Industry of Oshawa and Her "Frozen Forty": Schooner Days CCLXXXII (282)

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WHAT was first vessel built at old Port Oshawa?

The ancient shipyard was at the foot of the hill or rise east of the modern concrete harbor, as oak chips and sawdust, dug up recently in quantities near the shore line, prove. Old folk tell how there used to be great oaken skidways here for launching, with a buoyed anchor, bedded in the lake, for hauling off the new launched vessel, and a big wooden capstan on the shore for hauling vessels up the ways for repairs, The timbers of the ways, became the sills of Elder Henry's barn.

Mr. E. J. Guy. 161 Havelock street, Toronto, whose family were early Oshawa settlers and whose father was harbormaster, grain merchant and shipowner at Port Oshawa for many years, is of the belief that the Durham was the first Schooner built there.

The name suggests the adjoining county, of which Port Hope is the county town, but it probably commemorates the godfather of that county, Lord Durham, who made the famous Report, after the Mackenzie rebellion. He was popular in the Oshawa vicinity, where much happened to create sympathy with the Patriots and later Reformers.

"Durham meetings" were frequent in the troubled days after the rebellion. The ultra Loyalist Cobourg Star characterized Durhamites as "a crew of the most ill-favored Yankee-visaged democrats" and "Canadian Chartists, a contemptible collection of chiefly liberated traitors, notorious rebels, and men with out either character, property or education." A Durham meeting at Cobourg, July 8, 1839, was broken up by stones and shillelaghs, and the flag "DURHAM AND REFORM" torn to a thousand shreds, or something like that number. But Oshawa liked the Durham report and Port Oshawa was first called Sydenham Harbor in honor of the new Governor-General who put the reforms of the Report into effect.

So that it is possible that the first Oshawa-built schooner was named the Lord Durham. She was built by the late Capt. Joseph T. Moore, whose house is still standing in old Port Oshawa, is on record as paying tolls in Port Whitby harbor in 1844 and as late as 1849; what became of her afterwards I have yet to learn.

Other schooners built at Port Oshawa were:

Omar Pacha, built in 1853 and lost on Stony Island at the foot of Lake Ontario.

Paragon, also built on the beach by Lummaree, a travelling shipwright from Oswego, in 1853. Lummaree may also have been the builder of the Omar Pacha.

Allies, a three-masted echo of the Crimean War, which created good times in the grain trade. The Allies, called a barque, was launched in 1855.

James O. Guy, later harbormaster, gave the Paragon her name. She was begun when he was still clerk in the customs' office, and great things were expected of her, so much so that the townsfolk could not agree as to what name she should have. They debated Peerless, already in use; Nonsuch, and so on.

"If she's going to be so much superior to everything else call her the Paragon and be done with it," said young Guy, and Paragon she was. In reality she was a very ordinary two-masted schooner, and wore out a good many good wheelsmen until she was rebuilt at Lakeport in 1888 and became the three-master Keewatin. She went on wearing them out until she was destroyed by a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico in 1917.

But the Lord Durham may not have been the first schooner built at Oshawa. She was certainly not the first schooner owned there, for Capt. Daniel Conant and Capt. Jesse Trull, of Oshawa, had schooners in 1837, and they may have been built in the old shipyard with the surviving sawdust and oak chips. Capt. Conant had a little fleet, and they did a profitable business loading grain, lumber, shingles and wood on the north shore, whenever cargoes could be found, and carrying them to Rochester, Sodus, Oswego or Kingston, and bringing back the small quantities of coal then used, and the large amount of salt which then had to be imported into Canada.

Times were good for vesselmen on Lake Ontario one hundred years ago. Thomas Conant of Oshawa, whose Simcoe street residence, Buena Vista, used to be decorated with a whale's jaws over the driveway, wrote "Upper Canada Sketches" forty years ago. In it he related that freights were so high in the fall of 1837 that carrying salt from Sodus, N.Y., to Whitby, the next port to Oshawa, brought $1 a barrel, and the same freight was earned on flour out of Oshawa and Whitby for Kingston.

The vessels of the time were small, but even a small schooner could stow two hundred barrels, and a freight of $400 could be earned in a round trip from Oshawa to Kingston with flour, across to Sodus empty, and back to Whitby with salt, and the whole navigation of less than 300 miles could be accomplished in a week, if the weather stayed fine. Mr. Conant says the fall and winter of 1837 were mild, and that his father, Capt. Daniel Conant, who himself, sailed one of his fleet of schooners — the Industry — kept his own craft in commission until the end of the year instead of laying up in November, as usual. This Industry was very possibly built at Port Oshawa, before the Lord Durham.

