There Were Giants in Those Days: Schooner Days CLXXX (180)

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Something of the MacArthurs of Nottawasaga and of the Perry’s of Toronto, in Pioneer Times

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ALL the MacArthurs were sailors.

John, the head of the Nottawasaga clan, still represented by his son “Young John,” was born in 1812 at Port Askaig in the north-east end of the island of Islay - which, philologists tell us, is a redundancy. Islay or Isla means island, and the particular isle is one of the Inner Hebrides in Scotland. When nineteen years old he joined his uncle, Duncan MacDougall, who was farming in Peel County, near Brampton, but he liked the wheel spokes better than the plough hilts, and soon went sailing on the lakes. In 1835 he was quartermaster on the passenger steamer Thomas Jefferson, finest craft of her kind on fresh water, trading from Buffalo to Cleveland.

At the close of the season of 1835 he decided to take a trip to Scotland. No deportation proceedings or relief assistance for John MacArthur. With an Irish shipmate he set out to walk to New Orleans. It was farther to this southern seaport than to New York, perhaps, but the weather was better as they went south. They arrived at the southern port about New Year’s. The yellow fever was raging, and many ships lay at anchor with the yellow flag at their mastheads, and not a living soul on board. John and his chum found a sailing vessel that needed hands for a voyage to Glasgow, and joined her crew. She sailed with twenty-five men. Yellow Jack appeared as soon as she weighed anchor, and a series of severe gales damaged the sails and rigging and gave the short-handed crew a very bad time. After nearly two months of buffeting on the Atlantic, with only ten of the company left alive, and provisions so low that these were on half allowance, the vessel was taken in tow by another ship and brought into port in Ireland towards the end of February, 1837.

John had had enough of seagoing and went back to Islay, married a nice girl, and settled down to farming and raising a family. But his first-born, Duncan MacArthur, went to sea in the Cunard Line, between Liverpool and New York, as soon as he could get on board. Duncan came out to Canada with the rest of the family, when his father returned to this land in 1863, with Duncan's mother, his two brothers, and four sisters. Father John stuck to farming in the new country, but Duncan went sailing in the steamer Algoma (the former City of Toronto), owned by Perry and Carruthers, and plying between Collingwood and Lake Superior ports.

This MacArthur family first went to the Uncle MacDougall’s farm, eight miles from Brampton, where John had first worked, and after a year moved up to the Township of Nottawasaga. Here on the tenth line John and his son, John Jr., then 17 years old, and the youngest son, Donald, cleared a farm from the virgin forest. Donald soon ran away to sea, and his adventures would fill a book. They will be outlined shortly.

In 1876 young John also shipped as a seaman in the Algoma. While in her, he and some others were sent in the lifeboat from Fort William, on the first trip in the spring, to Silver Island, in Lake Superior, to bring in the body of Perry, the lightkeeper. The Indians had reported that he was frozen in with his boat, fast in the ice in the little cove that has ever since been known by his name — Perry’s Bay. This man was a brother of Captain Perry, one of the owners of the Algoma, and kept the light for a mining company on Isle St. Ignace. He was also engaged in fishing.

On the last trip in the fall, the Algoma had called to take him off, but he had refused to leave. When she reached Collingwood, Capt. Perry wired to Duluth to send word to the Hudson's Bay Company factor at Fort William to try to get his brother away from the island.

The poor man had decided to leave the spot, as winter set in, and started out for Fort William in a small boat, but was overcome by the cold and exhaustion before he got out of the bay. The Indians had found his body frozen in the ice near his boat. It had been touched by wild beasts. In the boat the crew found several articles and a gallon jug of liquor, intact, and wrapped in frozen canvas. The chronicles relate that the jar disappeared. The body was taken to Fort William and brought on the Algoma to Collingwood and sent to Toronto for burial in the family plot, for the Perrys lived here.

It was in this season (1878) that Capt. McLean and Mate James Orr left the Algoma and went down to Buffalo to the Chicora - the ex-blockade runner “Letter B”. Capt. Charles McIntosh, of Park Hill, went master of the Algoma, in Capt. McLean’s place. Duncan MacArthur, not being well, gave up sailing and went home to farm. His son, Douglas, president of the Exhibition for many years at Collingwood, now occupies the farm which Duncan took up, across the road from the old homestead, when he married Miss Flora MacGillivray.

“Young John” MacArthur’s last sailing was on the Chicora. In the spring of 1875 she was stuck for several days in the ice fields off Collingwood, and drifted down below the town. She was heavily laden with cargo, and had about three hundred passengers on board for the west. They did not reach Fort William until May 24, having met with much ice also in Lake Superior. To keep themselves in provisions they had to kill a couple of head of cattle, belonging to the late George Brown, who was going up to Prince Arthur's Landing to open up a butcher’s business. “Young John” at 88, is still going strong and makes his home with a daughter at Hidding. For many years he was foreman on the north-western coal dock at Duluth.

It Is our good friend Capt. James McCannell of Port McNicoll, commander of the C.P.R. steamer Assiniboia, who has compiled these details and others still to come.

THE FIRST STEAMER ALGOMA, EX CITY OF TORONTO—The Algoma, in whose lifeboat young MacArthur made the spring voyage to Silver Islet to recover Perry’s body, was a quaint old Victorian, built on Lake Ontario in 1840, and first named the City of Toronto. Sold to Detroit in 1863, she was rebuilt in much plainer style and renamed Racine. In 1864 she was bought by Capt. Perry and E. M. Carruthers, later lessee of the Queen’s Wharf, Toronto, and renamed Algoma, and placed on the Lake Superior route, where she plied for twenty-odd years. She was broken up in 1887. A fine C.P.R. steamer of the same name was lost on the Greenstone, off Isle Royale, in November, 1885. Below is shown the Algoma as she was when her lifeboat recovered Perry’s body.

THE OLD CHICORA, long popular on the Niagara excursion route and still in use as a barge lying off Fort William in 1872, when she was pioneering on Lake Superior.

TWO GLIMPSES OF SILVER ISLET, Lake Superior.

Ice- laden, as snapped by Capt. McCannel on the Twenty-fourth of May, 1922. Also abandoned. Millions of dollars in silver had been dug from under Lake Superior through this bit of rock, but the lower price of silver and the cost of pumping the lake out continuously suspended operations.