"ENTERRISES" on the Lakes, Ugly Duckling Goes to Beauty Parlor: Schooner Days DVIII (508)

by C. H. J. Snider

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THERE were many Enterprises on Lake Ontario, but three were in the ken of the generation of sailormen now passing out. The one Schooner Days knew best, at this end of the lake, was an ugly looking little brat fifty years ago, with a clumsy stern and with the ferocious expression of a spoiled child. She rivaled the encouraging Ann Brown in smallness, carrying slightly over two toise of stone, or 20 tons deadweight. Capt. John Miller, lightkeeper, guide, counsellor and friend in Port Credit, said in the 1890's that he remembered her from boyhood, that when he was before the mast in the Mary Grover he would sometimes see her lying in Long Point Bay on Lake Erie, waiting to run a cargo of tea or coal oil or whiskey for either side of the lake. She was "homely" then, with no topmasts or jibboom, and only three sails, jib, foresail and mainsail. Perhaps she had an outboard rudder. He thought she was an "American bottom," which meant that she had been built in the United States. The whiskey, he had heard, was run in cargoes of cedar-posts—-hollow ones.

She soon abandoned her suspected career and meandered to Lake Ontario and got into the stone and cordwood trade. She was carried out of the Credit River—this may have been the great September flood of 1878—and washed in on the beach, a total wreck, with her side stove in. Greatly daring, John gave up his foremast work, bought the wreck for a few dollars, and worked all the following winter rebuilding and rerigging her. He gave her topmasts and a jibboom, and carried out her repressed transom. If he improved her appearance she could not have been any beauty as a smuggler, for long after he parted with her she was uninterestingly ugly. But Al Hare, still living in Port Credit, got her, and some sails from the yacht Vivia. The sails did not fit, few stonehookers' did, but Al and his sidekick Newman were handy with the shears and palm and needle, and first thing the Credit knew the Enterprise spruced up with a perfectly fitting suit, from the gafftopsails down.

Then one winter Al took the curse off her by tearing out her ungainly hinder end and replacing it with a neat schooner stern, with little tumblehome quarters, perked up high. "Too good for her bow," criticized the Steambox Society of Naval Architects, which then fore-gathered in the shed in the yard where Capt. Miller hauled out yachts and stonehookers impartially for winter storage at $10 per store. Capt. Hare and First, Second and Third Mate, Cook and Crew Newman said nothing but sawed some more wood for new deck planking, and next season the Enterprise sailed better and carried half a toise more on the same freeboard. Her free board was never much to boast of, for if Capt. Hare had the whole of her sheerplank out he did not consider her loaded. Next winter he tore the stem out of her, and all of her bow back to the fore rigging, which was a matter of ten feet. He put in a new raking stem, carried her sheer up forward higher than it was in the new stern of the year before, and planked her back to the old midship section.

"Two ends and a middle," criticized the Steambox experts, "and each too good for the other," but the rebuilt Enterprise sailed better than she had in her life, carried three toise where she once had carried two, and looked like a respectable portion of a million bucks. As a matter of record, after a season in which she repaid all that had been spent on her, she sold for $500, which was a good price for a small stonehooker in 1902. Her purchaser had ambitions of making his fortune in the cedar post trade in Georgian Bay, and up that long, long trail the little ex-smuggler vanished.

The Dominion register gives her as built or rebuilt at Long Point, Lake Erie, in 1864, and owned by J. T. Beard of Oakville in 1874; 40 1/2 feet long, 11 feet beam, 4 feet 8 inches depth of hold.

ENTERPRISE was naturally a favorite name with the pioneers, and one of the earliest schooners or sloops to fly the British flag on the Great Lakes bore it. This was the Enterprise of Detroit, built there in 1765, when the place was a little British fort and trading post commanding the route to the far west, and Braddock's defeat at Pittsburg and the Seven Years War with France were recent events. An early steamer, of pre-rebellion times, was built at Kingston and called the Enterprise in 1834. Another Enterprise, a propeller, was built for Lake Ontario in 1864. And there was a gorgeous excursion craft, painted white, blue and black in the yet undevised Estonian national colors, on Lake Simcoe in the 1890's, bearing the name Enterprise, and also many rural Sunday School picnics.

There was also a small schooner Enterprise, of 35 tons, built at Whitby in 1832, and afloat in 1856 with Pat Gallicle as master. She was owned by J. Sullivan.

