This Barnes Brigade Had No Luck With Spars: Schooner Days CCCXXI (321a)

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THAT was a cute little box of tricks that came to Lake Ontario when George Hart, of Picton, and Jas. Swift and Co. of Kingston, bought the Burt Barnes from Graham Brothers, lumber merchants, of Kincardine.

The Baby Barnes, old upper-lakers called her, for she was the littlest and latest of the Barnes family of famous American schooners.

There was the big C. C. Barnes, three-masted, square rigged forward, built in 1873 at Manitowoc, Wisconsin, by Henry Burger for C. C. Barnes, president of the First Nation Bank, and Capt. H. C. Albright, her first master. She was a whopper, 582 tons register, 172 feet long, 31 feet beam, 12 feet depth of hold.

Capt. Albright sailed her for seventeen consecutive seasons. She was bought in 1890 by L. S. Sullivan, Toledo, but Mr. Sullivan did not buy the luck that had gone with her. In 1893, while on Lake Michigan with a cargo of coal from Lake Erie for Chicago, she was struck by a heavy squall and dismasted, her whole rig going out of her. The foremast went clean, the mainmast under the crosstrees, and the mizzen lost its topmast. Unmanageable without sails, she was blown on to the South Fox, going hard aground. After much grunting, the tug Monarch, of Escanaba, pulled her off and towed her into Manitowoc.

Here, where she was born, she was resparred and again faced the world. Within a year, on May 18th, 1894, she was in trouble with a lot of other schooners. A great gale swept the lakes that week, and eleven vessels were blown on to the beach south of Milwaukee piers. The Oswego schooner M. J. Cummings was one of them, and four men and the woman cook hung in her rigging in the May snowstorm till they froze to death. The C. C. Barnes was another victim. She drove in so far that you would walk around her on the soft sand. Six of the eleven schooners were completely wrecked. The C. C. Barnes and four more were refloated. She was cut down to a lighter in 1912, but was beached and broken up at North Point, Milwaukee, seven years later. And that was the end of Big Brother Barnes. The only picture we have of her is after her dismasting and stranding on the South Fox, when she appears at anything but her best. She was really a very fine looking vessel, with a cloud of canvas.

But the big boy had an elder sister, the Bertha Barnes, built at Sheboygan in 1872; twenty feet shorter than the C. C. Barnes, but also a very fine vessel.

Unfortunately the picture shows her, too, in the seedy senility of her early forties, when she was tramping the Detroit River in reduced rig, wearing patched clothes only big enough to property outfit the little Baby Barnes. Look at the mainsail, so short in the hoist it is lower than her mizzen, and the misfit gafftopsail above it waves around between the gaff and the topmast like a tangled flag. And look at the raffee, set on the topsail yard which used to spread the head of a lower topsail with goosewings twice as far apart as the raffee clews! The maintopmast head has been carried away, and perhaps all her spars were suspected. That may account for her reduced rig which looks as though she was reefed.

Bertha, however, came into her own again in 1914, when the Great War gave everything that floated a chance for prosperity if they could dodge the submarines. Rebuilt at a cost of $20,000 in 1911 and renamed the W. D. Hossack, she was sold to Boston at a price that made everybody happy, and went to the seaboard while war freights were high. She was said to be in commission seven years ago. Her registered dimensions are 330 gross tons, 151 feet length, 29 feet 6 inches beam, and 10 feet 3 inches depth of hold.

But the Burt Barnes, or Baby Barnes, was the cute little box of tricks we started to talk about. She was the last importation to Lake Ontario of many schooners which came from "up above." Since her there has been no other, for the line has run out. Graham Brothers had changed her American registry years before, and put a squaretail and raffee on her. The picture shows her clearing the end of Kincardine piers when they first got her, before they gave her the fancy tophamper. With that set she looked as big as the Big Boy himself, or the Big Sister - if you got that perspective right and did not look too hard at the "giant" at the wheel! For she was only 92 feet long, 24 feet beam, 7 feet in the hold - a little "yacht," smaller indeed than Oriole IV in some ways, and able to get into any hole and corner in the Bay of Quinte, where the dew was heavy at night. She registered 118 tons, with meant she was really one-fifth the size of the first named of the Barnes clan.

