In Search of Frenchman's Bay: Schooner Days DCLIX (659)

by C. H. J. Snider

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WHAT country, what provide, what city, what youngsters, so fortunate as those of Toronto, Ontario, Canada, who follow the water? Scenery, sunshine, romance and adventure right around the corner, six months in the year—and, for that matter, without going around the corner, for the other six months, for all who have eyes to see, and hands to haul a mainsheet.

Thrice this September have we swept the papers off the desk for the next salvage drive, hoisted sails to winds as free as taxpapers, and left six days work behind in sixteen minutes. Turning the corner at the lighthouse on the Eastern Gap, perched like a tree-top bungalow above the jungle of the waves, gilded domes and gorgeous palaces at once come into view. "Only" the new waterworks at Scarboro Beach, but not so very only, for there was nothing better in Nice, Florence, Venice or Naples, when we were there. Nothing could surpass this monument to the patient civic pride and civic patriotism of Roland C. Harris, Toronto born and Toronto trained Commissioner of Works. Against their background of ten thousand tree-embowered homes on the one side and the solid green mass of the rising Scarboro grade on the other, the waterworks shine as nobly as the marble kissed by the suns of centuries in the Mediterranean. And what is more, water for drinking, washing and working comes from them for a million mouths as readily and as steadily as comes light from a switch.

Before we have ceased to wonder at the waterworks, the Highlands of Scarboro are hanging overhead. Scarboro Heights, Scarboro Bluffs, call them what you will, these clay cliffs are unique masterpieces of nature. Gouged and scored by the rains of centuries into gullies and gables, revetments and ravines, in places these Highlands are shaggy with birch and poplar and willow, occasional fir or scrub oak, wild apple, wild cherry, and fruited sumach, gorgeous in dark green fernlike fronds slashed with scarlet and crimson plush. In others, as at the Dutch Churches, they are bare as the Needles in the English Channel, and sometimes as strikingly colored as the cliffs in Alum Bay. Pinnacles, spires, chimneys, walls and roofs have been chiseled by sun and rain and frost in ever-changing architecture. Here and there a tree, a bush, or even a plant, thatches an area not one yard square, its exposed roots now the sole protection of the sides of the pylon the elements have carved away.

From the narrow beach, or from a canoe skirting the shore, these cliffs of clay and sand are impressive, even oppressive, as they blot out half the northwestern sky. From the deck on the dancing waves they are fantastic fairyland. At any distance it can be noted that their height close-in is only a first step towards great elevation. As high again above it, but sometimes miles farther inland, rises the second step, tree-plumed, cleared in steep fields which zigzag down to the plateau where rise century-old elms and farm houses with their orchards as ancient, among recently built residences and summer pleasure clubs.

Very high against the sky gleams the cross of St. Augustine above the lofty cupola of the seminary. Higher still rises the homely ridge of the Scarboro Hogback, long the wailing wall for locomotive firemen, three hundred feet above the track level of Toronto Harbor.

These ravines, like the covered-ways in Sussex, were smuggling tracks up which such necessities of pioneer life as salt and tea and sugar were carried on men's backs in the brave days of the Yankee Freetraders, Scarboro Blades and Highland Rangers. They could put their slip-keel schooners on the beach under the beetling banks, unload them and push off before Her Majesty's Customs in Toronto got up in the morning.

The creek mouths were also used, but careful smugglers avoided these, for they were more easily watched and legitimate traffic was using them for shipbuilding sites and export harbors. Pioneer steamers and schooners one large enough to be a three-master, were built around Highland Creek, Port Union and the Rouge.

As we wing on, the Highlands die down mile by mile and recede into a bay from which Centre Point thrusts a flat-topped, seamed and shaven front, high enough still to command respect. Then Highland Creek, with its stories of buried treasure and its billions in war goods thundering over its double-spanned bridge at a train-a-minute, sometimes, day and night. Then vanished Port Union, marked yet by its water tank and half a dozen houses. More hogbacks, of diminished height, around where the Rouge runs red to the lake, and then Petticoat Creek trips daintily through lush woods.

So we come to a wide bight, where dozens of bright-sailed small craft are disporting themselves in the open lake. Some are mahogany hulled, some painted blue, white, green, black, or red, some varnished cedar. Some are flatter than beetles, they are like toy turtles, no longer than the two boys who are in them if laid heel to heel, no deeper than enough to float a fat man, and they would do that in six inches of water. Decked over like Eskimo kayaks, they look like little rafts with rounded noses.

Others are sharp and shapely and V-bottomed, and nearer twenty feet long. All have sharp-tipped marconi mainsails and high clewed jibs. One or two launches, open or cabined, bob about, three or four sailing spectators, crews heaving high above the moderate freeboard, hang on the outskirts. And, very strangely, the same thing seems to be going on ashore, for above a level stretch of sand, and against a background of trees and fields which have receded far from the lake, similar butterflies are fluttering across the view. It's a regatta. Yes, sir. the last regatta of the season of the Frenchman's Bay Yacht Club.

And now, having lured you as far as Frenchman's Bay, let us turn in. Literally. In towards the Bay itself, and see it, and learn all we can about it. Next week.

THIS IS ALEXANDER CAMERON TAYLOR, town steeplejack of Picton at the age of 82, and a lake sailor for sixty years. When the Picton armouries flag wouldn't go up this summer they sent for Alex Taylor—and he did. Shinned the bare pole to the truck, fifty or sixty feet above the ground, cleared the sheave, rove off the halliards and sent the Union Jack up flying. Then he went on to catch up on accumulated arrears of splicing farmers' hayropes and rack lifters. Half Prince Edward county depends on him for knotting. splicing and rigging work. Alex Taylor has not had much to do with Frenchman's Bay since the barley times of the 1880's, but he is a fine sample of the surviving lake sailor. Lives in Delhi, doesn't drink or smoke, has all his faculties, and was happy at the wheel of Kingarvie when this picture was taken last Twelfth of July.