Winter Waterfront in Black-Flag Times: Schooner Days CLXXII (172)

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AH- there you are! I thought you'd come. Glutton for punishment, eh, and you're game to finish the walk along the waterfront on January 26th, 1890?

So we meet as agreed, at the old waterworks wharf at the foot of John street. The waterworks, in 1935 only discoverable by a couple of tall chimneys' sticking up half a mile inland from the wharf-line, are in the same spot in 1890 - but, as you note, "away out" in the bay. So much so that iceboaters complain bitterly of the way they project, and the ice-cutters grumble at having to go so much farther out to keep clear.

The ice-cutters get a dollar a day, and count themselves lucky to average four days work a week. Times are hard in Toronto.

That's a new one! say you. Well, his time they blame it on the real estate boom bursting.

The News office, on Yonge street, has its windows full of loaves of bread for the needy. And the needy feet just that; bread, and no butter. If they want more Governor Green will supply them "over the Don" with "skilly," which is oatmeal and water. And nothing else but the soft side of a plank. R. J. Fleming makes one of his rare mistakes in tact this winter by telling an audience that whose trusteth in the Lord, his bread and water shall be sure. "For thirty days!" retorts a C.C.F.-er of the time, and R. J. is at a loss for an answer.

They've carried the Black Flag along Front street, from Yonge street to the City Hall at the old market; and the breadline has dispersed peaceably with handouts of loaves (some of which are tossed into the street car peastraw) and promises of work "immediately circumstances permit" - renewing the cedar-block pavements now buried under the snow.

But we must get on with our waterfront. Here at the waterworks, with their diminishing pile of water-borne fuel, we have more life in the schooner trade. The Ewarts of Cobourg have been carrying coal for "Paddy" Burns' pumping station contract and have laid their schooners up at the waterworks wharf - the big box-like Albacore, all black and red, and the sharper, smaller Caroline Marsh, black and lead-color. Beside these lies Capt. Hugh Kelly's Dundee, recently rebuilt in Oakville. She is white, with a lead-color bottom and neat green rail and covering-board. Her [same is on her quarter in big letters. 0n her stern it is followed by "of Montreal" - sure sign that she is an old-timer, from the days when there was no Dominion register, and Montreal was the hailing port for all freshwater craft of British North America, which cared to register.

Our antique Snow Bird, which we saw last week, had this notation in the British registry of shipping: "Original building place unknown; rebuilt at Presqu'isle, 1863."

The central waterfront is in the grip of railways, private boathouses and clubs. Tinning's wharf is here, and Tinning's Terrace. There are four club houses, side by side, almost, the Royal Canadian, Queen City, Toronto Canoe and Argonauts; besides Van Winckel's and Noverre's public boathouses and boat-building shops, and private slips and racks. Boat owning or renting is as popular in 1890 as radios will become forty years later.

It's when we get to Yonge street that the real forest of masts begins. Here, of course, the excursion steamers cluster, but the slip has lots of sailing spars.

There are the squatty ones of the little old John Wesley, dating from 1838—chunky, chubby, with a square yellow stern, green bottom, and white sides showing the rust streaks of the salt which has kept her alive so long.

There are the tall ones of the Mathews fleet, green-topped and red-bottomed, with names in yellow on the quarters; the Laura, the Clara Youell and the Emerald; with the puffy-cheeked barges Grimsby and Lisgar, schooner rigged, but without bowsprits or topmasts; and the little steam-barge Clinton, sitting up on her propeller like a rabbit warming its tail; and the long green propeller Niagara, with three stubby masts, soon due to go with all hands off Port Maitland; and the dark-green propeller Business. And there is the little Rapid City, fine in the bows and too full in the stern, with tall topmasts and a big rig generally.

There are more schooners in Scott street slip, by the new Electric Light Co.'s wharf, J. J. Wright, the manager, has a soft spot in his heart for sailing things, and his own steam yacht, the Electric, has a complete schooner rig, even to a squaresail on the foremast. She has also a battleaxe on the end of her bowsprit, but he discards that as too steamboaty. The propellers of the time rejoice in nose-poles terminating in gaily decorated spear-heads. These are to enable the wheelsmen, sweating at the clumsy "hand-grinders" in the pilot-house, to catch them as they swing. Their bows are so bluff and the wheels so far forward there is little chance of noting their heads swinging without some such range finder.