Capt. Pat McManus of Picton was delighted to get hold of her. Here was the sailor's dream come true - a vessel big enough to carry profitable freights and able to go anywhere, but one that two men could handle in a pinch, and where four would be plenty for al purposes. Her ten or eleven sails were all small; that was the beauty of the three-masted rig. The raffee made her sure of coming in stays even if only one man went forward to overhaul the headsheets. And she looked the part. Her sheer was as sweet and true as the curve of a new strung bow. She had a graceful clipper bow and neat clean run and transom. She was painted white above and lead color below, with a yellow stern, and big square and compass, when I last saw her in Kingston after the George Cup races of 1926.

But nothing is perfect in this world, and the fly in the Baby Barnes' milk bottle was that her foremast had dry-rot. The whole Barnes family seems to have been hard on spars. Captain McManus discovered that and began casting about for a new spar. But it was still summer, and if she could get through this season there would be plenty of time to step a new foremast in the four months Picton harbor was frozen over.

On the first of September they left Big Sodus on the south shore of Lake Ontario with 210 tons of soft coal for Kingston—-a daylight run with a fair wind, and they had the wind fair from the southwest. But when they had crossed the lake and were drawing in on South Bay Point the wind went to the northeast. That was not so bad, for she could shelter under the False Ducks, or stand up into the Bay of Quinte by the Upper Gap, and then come down the Amherst Reach to Kingston in smooth water. But she could not fetch in without tacking, and when she hung in stays the suspected foremast crumpled up and fell backward, taking foresail and raffee and the four jibs with it.

Then the mainmast, unsupported, fell too, and the mizzen followed. In falling, this last mast cut down the upper gunwale of the yawlboat, which was carried on the stern davits, and the opposite gunwale was crushed under the taffrail. The small boat, the only means of safety, was practically cut in two in that part of it which would be above water when it was lowered.

Capt. McManus felt he was fortunate in having a "full crew," for he had two sailors, Philip Haskell and Ernest Zierman, and a man cook, Edward Howard. They were all Prince Edward County men. They worked hard at clearing the wreckage and cutting the broken spars adrift, so that they would not beat the schooner's sides in. Night came on, and all night long they burned flares from a bale of oakum. The September morn found them so close to Long Point, or Point Petre, on the south shore of Prince Edward County, that they could make out the figures of men on the beach. But the sea was now running fairly high, under the continued north-easter, and the laden schooner lay so low in the water, without her spars, that the men took no notice of her. If they saw her they may have thought she was a fish boat, hauling or setting.

The Baby Barnes was leaking now, having labored and tossed uncontrolled in the trough for many hours. All four men pumped until they were exhausted. All day the schooner rolled and lurched and drifted past their home shores unnoticed. At four o'clock in the afternoon the water was so high in the well they were afraid she would sink under their feet. Reluctantly they lowered the shattered yawlboat, after making such repairs as they could to its deep-bitten topsides. They got a loaf of bread and two pounds of butter out of the cook's galley, and with this short provision began a small-boat voyage across Lake Ontario.

The north shore was still in sight, but it was blowing too hard and the sea was running too high for them to attempt to pull for it. Their boat could only move in one direction. Steering before wind and sea in order to keep their frail refuge afloat they watched the Baby Barnes get lower and lower in the water until at sunset she had disappeared. They could not tell whether she had actually sunk or only vanished in the troughs.

She was not visible next morning. All day they drove before the northeast wind, and all that night. By midnight the lights of Rochester were very plain. At four o'clock next morning, while it was still dark, they landed under the beams of the big lighthouse on Braddock's Point—"Broderick's" to all lake mariners—twelve miles west of the piers of the Port of Rochester. They had been adrift thirty-two hours, and had covered 50 or 60 miles of lake bottom. They were all very sunblistered and hungry, and the last of the Upper Lakers, and the last of the Barnes family, and the last of all the "three-and-afters" had vanished from Lake Ontario.

The BABY BARNES clearing from Kincardine.

The BERTHA BARNES, minus maintopmast head and much of her original sail area.

The MONARCH bringing the dismasted C. C. BARNES into Manitowoc.