On the day after Christmas, 1837, Capt. Conant sailed the Industry into Whitby, unloaded a profitable cargo of salt from Oswego or some of the American ports, and stripped her for the winter. The year was almost over, it had been a good one, the risks of navigation increased with each passing day, and as a wise man he determined to let well enough alone and "lay up," as sailors say, till spring.

But the country was in a ferment with the terror that spread after the pitiful battle of Montgomery's Tavern north of Toronto. It is hard for us, a hundred years afterwards, to enter into the feelings and actions of the many brave men, Loyalists and Patriots alike, who suffered and died then to make our Canada of to-day. We are so used to hearing of the Family Compact and of the flight of the rebels that we think mistakenly of of the Loyalists as bloodthirsty sinecure holders and the Patriots a lot of frightened rabbits. All the terror of death and ruin was not felt by Mackenzie's followers, and all the hunting and hanging was not done by the Family Compact. At least, if the Patriots never staged a public execution like that of Lount and Matthews, they had their share of private killings to regret, such as the Usher outrage at Niagara.

As he stripped the Industry, Capt. Conant heard nothing but tales of terror of those who were hiding or fleeing from the militia because they were suspected of rebel sympathies. One of his own dugout canoes had been stolen by a panicked Patriot, and the poor beggar had paddled all the way from Port Oshawa to Oak Orchard, N.Y., with it, before a fresh north breeze. He had sat in the stern with a stone between his feet to keep the leaky bow of the hollowed pine log out of water. He had covered the sixty-five miles in sixteen hours.

Women came to Capt. Conant and pleaded with him to save fathers and husbands and sons from hanging. They did not know what was going to happen to them. All they knew was that their men were in hiding and the soldiers were after them.

Capt. Conant was not a rebel, nor was his heart made of the nether millstone. That night the Industry hastily bent again the sails which had been stripped from her spars and slipped out of Whitby, steering east in the quiet frosty moonlight, a thin piercing off-shore wind just rounding her canvas.

"Guess Dan Conant's going to lay her up in one of the Oshawa shore ponds, that much nearer home," was the comment around Whitby wharf, but the wise Daniel had said nothing as to his intentions.

Forty times, through the long winter night, a light had twinkled along the shore, the Industry had rounded to, and a punt or canoe had put off from the forest-shrouded beach, and a frozen Patriot had clambered over the Industry's rail. By morning her black shallow hold was filled with refugees, curled together for warmth on the blankets and baggage they had brought with them. The hatches were on above them, battened down to keep out the cold.

On deck Capt, Conant and his crew stamped and flogged their arms on their chests in the frosty weather, as the Industry, wing-and-wing like a butterfly, fled before the wind for Oswego. Soon the north shore faded, and the Patriots, safe from immediate pursuit, came out on deck and shared the scanty provisions they had been able to bring along.

Next morning, with the year almost at an end, they were abreast of Oswego in the United States. But three miles of broken ice stretched between them and the promised land. The northwest wind which had brought them had also brought down ice cakes and packed them at the lee end of the lake.

Back and forth the Industry tacked, seeking an opening. Sometimes she would find a lead and make a few hundred yards of progress towards the port. A rugged Port Oshawa tar climbed out on the bowsprit and down on to the bobstay, and, steadying himself by the jib downhaul, kicked and pushed at the ice cakes as the vessel dipped and rose in the swell of the sea that was running. He was drenched and cased in ice himself, but sweated with his efforts. Yet when darkness fell they had only made a quarter of a mile through the ice field. With the dropping of the wind they could push no farther.

Next morning the Industry was frozen in solid, with clear ice two inches thick around her and lumps of it of greater thickness all the way to the shore. Sailor John went overside and found that the two-inch ice would bear. Little food was left in the schooner. The Patriots, tearing off pieces of her bulwark planking, for use as lifesavers, started for the shore, burdened with the poor belongings they had brought from Canada.

Sailor John warned them to keep off the hummocks and on the thin new ice, and whenever they neglected his warning they would break through. But their fragments saved them, the ends catching on solid ice and enabling them to crawl out and resume their march. With their clothes freezing to their bodies they staggered on, breaking through again and again. Capt. Conant and his crew fell in, too, getting wet and frozen in the process of continuous rescue; all but one man, John Pickel, a sailor lighter and nimbler than the rest, who had provided himself with a larger plank than any.

