Gunboat Times of the Great Lakes: Schooner Days CLXIV (164)

THAT square stick of timber which Capt. Wm. Quick and his little daughter picked up in mid-lake, when they were bringing the Amanda home alone, after her crew went bounty-jumping in the Civil War, did make a grand keel for the new schooner Capt. Quick had planned to build at Brighton the following winter.

This was the William John, called after Capt. Quick's second son, as the Sarah Jane and Amanda were called after his daughters. William John became a captain like his father. The schooner named after him had a successful career, until one night she struck the waterworks pier at Kingston. And that was the end of her.

Orin Quick. William John's elder brother, never had a family schooner named for him, but he did better than that. He became a master mariner out of Presqu'isle, and then crossed the lake to Wilson, New York, and established a shipyard there, and built vessels of his own. He continued to sail schooners as well as build them.

Capt. Wm. Quick's sailor daughter Amanda, who helped him salvage the William John's future keel, because a sailor's bride. She married the late Capt. John Covell, of Brighton. One of her treasures is a large framed model of a Great Lakes barquentine, the Jessie Bell, which her husband made 60 years ago. Capt. Covell sailed a small schooner called the Jessie Bell and liked the name, and he called this big dream ship, represented by the barquentine model, after the actual craft. He was a well-known lake mariner. One of his early commands was the Brighton schooner Primrose, of 61 tons register, built in Oswego. She drowned crew after crew until he got her and then she behaved herself. He later commanded the excursion steamer. Flower City, plying to Rochester, and still later took charge of the large American tug Blazer, which towed the great dredges engaged in keeping the Maumee River clear at Toledo.

Mrs. Covell now lives with her grandson, Mr. O. A. Marshall, at 92 Hammersmith avenue. She was born at Presqu'isle Bay, 90 miles east of Toronto. Not at the Cove, around which the present summer colony clusters, but away up the bay on the west shore, north and west of Brighton Wharf. Her father had his shipyard and wharf and warehouse on the west shore. There was a considerable settlement at the head of the Bay at this time, and grain, lumber and cordwood used to be shipped from the wharves. Farmers used to line up for half a mile back on the roads, teaming grain to the long wharf in the Bay.

This was a generation before the Murray Canal was cut through into the Bay of Quinte. Cargoes for Quinte had to be unloaded at the Carrying Place docks and run across on the wooden railway. Where the canal was cut through was Weese's Creek, usually filled with vessels crowding in to load cordwood. Cordwood was the domestic fuel for the province and cordwood fed every locomotive and every furnace and every firehold. Sometimes as many as 50 vessels would be in Presqu'isle Bay. Capt. Dolph Corson, the elder, sailed the schooner Wanderer out of Presqu'isle at this time. Old Capt. George Sherwood was another of the Bay traders. He would never sail on Sunday; but little Amanda Quick noted and remembered the comment that it always turned out at the end of a season he had made as many trips as anyone else. His son still lives in Brighton.

Capt Quick built vessels in between seasons and sold them or sailed them himself. First he bought the American schooner Kentucky at Sackets Harbor, took her to Presqu'isle and used her bottom and outfit to build a larger schooner, which he called the Sarah Jane, after his first daughter. This was in 1843.

He sailed the Sarah Jane for 11 years or more. There is an entry in the old books of the Port Whitby Harbor Co., in 1853, of the schooner Sarah Jane, Wm. Quick, master, loading 5,440 bushels of wheat there at 3 1/2 cents a bushel freight, for Kingston, and carrying lumber from Port Whitby in 1854.

In 1862 he built the Amanda, in which he and little Amanda had their good times together, carrying lumber out of Dundas at $900 a freight sometimes and making hay generally while the sun of the Reciprocity Treaty and the American Civil War shone on the Great Lakes. The Sarah Jane worked until she rotted and was dismantled. The Amanda continued in the lake trade until she waterlogged off Port Hope one night with a cargo of cordwood. Capt. Quick and his crew escaped with their lives when the schooner was lost.

The ten years between 1855 and 1865 were prosperous in Canada, from the high prices for natural products beginning with the Crimean War and the disturbances which followed when John Brown's body lay a-mouldering in the grave.

It was exciting, too, sailing the lakes, when they began to sprout gunboats, home-made ones like the Rescue, Hercules, Royal, Prince Alfred, Magnet, and the W. T. Robb, and English-built ones like the Cherub and the Britomarte, and the Heron, following the "Trent affair," and the Fenian Raid of 1866. Capt McMaster formed his Volunteer Naval Brigade and trained them to be ready—aye-ready—in the schooner Eureka, out of Toronto. The Robb was a Toronto timber tug, which carried troops to Ridgeway in '66. Her bones have been a bulwark for Victoria Park for forty years. The other "home made" gunboats were tugs and passenger steamers pressed into service.

Scares were many among the lake shipping during the American Civil War and the Fenian Raid.

Frank Guy was telling the other day of how the rising mist one morning revealed a schooner in the marsh where the creek came into the lake at Oshawa. Apparently small vessels could get in there seventy years ago. Someone spotted a "red coat" on board, and the rumor ran that the Fenians were landing, disguised in the uniforms of British regulars. The soldiers who held Mr. Daniel Conant's residence as a picket point, rushed down to the beach, only to discover that the red coat was the red and black checked flannel shirt of a deck-hand who was altogether amazed at his own sudden importance.

About the same time word reached Whitby that the schooners Trade Wind and Enterprise had left Charlotte with armed men on board. Supposition was that the Fenians had captured them in the Genesee river and were making another raid. Citizens besought the harbormaster to stretch chains across the harbor mouth. This was vetoed, because the chains might wreck any vessel attempting to enter the harbor in the dark. Next day the Trade Wind and the Enterprise appeared, manned by their usual crews.

"Where are your arms?" some of the relieved burgesses demanded jokingly, trying to cover their scare.

"Behind our fists!" shouted back the sailors, not at all pleased at being taken for Fenians. "How d'ye think we'd get them sails aloft if we kept 'em folded like you town dudes?"

Black eyes and bloody noses given and taken behind the old International Hotel on the Port Whitby road restored harmony in the community.

Capt M. L. Butler, well-known proprietor of the Brighton service station bearing his name, writes:

Brighton. Ont., Nov. 25

Sir,—Re your Amanda article in last week's "Schooner Days" in The Telegram. There is a man living here, Capt. Sherwood, who was on Capt. George's schooner when the Amanda sailed out of Charlotte as described, with the little girl replacing the crew of six men. There are several men here who sailed on various schooners mentioned--the Mary Taylor, Katie Eccles, E. R. C. Proctor, Garibaldi, etc.

Yours truly,

M. L. BUTLER.

H.M. GUNBOAT ON LAKE HURON

H.M.S. "Cherub" in Goderich Harbour, 1867; length 123 feet over all. Broken up at Portsmouth, England, 1895.

Chin-whiskered bluejackets of Her Majesty'! gunboat in Goderich sixtv-seven years ago.

Master Mariner, Shipwright, Owner And Wharfinger of Seventy Years Ago.

Capt. Wm. Quick, of Brighton, at the time of our story.