When the Lithophone Crossed the Lake Twice Under Bare Poles: Schooner Days CLXXIX (179)

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QUTGOING of the ice from the Credit and the Etobicoke this week recalls the curious voyage of the Lithophone.

Oregon Bob Joyce, of Bronte, who built the 40-ton stonehooker Lithophone in 1886, was strong on carpentry and weak in philology. That may have been the result of environment. Everybody called the Oregonian Robert “Or’gon,” as though he were a musical instrument and, true enough, a pretty tune he could play with the ship-axe, adze, and handsaw.

In model the Lithophone was the raciest looking of all the scow-built stonehookers, and she had the distinction of being the only unit in that noble fleet which possessed any gilt work. When she came out the name “L-I-T-H-O-P-H-O-N-E” appeared on her transom in golden letters on a band of black.

“Or’gon” arrived at the peculiar moniker by this course of reasoning:

“A telephone is a sound carrier. If lithos is the Greek word for stone, phone must be some other kind of a word for carrier. This hooker is a stone carrier. A lithophone. So that’s her name.”

And so it was. The Lithophone quickly graduated from Bronte to Port Credit, mecca of the stonehooker fleet.

Said Walter Hare of Port Credit to Walter Nash of Port Credit, at the tail end of the Lithophone’s twelfth winter: “Wall, she’s ondoubt-less going to be a terrible bad freshet in the creek this year. Go get the Lithophone’s anchor ashore and bury one of the flukes of it good and deep in the bank of the creek, well back inshore. Heave in the slack, and if you’ve, got enough chain, double it. She’ll need all the moorings you can wrap on her? when the flood comes.”

W. Hare had sold the Lithophone to W. Nash who had not yet paid in full.

Walter Nash dug a hole in the bank of Credit River, well back from normal high water mark. He carried the Lithophone’s anchor ashore and buried one of the flukes in the hole. He had some doubt about the advisability of heaving in the slack and there wasn’t enough chain to double; so he called the job square as it looked, and forgot to look-see if the bitter-end of the chain was made fast.

The spring freshet proved worse and more rampageous than Walter Hare had anticipated. By daylight of Easter Sunday morning, 1898, it had broken all freshet records of all time and was carrying more ice and driftwood than ever had been seen before in all the Credit Valley.

There were several hookers beside the Lithophone in Port Credit harbor. All the others were well and truly moored and their moorings held and defied the flood. The Lithophone’s lines couldn't stand the strain and they parted. The anchor chain overhauled itself blithely ’round the windlass after the pawl carried away until the free bitter-end leapt overboard. The Lithophone was adrift and the freshet claimed her for its own.

She was abreast the inner pier ends of the harbor mouth and drifting fast before her plight was discovered. Captain Al Hare roused cut his brother Walter and other people roused out of their own accord. In a few minutes a crowd had gathered at the piers. They watched the Lithophone drift out into the lake and were as helpless as she to do anything about it.

Chris Sinclair offered his little grey mackinaw fish boat for the use of anyone who cared to take the risk of going out after the drifter. Al Hare counseled a short wait. “The ice’ll clear out of the harbor inside an hour,” he averred. “Then we can take the Hecla out. She’s three times as big as Sinclair’s boat and just that much better for the work she’ll have to do. Let’s load the Lithophone’s gear into her and get all set to go as soon as the ice clears away.”

His advice was rejected, but not his services. The Lithophone’s gear was loaded into the little grey mackinaw. Al Hare, Walter Hare. Walter Nash and Jack Cummings piled aboard. Good boatmen, all of them. They poled and rowed the little mackinaw through the ice and wood-drift and out of the harbor. They bent their backs and hove on the good white ash until it bent and sprang and sang. A nor’west wind and a stiff current were helping them. A cross sea from the Sou’west was harassing them. Wind and current were carrying the Lithophone further into the lake. The grey mackinaw wasn’t doing so well. She was narrow and cranky and not much of a sea boat. Chris Sinclair had fitted her with bilge keels to stiffen her, but she was not a weatherly craft. She took water over her gunwales by the bucketful and she handled so badly in the lumpy cross sea that three of her volunteer crew wanted to give up the rescue effort, and pull back to shelter.

