The NANCY Sails for the Fair: Schooner Days CCLV (255)

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POOR old Port Granby anchor!

You will have to wait one more week before we can get on with your story. Next Saturday sure.

Meantime we have something for lovers of Schooner Days, and for everybody else, which can’t keep— because the Exhibition is on, and if not told about this now you might miss seeing it altogether.

At long last, boys and girls, sailors and soldiers, old and young, have a splendid opportunity of seeing what the famous Nancy was like in life. Hence the interruption in the anchor-watch.

The Nancy was a fur-trader, built in 1789 when Detroit was a British post. She fought through the War of 1812 carrying troops and stores for the British capture of Detroit and the British attacks on Fort Meigs and Fort Stephenson; supplying the British garrison in that Gibraltar of the North, Fort Mackinac; fighting her way out of the St. Clair river when ringed with enemies. Her skipper, Alexander Mackintosh, met their demand to surrender with cannon balls and the promise to blow her sky-high first. She was chased into the Nottawasaga river in the last year of the war, and set on fire after a spirited fight with three American ships. She went down with colors flying. Her crew avenged her by boarding and capturing two of the three assailants. The third had sailed home. Alexander Mackintosh’s cutlass took off the head of negro gunner of the Tigress and several men were killed and wounded in the process of squaring accounts. Sixty bearded prisoners of war were marched down Yonge street.

The Nancy’s charred remains were raised from the Nottawasaga river by the Ontario Government in 1927, and enshrined on Nancy Island, at Wasaga Beach. Thousands have seen them, where they are housed and cared for by the Nancy Committee and Simcoe County Council.

And now the first and second million attending the Exhibition have a chance to see what this spit-fire fur-trader man-of-war was like when alive. The chairman of the historical section of the Nancy Committee has had prepared a large model—it is eight feet long from tip to tip and six feet high—and it is complete in every detail, from the ship’s bell on the forecastle head to the wooden binnacle which held the compass, and the heel of the rudder that steered her. It embodies parts of the original ship. The lines of the existing remains—the bottom of the ship from stem to stern—have been taken off and projected, and the model has followed them religiously.

There are no contemporary pictures of the Nancy in existence; it is improbable that any were made. But close study of her logbook and building records, checked by comparison with 18th century tables for rigging and sparring, and consultation with naval architects who have specialized marine history, have made possible a reasonably certain presentation of what the living ship looked like.

This living ship, guns, swivels, boats, anchors, sails, flags and all on a scale of one-sixteenth actual size is first presented to public view for the next two weeks through the courtesy of the Nancy Committee, with the consent of the owner of the model, by the enterprise of the Provincial Department of Education, which has secured her for their educational exhibit in the Coliseum. They are to be congratulated upon their enterprise in thus making history live. Later on the Nancy may be on view in the Royal Ontario Museum.

And now for a description of this miniature Nancy. Her building “from a stick to a ship,” was described in The Telegram as it progressed. She has since been rigged and equipped with sails to the last rope yarn. If the technical details made your head move the way the music does, remember that first-class honors go to the lady who ended the topsail schooner-barquentine argument with the pronouncement “It’s all Greek.” But even if not a Greek or Schooner Day scholar, you may glean a little about the model from the following:

Every detail has historic authority. The Nancy’s boat, for example. Lakesmen would call it the yawlboat, and landsmen the lifeboat, and the Nancy’s sailingmaster called the boat, each after the fashion of his time. It is large (16 feet long) and is carried on chocks amidships, and is fitted with tiller and rudder and six oars. Schooners’ boats were usually carried on davits on the stern, and steered with a sculling oar, but we know, from Alexander Mackintosh’s logbook, that the Nancy’s was carried on chocks over the main hatch, and that it had a rudder. This was lost when the boat filled with water, making a rough landing on the shore of Lake Huron when the invading Americans were in possession of the St. Clair River.

