Dashing Dames of 90 Years Ago: Schooner Days DCLXIV (664)

by C. H. J. Snider

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LAST Saturday was the loveliest yachting day of the season for real sailors, and real sailors took advantage of it. The bay was full of color, green, white and blue wavelets against a background of golden willows, gleaming planes, camouflaged or priming coated warships, and skyscrapers in all tones from ivory to amber. The high light lifted everything up till an orange sailed dinghy looked like a Columbian caravel. Walter Windeyer's jaunty little Tern might have been the Golden Hind, Rear Commodore R. B. F. Barr's peagreen Aphrodite Venus herself rising from the sea. Jimmy Harris' gallant Vivia II., launched in 1911, looked as big and as new as T. O. M. Sopwith's last Endeavour. All were dashing about at high speed in a strong October wind which may have been blowing great guns aloft, but only ruffled the feathers of the harbor.

The scene recalled another brisk sea piece of ninety years earlier seen the day before in R. W. Kenyon's Art Shop, where it was being reglazed. Sir William Mulock, whose yachting began in the 1860's may have witnessed the pictured scene before he was in his teens, but he is now hull down below the horizon of the century, and who is left to interpret it?

It does not need the signature and the date, 1854, to confirm that this large wafer color, well preserved, was the work of William Armstrong, C.E., first secretary of the Royal Canadian Yacht Club, for it has all the Armstrong characteristics of form and color and action.

THE picture is the property of Mr. Stanley Jones, a branch manager of the Imperial Bank of Canada, and its history is that it hung for many years in the family home in Oshawa. His father, Charles Arthur Jones, was an early member of the Royal Canadian Yacht Club, and often sailed in such old-time yachts as the iron cutter Rivet and the Undine. Mr. Jones, Jr., naturally thought these were the two yachts depicted, but neither of them corresponds to the Rivet nor the pictures Armstrong painted of her.

The picture shows two of the first depicted Toronto yachts. The yacht to the left is painted black with a white or lead-colored bottom. The emphasis shown upon the seams of her planking suggests that she is lap-streaked a clinker-built, as are many rowboats of the present time. So, too, were the long ships of the Vikings. Her stern is wide and marked with a white scroll. The lower part of the transom is colored or shaded differently from the upper part, which seems to overhang at a greater angle. The rudder is partly outboard, and its stock comes through the upper half of the transom. This is an antique fashion long abandoned. The crew wear flat round hats and red or blue shirts. Two are engaged in the modern dinghy-sailing practice of hiking out, to keep as much ballast as possible to windward. Even the yacht's little anchor is slung outboard for the same purpose.

The rig of this yacht at first glance seems as modern as the marconis of Aphrodite or Vivia II. But the mast is very different from the long, hollow pea-shooter or beanpole of the marconi rig, with the multiplying sets, of struts and spreaders, both ahead and athwartships, and a web of chrome steel backstays, headstays and shrouds. This yacht's mast is as bare as a blade. It is evidently a solid spar, cut from a young pine, clean as a whip and supported only by the forestay and two hemp shrouds on each side. The mainsail, which is reefed down, travels up this mast on wooden hoops, instead of on slides in a slot or track. No gaff is needed. The jib, or forestaysail, seems to be hanked to the stay with little wooden hoops made by bending tough strips of ash till the ends lock.

Her big jib projects on a long bowsprit, hogged down with a hemp bobstay set up with a tackle. The bowsprit is bare for half its length. On this a flying jib will be set as soon as the yacht gets around the mark-buoy. It is blowing too hard for her to carry the flying jib on the present tack.

She is wearing a big burgee of the same pattern as the Royal Canadian Yacht Club burgee of to-day, but red instead of blue. That may be because her owner is a flag officer.

The turning buoy is marked by a white flag with a red cross or saltire and a black circle in the centre, characteristic of the course marks ninety years ago. Now black balls or baskets are employed. This yacht seems longer and lower in the water, and a long low cabin trunk rises from the deck.