With Americans the name was equally popular, especially after the famous duel between the British brig-of-war Boxer and the United States brig Enterprise, in which the two young captains were killed, and were buried side by side in Portland, Me. The honors of the battle went to the Enterprise. She was a schooner originally. "Mike" Vanderbilt thought so much of her that he called his first America Cup defender Enterprise, and a framed photograph of the old man-of-war's model was the sole decoration of the cup cutter's chart room.

TIME of the Crimean War there were two Enterprises launched on Lake Ontario so much alike in their meagre registered descriptions that one might have thought them twins, or the same vessel registered twice, after a change of ownership.

One was built at the little remembered port of Wilson, N.Y., six miles east of Niagara, which went out of business fifty years ago, when the Marcia Hall carried in the last load of lumber from Toronto's old Northern docks. If there was a revival during the rum-running era of thirty years later, history is silent. Littles was an active shipwright in 1854, and he then and there launched the two-masted schooner Enterprise of Wilson, of 116 tons measurement. She underwent "large repairs" in 1861, and by 1864 had passed to Canadian registry, being owned by John Stanton and Co. of Picton. Her insurable value was then rated at $2,300. In 1874 she was registered as owned by George Hicks, a Marysburg township blacksmith in Prince Edward County.

. What became of her is not known to the writer, unless she made her exit from American registry in her second year and emerged on the Canadian register as the round-sterned Enterprise of Port Hope, of 118 tons. The similarity in tonnage and the difference of one year in age might favor this idea, but it is discounted by other details. Robert Thomas' list of vessels of the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence River, published in Buffalo in 1864, names both schooners as then on the Canadian register, and gives the second Enterprise as built at Port Hope in 1855 by Wm. Manson, long established there. She had been repaired in 1862, was flat in the bottom, and had bilge pumps, which brought her insurable value to $2,500. Hargraft and Butler of Cobourg were her owners in 1864. As the same publication lists the Wilson Enterprise as owned by Stanton and Co. of Picton in this same year, there would appear to be two vessels of the same name plying the lake in the same trade, freighting coal, grain and lumber.

Schooner Days never saw either of these Enterprises, but has a feeling of having known the round-sterned one well, through the stories his best friend, Capt. Will Wakely of Port Hope, used to tell of her. Will did his first sailing in her when this Dominion was very young, and so was he. He was only thirteen, and went in her as cook. His father was the captain, and Will learned to bake bread as good as any housewife or store baker could make. He also learned to "hand reef and steer" while he was cooking for a total crew of five. The Enterprise was smallish, and her berths were just bunks on the cabin floor under the wings of the quarterdeck, leaving the cabin house to be divided between the galley and dining room.

Port Hope was even in those days divided into two harbors, a timber pier separating the east one, which was the mouth of the Ganaraska River, from the basin to the west. Piers ran lakewards, as now, but not so far, and there was a breakwater. One dirty night the Enterprise came booming into the piers, forced to carry sail to get in and staggering under her press once she had got in. Her small crew fought madly to get the canvas off her as she tore through the entrance.

"Hard up! Hard up!" sang out Capt. Wakely to the man at the wheel—he wasn't, young Will—intending to shoot into the narrow east harbor. At the same time the mate sang out "Down with those jibs, boys, jump on the downhauls, down with them, down!"

The man at the wheel caught only the "Down—down—down!" above the thunder of loosened sails and the roar of the seas on the beach, and spun his wheel hard over.

"Hard up, for God's sake!" called back Capt. Wakely, and the sailor heard and whirled the spokes back. Alas, if he had not been so prompt the Enterprise might have swung into the west harbor, and the worst that could have happened to her would be to fetch up on the sand. But she just wove back far enough ,in her swing to catch the head of the timber tongue fair and square on her stem. Her bowsprit reared up like a mast and her bulwarks flew in white splinters as her stem was driven back between her- knightheads and her anchors were thrown in on deck.

Capt. Wakely got the pump going at once. He next rushed some of his crew up to a nearby stable and rushed them back with a waggon load of manure. This was dumped against the shattered bows, from which the hood-ends of the planks were gaping. It helped stop the inflow of water to some extent, but in spite of all that could be done by continuous pumping the Enterprise settled lower and lower until she rested on the bottom, with the water lapping her hatches. It was an awful job refloating and repairing her. The owners were not pleased. And after that young Will went sailing in another vessel.

THIS WAS THE PORT CREDIT "ENTERPRISE" AFTER HER BEAUTY TREATMENT

In the lower drawing the "ENTERPRISE" is the small vessel to the right, sporting a tiny jib-o-jib cut from the remnants of her yacht wardrobe. The scow-schooner above is the ancient LILLIE of PORT CREDIT.