Precious Freight From Quinte: Schooner Days CCCCLI (451)

(Life Story of a Toronto Master Mariner)

by C. H. J. Snider

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THEIRS was a true love match.

"Forty-nine years together, and our first cross word is yet to be spoken, over money or anything else. If I said, uneasily, it had cost me three dollars or five, out with the boys last night, she would laugh and say 'You must have had a good time, and I'm sure one is coming to you,' and that would make me think how much better the best of good times were, spent with her. And if it happened that she had been shopping and lost what she had bought and was vexed about it I would make her smile again by telling her she had had the fun of the buying anyway, and there would be more money where the last came from."

This is Capt. John Williams' synopsis of his almost half-century of married life which began in 1885. Perhaps readers of Schooner Days will recall that the number before last ended with the explanation that he was going to be married, when he invested in a quarter interest in the schooner W. T. Greenwood.

It is not true that the course of true love never yet ran smooth. Theirs did.

Johnny Williams and Mary Stinson had gone to school together. Johnny's schooling was necessarily scrappy, for he began lake faring when he was nine. But there were the "long Canadian winters" of the story books, in the '60s, '70s and '80s of last century, when the Bay froze solid from December to April; and Joseph Williams, Sr., late color sergeant in H.M. 100th Regiment of Foot in the Toronto garrison, was not one to neglect his children's education. So Johnny saw Mary in class, and liked her, and Mary missed Johnny when spring skies called the sailors from the shores; and later she realized the words of Weel May the Keel Row—

"O wha is like my Johnny

Sae leash, sae light, sae bonny?"

and when the rising young captain asked her to marry him she said she would—-some day.

Her parents liked Johnny, too, but they wanted to make a big wedding for the pair, and urged them to wait. Oldsters sometimes do not understand that youngsters want each other more than pomp and and circumstance; if they do not they should not get married at all. John and Mary were dutiful children, and respected the wishes of their elders, and waited.

Eighteen eighty-four had been a hard year for schooners, with freights scarce; but 1885 was worse, a hard year, a very hard year. Yet from the first of it young Capt. Williams knew he could make his new command pay. She was a smart, able vessel, the Greenwood, strong, but lightly framed. She could carry the more cargo for her inches and carry it faster, because she was carrying less wood in her sides and decks and bottom, wood that never paid any freight.

Johnny practiced the most strenuous economies with her.

Other captains of vessels of 300 tons always took a tug, in and out of harbor. They needed the tug to berth their charges when their sails were down. It was much easier to be towed in from a mile out in the like, with the canvas being stowed as the tug grunted along ahead, than to have to hang on to every stitch, in order to enter the tricky harbor-mouth, and then have to work like mad to get sail off her and drop the anchor, to keep her from smashing the dock, and then heave up the anchor again and run lines ashore by the yawlboat, and warp the vessel into her berth with the capstan clanking paul-paul-paul while four men, including the captain, sweated at the capstan bars. Sometimes, in a calm, Johnny Williams would have half a mile of strings out, stretched from the knightheads to the distant pier by the yawlboat's great efforts, trying to tickle the Greenwood into port without paying $10 for a tow-bill for the poor $60 freight.

Old Capt. James Ewart, who had sold him the quarter interest, said that no human being could keep the Greenwood or any other vessel out of the hole, the way freights were in 1885—-but Johnny knew better. He could.

He kept the Greenwood shining for all her poverty, and that summer, when July came to settle the weather into pleasant sailing, he ventured to invite Mary for a trip. Nothing underhand about it, both parents knew she was going for a fortnight's holiday sailing, with a nice motherly Amherst Island woman, the Greenwood's cook, acting as chaperon.

Luck had broken for the Greenwood and for Johnny. He had got a cargo of lumber for Oswego, and a cargo of coal back to Belleville; a really paying voyage at last. And he had Mary for a passenger!

They loaded the lumber in the old Northern docks in Toronto, and, getting a fair wind out, saved a tug bill at this end. It was summer weather, and the sail down to Oswego was pleasant.

The Greenwood had a good cabin, the forward half of it divided between the galley and the captain's stateroom. This, Johnny gave up to his guest. A settee was all he needed for sleeping. The after half of the cabin gave a little dining saloon with small rooms off it for the cook and the mate, with built-in berths, and a spare room used for a store locker.

The Greenwood's cabin differed from the more usual accommodations in lake schooners, which had square flat-topped houses built on the after-deck, with alleyways on each side and an open space astern for the steering gear, boat davits, mainsheet cleats and posts and so forth.

These houses were high enough to give full headroom under the beams, and were entered from the deck, forward and aft. In smaller vessels the cabin floor was sunk below the level of the deck, to give headroom, and might be extended athwartships, so as to use the whole width of the vessel for bunks below decks. All such cabins were lighted by square windows, with shutters, in the sides and ends; sometimes they had additional light from round fixed ports or deadlights, in the stern, below the level of the main deck.

In the Greenwood there was no house or trunk, but a bulkhead ran across from the bulwarks of one side to the bulwarks of the other, and the whole after space was decked over to form the cabin, A skylight in the middle was the principal source of light. The wheel was in a little well or cockpit, with a binnacle before it. Having the cabin under the raised quarterdeck made a "commodious apartment" with certain advantages and certain disadvantages.

They had good luck getting into Oswego, and more pleasant days for Mary, visiting that bright city where all the streets run to the water. It took some time to pile all the sweet-smelling newly cut pine out into the lumber yards, with their great stacks of lumber, square on the sides, straight but overhanging at the one end, to save the weather-checking of the butts, and irregular at the other end from the varying lengths of the planks. Oswego was a tremendous consumer of Canadian lumber then, being a depot for the wood-building Americans of the denuded state of New York.

