Beauty and the Beach: Schooner Days CCCXVIII (318)

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As remembered, the Singapore, of Kingston, was the prettiest schooner on the Great Lakes forty years ago. Except, perhaps, the Hunter Savidge.

The Savidge, when loaded, looked the lake sailor's ideal for a yacht. High in the ends, so low in the waist her coveringboard was a quarter of an inch under in still water, a sheer like a strung bow. She had a beautiful long curved cutwater and shapely transom, American style, well clear of the sternpost. Her sheer was heightened by her paint. The blue-grey of her bottom followed the springing line of her planking up to within three strakes of her coveringboard. This color was repeated on her bulkwarks in long gussets at either end, between coveringboard and chinwale. The rest of her was white, with red and green trim and beading.

Her rig was a sailor's delight, too, lofty, but with much of its height in the topmasts, so that she was as good as reefed when the gafftopsails were clewed up; a long mainboom, which was a point of pride, and a long jibboom, thrusting the tack of a big jibtopsail sixty feet ahead of the foremast. Also, she had a squaresail yard and double raffee, which were the signs of clipperdom with the two-masted schooners or "fore-'n'-afters" as we called them.

When the Hunter Savidge was unloaded she sat less gracefully in the eye. Her Old Man claimed she could do "twelve miles an hour by-the-wind, and sixteen running," but when she visited "Toronto in 1895 she took three or four days for the hundred and fifty miles from Oswego. She was an Upper Lake fore-and-after, as her raffee showed, and she hailed from Alpena. She rolled over in Lake Huron in 1899.

Perhaps, like the Singapore, the Hunter Savidge "didn't sail accordin' to her model" — sometimes. That was the criticism lake sailors had of the Kingston schooner. In looks the Singapore was a perfect princess — less flamboyant than the Hunter Savidge, more dignified. Her rig was rather low and "modern" for its time. Topmast rigging went to the heads of the topmasts, and she had no topgallant stays. Her sheer was sweet, but not emphatic. She had a neat clean run and well-moulded stern. And her bow was a dream.

Wedgelike at the waterline, flaring gently, carried out in a beautiful clipper stem and cutwater, with a fiddlehead and trailboards sweeping back in graceful curves to the bolsters on the bulwarks, which took the scrape of the anchor flukes when the hooks were catheaded. Figurehead and trailboards were painted in rich warm yellow scrolls which looked like goldleaf. Her bulwarks and topsides were black, trimmed with red rail, red beading and red coveringboard, in long parellel curved lines. The red paint was repeated below the load waterline.

She did look a princess, and when she was in Toronto harbor with such clippers as the White Oak or the Maple Leaf or even the Vienna, they seemed hulking country wenches in contrast

But out on the lake it was a different story. They would often run away from her. She was hard to steer. She needed four men forward, when other vessels of her size could be sailed with two. She registered 186 tons; was 106 feet long, 25 feet 5 inches beam and 9 feet in inches deep in the hold; rather chunky, observe, despite her graceful appearance. She had a "kettle bottom" and drew rather a lot of water without corresponding cargo space. She was crank, that is, apt to roll and be tippy, and sometimes she was "just plain mean." She broke her mainboom on Sam Malcolmson in her rolling, but Sam was resourceful and worked her into port with the boom lying in two pieces on the hatches. He had the mainsail reefed, with the mainsheet block hooked into the earing cringle. So she sailed her with the loose-footed mainsail like a lug, and the gafftop-sail set over it.

The Singapore was one of a fleet of schooners with Indian names — two others being Hyderabad and Bangalore — built in Kingston by William Power between 1877 and 1880. The latter year and 1878 have both been given as the Singapore's birthday. The Hyderabad and Bangalore were full-sized canallers, three-masted, homely as sin, good carriers. They ended as barges. The Singapore was a little beauty, half their size, and as naughty as little beauties often are. She came to a bad end, as you shall hear next week. Only a few months ago they located her centreboard, intact, in the shoal water south of Kincardine piers on Lake Huron.

AND THIS WAS THE LAST OF HOPE ..SINGAPORE—KINCARDINE, SEPTEMBER, 1902