Building of the BETSEY: Schooner Days DCXXII (622)

by C. H. J. Snider

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The GOAT and Oakville's Oil Trade of the 1860's - Life in the River Mouth - DEFIANCE and The Tender MINNIE - Perennial HELEN - Duckfoot Steamer That Never Swam - The Handy Wreck - Early Chapters In the Log of Capt. Richard Goldring, the Evergreen MAPLE LEAF Man

FATHER was shoemaker, fisherman, gardener, sailor, carpenter, wharfinger, ship-owner, as required, but always Captain of the good ship Goldring.

Life began for young Dick when Father weighed anchor from the cottage at the mouth of the Mimico Creek, Mimico, and steered his little argosy of eight for the Etobicoke in 1862. He had a fisherman's license and fisherman's rights in the river mouth. Those days — at the beginning of the great American War — fish were fish. They were netted in shoals and fried in the pan the same day or salted in the barrel for the winter. The market was just across Humber Bay in the growing city of Toronto, with 45,000 inhabitants. The lake was crystal clear and unchlorinated. Salmon and sturgeon were taken in the rivers; herring, lake trout, whitefish in the lake; bass, perch, pike, pickerel, chub, suckers and catfish in the creeks and ponds.

The Etobicoke, now a broad dried-up bed with a bad habit of flooding its flats in spring, was a better river eighty years ago. There was a natural harbor at its mouth, behind the bar covered with willows, and Boss Harris had cut timber and built a little ship there—the Defiance, with a square topsail and a standing keel and no centreboard (at first) and a name which expressed the builder's opinion of farmers' claims to riparian rights. The river's mouth sheltered Father's fishboat and his license provided him with a fishlot on which he was entitled to build what he chose.

DUCKFOOT PROPELLERS

A little to the east was what was then known as Van Every's Point, later called Houten's Point, with the Dutchman's Bar adjoining, and Two Tree Point, from the lone survivors of an apple orchard which lingered there until the New Toronto waterworks swept away trees and tradition alike. On the point, an old Dutchman lived alone on his farm, and in a runway close to the water's edge he had gradually built a working model of a steam vessel which was to revolutionize that method of travel. The boat was almost sixty feet long, put together with pins, the ribs so close they formed a solid wall. She had paddles like duck's feet, and as soon as the inventor was' satisfied with the engine to turn them over she was going to be launched. Weathered and paintless, she stood until she had grown grey as the builder's barn, and still he tinkered at the engine. Then, one night in a winter snowstorm, there was a great glare on the point and in the morning the Dutchman's house was found to be a charred ruin, and he himself a frozen corpse in a newly heaped snowdrift.

"IT'S AN ILL WRECK

THAT BRINGS NO ONE GOOD"

The schooner Glover had been wrecked on Van Every's Point, and Father and his eldest son, John, Dick's half-brother (in his 'teens, and a man to Dick), salvaged remnants of her 250 tons of coal. As she broke up, they got pieces of her, and poled and towed into the Etobicoke enough good oak and ironwork for the frame of a little square-ended scow. By the time the bilge stringers and sister keelsons had been laid, John and the Widow Blower's boys in Port Credit, Mark and Tommy, had rafted down enough pine plank to go on with the work.

And so, plank by plank and nail by nail, the good ship Betsey was got together, between hauling and setting nets, marketing fish, working a garden, gathering coal and making shoes. Every one of the Goldring brood had a hand in the building of the Betsey, including Dick, then aged five. He helped whittle treenails and dowel pins.

HOUSE, FACTORY AND VEHICLE

The Betsey, 40 feet long, 12 feet wide, three feet deep in the middle, and curved high at each end like a rocker, was no Queen Elizabeth, but she meant as much to the Goldrings. Father raised her sides at the stern above the line of the bulwarks, and built a deck across them, so that she had an old-fashioned poop-cabin, a low ceilinged room with shelf-like bunks on two sides and across the stern, and space between for a stove and a table and benches, and lockers for pots and pans and dishes and clothes and gear. The rudder was unceremoniously kicked outboard, and hung on behind like a door, and the tiller by which it was turned was a long pole coming inboard over the cabin's coach-roof. You steered standing in front of the cabin. For fourteen or fifteen years Dick Goldring never slept under any other roof, summer or winter.

William Goldring prospered with the Betsey, as he deserved. There was work then for all craft that could creep into a creek mouth. There was the fish to bring to Toronto, and cordwood to be loaded on the shore, and grain bags and apple barrels to be gathered from, the bank, and hay, straw, lumber and shingles and beach stone, sand and gravel to be carried.

THE GOAT IN THE OIL TRADE

And there was the Oakville oil trade. You may not believe it, but the B.A. development is not the first refinery in the vicinity of the Sixteen Mile Creek. In 1850 a Chicago man, R. S. Wood, did what he could to exploit the possibilities of Oakville as an oil centre. He had borings made, and built his tanks and got his refining machinery in, on the banks of the creek, between the Lake Shore highway and the station. The bases of the tanks are still to be seen, the tanks themselves are said to have vanished into the creek with the aid of juvenile disciples of Archimedes. He couldn't find a flow of oil for refining near Oakville, so he sent for oil from Cleveland and Petrolea. It came in schooner loads, thick crude stuff in barrels, but the schooners were too deep to carry it up the creek as far as the refinery, so little hookers like the Betsey, or the Minnie which John built as a boyish experiment, or another tiny black sloop called The Goat, ferried the crude up to the refinery and brought the clear coal oil down. It began to compete with tallow candles. whale oil and gas in Toronto. It was a good trade till a fire wiped out Mr. Wood's refinery.

Little Dick sailed in the Betsey on her first voyage—and his—and he became cook when he excelled his brother Ted, two years older, in tossing flapjacks. He was a regular rating from then on, in the crew of the craft on her voyages from the Etobicoke to Toronto or Oakville, Brother John built two tiny hookers in the creek mouth—this Minnie already mentioned and one too small to have her name remembered. The Minnie was only 8 feet wide, so narrow that she was tender, that is unable to carry her sail, and capsized twice. "Let her go!" said the practical John, the second time. He didn't bother righting her.

"VOYAGE" OF FIFTY YEARS

He went sailing on his own in big vessels, and in a few years returned from Lake Erie with the scow J. J. Pugsley, which he rebuilt as a schooner and called the Helen. She lasted him fifty years. When she died in the breakers off Bluff Point at Oshawa she had a gasoline auxiliary engine, which was as far in the future as the flying machine when Little Dick was flipping pancakes in the Betsey. But when the Helen died stonehooking. the last stand of the small coasters, had died too. Little Dick, long since a captain, had sold out and gone into a prosperous business at Port Whitby—coal, groceries, and some acres of land.

PORT CREDIT IN HOOKER TIMES - THE "BETSEY," HOME FOR EIGHT, WAS SMALLER THAN THE SMALLEST OF THESE LITTLE VESSELS, AND THE BLACK "GOAT" and the "MINNIE" WERE SMALLER STILL