In despair many of the Patriots' sank down on the ice to die, but John belabored them with the bulwark strip and urged them onwards.

Hundreds of Oswego folk lined the shore to welcome them, but could not get out to help them because of a widening crack which was developing between the ice and the shore. The wretched band reached this at three o'clock in the afternoon. The wind had sprung up from the south and the crack broadened with the lake ice being pushed northward. The gap was too wide to jump in their frozen clothes, and it seemed as though, within twenty rods of shore, the freezing forty would have to trudge back to the abandoned Industry, over two miles of broken ice.

But John Pickel came up with his plank, and the last straggler whom he had rescued, flung the plank down, and rushed across it, shouting, "Run for your lives!" Every man of the Patriots and of the Industry's crew ran across this four-inch bridge as the moving ice slipped from under it, until, with the last man across, the end dipped into the icy lake. Another second and it would have been too late.

The good folk of Oswego carried the refugees to the nearest tavern, where fires were roaring in the red-hot stoves in the brick-floored basement barroom. It is related that as their frozen clothes began to steam and thaw the water dripped from them until it formed a pool over the bricks ankle-deep, and the crowd had to adjourn to higher regions.

Capt. Conant lost his vessel by this humane act. She was carried offshore in the ice pack, by this south wind which had sprung up. Then an east wind drove her and the pack out of sight up the lake. He and his crew quietly returned to Oshawa within a few days and although much was suspected against them, they escaped prosecution or persecution for aiding those who had fled.

In the spring he sent out John Pickel and William Annis to search for the Industry. They found the remains of her on the south shore, near Oak Orchard. She had drifted in there, and a freebooter had stripped her of her cables, spars and gear and cut her up for firewood. The Oshawa men went after him and put the pressure on hard. They also learned that the laws of New York State provided a penalty of ten years imprisonment for barratry, wrecking and piracy, and that they could prosecute the destroyer of the Industry for these crimes. The outcome was that the villain's father-in-law paid over $1,100 in settlement. Capt. Conant was entitled to much more, for the Industry was valued at $8,000, but he was not a hard man, reaping where he had not strawed.

When the Rebellion Losses Bill became law he was urged to put in a claim for the loss of the Industry. Many others put in claims and collected, too. "Fisty" Masterson the smuggler had his little schooner rebuilt on the Government dock at Niagara because he showed bullet holes in her hull "received in the Queen's service." The Queen's service, for all that could be proved, had been Her Majesty's customs chasing the Christina when she tried to run a cargo of contraband tea.

Capt, Conant's sense of humor was too keen to attempt to collect damages for running a cargo of rebels, "No, my son," said he, "if I was fool enough to risk my ship and my life in the business of the rebellion in midwinter I deserved to stand whatever loss there was." His grandson, by the way, is the Crown Attorney of Ontario County, Gordon Conant, K.C.

But he suffered in more than the loss of his vessel, through his patriot sympathies. Om the 15th day of the following February, his father Thomas Conant the First, grandfather of the author of "Upper Canada Sketches," was walking from Oshawa to Bowmanville, the winter road being impassable at the time for wheeled vehicles. As he neared a tavern (still standing on the south side of the old Kingston road in Darlington Township) he saw a red-coated despatch rider sitting his horse and tossing off two stirrup cups in succession. Possibly the government dragoon felt he could lord it over the father of the sailor suspected of running a cargo of refugees, and hailed him insultingly. At any rate, Mr. Conant, who knew him well, replied: "Good day to you; drunk again!"

The dragoon, infuriated at the thought that he might be reported for drinking while carrying despatches, dug his spurs into his horse and tried to ride the old gentleman down. Mr. Conant seized the horse 'by the bridle and so saved himself momentarily; but the dragoon drew this sword and struck at him, fracturing his skull. He died within few hours.

The despatch-rider was not prosecuted for manslaughter, because the coroner's inquest revealed the fact that the three witnesses of the homicide had only seen it "through the glass of the tavern window." Their evidence was therefor considered inadmissible. This was one of the many causes of rebellion-time bitterness against the institutions of the Family Compact.

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DANIEL CONANT'S SCHOONERS LOADING ON THE SHORE. The INDUSTRY is the vessel shown at the left.—From "Upper Canada Sketches."

CAPTAIN DANIEL CONANT. From "Upper Canada Sketches."