The other yacht has rounded the buoy. She is gaff rigged, with a topmast, and has set her flying jib.

Putting a magnifying glass on the flag at her masthead revealed actual letters, instead of mere indications. At first they seemed a jumble — e-g-n-e-l-l-a-h-c — and all turned backward, but looking through the glass at the flag reflected in a mirror they made sense — "Challenge."

The artist of ninety years ago had taken the trouble to paint in the microscopic letters and to paint them as they actually appeared in the side of the flag visible to the spectator. They were let into the flag, not sewn on one side only, and he showed this—a tribute to William Armstrong's thoroughness.

In 1854 there was a yacht Challenge in the fleet of the new Royal Canadian Yacht Club. The club then in its third year of existence and the first of its enjoyment of the "Royal" prefix.

This Challenge was owned by Mr. John J. Arnold, who was first lieutenant of the club when it was formed in 1852. He was a founder of the Toronto Boat Club in 1850, which became the Canadian Yacht Club in 1852 and the Royal Canadian Yacht Club in 1854, the year the picture was painted. It is possible that the Challenge is also the yacht shown (upper left) in the earliest printed picture of the yacht club fleet, in Gleason's Pictorial Magazine, 1853. The yacht immediately below and to the left in the old engraving may be the yacht on the left in the Armstrong watercolor, because she has the same three-cornered or leg-of-mutton rig. The triangular rig was rare on Lake Ontario ninety years ago, and it is not likely that there was more than one then in the yacht club fleet in 1854. It was then called the "Bermuda plunger," because it reproduced the rig still native to Bermuda, a sloop with a very short gaff or none at all. Indeed our English friends call the modern marconi a "Bermuda rig." The tall solid mast, incapable of reduction by lowering a topmast as the cutters did, made the short-ended plunger pitch in a head sea.

The Bermuda-rigged vessel of the Armstrong picture and the Boston woodcut seems to be the Undine of Mr. Jones' father's recollection. Secretary Armstrong himself listed her, as owned in 1852 by Mr. J. Ewart and taking part in the first race under the auspices of the Toronto Boat Club in August of that year. Other competitors were the Abercorn, America, Cherokee, Jenny Lind and Saucy Jack. There were Ewarts in Cobourg and Ewarts in Toronto, both interested in sail. We would like to learn more about the "Undine," "J. Ewart," of 1852, and about the Challenge in the same picture. Mr. Phillip Jones, a banker brother, is under the impression that the Blakes sailed her at one time, possibly Samuel Blake, Q.C.

UNDINE CHALLENGE

Reproduction of a watercolor by first secretary of the Royal Canadian Yacht Club recalls forgotten craft of 1854.

"TORONTO BOAT CLUB FLEET COMING INTO HARBOUR"

"We have been favored by a marine artist from Toronto, in the neighboring provinces, with a representation of a few of the boats of the Toronto Club coming into the harbor from a cruise on the lake. They are passing the Queen's Wharf, which forms the boundary of a narrow channel into the harbor, and the only entrance. On the end of the wharf is a lighthouse. This is a regularly established yacht club, and consists of about twenty vessels of various sizes, of from three to twenty tons. The scene on the bay—always a busy one, with steamers, propellers and merchant vessels—is much enhanced by these beautiful little vessels, with their lofty masts, and always under a press of canvas, so that one is alarmed for their safety. Yet no accidents occur as they are skillfully and well handled, though chiefly by landsmen. Their fairy forms and white sails may at all times distinguish them from others. They have regular regattas, prizes of considerable value in silver cups, etc. On the bank, at the foot of the Queen's Wharf, may be seen a first-class locomotive, built in Toronto at Good's Foundry, and it does him great credit. The Toronto and Huron Railroad runs along the bank in front of the town. There will shortly be railroads running into Toronto in every direction, and it is destined to be ere long a city of first magnitude. Part of the garrison may also be seen, and the lunatic asylum, in the distance." ,

—Gleason's Pictorial Magazine, Boston, August, 1853 [sic: 8 October 1853].