"Sunday RAY" andOswego Wreck: Schooner Days CCXXXVIII (238)

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"Keel laid on a Sunday,

Launched on a Sunday,

Loaded on a Sunday,

Sailed on Sunday,

Sunk on Sunday,

Sunday Ray."

SUCH is the Prince Edward County epitaph of a strange schooner, believed in the county to have been named the John Ray and to have perished on her maiden voyage the better part of a century ago.

The epitaph is not necessarily accurate. Some are not. Indeed there are details about the tradition difficult to reconcile, apart from the improbable coincidences of the Sabbath-breaking, which was rare indeed in the first half of the nineteenth century.

Ever since the Ark sailed for Ararat ships have been sailed on Sunday, for it is easier to start a vessel than to stop her.

But it was certainly far from general practice in schooner days to lay a keel or launch a craft or load a cargo on Sunday. Some masters, like Baird of the Baltic, wouldn't even casting off their mooring lines if the wind came fair on a Sabbath morning after they had lain windbound for a week. That didn't save the Baltic from going ashore at Oswego and becoming a total wreck, after Baird had got her all paid for; but then again righteousness didn't save Job's flocks and herds and sons and daughters from destruction.

Without wandering into theology let us stick to the John Ray. The rather that she is one in that challenging list submitted by Inspector Stothers, of Picton, as Prince Edward vessels of which he has no information.

Let us begin with tradition, and hope we won't end there.

First of all there is the "epitaph," which is still quoted by old sailors. George Bongard, of Picton, who generously supplied the photograph of the Baltic's wreck, mentioned it last Sunday. He had heard it from his father, like himself a sailor and fisherman.

And to this day "the Ray Set" is known among the fishermen of Point Traverse, at the extreme southeastern tip of the county.

Now a set, ye shore-stayers, is, in the fishing business, the act of placing the nets and also the location where the nets are placed. The lake bottom is a big town to the fishermen, and, to the Point Traverse boys, where the Olive Branch has been mouldering for fifty-six years with her garboard strake sprung for six or eight feet from her keel, or where the Annie Falconer settled with her load of coal, or where the Fabiola went down, leaving her brand-new mainsail to float up on the buoyancy of the gaff and boom—these points are as well defined for them as the City Hall or The Telegram Office or the Union Station is for us here in Toronto.

And they know what the bottom is like between them. Where there are boulders, and where the limestone is flat as a floor, where the mud holds everything that sinks—that is why none of the Olive Branch crew was ever found—and where the bottom is covered with native copper, in handfuls like rags of pure metal, or thickly woven through gleaming white quartz crystals. George Bongard has chunks of both kinds of copper, which he has brought up in his nets off Point Traverse.

He also knows about the Ray Set, which is a good place for lake trout and Whitefish sometimes, and sometimes for herring, two miles south of the point. His father showed it to him, and he has fished there and fouled his nets in the wreck of the long-vanished Ray.

According to the information passed on from father to son the Ray must have been the ultimate in schooner day elegance. Every rope's end aboard, according to tradition, was bound with a neat brass band or cap. Rope's ends are usually served or whipped with several rounds of sailtwine, to keep them from fraying and unravelling. The brass caps sound a little ultra, but; the tradition may preserve the fact that the Ray, after the best practise on salt water, had brass or copper bands where the tarred shrouds of her rigging were turned up and seized above the deadeyes. Ye landsmen don't know what we are talking about here, and far be it from us to disturb your happy innocence.

According to tradition also, where the Ray went down was much farther out in the lake than where her wreck lies; maybe as much as two miles. That would seem probable, for something must have shown above water, her topmasts or their heads, to indicate she had "Sunk on Sunday," as the epitaph runs. From her keel to her highest topmast truck could hardly have been a hundred and fifty feet; probably less. Off Prince Edward the water does not go down deep quickly everywhere. By the time you get four miles from Point Traverse you are reaching the 15-fathom curve, according to the chart. In 90 feet of water the topmasts of the schooner would be visible, but salvage operations, with the diving equipment of those days, would be difficult. There are high spots along the 15-fathom curve where you get 10 or 12 fathoms, and the Ray may have picked one of these.

