Ghost of Horse Island: Schooner Days CCLXXXV (285)

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YEO ISLAND, about which such a hullabaloo was raised last week — fortunately unnecessarily — is a rockpile in the Georgian Bay which once bore the name of Horse Island and the reputation of being haunted with the ghost of a white horse.

Perhaps it was the flowing mane of the white horse's ghost that looked last week like flashes of distress signals from the lumbermen wintering on the island; perhaps it was something else. As the "signals," on analysis, seem to have come from Cove Island five miles away and not Yeo Island at all, Louie, the lost white horse, appears to be absolved from blame.

It is easy, in the snug comfort of a city, to philosophize over folks in the sticks getting the wind up over bad dreams and feeling sure something has gone wrong when someone reports an unexplained phenomenon. For this compiler's part, he has nothing but admiration for the prompt pluck of Bill Speers of Tobermory, who set out in a power yawl in a March gale to find out if anything really was the matter with his brother, Perc, and the rest of the woodcutters. He has admiration to spare, too, for the efforts of the other Tobermory people who cut a 500-foot channel through 16-inch ice to send the tug John and Alex to the rescue. The fact that rescue wasn't needed did not lessen the moral value of the action.

But this is the tale of a horse, not a disquisition in philosophy, and the horse was Louie, who gave name and fame to the island more enduring than that of Commodore Sir James Lucas Yeo. The latter's name was tacked on to it by that early surveyor Capt. Fitzwilliam Owen, who was a good hand at tacking on names - including his own, to Owen Sound, Owen Channel, Fitzwilliam Island, and so forth. Yeo, his superior or predecessor in command on Lake Ontario in the War of 1812, was a power to be placated or immortalized in 1817, when Owen was doing his surveying.

At this date, it is unknown whether Louie was the short for Louis or Louise, which is very embarrassing, because we refuse to call either a ship or a horse "it," and now we don't know whether to say "he" or "she" in regard to the said equine.

However, Louie was a saddle-horse, white in color, and the pride of William Solomon, who had a farm on Drummond Island and an official position as interpreter. Drummond Island had for some years a British garrison, and the buttons of the regiments once stationed there are still dug up among the ruins of the long-abandoned fort whose surviving chimneys are discernible on passage up the Detour to the Soo.

Drummond Island has no fighting history, perhaps, but it was one of many outposts of Empire in pioneer days, and was a point of contact with the Indians who skinned the furry folk of the forest and were themselves skinned by the fur-traders with their ever-lengthening trade guns. For a musket, Poor Lo had to give a pile of skins as high as the mark the muzzle of the gun would make when stood against a tree; and the honest traders were soon selling him muskets so long that he had to climb the tree to shove the ramrod down the barrel.

The military post was some protection to the poor savages. Mr. Solomon officiated as interpreter between the commandant at the fort and the Indians who traded there or received their annual treaty-presents at this point.

When it was decided to evacuate Drummond Island in 1828 and remove the post southwards to Penetanguishene, the Government sent the brig Wellington and the schooner Alice Hackett to do the job.

Of this Wellington I have not yet been able to learn much; we had two vessels of that name on Lake Ontario, but they were both schooners. The brig Wellington may have been a Government vessel. The Alice Hackett was not. She was built at Moy House on the Detroit River —where the historic Nancy was once owned—for Capt. James Hackett, an Orkneyman. He sailed her. For generations the Hacketts have had marine property on the Detroit. One of them sailed the schooner Conductor of Amherstburg, whose crew Abigail Becker rescued on Long Point. In a later generation one of them sailed the big tug Home Rule.

The Wellington gathered up the soldiers and their equipment and sailed for Penetang, and the Alice Hackett followed with all that was left. These included 25 passengers, settlers on the island around the fort. Among them were one Fraser, who kept the tavern or canteen. Pierre Lepine and his wife, Angelina, and their 10-year-old daughter, Therese, and Solomon, the interpreter.

There was also Louie.

There were three other horses, eight head of cattle, some sheep and pigs, and 13 barrels of whisky and rum, which Fraser had not sold to the thirsty redcoats or redskins. Another item in the Hackett's manifest was a small brass cannon, said to have been brought to Drummond Island from Michillimackinac, and to that post with the long name and bloody history from James Bay by the French in 1756.

As they blew along before a light breeze on the last day of September passengers and crew did a roading business with Mine Host Fraser's surplus stock, so much so by nightfall the only remaining sobriety of which we have documentary evidence was that of Louie, Madame Lepine and Therese. The others may have been as sober as judges — good judges of whisky, perchance — but what happened does not assist us in coming to conclusions. The Alice Hackett, under full sail, ran on to the southern extremity of Fitzwilliam Island, touched bottom and stuck there.

They hauled the yawlboat alongside and all the men piled into it. So did the sheep and the pigs and the cows and the horses; at least-they all tried, all but Louie. The-16-foot yawlboat, loaded to the gunwale with panicked people, drifted before the north wind across the narrow strait and fetched up on Yeo Island. Here the gang spent the rest of the night. But Mme. Lepine, left behind in the confusion, lashed herself and her child to the mainmast on the steeply slanting deck and prayed to the Virgin for daylight and rescue.

These came, one after another, a shame-faced boatload of survivors putting off from barren Yeo Island to search the wreck and salvage as much as possible. They found the little French girl and her mother almost dead with cold and hunger. Poor Louie had stuck to the ship, thereby displaying wisdom, for the rest of the livestock had swum around in the dark until drowned. The gang first rescued Mme. Lepine and Terese and then towed Louie by the halter till four hooves struck bottom and the gallant steed splashed ashore. They tried to rescue the old brass gun, too, but it rolled down the hatch with the slant of the deck, and disappeared in the water, which had filled the hold. The Alice Hackett's days were numbered. She was so badly bilged on the rocks that her owner gave up hope of keeping her afloat, even if she could be got off.

Three days later a small vessel sent out from Penetang by Capt. Wodin, the officer commanding there, discovered the castaways on Yeo Island and rescued them. All, again, but Louie. There was no way of getting Louie on board, and no room if Louie could have been got on board.

"Oh Louie, Louie, I will come back for you," wailed the penitent interpreter, throwing his arms around Louie's white neck. Louie just snorted. A nice little solid island all to yourself was ever so much better than one of those funny floating platforms that wobbled up and down and made a horse wonder what was wrong in the Department of the Interior. Louie gave a joyful neigh as the crowded little hooker got her anchor and bore away for Penetanguishene, "the Place of the White Rolling Sands."

Poor Solomon meant to keep his promise. Master after master of fish boat and fur trader he besought to call at Yeo Island and take off the marooned steed. Master after master refused. Some promised. None performed. Through Solomon's persistence in trying to persuade them to call for Louie the island became known as Horse Island. Louie lived in horse luxury and died painlessly. But long after the crows and gulls had picked the white horse's bones as clean as the white horse's hide, sailors used to tell of the ghost of the animal galloping up and down the shingle while they scudded past the island under reefed foresail in the black nights of early October.

It was the first of October that the Alice Hackett struck. She soon broke up. Years afterwards, in 1860 to be exact, two Southampton fishermen, of the Macaulay and McLeod families, found the old brass French gun on the bottom, and managed to get it into their boat. They also fished up a Drummond Island musket. But ill luck still followed this Drummond Island removal. The boys were almost home when their boat capsized off Chantry Island, outside Southampton, and the gun again went to the bottom and stayed there.