Wooden Rails to Buffalo--Eighteen Hours a Day Work--Whiskey Tumblers at Tap: Schooner Day CCVII (197)

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Pioneer Sailing Conditions on the Great Lakes Described by Boy Who Sought and Found his Fortune There

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RECOLLECTIONS of Alexander' Muir, founder of Muir Brothers’ Drydock at Port Dalhousie, were interrupted last week by the discovery of relics of the vessels he found in Lake Ontario when he first saw these great inland seas, in 1837. Alexander came up the St. Lawrence to seek his future—and found it. Here is how he began:

“At Prescott (in April, 1837) J shipped on board of the schooner Sir Francis Bond Head, Capt. W. Taylor, wages $15 per month.

“This vessel was built at Prescott, and was owned there by Hooker and Henderson, forwarders. She was named after the then governor of Canada [ed.: Lieutenant Governor of Upper Canada].

“I found the schooner discharging flour. She had made one trip up to Hamilton on Lake Ontario and had returned down the river to Prescott.

“The mate of the Bond Head was Capt. J. Jones. There were also on board two young men from Prescott, Matthew Bondman and Hugh Newman. We sailed the following day for Hamilton with a part cargo of goods and when we arrived there at the head of Lake Ontario unloaded it at a pioneer wharf in Burlington Bay.

“Our return cargo of flour was boated down from Dundas by two bateaus, each of which was 90 feet long and carried 300 barrels.

Capt. Muir does this little thumbnail sketch of the pioneer forwarding business a hundred years ago, when the hilly “inland town” of Dundas was a shipping port, communicating with Lake Ontario by the Desjardin’s Canal and Burlington Bay.

“One man owned the dock, the boats, and, I believe, 200 acres. He had several daughters and one son. The son was a young man of about my age, eighteen, and had charge of these two boats, each of which carried four men.

“In one end of the warehouse there was a barrel of whiskey with a tap in it and a tumbler on top. Every man who wished helped himself, and these boatmen every morning filled a gallon jar from the barrel and then started for Dundas rowing if the wind was ahead or scanty, sailing if it was favorable They returned every evening with their bateaus laden with flour, and unloaded their cargoes of 600 barrels before they were through. This constituted their ‘day’s work’.”

Sometimes it must have taken eighteen hours out of the twenty-four to load and unload 600 barrels, with no tools but eight pairs of hands. But a forty-hour week was unheard of in Alexander’s day, and he writes as though his boatmen were rather lucky in having the rest of the day to themselves after eighteen hours’ toil. Alexander never spared himself; what his hand found to do he did with his might.

“The proprietor of the wharf stood by witnessing all this. Little did he think that he was encouraging his only son in the broad way to the drunkard’s grave.

“This son, after he had squandered all his father’s property left to him at his death twenty years after, I met in Port Dalhousie in front of Neal’s Hotel. (Alexander was then the owner of Port Dalhousie’s first drydock and was completing their first schooner, the Ayr, value $18,000. He had been a master mariner for several years by this time.) He asked me for three cents, and his hand was shaking like the hand of a man with the ague.

“Moderate drinkers, think of this! I believe that every moderate drinker is on the broad road that leads to a drunkard’s grave. I never met him after, but I heard that he died about a year later.

“I might say here that I did not give him the three cents.”

After two trips Alexander left the Bond Head and went west as far as Cleveland for the higher wages he heard prevailed on Lake Erie.

Part of his journey was on foot but another part of it was along the railroad from Lewiston to Niagara Falls. The railway had wooden rails, faced with flat bars of iron spiked on top, and horses drew the cars. At the falls a locomotive took the cars to Buffalo, over the same sort of rails.

Alexander gave the falls a good look, then took the train for Buffalo. "There found only one or two vessels in the harbor, the wind northeast and no vessel arriving. There were a number of steamers, but I was no steamboat man and did not like the handling of so much wood.

“These steamers had to get wood fuel at every harbor they came to.

“As there were so few vessels no lights were shown at this time in the rigging (red and green lights were yet to be invented), but when two vessels met at night a light was shown till they had passed each other and was then put out.”

The steamers were visible for miles away from the sparks and flame from their tall wood-burning funnels.

Alexander had no luck in Cleveland. Six or eight vessels were waiting but no crews were needed for some weeks yet, when the harvest would give them cargoes. So he fared back to Kingston on Lake Ontario and crossed over to Clayton and found schooners discharging cargoes of square timber, to be rafted to Quebec.

Here he shipped in the schooner St. Lawrence, ‘‘owned by a firm in Kingston and they were bad pay.” His wages were $16 per month, but “money was not plentiful in the country at this time and the sailors sometimes got orders on the stores for part of their pay. This was the way I got part of mine.” The captain of the St. Lawrence was a French-Canadian named Masne, and her mate was an Englishman named Gibbs. Her cargo was 6,000 cubic feet of oak timber. They discharged that in Clayton and sailed for Eighteen Mile Creek (Olcott, N.Y.) “a small place on the American shore.”

The St. Lawrence was commanded by Capt. Van Cleeve in 1832, and he has left an interesting map of the head of Carleton Island, where he was windbound in company with other vessels which discharged their cargoes of staves and timber there for rafting down the river. One of his consorts was the old American brig-of-war Oneida, which had fought in 1812. She was a poor sailer but a good timber drogher.

"After six months I left this vessel and shipped in the Lady Hillyard at Kingston, with Capt. Peter McIntyre. She was partly loaded with wheat consigned for Oswego. We discharged this cargo and then loaded salt in barrels for Whitby. This was called Onondago salt as it came from the Onondago Valley, south of Oswego.

“Here for the first time, among Americans I saw vessels loading and discharging their cargoes on the Sabbath. After reaching Whitby we discharged our cargo there and loaded barley and peas for Brockville. After we unloaded at Brockville we towed up to Kingston with the steamer Sir James Kemp. I sailed till we laid up, Dec. 8th, 1837.”

Just in time for the Mackenzie Rebellion, as you shall hear next week.

The steamer which towed the ancient Lady Hillyard to Kingston (we mentioned a fortnight ago her various aliases, Dove, Alwilda, Caspian, etc.) was the Sir James Kempt. That is the correct spelling of her name.

It was naturally and consistently misspelled by lake sailors and others, for it did not commemorate a mariner at all, but a tough old warrior who was lieutenant-governor of Nova Scotia and afterwards Governor-General of Canada. Sir James Kempt commanded the 8th Brigade at Quatre Bras and Waterloo. Before that he had a brigade at Vittoria, Vera, Nivelle, Nive, Orthes and Toulouse. He was wounded at Nivelle and Badajoz, in the Peninsular war, and had fought in India, Holland, Naples, Sicily and Spain. The steamer named after this gallant old fire-eater was built at Bath on the Bay of Quinte in 1829.

Capt. Alexander Muir