Frenchman's Bay--Its Name and Its Yachtsmen: Schooner Days DCLXI (661)

by C. H. J. Snider

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FRENCHMAN'S BAY, after a two century career as a Sulpician shrine or war post for the Indians, a rafting place, a barley and lumber centre, a haunt of stonehookers, and finally an abandoned port, is on the chart again. Partly because this war created a restricted area measured from "three miles south of the old lighthouse at Frenchman's Bay," but much more because of the push and enterprise of the Frenchman's Bay Yacht Club.

This came into being in the winter of 1937-8 in an old coach house on lower Jarvis street in Toronto. Sixteen lively lads, who knew the possibilities of the Bay from camping and cottaging here in summer, got together and built eighteen sailboats with their own hands, for their own use.

One of the eighteen boats was raffled off and this provided the first capital for the new-formed club. Eric Blenkarn was the Commodore, Tom Tomblin, Vice-Commodore, Bill Green the Rear. The first secretary was Herb. Cunningham and first treasurer was Alf. Piggins. Others associated with the enterprise were: Al. McCord, now RCAF; Tom Mullaney, Jim Johnson, Tom Archibald, who as a technician with the Ford Company has been pulled away from the club for the duration; Jack Defoa, present moth champion:

Norman Laidlaw, currently with His Majesty's Army; W. W. Yeates, whose 16 foot dinghy is the fastest ship in this year's fleet: Harry Hughes, Clarence Skitch, current contender for the national fleet championship; and Norman Williamson.

These names are important, although they belong to yachtsmen, that contemned class of untouchables whose properties are "toys" to learned counsel, and whose sacrifices from Dunkirk to Dieppe—and back to Dunkirk again—keep the cold feet of the Zombies from dropping off from mortification. Never a list of battle honors now from air or land or sea, but a yachtsman's name is in it. Never a Canadian casualty list in The Evening Telegram but some yachtsman's name appears. These "toy" makers fly bombers, sail submarines, drive tanks, push bayonets. A thousand yachtsmen from Toronto alone are in the war—and the thousand include the Frenchman's Bay Yacht Club boys.

IT is possible that Frenchman's Bay derives its name from Fenelon and D'Urfe Sulpician missionaries, who wintered somewhere in the vicinity of the Rouge River or Duffin's Creek, in 1669-70. Denonville, the governor, was entertained there seventeen years later at a great pow wow of converted Senecas and other Indians who provided two hundred fat deer for the regalement of the governor and his motley army of French and Hurons and Algonquins, after these had converted the heathen Senecas on the other side of Lake Ontario into homeless refugees and eternal enemies by raiding their villages and destroying their stores.

Against the probability of this reason for the name of Frenchman's Bay is the fact that such a name does not appear on any of the early French or English lake charts.

A less romantic suggestion is that it was so called a hundred and fifty years after the short visit of the French priests and French governor because of the French-Canadians who used to come up from Quebec every spring and work in the lake harbors or along the lake shore, forming rafts of the logs or squared timbers which the farmers had cut in the previous winter to clear their land, and hauled in on sleighs while the snow made good roads. Much of Ontario was cleared this way. The French were good raftsmen and expert at working the timber into drams. These were moored in every bay along the north shore until the big timber tugs would come along and pick them up, and the long slow voyage to the timber coves in Quebec would begin. Sometimes it would take a month, for the tugs might not be able to take a mile an hour against a headwind. Frenchman's Bay, lying within a bay itself, was an excellent sheltered assembly point. The raftsmen lived in shanties aboard the rafts they formed, and thus got a free trip back to Quebec.

Up Duffin's Creek, a mile from the lake, and a mile east of the Bay, on the Field farm, there is or used to be a curious structure of field stones and granite boulders so strongly cemented together with a red mortar that, it had resisted several attempts to blow it up with gunpowder. It was in shape a rough cube, and was sometimes called the Jesuits' Altar, on the unconfirmed supposition that it represented the efforts of those early missionaries. It might have been a Sulpician relic. Indian remains were found on the Rouge only this summer. The west bank of the Rouge appears to have been the site of the Indian town of Ganestiguiagon, Gandatsiagon, and a score of intermediate spellings, all alike only in beginning with G and ending with N. This was the place where the first white priests to visit the Toronto district wintered. The Indian town with the difficult name is shown on Raffeix's map of 1688 which shows a large mouth or embouchure for the Rouge River. Frenchman's Bay is about a mile east of the Rouge, but it is not named nor indicated on this map. It is possible that it was not in existence in 1688. It has been formed, like Toronto harbor, by sand washed from adjacent cliffs or banks forming a bar where a creek enters, and cutting off a triangular area of water from the lake.

TALL RIG FOR SHORT SHIP

This is one of the Frenchman's Bay Yacht Club MOTHS, the little ships which started the club on the way to fame and startled the crowds at the Canadian National Exhibition. ERIC BLENKARN, first commodore of the club, folded up to accommodate goodly length to the 11-foot ship, is at the helm.