Square Topsails: Schooner Days CLXIX (169)

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Particularly Those of the Stuart H. Dunn, Last on Lake Ontario Till a Seal-Oiler Looked In

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FRIEND Rowley Murphy, whose depiction of the life of older Toronto, uptown and water front alike, in line and in color rises to heights of genius, has been asking for something about the Stuart H. Dunn, last square-rigger on Lake Ontario.

Mr. Murphy is right in this recollection of a well-known feature of Toronto's waterfront thirty years ago, although, very curiously, we had a square-rigged visitor as recently as last summer. This was the Alembic.

Neither the Dunn nor the Alembic were what might be called fulltime square-riggers. The squareness of their rig in both cases was confined to topsails on the foremast. The Alembic sported a topgallant-sail as well as double topsails, and she relied on her motors and twin screws in such narrow waters as fifty-mile-wide Lake Ontario.

Even so, both vessels were striking notes in the lakescape, in contrast with the hundred lean-pinioned fore-and-afters which once swarmed there.

We shall have to "begin all over again de novo," as the late Ald. Baxter used to delight to say, and explain that square sails are those which are extended by spars crossing the mast, called yards. Fore-and-aft sails are hinged, as it were, on the after side of masts or stays. The square rig is the more ancient, and required more gear and crew. The fore-and-aft rig is less picturesque and more easily handled.

The Stuart H. Dunn was a sort of double-header. She had two names, two yards on the foremast, two centreboards, two birthplaces, and two home-lakes. She was born in South Bay, on Lake Ontario, and christened there, the Wilfred Taylor. (It is one of the jokes on us poor shipwrights that no matter how manly and masculine our offspring, by name or by nature, they are always called "she." Except by the dumbells who call 'em it.) The Wilfred Taylor was what was known as an "Old Canaller," fitting the locks of the second Welland canal, and was able to carry 22,000 bushels of wheat, or 700 tons of coal, as a maximum load. She was of about the same dimensions then as our later friend Alembic, which is 123 feet long, 23 feet beam and 12 feet 6 inches draught. The Wilfred Taylor was ten or fifteen feet longer, but not so deep in the hold.

After a dozen years of successful service she got ashore in Lake Erie, and here came her second name, birthplace and centreboard. She was hauled off the beach and towed to Port Robinson on the Welland canal, and given a rebuild which materially transformed her. She was lengthened and deepened and broadened and strengthened with steel arches inside. Intended for the great trade in square timber, a whole forest was built into her, as if to encourage the hewn sticks to come aboard. She was given a good sheer, or curve, but for convenience in handling deckloads of timber her decks were kept straight, and she had a fender-wale on the inside of her bulwark stanchions, and square ports in her transom with skid-ways to guide the sticks of timber past her cabin, and hinged ports below, under the counter, to admit the timber to her hold.

Like all three-masters, she had had a centreboard between the mainmast and foremast. When she was lengthened she needed more centreboard area, so they cut a slot in her keel and built a box for another board between her mainmast and mizzen. It was really an excellent idea, for by heaving one board up and dropping the other down she could be made to steer well no matter how adverse the circumstances.

Finally, brethren, she was given a new name, STUART H. DUNN.

The Dunn had long flat sides and bluff bows, and when she lay at a wharf one would think a race between her and the wharf would be a dead heat. But give her a breeze and she could sail like a cyclone. They say she ran once from Port Dalhousie to Kingston, under bare poles, with a full load of square timber, in seventeen hours. All this proves, if it is true, is that it was blowing exceedingly hard. It must have been, to push any craft along at the rate of ten miles an hour, with no sail showing.

But I have been in the Dunn when she made better time than this. We left Toronto at 8 a.m.one November morning, and set nothing but two jibs, the square topsail, and foresail; less than half her canvas. Through the day we got the mizzen on her, and later squatted it; we also gave her the raffees for awhile. But although she never spread more than half sail, by two o'clock next morning, eighteen hours after towing out, we were at anchor under he Snake, within a few miles of Kingston; an average of almost ten miles an hour. We lay there till we got a shift of wind and stood over for Fair Haven, N.Y., whither we were bound, sixty-five miles away. We got there in six hours.

