Ferryman of Many Years, Many Ships, Many Rescues: Schooner Days CLXXXII (182)

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MEET the captain! Captain Jim Quinn!

Man and boy, he's been sailing in and out of Toronto Bay better than 60 years, and his 74th birthday's just in the offing. Seventy-four years may sound stupendous to the likes of some of us, but old lakesmen have a tendency to be spry and active up to . . . oh, 85 and 90. A 74-year-old like Jim Quinn is but a child.

Captain Quinn? You'll find him down on the waterfront now scanning the bay with his far-seeing seaman's eyes. He's listening to the clank of hammers, eyeing men with paint pots, generally watching the slow process of Toronto's shipping emerging like a gilded butterfly from the cocoon of winter's ice.

Capt. Jim is not to be confused with Capt. Jim Quinn, of Oakville, recently deceased. Both of these worthies held command in steam and sail, but ferries have been the Toronto man's specialty, whereas schooners were more in the line of the Oakville mariner. Yet Capt. Quinn, of Toronto, could shift a fore gafftopsail sheet or steer a trick in a "snake's back-breaker" with the best of the schooner men. His last sailing, command was the stonehooker, Snow Bird, which sank through the ice in the Bay thirty years ago. He owned her; but he sailed the Arthur Hanna and other hookers, and was before the mast in canal-size schooners like the St. Louis.

Time was when just about everybody in Toronto (all 80,000 of them, in 1883, when Captain Jim was master of his first ship) must have known Jim. Those were the days when the city wasn't so big and the Bay meant more to the folks around town that it does now; when they used to go sailing for sport, instead of burning up gasoline to put Toronto as far away from them as they can; and when, holiday times, the family paraded over to the island for picnics. Yes, Captain Quinn's first command was the ferry Arlington, which in the late seventies and early eighties plied from Church st. slip and George st. wharf, and from Yonge st. and Brock st. wharves to Island Park or Ward's Island.

But even now, despite the size Toronto has grown to, Captain Quinn still knows a goodly number of residents, including that cross section of the community that takes , its pleasures at the Royal Canadian Yacht Club. The Captain's most recent command is the Hiawatha, which during the season ferries members and their friends and guests across the Bay to the coolest spot one could hope to find hereabouts. He's been master of the Hiawatha for five seasons.

Jim has no early recollections that aren't associated with the waterfront of Toronto. On his father's side, he did not come of nautical stock, and for whatever attraction the waterfront has for him, he has his mother's forebears to thank.

At the age of 10 or thereabouts he learned to swim and dive. One of his first diving experiments was for the purpose of hauling out somebody who'd fallen in at the Church st. slip one spring day in the late seventies. He remembers the "bawling out" he got that day from George Williams, the esplanade constable.

From then on, Jim did a lot of exploring. In the spring, he'd explore the spaces under the wharves and such portions of the bottom of the bay as were within his diving range. He remembers finding a body under a wharf one day.

"It had been there all winter," he said tersely.

He also recalls remarks which George Williams, the esplanade constable, made on that occasion.

When Jim fashioned himself a dugout canoe at the age of 12 or thereabouts, his world grew immeasurably larger. Much farther afield could he go. But exploring without funds was a trying business, and Jim had to scout around for income.

The first "real money" Jim Quinn earned was at the tender age of 13 or 14. He made it by going aloft on the schooners in the spring outfitting to do work which, according to Jim, some alleged lake sailors of the seventies and eighties wouldn't or couldn't do, because they didn't know how to climb. Jim fashioned himself a pair of shin-guards made out of discarded rubber knee-boots to take up the chafe of the wire shrouds and scraped topmasts, and up he'd go to "reeve off the halyards."

"What's that?? the interviewer asked.

"Reeve the halyards off," he explained succinctly. By which he meant threading ropes in the right grooves of the blocks, so that the sails could be hauled up.

"And don't climb, in new rubber boots" he warned the scribe. "It cuts your boots all to pieces."

Jim used to make 50 cents a time, "reeving off the halyards."

In 1875 or 1876, Jim Quinn, then 14 or 15 signed on to sail before the mast. He sailed in a vessel called the Ontario loaded with malt. He distinctly remembers the day. "March 15," he says, but he isn't sure of the year 1875 or 1876...It doesn't matter anyhow, for just outside the bay the Ontario sprang a leak and began to ship water badly. She limped back into the bay, her rigging an icebound tangle.

Jim didn't get another ship that season. But he made himself $25 in one swoop. A young fellow had invented a life-saving gadget and he wanted to test it out. Somebody had to jump overboard in the lake with all his clothes on, and be rescued by the life-saving gadget that hadn't yet been patented. Jim heard about it. Twenty-five dollars was a lot of money.

The steamer Chicora was chosen for the jumping off point and Jim and the inventor went out on her. A heavy sea was running that day. Two women fainted on deck, Jim says, as he mounted the rail and plunged in.

To make a long story short, the life-saving gadget didn't work. The Chicora's paddles didn't stop immediately. Jim had visions of swimming to the nearest bell-buoy and staying there till called for. He thought of his mother and what she'd say. However, he was duly picked up. The $25 was paid to his mother by Captain Thompson of the Chicora. Jim invented a convincing story as to how he happened to have so big a sum coming to him—and another notch was carved in the many-notched stick which is Jim Quinn's eventful life on the lakes.

And that was in 1876, close upon 60 years ago.

