DEFIANCE Ends at Long Last: Schooner Days DCXXXIV (634)

by C. H. J. Snider

THE END of the defiant Defiance was in this wise.

It was September, 1913. The Great War was already casting shadows over the world, though only old Lord Roberts believed it. Fred Kirk, youthful amateur master of the Defiance (and still alive and well) could only get a boy to "go with" him on this trip. He had unloaded in the city. They spent the whole day sailing down the lake and getting nowhere. The Defiance went through the water, but not past the land, because a current was coming up the lake strong, forerunner of an east blow. Towards evening the wind died out altogether, and the Defiance began to drift back towards Toronto. Kirk stood her in towards Port Union, and anchored there, fourteen miles down the lake after a hard day's work.

The roll came in heavier and heavier from the east, and still no wind. Poor old Defiance, now going on seventy, rolled and tumbled and rolled in the trough of the sea. And creaked and squeaked and leaked. Her bottom planking started with the strain and even her decks began to break up.

To relieve her of the jolt of the beam sea and anchor chain her skipper hoisted sail again and tried to run her back to Toronto harbor. A trickle of wind came in from the east, and she got steerage way, but still she leaked faster than the two of them could pump.

She got as far up as the Poplars, and the loom of the highlands of Scarboro was now high overhead. The water was high in the hold. Fred Kirk hauled the scow the Defiance towed for work purposes up alongside and got his more valuable possessions on to it. The boy was afraid to jump to it in the dark—and small blame to him, for it was easy to get crushed between hooker and scow and hard to stay on the bouncing bit of sidewalk which its flat deck formed.

The skipper got aboard it and lashed a lantern to the ringbolt of the painter. Then back to the hooker and lowered the boy over the rail. Then he jumped, with the painter in his hand. And the Defiance went down, after seventy seasons' defiance of the enemy who gets us all in the end.

From the east the wind now roared like bulls, and the seas mounted up the face of the Highlands till the clay cliffs came tumbling down. It was a high-water year, like last year was, and there was no foreshore all along the Scarboro Bluffs. With great judgment Fred Kirk had picked the one short strip of remaining beach for his midnight landing. Otherwise he and the boy would have been drowned at the foot of the Highlands. By daylight the Defiance had broken up in the shallow water where she sank, and fragments of her strewed the cliffs. One bolt, from the fastenings the blacksmith hammered out in the mouth of the of the Etobicoke Creek when she was hewn from the bush a hundred years ago, is all there is to remember her by.

That - and a compact yacht named Night Hawk, recently described in these columns. Night Hawk's hull resembles Defiance's in nothing but its happy ability to give a maximum of accommodation on minimum dimensions. Night Hawk is only 27 feet over all—and by the way, there has been a very good oil painting of her in the Eaton galleries this month. But Night Hawk's sail plan is unlike most schooner-yachts', and strongly reminiscent of a hooker's, and that hooker Defiance because Roland Kirk, Night Hawk's owner, as a boy, watched hookers with his brother, Fred, and sailed with Fred in this very Defiance. Night Hawk is better balanced than was Defiance, even after the stepping of her masts had been altered to cure her habit of "getting in irons."

The Defiance had begun as a packet, carrying mixed freight and passengers, in the first half of the 19th century; descended to cordwood, and became a stonehooker, in the last days of the stone trade. Thirty years ago, even later, there was still a living to be made, carrying sand and gravel and building stone, granite boulders for the crusher, or beach stone for the cribs. New piers at Cobourg in 1910 and Port Dalhousie in 1917 were about the last flicker of government contract work for the hookers. Soon afterwards they lost the dwindling market for builders' and paving supplies.

One or two of the larger hookers continued in the summer-camp trade as cruisers, and one or two went rum running in the prohibition era. The waterlogged hulls of the hopeless remainder mingled with the harbor mud in Port Credit, Port Whitby and Frenchman's Bay. The era was ended and forgotten by 1930.

Fred Kirk, the amateur, is the last of the long line of skippers of the Defiance since a hundred years ago. He was, as said before, "young and strong and not afraid of hard work," when he went into her. He has stayed young and strong and not afraid of hard work all these years and he weighs two hundred pounds now. He has two sons in the navy. His "little brother" Harold, just young enough to get into the navy for this war, has spent the last four winters on service at sea.

SPEEDWELL, HIGHLAND BEAUTY, FIRST IN AGAIN

Two schooners, the "Speedwell" and the "Highland Beauty," made a dead heat of opening the 1944 navigation season for British war victims in London by arriving simultaneously in time to celebrate the birthday of that evergreen mariner, Capt. John Williams, who was born at Kew Beach, March 22nd, 1857.

The double arrival was appropriate, for Captain John was a twin. The "harbor dues" on the two vessels, amounting to $15, were placed to the credit of the British War Victims' Fund, in particular for those who have suffered in these March blitzes on London.

Joseph Williams, color-sergeant of the old 100th Regiment, who founded this Williams family in Canada, came from Kew in London, and commemorated the fact in the name of Kew Beach. Kew Williams, son of Color-Sergeant Joseph and youngest brother of John, was one of the family party—all men—which celebrated the captain's birthday in the Georgian Room yesterday. The two schooners carried many cargoes of grain and lumber out of Toronto fifty years ago or more, and brought back coal and stone, with a Williams walking the cabintop, and their names have been frequent among the "arrivals" for the British War Victims' Fund in the past four years. Without naming any more names (as requested) we do think that Miss Daisy Williams has a happy way of celebrating her brother's birthdays. So has Capt. John's daughter, Mrs. Leon H. Watts.

Miss Daisy and Capt. John were not twins, but there were four twins in the Williams family. Speed well the Speedwell, and may the Highland Beauty never fade, though one was burned and the other wrecked, long since.

Capt. Tommy Williams sailed the Highland Beauty.

Capt. John Williams graduated from the Speedwell many birthdays ago—fifty-two in fact. It was in 1892 that he took the newly bought Straubenzee down to Oswego in March, without compass, sidelights or light sails, and brought her back with a load of coal and completed her outfitting. Afterwards he went into steam, and in a big way. A fair wind to him now, in his 88th year, and a pleasant landfall always.

HALE AND HAPPY IN 88TH YEAR— CAPT. JOHN WILLIAMS

THE DEFIANCE sails on her last voyage, 1913

THE NIGHT HAWK, showing her sailplan of 1943.