Even after we had taken the topsails off her, when the tug rounded up behind us, expecting to take our towline, we dropped her as though she was a towing dinghy and someone had cut the painter. McGuire, the tugman, gave her everything he had, and she was logging twelve knots, but she couldn't get near us until we had stowed the mainsail. McGuire said he burned more soft coal catching us than he did towing us in or out.

The Dunn could readily do fourteen knots in smooth water; a little better than the champion Bluenose has yet recorded on a measured course. The Dunn, however, was forty feet longer on the waterline than the Bluenose, and, as rebuilt, she would carry four of the Bluenose's loads. She could get a thousand tons of coal under hatches. The Bluenose has taken 257 tons of dried fish to the West Indies.

In 1910 the Dunn was stripped of her tophamper and went towing in the wake of the company's newly acquired steambarge Congercoal. And so the last square topsail vanished from the lakes. It was twenty-four years before we saw another, and that was when the Alembic came in with seal oil from Newfoundland to be made into Toronto soap. There used to be hundreds of square topsails on the lakes, on "barques" like the Dunn, or barquentines or brigantines and in the earliest days, true brigs and barques and square-rigged ships.

Later on the Dunn became a sand barge and contractor's plant, and what is left of her now lies at the bottom in Whitby Harbor.

When Toronto knew the Dunn— that is, when she was a regular caller here - was between 1900 and 1910, when she was owned by the Conger Lehigh Coal Company, and Capt. Will Wakeley of Port Hope sailed her. Before that she had long been a member of the Calvin fleet, trading to Garden Island, with square timber from Toledo. Capt. Dix sailed her for ten years in that trade, and did well with her.

When she went into the coal trade her timber drogher equipment was taken out of her, but to the last of her sailing days she retained the rig of so many of those timber "barques," the usual ten sails of a three-masted schooner, with a square topsail, spread between two yards on the foremast, and two triangular raffees stretched above the topsail yard to the topmast head.

The Dunn's square topsail was a "standing" sail. That is, it was not hoisted or lowered. The two yards were stationary, hung on trusses from the mast, and controlled by lifts and braces. The sail was furled by clewing up the corners and pulling on the brails, until it was bunched against the topsail yard. Then two men or more went up and out on the yard to pass the gaskets around it. The raffees were made fast to the yardarms, but hoisted and lowered on jackstays, to which they were fastened with hanks, like jibs. The topsail was what would be called a lower-topsail, in a square-rigger on salt water, where the lower topsail yard is stationary and the upper topsail hoists to the eyes of the topmast rigging.

This square topsail was the life of the Dunn, and was usually the first sail set and the last sail taken in, no matter how hard it blew. It saved her once, when we were trying to make the Eastern Gap, one last trip of the season. It was after the Thanksgiving Day street-car crossing smash on Queen street east, years and years ago. In the sea that was running the Dunn almost missed the pierhead. She poked her jibboom into the Gap and commenced to turn round in her tracks. Will Wakeley threw the topsail aback on her, so as to force her head off, and clewed up his main and mizzen gafftopsails and let his after sheets run. She struck the corner of the pier with a crash that drowned the foghorn's voice. For a second it was a toss-up whether she would back off and break around the corner into the lather of creaming billows rolling up the beach on Ward's Island. But the pressure of the backed topsail swung her head northward and she sidled along the west pier with a great grinding of fenders, just as Joe Goodwin pried his way through the fog with the tug Nellie Bly and picked up our towline.

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Last Sail-Borne Coal Cargo Into Burlington Bay.

The Stuart H. Dunn sailing into Burlington Piers in 1909 with coal for Hamilton

Salt water topsail schooner ALEMBIC, in port here last September.

The NELLIE BLY towing the DUNN through the Eastern Gap, Toronto, outward bound, light, for Fair Haven, N.Y.