Hard Driving Scot and Some of His Ships: Schooner Days CCCI (301)

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SUCH a grand old man of the lakes as Alexander Ure, who died this week, cannot be allowed to make his harbor furl without salute from the brethren.

There were many fine things about this hard-working Scotchman. The pious will remember how he sacrificed gain to adhere to his principle of not sailing on Sunday. If a schooner is in the middle of the lake at midnight Saturday she has to be handled just the same as at any other time. But Alex Ure's rule was to keep the Sabbath holy, and he wasted many a fair breeze and many a dollar in wages lying at the dock rather than start out on the Lord's Day.

My own best recollection of him is his fatherly kindness to his four little daughters when their mother died. Instead of leaving them alone ashore he took them with him on the Ariadne and later on the W. T. Greenwood, hiring a particularly nice motherly old lady as cook, to look after them. Their neatly tied pigtails, clean print "pinnies," snow-apple cheeks and merry laughter are a pleasant memory forty years old and more.

But Alex Ure was more than a pious, Presbyterian church elder and kind father. He was a graduate of the university of hard knocks, as tossed- about as AEneas or Ulysses, and as gallantly triumphant over fate as they.

Well did he merit the serene calm of his seventies, eighties and nineties, for the billows of all the seas, salt and fresh, had battered him for sixty years. They assailed him before he opened his eyes. His father was drowned ere he was born, in 1846. When nine years old he was working, for his "keep" as cook for the crew of three of the Fifeshire sloop Chance, trading between Limekilns and the Moray Firth. Before he was ten he was winning a crown a month—and his keep—in the Scotch schooner Luna. Then he got a berth in the schooner Gufferts, going foreign between Leith and Rotterdam.

With a little flesh on his bones he qualified as carpenter's apprentice, and for seven years he served his time with a ship's carpenter in Limekilns. Down to the seven seas again he went with carpenter's rating in ocean-going craft; but he had learned to love his Sabbaths in his seven years' apprenticeship, and he was ill at in a world afloat where Sunday was like every other day.

So he followed his mother, who had remarried and was now Mrs. Peter Young, at Frenchman's Bay in Canada. Dunbarton was the post office of the little village at the head of the bay, and the name of the old rock on the Clyde, and the country church bells were music in the ears of the young Scot. So, too, was the name of a schooner he found there — the Highland Chief — painted black and red, like the Macgregor tartan. He found in her a ripe field for his talents as ship carpenter. Very ripe; she was five years older than he was, and had been built in Port Credit. Verb. sap. In the end he owned her. John Cuthbert, brother of the more famous "Al" Cuthbert, sailed her for him, and lost her for him on the boilers of the old Monarch, off the Eastern Gap, on the 19th of September, 1873.

All Alex Ure's earnings went down in the Highland Chief, but, undaunted, he ventured into the Rapid of Port Credit, patched her up, and sold her at a profit. Then he got the ancient John Wesley of Port Hope, built in 1838; gave her a new lease of life (she lived, to be sixty) and sold her; and took a plunge into ownership of a "big vessel" for her time, the Isabella of Whitby. She had a bottom of four-inch rock elm and could carry over 200 tons.

Capt. Ure spent a lot of time and all his savings on her, and got her into good shape again. Many of her frames had gone soft, and that was why he got her cheap to begin with.

He lost her on her first trip, with a load of iron ore from Whitby for Charlotte, First the mainmast went out of her, in a northwest gale; then the foremast, when she was within sight of safety off Charlotte piers. He gave her both anchors and hung on in the roaring seas just outside the pierhead. The Isabella dragged to within twenty-five feet of the corner, and held there. The seas were running too high for the tug Florence Yates to come out for her, although Capt. Ure kept hailing: "Two hundred dollars for a tow in, no cure, no pay." After twenty-four hours the Yates blew her whistle and started out. The Isabella's crew had been pumping till they were dead beat. The Yates got near enough to cast a heaving line, and two turns of the towline were around the Isabella's paulpost, when Capt. Ure roared, "Cast off! She's gone!" As he spoke the schooner went down under their feet. The crew scrambled to the cabin top, and from that to the tug. The Isabella broke up in the pounding of the seas, rock-elm bottom and new frames washing in together like so much cordwood.