To get his boat aboard Alexander Mackintosh had to hook on tackles and hoist her in over the side. Consequently two skids are shown in the port and starboard bulwarks of the model, to let the boat come up over the rail with the minimum of scraping. The tackles used for the purpose would either be hung from the yards overhead, or would be the purchases of the lifts and backstays.

There is no foreboom, because Alexander Macintosh does not mention one. He intimated that the Nancy’s foresail, in accordance with the usage of the time, was loose-footed and brailed to the mast. So the Nancy’s foresail is shown, to the wonder possibility of us moderns to whom the foreboom seems an essential in a schooner.

Further puzzlement is afforded by the presence of a stout stay from the mainmast head to the foot of the foremast, which would seem to make it impossible for the foresail to swing across when the Nancy tacked. So it would, but this mainstay is not permanent, but could be unhooked and carried around to the weather side when the Nancy came about; meantime the spring-stay aloft supported the mainmast. Alexander Macintosh tells of setting up the mainstay at the time of the Battle of Fort Stephenson, showing that it was not permanent, and he also speaks of stranding and splicing his spring stay. The model has been rigged accordingly.

Other details which may strike the beholder as odd, but which are explained by log-book references, are the position of the windlass, abaft the foremast instead of forward of it; the raised quarterdeck; the dead-lights in the quarters, lighting the cabin in addition to the stern windows; and the number of square sails, quite unknown to modern schooner men.

The Nancy had nine sails and only nine men to handle them, until the navy took her over. When one looks at the maze of cordage involved, over one hundred pieces of running rigging, one can see that the nine men must have been busy as ants. When the square sails had to be reefed or furled they had to run up the slender rope ratlines and lay out over the yards, heels on the swaying footropes fifty or sixty feet above the water, and hanging on by their eyelashes.

The standing rigging of the model is all black, to represent the heavily tarred hemp used in 1789-1814. Wire rigging was not employed until about 1860. The running rigging is the natural color of the rope.

The Nancy had a squaretail which furled on the yard. She also had square topsails and topgallantsails both on the foremast and mainmast, and the topsails had two lines of reef-points. And there were two reef-bands in foresail and mainsail. There may have been a third. The log never mentions three reefs, but frequently mentions double-reefing. The mainsail had a boom, but was loose footed, in accordance with 18th century practice, and its tack, or inner lower corner, would be traced up to reduce sail in short order.

There was doubt about the Nancy’s guns. She was listed as capable of being armed with six 4-pounder carriage guns and six swivels. There was no definite statement as to what guns she actually had on board at any time. We know that her armament varied, that she gave her guns to arm guard-boats on the Detroit River during the War of 1812, and supplied others for the gunboats attacking Fort Stephenson; that she got some of these back, or others in their place; that at one time she had to make shift with a 3-pounder field piece, and that another time she apparently have one or more 24-pounders on board, probably as cargo. Twenty-four-pounders were too heavy for her to carry on deck.

We are pretty certain that she was armed with 6-pounders when she was destroyed, for 6-pound shot was found in her hold among the burned pork bones, barrel staves, boarding pike heads and flintlocks. It might have been fired by the enemy, but they were using 25-pounders, as their recovered cannon-balls proved.

The model has been equipped with six 6-pounders, to scale, with little shot-racks amidships filled with cannonballs the size of peas. These represent the 6-pounders’ ammunition, which was about as large as baseballs.

On timberheads in the bulwarks four swivels have been provided. These look like hose-nozzles, or telescopes. They were actually small affairs. One dredged up from the huge H.M.S. St. Lawrence (1814) was only 21 inches long. They were the great aunts of the modern Emma Gees.

Eighteen-century vessels armed with swivels usually mounted these on swivel-stocks, which were (to the landsman), posts fitted on the outside of the bulwarks. As we have no proof the the Nancy had any swivel-stocks, and as she was built for a fur-trader and not primarily as an armed vessel, these have been omitted from the model, and timberheads used in their place, for one certainly had these latter.