It took less time to load the Greenwood with coal, after the chips and splinters had been swept up, and she had hauled over under the chutes of the D.L. & W. trestle. Mary stayed uptown during those black and thunderous hours, returning to be properly horrified by the spectacle of the last of the trimmers, stripped to the waist and only to be known as white men by wriggly rivers where the sweat coursed down their bodies.

Johnny and the crew of the Greenwood had been white-eyed and blackfaced, too, but the moment the last lump was aboard he had fallen to with bucket and brush and soap and towel, and scrubbed himself while his still grimy crew swept away all the dust and sluiced the deck and rail and every corner and crevice till the Greenwood shone again. The cabin had been covered with tarpaulins, and, Mary's room was as clean as a new pin—-or as when she had left it. She herself was always so neat.

So the sailcovers, heavy sheets of canvas long since hopelessly grimed oh the outside, but dustproof and waterproof, were stripped from the gaffs, and the big foresail and mainsail slowly rose, with vast grunts and cries and heaving and hauling, and the jibs snaked up the stays, and the gafftopsails were shaken out—-and the Greenwood started for Belleville.

In 1885 the Bay of Quinte was not accessible from the west, as it is now by way of the Murray Canal. It had to be reached from the east and south by one of two gaps, the Upper and Lower, with the long stretch of Amherst Island between. But then as now it was one of the most beautiful cruising waters in the world, filled with islands, large and rich and fragrant with hay and fruit and ripening barley, or small and rocky, rimmed with bulrushes or crowned with ironwood, elm, butternut, basswood, oak and pine. And then as now the birds sang all day long.

In good times every reach had its wharves and warehouses, and the farmers teamed in their barley crops and shot them into the schooners' holds, sometimes by the shovelful, sometimes by wheelbarrows, sometimes through square chutes built out from the warehouse, as at Rednersville—-sometimes by troughs formed of the vessel's own sails, stripped for the purpose and stretched up the high bank.

A grand place, the Bay, in the barley days, when ploughshare and centreboard were twin sovereigns, and the County of Prince Edward waxed rich on the appetite of Oswego breweries for the best waterborne barley in the world.

The flavor (of the Bay, not the breweries) lingers. Only last week the writer wandered into an old red warehouse marking the ancient port of Emerald, lost among overgrown lilac bushes, on the "Isle of Tante," which commemorates La Salle's lieutenant in Frontenac's time. This warehouse was built of planks, laid face to face. It still had its pointed wooden tower at the shore end, for the hoisting machinery which elevated the grain, it still had its bins and inside chutes, which filled the little trucks that used to run out to the hatches of the waiting sloops of the Bay. But its only use now is to hold a little freight for the Amherst Islander, the ferry which makes two trips a week to Kingston, or to store the ice and soft drinks for the tiny Red-and-White store which has emerged at the crossroads for the benefit of the dairy farmers who have succeeded the barley growers.

There was a brisk, homely, local trade within the Bay, little scows and schooners loading wherever they could, often from the very farms where the grain was grown, and carrying it down the smooth Bay reaches to Kingston, for transshipment in larger schooners to Oswego across the lake, or in barges to Montreal.

"Maggie L., bay ports, barley; Idlewild, bay ports; peas; Granger, bay ports, oats and buckwheat; Greyhound, bay ports, hay," the column of Arrivals in the old Kingston Whig used to read. Bay ports meant anywhere along the shore, for a tiny cargo of a thousand bushels might represent calls at half a dozen farms. Stella, Emerald, Bath, Millhaven, Picton, Rednersville or Northport might be mentioned, but bay ports covered them all.

And the place names - Ox Point, Calf Pasture Shoal, Horse Point, Captain John's Island, Telegraph Narrows, Hay Bay, the Carying Place, Twelve O'Clock Point, Mill Haven - music of the simple life, close to the soil and close to the wave, sheltered, secure. Few gales can vex the Bay of Quinte, though it has its other perils.

It was a sea of enchantment for Mary, and a sea of enchantment for John, though he never lost track of its unexpected shoals and its squalls that swept without warning over the high banks where the laden Greenwood could come so close in she could moor to the treetrunks.

All too soon the Greenwood nosed into the rock-bottomed harbor the rushing Moira had hewed out for Belleville, and the slow horse-and-bucket process of unloading began.

John took his courage in both hands.

"Mary," said he, "we'll be here for some days, unloading. Why not be married here quietly, and have all the worry of the big wedding and the waiting for it over, by the time we get back to Toronto?"

Mary looked at him, with shining eyes.

"I'd love that," said she, slowly. So up to the town hall hurried Johnny, and got a license, and then on to a parsonage, to get a minister. And so, decently and in order, with the necessary witnesses, they were married by the Rev. John Bogart, of St. John's Anglican Church, Belleville, the young Anglican clergyman--young then--who died only the other day, full of years and sanctity.

They were married on the 10th of July, 1885.

They came back to the Greenwood, the vessel clear at last of the smallest trace of coaldust, swept clean for grain, her colors flying in celebration of the occasion. She was their home, all that summer, and the next winter, and the next season. They lived together in great happiness, and they are both still happy in that happiness. Mrs. Williams died in May, 1934.

GOOD TIMES IN THE BAY OF QUINTE SIXTY YEARS AGO.

"FORTY-NINE YEARS TOGETHER, AND THE FIRST CROSS WORD YET TO COME" - Capt. And Mrs. John Williams when their golden anniversary was drawing near.