Over in Sylvester's slip at the foot of Church street is another mast-forest. Tommy O'Brien has laid the Jessie McDonald up there, free from the summer servitude of pumping her, at least while the ice holds. Sylvester Brothers' own schooners, the St. Louis and Jas. G. Worts, are there, the St. Louis with three square yards on her foremast. Their propeller Shickluna, with a bow like a martello tower, is also in the slip; and at the end Johnny Williams has tucked in the hard-steering Speedwell.

He is going to fit that waltzing wagon out next month, and take her down to Charlotte with a winter cargo of ice for the Rochester breweries. (As a matter of fact he poked her into the Genesee River on Feb. 18th, 1890, with the first cargo, and he was back on March 1st with the second load. It wasn't Toronto Bay ice, either, but good clean lake water solidified at Whitby and Presqu'isle.)

Then we haul around into West Market street slip and find Capt. Williams' earlier command, the Paddy Young, with her round bow and square stern and high poop-cabin; and all the stonehooker scows, caulking in the slime of "the Hospital," as they call the filthy Jarvis street sewer mouth. Among these box-like hookers is the Una, of Port Union. She came in only a fortnight ago, on the 6th of January, just before the freeze-up. You will easily remember her by the attention her skipper has paid to artistic symmetry. On one side of her butt-ended bow he has painted her name UNA. To keep her on an even keel he has painted it, on the other side, ANU. Eight years later the ancient Defiance—fifty-three years old in 1898—emulates the Una's late arrival.

Farther east, at George street, after we pass Salter's boathouses, the Highland Beauty will be lying, with the aristocrats of the hooker fleet, like the Northwest, and the Maple Leaf; and the Newsboy - little, low and new at this time, and a clinker to sail; and perhaps the black and green Flora, recently rebuilt schooner-style, but betraying her square-lined original, the scow Flying Scud, of Picton; and perhaps the H. M. Ballou. Then lots more private boathouses, and Polson's yard, and boatbuilding shops like Warren's, aboard the hull of the old excursion steamer, Lady Rupert, at Sherbourne street.

And so on to Princess street, beside the old sugar refinery, where the three-masters, E. H. Rutherford and Keewatin, lift their gaunt bare spars above the chimneys; and across Reid's lumber yard to the Berkeley street slip.

Here lurks all alone a gaunt dingy white schooner with Helen of Toronto on her stern, in black letters above an area of dark blue. For some reason she has no maintopmast at this time. Not so long ago—ten years before I was born— she was the John Pugsley, of Port Dover; and old John Goldring is going to sail her and sail her and sail her, often single-handed, though she is a handful for three when it blows; and he is going to lose her on a rock at Oshawa one night, when he is all alone.

But he doesn't know that,, and we don't know that, of course, in this year of the cars-on-sleighs in Toronto.

There is only one more mast left in sight on the whole waterfront, now. That's a lone spar half a mile yet to the eastward. Of course, by masts we mean masts, schooner masts, not steamer's flagpoles.

It's been hard work, tramping the snow and the Bay ice from Bathurst street to Berkeley, but let's finish the job. Steer for that solitary, slanting white-headed spar. It's on a vessel at Coghill's drydock—not very far from where the drydock can be found in 1935, at the foot of Cherry street. It's in a wilderness, in 1890, of marsh concealed under ample snowdrifts. Yes, there she is; a big bluff hulk of a schooner, with only her mainmast standing. The crosstrees on it look like gibbet-arms, On the quarter, in yellow letters on faded green, above bottom paint which has faded from red to a faint buff, you can read the name—Gleneiffer.

She's a wreck. Last year she was coming up the lake in a hard blow, and in trying to round Gibraltar Point she carried away her foremast. Unable to do anything else, she let go both anchors and dragged clean across Humber Bay and fetched up on the shore at Long Branch. That same gale the schooner Annandale drove ashore at Lorne Park. They got her off. They got the Gleneiffer off, too, but the broom at her masthead tells the story—she's for sale, like everything else in these days after the burst of the boom.

PAIR OF OLD-TIME PROPELLERS FROZEN IN

EARLY BIRD—The little schooner DEFIANCE after opening one navigation season or closing another by reaching the Queens Wharf on Jan. 5th, 1898.

The HOPE—Stonehooker on box-car model.

WINTER QUARTERS OF THE HERBERT DUDLEY, AT THE QUEEN'S WHARF.

The H. M. BALLOU and the SNOWBIRD in their last days.

The GRIMSBY drying her towline of a summer day.