GEORGIAN BAY, FIFTY YEARS AGO

Second from the right is the Sand Tan, largest in the Collingwood fleet, and owned by Archie Carmichael, one of the Scots who made their name renowned in sail on the Great Lakes. Big schooners or tiny smacks were all the same to them. He was drowned September, 1886, when the mainboom struck his head when the boat rolled over. Note the prevalence of tanned sails and loose-footed foresails. Capt. Jas. McCannel fished in the smallest boat in the fleet, the dark-sailed one in the centre.