For six or seven years after this, Jim "pottered about" as he calls it. Although Ned Hanlan was some few years his senior, he and Jim were close friends. Jim watched the meteoric rise of this to-be world's champion oarsman, and can remember the ovation with which Toronto greeted Ned Hanlan on his return with the world's championship trophy under his arm in 1878.

"Twenty thousand people were at the Union Station," Captain Quinn recalls. "And he was presented with a gold medal from Lord Dufferin."

Jim recalls an incident about Ned Hanlan in which the Chicorca also figured. Ned Hanlan had a giant darky, Bob Berry for a playmate. Berry was a marvelous swimmer and an oarsman of great repute. Ned and Bob were practicing in their shells on the bay one afternoon when the Chicora left her dock on her run to Queenston.

"Let's race her, Bob," Hanlan proposed, knowing full well Bob couldn't row well enough to keep abreast, nor probably could he.

Hanlan rowed fast, and, with finely timed strokes, rode the wing of the Chicora's bow wave, veering his shell in the following trough and sheering into the eddy close to the hull. The Chicora was only traveling half speed.

Captain Thompson didn't like the idea of a rowboat beating him or even keeping up, so he gave her four bells and the Chicora forged ahead. And so did Hanlan. The Chicora couldn't shake him off, for he was rowing downhill. She went full steam ahead, but Hanlan held his place. They raced for a quarter of a mile. Then the Chicora slowed down and Hanlan sheered his shell away. As long as he could stay where he was, the trough of the bow wave helped drag him along, but he couldn't go ahead, and if he sheered off, he'd have been swamped. Worse still if he'd dropped back. Bob Berry had failed completely to contact the Chicora and on the first ripple of her bow wave, his shell capsized.

There's a memorial to Ned Hanlan now out on the Canadian National Exhibition grounds. But Jim Quinn still is his own monument.

Jim Quinn became entitled to be called "Captain" in 1883, when he was given command of the ferry, Arlington, on which many of Toronto's older folk will remember taking their families over to Island Park and Ward's for picnics. She was only a single ender, the Arlington, and at a pinch, she'd carry 100 passengers.

She ran opposite the Minnie Kidd on a service between Toronto Island and away up the Don to the Gerrard street bridge.

"We used to have a great time back then," Captain Quinn recalls. On one of her trips Lizzie McLean fell into the water. "She was waving at somebody on a boat leaving Island Park," Jim said, "and she fell in. We were turning the Arlington 'round to go across the bay. I went in after Lizzie."

And Lizzie McLean, he says, is still living "somewhere up north."

Jim was always a man for "jumping in after people." His rescues were altogether too frequent.

"How many people have you rescued?" he was asked.

"Oh I don't know," he said, his blue eyes gazing back through the space of 60-odd years. "I don't know. There was Bob Elliott, who fell in at the Church street slip at 1:30 in the morning. I went in after him. And there was somebody named Strong. He went through the ice. And Dick Goldring, and Billie Ward and --"

"Will 50 be about right?"

"I don't know, come to think of it. And there was a man at Buffalo I jumped in after. I was supposed to get a medal and become an American citizen for that, but all I got was a two-column story in a Buffalo paper." His eyes twinkled over this.

A man of many rescues is Jim Quinn, besides being captain of many craft. The Arlington was his first command. And through the years, down to the R.C.Y.C. tender Hiawatha, there has been a great cavalcade of ships, most of them predeceasing their one-time captain. He was master of the Gypsy, the Greyhound, the A. J. Tymon, the C. H. Merritt, the Arctic, the Cruiser and the City of New York. He sailed the steam yachts Tranquillo, Dauntless and Isly on Lake Simcoe, and the tug John E. Russell on Lake Ontario and the St. Lawrence River. There's the Weaver and the Martha Stewart, and the J. C. Stewart, and the Montreal, and three seasons at Niagara Falls as master of Maid of the Mist No. 1.

The interviewer hit upon the Maid of the Mist No. 1 as being! perhaps the most romantic of his commands. But when Captain Quinn was asked about the newlyweds he had ciceroned on the mist-sprayed tourist journey below the Falls, he very matter-of-fact-like said: "Oh, they were all the same to me. They paid their fare like other people. I didn't notice the difference."

But, actually, Jim Quinn for all his 74 years, is romantic yet. What his lips fail to say, his eyes eloquently tell. He revelled in those seasons in the Maid of the Mist Number One.

Jim Quinn was never a man to hole-up for the winter, like most lakesmen. He used to sail ice-boats. He bought his first, the Volunteer, for $18, and that was before the turn of this century. He made the Volunteer a world-beater by dint of changing her skates and remedying her other deficiencies, and there were days, Jim recalls, when the Volunteer earned him $50 in prize money. And he had other ice boats, too, which won him fame and minor pieces of fortune. Even of the latest years Jim hadn't holed up. He likes to stay close, to the waterfront, as a precautionary measure against rheumatism. Also, he likes the environment, after sixty-odd years of it.

Erect as a ramrod, Jim can be found any day now "looking things over." Don't let the thousand wrinkles in his weather-beaten face mislead you. He's younger yet than many a man half his age.

You'll find Jim on the bridge of the Hiawatha the first trip she makes across the Bay to the Royal Canadian Yacht Club. It will be his sixth season in command of her, it will be his 60th season as an active lakesman, his 52nd as a captain, and his 74th birthday is no far in the offing.

You'll find him a good man still, and a lakesman every inch.

Caption

CAPT QUINN'S PRESENT COMMAND, THE R.C.Y.C. LAUNCH "HIAWATHA."

CAPT. QUINN'S "VOLUNTEER" LEADING THE ICEBOAT FLEET