Back to the stonehooking and wood-carrying, which had been the trade of the Highland Chief and Rapid and John Wesley, went Capt. Ure. Frenchman's Bay nicknamed him "Wild Alex," and "the Tip-Up" for his hard luck, but he matched hard luck with harder work, He got another John Wesley, this one a Prince Edward scow, with bows like the head of a barrel, and with her earned enough for another venture in ship-carpentry and ship ownership.

This was the schooner Ariadne, of Port Burwell, which could carry 300 tons of coal. She was partially dismasted in a westerly gale, and all, hands gave themselves up for lost, but he got her into Kingston. She proved profitable to him, but was the death of Capt. Sutherland McKay and his crew on Stony Point four years later.

When he sold the Ariadne Capt. Ure bought the Undine, of Hamilton, another fore-and-after, a very witch to sail. She once made the round trip between Hamilton and Oswego four hundred miles, in forty-eight hours, including the time it took to load 400 tons of coal. But he lost her on the Devil's Nose, twenty-two miles from Charlotte, running her ashore there to save the lives of his crew. She was leaking like the Isabella.

After the Undine Alex. Ure was in partnership with Capt. John Williams, in the Greenwood and the Speedwell, and the W. Y. Emery, and a stormy time he had in all three, although nothing worse befell him himself than a broken arm at the Speedwell's centreboard winch. He rebuilt the Emery here in the water at the foot of Parliament street, reframing her bottom, and taking her across to Muir's drydock at Port Dalhousie for the necessary fastening.

Tricky bit of work for him and Capt. Williams, for the new floor frames were only held in place by the ceiling planking. He emphasized his name of "Wild Alex" by giving the staid Emery a maintopmast staysail and a blue-devil or jib-o'-jib on the end of her horn—and he wrung off the head of her foretop-mast by hanging on to the fore-gaff- topsail too long. He was always a great man for light sails and would come out of the cabin with his arms full of them about the time the cautious mate was getting ready to clew down the topsails. He kept his eye open for spare jibs, and so on, from yachts, getting them at better price's than the junk man would pay, and blowing them out with great satisfaction if they helped clip down the time of a passage.

He later bought the timber drogher Antelope for the Conger Coal Co. and himself, and re-fitted her. She had been towing for years, and had lost her topmasts. This was a successful venture, and was followed by the purchase of the three-master Augusta, in similar circumstances. He decorated her with extra canvas. But he lost the Augusta on the beach at Port Credit in a snowstorm; she had broomed off the head of her rudder-stock, and was unmanageable.

Next he went into that "Bull of the Woods," the large American-built schooner, Reuben Doud. She was as awkward as her name, and gave him endless trouble, getting ashore above Charlotte and sinking when she was refloated and towed into port, and the salvage bills wiped out his share in the ownership of her. She went ashore again opposite Ward's Island in 1906, when Capt. Joyce was sailing her, and broke up; an end too long deferred for a ship that had been hoodooed from her launching cradle. She was built on the Fox or the Wolf River, in the woods of Wisconsin, and it took forty oxen to tow her down to the lake. They had all sorts of trouble with her getting aground on the way down, and she had lots of trouble afterwards. When Capt. Ure bought her she was a dismasted wreck lying in. Detroit, having got on the bottom of the Middle Ground in Lake Erie, losing her spars and almost drowning her crew.

Capt. Ure always counted himself lucky to get out of the Reuben Doud. Fortunately, as mentioned elsewhere, he had gone in for housebuilding during the winters ashore, an he had this sturdy "anchor to windward" when he retired.

FLYING NURSERY - The W.T. Greenwood, in which Capt. Ure mothered his orphaned little lasses. Like other vessels of Capt. Ure's, the Greenwood shows a maintopmast staysail or fly-by-night, one of the extra pinions in which he delighted.

IN HIS PRIME - Capt. Alexander Ure of Dunbarton.

WITCH OF THE WAVES—The Undine of Hamilton, in which Capt. Ure made the round trip to Oswego in forty-eight hours, including loading time.

ON THE BEACH -Wreck of the Reuben Dowd at Ward's Island, 1906.

READY FOR REFIT—The Antelope, which Capt. Ure re-rigged with topmasts and revived as a schooner.

BARREL-BOWED JOHN WESLEY - Second of the name in Capt. Ure's argosy.