“Fine and dandy,” Captain Al Hare agreed. “It’d be a good plan, only we’ll swamp her if we try to do it. The safest place for us just now is aboard the Lithophone. Let’s go on.”

They tried hard enough but they couldn’t make it. The wind shifted and they drifted down the lake, but not as fast as the Lithophone drifted ahead of them.

The ice cleared out of the Credit harbor sufficiently to allow the big mackinaw Hecla to get out. Old Captain Dan Sharp was sailing her. He had Lou Nash and Bill Newman and Jack Trotter with him.

The Hecla made for the Lithophone and sailed around her. Captain Dan was looking for the crew of the grey mackinaw. He knew he couldn’t do anything for the hooker. In the high sea which had risen he ran down the lake to within half a mile of Sinclair’s boat but failed to see her, although Al Hare was waving his coat aloft at the end of an oar. The Hecla worked out to the Lithophone and sailed around her again. The wind was rising to a full gale, and the sea was increasing. Captain Dan decided that he couldn’t get the Hecla or the Lithophone back to the Credit, so he ran her down the lake to the Humber.

Meantime the four stalwarts in the cranky grey mackinaw had struggled inshore and landed at Long Branch. When the Hecla ran past their landing place they signaled, and their signal was seen, but the Hecla couldn’t stop.

The four unfortunates started to walk back to Port Credit. The lake shore was impassable. The lake shore road was' a knee-deep mud wallow. They tramped home on the Grand Trunk Railroad and arrived at Port Credit to find their families and friends mourning them as drowned.

Weary, wet and plastered with mud, Walter Hare trudged home to find his wife lying sobbing on a couch, her head buried in her arms.

“Why, what’s this? What’s the matter?” Walter queried, bending over the weeping woman.

“Walter’s drowned,” she moaned. “Walter’s drowned.”

“When was he drowned? What Walter do you mean?”

Then Mrs. Hare recognized her husband’s voice. Sobs ceased. Sorrow was forgotten. Walter was almost smothered in his wife's embrace. “How’s chances for a bite to eat?” he asked.

Al Hare found his wife also weeping, and his presence, of course, stopped the tears.

Walter Nash’s young son, George, met the returning parent at the door of their home. “Well, paw,” he greeted him. “It looked like I wouldn’t get to go sailin’ with you this year. But it’s all right now. Everybody swore you and Al and Wal and Jack were drowned. Couldn’t see no sign of Sinclair’s boat or you four, neither. Better get in an’ tell maw you’re safe She’s feelin' pretty bad about it.”

A week went by with no news of the Lithophone. Then the Chicora’s captain reported her adrift and awash, eight miles off Niagara shoals. Port Credit read the report in The Evening Telegram and another rescue and salvage expedition was organized immediately.

This time Al Hare, Lou Nash, Jack Trotter and Bill Newman manned the Hecla. They loaded her with the Lithophone’s sails and gear, and a supply of grub, and at ten o’clock on a Monday night they sailed for Port Dalhousie.

In mid-lake and after midnight the breeze left the Hecla and the cold came along. Nearly an inch of ice formed. The Hecla’s crew wrapped themselves up in the Lithophone’s canvas and suffered until morning. A light breeze came along with the sun and helped shatter the new ice and gave the Hecla steerage way.

Fog drifted up the lake. When the Hecla picked up a landfall in late afternoon, she was close in on the south shore and two and one-half miles east of Port Dalhousie.

When she arrived at the port her crew hunted out Billie Hand of the little fishing tug, Nellie Bly, and asked him to help them find the Lithophone. The fog had lifted. William looked long and earnestly out over Lake Ontario and said: “Well, there she is, about eight miles off shore. We’ll get her in the morning.”

Sure enough the Lithophone was in sight.