At any rate, she was in shoal enough water for salvagers to see her, and to get chains under her and begin lifting her. They got her some distance from the bottom and commenced to move shoreward with her. But two miles off the point, in shoaling water, she grounded, and in trying to heave her up higher their chains broke, and so they left her.

Here tradition runs out, unless some kind friend can grapple the sunken hull of truth and lift it a few fathoms further towards the surface and a few furlongs nearer shore by telling Schooner Days what they know. The information will be very welcome.

Now for documents.

Search of local and Dominion customs records fails to reveal a John Ray of Toronto, built on a Sunday, laden on a Sunday, etc., or on any other day. The nearest thing to the name is a schooner John Rae of Kingston, built there, or registered there in 1853. This, name appears in a list of Canadian lake shipping published in the Globe in 1856, when the John Rae would be three years old. Her owner is given as John Rae, whose name she bore. There was a John Rae, shipowner, in Hamilton, at one time, and this may have * been the man. Her captain is given as J. Malcolmson, and the Malcolmsons were a family of Hamilton shipmasters. Her size is quoted as 210 tons register, and her insurable value as $10,000, both of which indicate a large and important vessel for her time.

No tradition exists connecting Mr. Rae or any of the Malcolmsons with ill-judged zeal for keel-laying, launching, loading or losing, on the Sabbath day; so the John Ray and the John Rae may have been different vessels. Since the John Rae was afloat apparently as late as 1856, three years after her building in 1853 (unless the Globe had not yet heard of her disappearance) she could not have been lost on a Sunday "on her maiden voyage." But this last is a detail on which Prince Edward County tradition insists. So here again the Ray and the Rae are different.

Going back to the Baltic, whose sad end is here shown so graphically, the compiler of Schooner Days well remembers her wreck, although he did not see it occur. He was aboard her hull soon afterwards, as it lay on the beach at Oswego.

It was in November, 1894, that the Baltic, built forty years before at Wellington Square, and registered at Hamilton, tried to make Oswego, barley laden, on the wings of a north-west gale, Capt. Baird sailed her with his son as mate and his wife and daughter as cook and a crew of three men. He had his vessel in good shape, and he was a skilled seaman. But when he squared her away for the harbor entrance—as the reefed-down Clara Youell is shown going in, in the picture—the screaming nor'-wester shore through the Baltic's sails like a shears ripping sheets of brown paper. She was then unmanageable. The tug could not get her, and the shouldering lake seas, meeting the out-current of the Oswego River, tossed her across to the boulder-buttressed beach under the ramparts of Fort Ontario, on the hill east of the town.

The poor Baltic seemed to turn around to strike back at her smiters, then up she went on the beach, so close to the bank you could easily walk into her when the gale went down. Her boat had been swept from the davits, her port side burst out, her back broken, the deck caved in, and ten thousand bushels of barley washed out in a ghastly broth of boiling lake foam.

The lifesaving station is right on the beach at Oswego, almost where she came in, and the lifesavers shot a line aboard and rigged a breeches buoy in no time, and took the crew off. Either Mathews and Co. or Hagarty, Crangle and Co., of Toronto, owned the cargo.

A few hours after the Clara Youell staggered in it was blowing harder than ever, and another three-masted schooner, the Daniel G. Fort, of Oswego, attempted to make the entrance. Like the Baltic, she missed it, and like the Baltic she drove right in under the fort. Only she came in end on, head first, right across the Baltic's bows; so close, if I remember rightly, that she tore away the Canadian schooner's jibboom. The Daniel G. Fort's own jibboom was so far out over the beach that her crew could drop from it and reach land dryshod.

THE BALTIC on the beach. The CLARA YOUELL running in.