The model’s anchors will attract attention. They are after the pattern of their time, according to Falconer (1769), the bower anchors straight armed, the kedge round-armed. All have wooden stocks, banded with iron. The anchors are made from molten lead found in the Nancy’s cabin; remains of a bag of bullets or of her cabin service of pewter marked “N”, which Alexander Macintosh inventoried. The woods stocks of the anchors are made from oak from the Nancy; so is the model’s keel. The quarter rails are from red cedar taken from the hull. The Nancy herself was built of white oak and red cedar. So is the model.

The figurehead seems elaborate and gay for a converted merchantman. It shows a young lady in the bouffant costume of the 18th century, blue and white, with a big hat and feather. The figure is as described by the Hon. John Richardson, who had the Nancy built. He took great pains over the figurehead, because he probably meant it to represent his daughter, whose pet name the schooner bore. The shape and coloring are confirmed by Waverley Smith, R.12, Midland, who as a boy of six saw the wooden image. His grandfather, William Wilson, Nelson veteran in the British navy, has been ship’s carpenter in the Nancy. After her destruction he salvaged the figurehead and kept it in his tool shop until the shop and figurehead were both burned, fifty-six years ago.

The figurehead is supported by two curved timbers known as head-rails. This is rather unusual, the head-rails often numbering six and being connected by uprights, but the single open rail on each side is shown in the same way in the model of H.M. Schooner Chaleur in the great South Kensington museum, and in the Admiralty drawings of H.M. Schooner Halifax. Both these vessels were built on this continent in the 18th century for commercial purposes, and, like the Nancy, were purchased by the Admiralty. Moreover, Alexander Mackintosh speaks of making only one mould when he replaced the Nancy’s headrails. Had she had three to a side he would have made three moulds, for the curves vary.

The rig is rather tricky. So much gear is required for the five square sails that the forward side of each mast looks like a strung fiddle. On the foremast, for instance, seven halliards, six lifts, six clewlines, six leachlines, four buntlines, and three brails lead down the spar to belaying pins—twenty-eight little- strings which the trading crew of nine had to pull! Well, they are all needed, and were all in the original Nancy.

The squaresail, corresponding to a yacht’s spinnaker in use, takes a lot of gear. It had a couple of booms to extend its foot. Alexander Mackintosh tells of breaking and replacing these. The booms are shown stowed on deck. Their use was to thrust out the clews, or lower corners as required. The squaresail and top- sails are also fitted with the long-forgotten bridles and bowlines which made their luffs “stand” when the Nancy was hauled close on the wind. In the model the sails are all trimmed closehauled.

The Nancy’s flying jib was so rigged that it could be drawn in on the jibboom when sail had to be shortened for heavy weather, and Mackintosh often speaks rigging the flying jib half-boom-in when he furled his top gallant sails. In the model the sail is set at the end of the boom, and so rigged that it can be hauled “half-boom-in” as in life.

In the Nancy’s time the naval ensign was white for some ships, blue for others and red for others, and the pendants varied similarly and sometimes combined all three colors. The flags shown in the reproduction are the white ensign with red St. George’s cross, and the red-white-and-blue swallow-tailed pendant. Similar flags are known to have been worn by H.M.S. Queen Charlotte flagship of the Lake Erie squadron, and are shown in the model of H.M.S. Chaleur. This pendant, very pretty, has long been obsolete.

The Nancy was entitled to full naval regalia of ensign and pendant. Sir James Lucas Yeo assigned Lieut. Miller Worsley and a company of twenty-one seamen of the Royal Navy to her in August, 1814. These reinforced her original fur-trading transport crew of nine men. With the naval surgeon and a few Indians and voyageurs she had a ship’s company of thirty-seven all told when she came to her fiery end fighting three American vessels manned by two hundred sailors and marines, besides soldiers and artillerymen.

ON HER WAY TO SHOW AS IN THE WAR OF 1812 The only retouching which has been done to this photograph has been to paint in a foreground of water and a background of sky. It is an actual snapshot of the Nancy’s model just before it was encased -a weather quarter view.

The Nancy’s model on its stand.

The Nancy’s battle burnt hull as dug out of the Nottawasaga River in 1927.