Next morning the fog came down again, “thicker’n pea soup in a Scotch bowl.” The Nellie Bly steamed out towing the Hecla. When Captain Hand thought they had gone far enough he stopped the tug and ordered two men aboard the Hecla to cast off and cruise around. Fifteen minutes later a prolonged blast of a fish horn proclaimed the finding of the Lithophone.

Her stern and part of one side had been knocked out while she was adrift. She was full of water and most of her rail and bulwarks were gone. She had no ballast and the wood of her construction, mostly pine plank, floated her. The Nellie Bly undertook to tow her and the Hecla back to Port Dalhousie. A southerly breeze blocked the attempt. Lou Nash and Jack Trotter sailed the Hecla in against the wind, and travelled three times as many miles as the Nellie Bly and beat her in by half an hour.

The adventure was not ended.

The steamer Lakeside came into Port Dalhousie carrying more way than she ought to have had. Her mate hurriedly bent a heaving line on the eye of the after-dock line, and hove mightily. The heaving line shot across the dock. A man stepped on it. The end whipped around his leg and before he could untangle himself he was yanked into the water of the Welland canal.

The Lakeside’s propellor, threshing in reverse, drew the slack out the heaving line down and fouled it, and the man was dragged under water.

The Nellie Bly was lying at the other side of the canal. Billie Hand cast off his lines faster than they ever had been cast off before and tapped four hurried bells to the engine room. Hand junior, aged twelve years, was in the engine room. He started the engine “full ahead,” seized a coal scoop and shoved back the bank of the fire with one swipe and hove in a couple of scoops of soft coal with his next two motions. He was back at the throttle in time for the next bell signal, three taps. Slow.

Capt. Hand and the Port Credit men got the victim of the heaving line out of the water after he had been immersed for seven minutes. The Nellie Bly fled with all speed to Lock One, where first-aid appliances were supposed to be kept. There weren’t any, but there happened to be a doctor there and he immediately pronounced the man dead.

Al Hare had other ideas and put them into effect.

“We’d rolled most of the water out of him by the time we got to Lock One,” Captain Hare relates. “Seeing that the doctor couldn’t do anything, we started in to resuscitate him ourselves. While we were working on him the doctor asked: 'Did you ever revive a person who was drowned?’ I told him that I hadn’t and nobody else ever had, but I’d revived a few that weren’t quite drowned. ‘That won’t be one of them,” he said. Just then a fellow came running up to say that I was wanted at the telephone and, while he was saying it, the man moaned. The doctor said, ‘I mean, this won’t be one of them that’s completely drowned.’

“When I got back from the telephone, the man was sitting up. We hustled him over to the hotel and put him to bed. Then the doctor and the captain of the Lakeside asked me to come into another room for a minute. We stayed there all night and had a wonderful time. No, I didn’t feel at all bad, next morning, only I was kind of sleepy.

“The Nellie Bly towed the Lithophone and the Hecla to Port Credit. We had to build a platform on her quarter for a man to stand on to steer her. She was still full of water. There was no way of getting to him to spell him off, so he had to steer all the way across the lake, which took all night. I guess it was the worst trick at the helm he ever stood.

“The Lithophone was patched up at Port Credit, and Walter Nash sailed her for years. She wound up filled with stone and used for a dock at Colonel Adamson’s place, on the lake shore.”

GOOD OLD IRIS AND DAFFODIL

Sir,—Do you not think it would be appropriate to name the new ferry boat about to be built the “Iris” or “Daffodil?” The two English ferry boats of these names gave very good accounts of themselves in the raid on Zeebrugge and are worthy of being commemorated. Also these names should be in keeping with the custom of naming the boats after flowers. If you think favorably of this idea would you give your support by bringing it to the notice of the proper persons?

Yours truly,

J. F. PHILLIPS.

39 Glendonwynne road.

Good idea! I’ve seen the Iris in Liverpool, where she was again doing duty after her gallant feat in the war. But I can’t see why it should cost $80,000, as threatened, to replace the eighty cent Luella—this last being the sentimental value of that venerable antique which cost much less than $8,000 when new.

CAPT. AL HARE