When the Calvin Fleet Came Here in the Spring: Schooner Days CCCXXXIX (339)

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ONE of the mysteries of our boyhood along the waterfront was why the Calvin steam barges were always painted green and white, while their tows were painted black and lead color.

About this time of the year the old waterfront would be resounding with the thunderous splash of squared logs of oak and pine being unloaded into the bay from flatcars on the Esplanada. The Queen's Wharf and the old Northern docks would be the venue for these performances. Northern was not geographical, as far as the city was concerned, for these docks lay to the west, but it commemorated that early railway which the Grank Trunk had absorbed. The squared timber came from areas tapped by the Grand Trunk and the Canadian Pacific, and was hove overboard from the flatcars and moored in booms. At one time hundreds of raftsmen used to be at work forming it into rafts or drams, to be towed down Lake Ontario and eventually to Quebec.

The last raft left Toronto in the early 1890's. By this time the spring appearance of the Calvin fleet had long been a seasonal fixture. The steam barges and their tows swallowed the square timber and waddled away with it faster and safer than the old rafting method could move it, and so rafting out of Toronto ceased to be.

Every spring the D. D. Calvin or Armenia or India would appear, shining in fresh green paint, with timber-ports as big as barn doors in their bows. With them, with timber-ports in bow and stern, would come a string of captive tows; the Norway, which had been a full-rigged three-masted schooner; or the clipper-towed 200-footer Ceylon, which had three topmasts and a jibboom and was schooner built, but was only a three-masted barge because she used lower sails only; or the round-sterned Augustus or Valencia, or Burma or vessels like them which were barges outright, with stumpy masts for auxiliary sails. These tows were always painted black, some of them with lead-color bottoms and lead-color trim of rail and covering board, and all shining like niggers' heels. The Ceylon was distinguished by her solid black sides broken by a golden covering board stripe. They would be fresh from fitting out at at Garden Island, where the great Calvin reigned—either Hiram of that ilk, or his father before him. Each was known as the "King of Garden Island," and each was a member of Parliament for Frontenac.

The first founded the village and the island's prosperous industries of ship-building, rafting and wrecking, and the second expanded them. They had their own shipyards, launching ways, wharves, stores and lighthouses; their own farms, their own school, their own church, their own fleet. They built ships for their own requirements and for the world. They were monarchs of all they surveyed when they bought the island from Cameron, the original Crown grantee a hundred years ago; and never was there monarchy more benevolent or more happy in holding together a mixed population of French, Irish and allcomers.

So the mystery of why the steambarges of the Calvin's were green and white, while the tow-barges were black and lead-colour, intrigued our youth and still intrigues our age. Hints at its solution have appeared from time to time, and last year there came one which was almost successful. Two Queen's men, T. R. Glover, LL.D., one-time professor of Latin at that university, and D. D. Calvin, of Toronto, a Queen's trustee, celebrated last Dominion Day by completing "A Corner of Empire—the Old Ontario Strand," and the MacMillans published it. It is a good book, and the restoration of Kingston's Fort Henry, which has been receiving such deserved attention, increases its appeal at the present time.

The particular corner of empire described is, approximately, that N.E. corner of Lake Ontario where the St. Lawrence begins its journey to the sea, where the city of Kingston has stood for a century or more, and where, across two miles, Garden Island has stood since the great Lake Iroquois ebbed and left it dry.

The writers stake the corner's imperial claim by citing the struggles of three empires, French, British and American, to secure possession of it and retain it. The British made the best effort. British Kingston has been for a century and three-quarters, and British may it the natural spirit of the book, appropriate to the history of a United Empire Loyalist town and countryside.

Son and grandson of monarchs of the island, Mr. Calvin's share of the work deals generously, as might remain to the end of time. That is to be expected, with the part shipping, and in particular the timber trade, have played in the development of this imperial corner. The Calvins themselves, sometimes alone, sometimes in partnership with the Cooks or the Brecks, were the greatest single shipping firm in Kingston's history.

Garden Island, now a family residence, still bears the evidences of their extensive rafting, forwarding, shipbuilding and wrecking enterprises. They were wreckers, not in the fiction sense of false-lights and crews murdered for ship-plunder, nor in the landlubberly sense of junk makers, but in the practical profession of salvagers.

Mr. Calvin describes graphically, from his own experience, the excitement and bustle which ever followed a call for assistance from some steamer which had come to grief in the swift-running currents of the St. Lawrence between Garden Island, where the Calvin plant lay, and Quebec, where they delivered the great rafts of timber they assembled. His picture of wrecking is a notably just one, putting the proper emphasis upon the vast amount of planning and preparation which leave the successful climax comparatively tame and unimpressive. Usually in books the salvagers' supreme effort is depicted as a heroic measure, with success achieved by a lucky chance and superhuman exertions. Mr. Calvin shows that most of their salvage operations succeeded because they had been properly planned and the Calvin tugs had the right hawsers and anchors in the right place.

Garden Island built schooners, barges and steamers, and even a square-rigged barque, named alter the place, for work on salt water. She made a successful voyage to Liverpool with her owners' timber, was sold there, and had a strenuous career at sea for thirty years, ending her days under the Norwegian flag.

Sometime Schooner Days is going to devote a chapter to "Out of Garden Island," and this book of Messrs. Glover and Calvin will be drawn upon further, if the authors are willing. But what we started out to discuss was the question of the paint in the Calvin fleet, and to see whether "A Corner of Empire" would shed light on such an obscure detail. It does, although its scope is so much wider and its aim so much loftier that it makes but passing reference.

The painting of the Garden Island fleet appears to have been under the direct control of a Manx-man named Crane, whose scale of wages for the painters was "eye-ty pounds, tinp'nce a day." That is, a little lad who weighed eighty pounds plastered paint on all day for twenty cents. If he weighed more he got more, old Crane apparently thinking that the heavier boy covered the greater area. He had scales ready to weigh each applicant and fix his pay.

But the builder or yard foreman was Henry Roney, succeeded by Tom Brian—both it may well be suspected, Hibernian by birth or sympathy. Hence the steam barges, like the D. D. Calvin or the India, in which the builder took the greatest pride, were resplendent in the emerald hues of old Erin with white trim in their upper works for decency and distinction; while the tows, being of lesser account and likely to be scrubbed by canal locks and timber booms, were covered with black for service, and lucky to get the leadcolor for trim. Leadcolor was a mixture of white lead and linseed oil, tinted with a little lampblack and sometimes a little blue. Perhaps it was Dix, the sailmaker and rigger, who slipped the golden stripe on to the Ceylon.

"A Corner of Empire" deals so well with the more important facts of Kingston's history that one can recommend it as a handbook for Fort Henry and the whole district.

The D. D. CALVIN loading square timber through her bow ports on the old waterfront at the foot of Brock street forty-odd years ago. Astern of her the schooner HERBERT DUDLEY stands up the Bay.

THE AUGUSTUS AND THE CEYLON GETTING THEIR SQUARE TIMBER ABOARD