A 'Hesperus' out of Frenchman's Bay: Schooner Days DCLXVII (667)

by C. H. J. Snider

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IN 1864, with the American War drawing to its close, William Bellchambers built a little schooner in Frenchman's Bay. He named her the Anna Bellchambers, after his wife or daughter. The vessel was called "Anna Bell" for short, so her name has become confused with that of Annabel Chambers, in narration, but Anna Bellchambers it was, and so it stands on the first Dominion register after Confederation.

This gives the vessel's dimensions as 52 feet long on deck, 13 feet 6 inches beam, 5 feet depth of hold and 31 tons register. She was therefore a narrow version of one of the many stonehookers which used to crowd the bridge at Port Credit or Westmarket street slip in Toronto. She was not a stonehooker, but a wood carrier, one of the fleet which supplied the growing Queen City with fuel for its homes and factories, steamboats and locomotives. There were no internal combustion engines then, coal was a novelty, and everybody used cordwood, hard or soft. Wood-wharves stretched from George to Yonge street, and were piled with cordwood like the coal mountains of today at the east end of the harbor.

Towards the end of October seventy years ago the Anna Bellchambers loaded fifteen or twenty cords of green wood on the shore half a mile east of Frenchman's Bay, ferrying the sticks from the beach. It blew hard from the northwest, but she lay in the lee, and when the wind lulled ventured out for the wood market in Toronto. Her captain was William Edwards, maybe the very man of that name who cut the channel into Frenchman's Bay from the lake with a horsepower dredge in 1843. Capt. Edwards had two men in his crew, Peter Young, of Dunbarton, an old saltwater man, and another named Mansfield, and he also took along his son, Joseph Henry, a lad of fourteen. The schooner had been named after his mother, who had died four years before.

A man and a boy could handle the small schooner, but she leaked with the heavy deckloads, and extra crew was required to keep her pumped and to pile out the wood at the wharf. While the wood was in her she was sure to float, but in the two preceding autumns she had waterlogged while trying to get into Toronto, and life-savers had taken her crew off and helped pump her out when the lake calmed down.

Capt. Jack Marks of the R.C.Y.C. steamer Kwasind used to tell of seeing his boyhood chum, Joe Edwards, going aboard the Anna Bellchambers that morning, all eager for the trip to the big city, his pockets bulging with red snow apples, his eyes dancing with expectation.

It took hours for the laden schooner to beat up to the meridian of the Eastern Gap. This was then a half-mile stretch of shallow water, across the long neck of the Peninsula which started at Scarboro Bluffs and hooked around towards the Garrison and Queen's Wharf at the far west end of Toronto. There was a narrow, winding channel through it, marked by two buoys, but no lighthouses and no piers.

When Capt. Edwards got this far he anchored, and sent one of his men ahead, in the schooner's little scow, to hang lanterns on the buoys, for it was dusk and the wind was going around so that the schooner had to zigzag to get through. He did this with some misgivings, for it was just in this same position that the Anna Bellchambers had waterlogged twice before; and she was already leaking more than enough.

The man either missed the buoys or lost the lanterns, and sculled on across to the city. When he got what he wanted there it was blowing too hard for him to get back. The wind had gone around to the east and was freshening to a gale.

The Anna Bellchambers reared and plunged at her anchor, with all on board watching anxiously for a lantern's gleam and a hail from the returning scow. They pumped and pumped, but the water gained on them.

The Port Credit scow Samson — or the Olive Branch, they couldn't, be sure which, in the early night — drove past under a squatted foresail. They could just make her out in the dark. They talked of her big race with the Catharine Hayes and the Hunter, ten years before, when Bob Collins wrung the Samson's mainmast head off carrying sail. Billy Hutchinson was sailing with more caution this time.

They climbed up on the drenched deckload, for the "Annabel's" deck was now under water. The deckload began to wash away. Before it was all gone the weight of it, water-soaked, rolled the little vessel over on her side. Poor Peter Young was swept off and drowned, although Capt. Edwards caught him once. He could not hold on in the fore rigging. Capt. Edwards scrambled up the main rigging and lashed himself to the crosstrees, with young Joe buttoned inside his overcoat to keep him warm. The only friend they had left was the tall stone lighthouse on Gibraltar Point, two miles away. Its regular flash through the darkness beamed encouragement.

"Bear up, Joey," said the father. "They'll see us soon as daylight comes, and take us off. They did that the last time, and the time before. It'll soon be light! It'll soon be light!"

"Don't be scared to die, pa, I ain't," whispered Joey through numbed lips. "I can hear music sounding on the shore."

But the only earthly music was the tramp of the surf and the howl of the increasing wind. It got darker after midnight, and thick smothering snow began to fall. Even the faint glow of the city gas lamps on the clouds vanished. The light on the Point shut out, hidden in snow whirls. Billy Hutchinson, homing for Port Credit, missed this stern range, and could see nothing of the Credit light ahead. In the dark he tried to round the point of Toronto Island and gain shelter at the Queen's Wharf, but the hooker swamped in the trough of the sea and drifted before the bursting billows until she struck on the Dutchman's Bar and was dashed on to that shaly headland on the far side of Humber Bay known variously as Pig Iron, Two-Tree, Hooten's and Van Every's Point. And there she was found next day, her masts gone, decks stove in, everything covered with snow and ice and Billy Hutchinson and his mate dead in the breakers.

William Ward, hardy fisherman whose name survives in Ward's Island, had to dig his way out of his island cottage in the morning. The cottage stood a thousand feet south of the present island breakwall, and three fathoms of water now washes over its hearthstone. The first thing he saw on the shore was cordwood.

"Don't tell me the'Annabel' has waterlogged again!" cried he. He fired a gun and roused Bob Berry, the big black oarsman, and they ran a fishing skiff down the snowbank to look for the wreck. By this time it was light enough to distinguish a sort of iceberg rising and falling to the eastward, but not moving in with the seas. They pulled to it, through a wide wake of floating cordwood, and found a mass of ice-coated spars, rigging, cordwood, and planking, which crystallized into a small schooner on her beam ends. There was a blob at the main crosstrees which they took to be an unstowed topsail. Wm. Ward hacked with his clasp knife at frozen lashings, and .cut loose the captain and his son in one mass.

The frozen bundle fell into the boat. The rescuers dragged the mass into the Ward cottage and sent across to the city for three doctors. For seven hours, till darkness fell on that short November day, they worked ceaselessly on the man and the boy. When they lighted the coal oil lamp on the kitchen table Wm. Edwards began to murmur:

"Light! Light! They'll see us soon, and come for us, Joey! It's getting light now!"

But for Joey the light that shone was from the place where there is neither sorrow nor crying, and there is no night there, for the Lord God giveth them light. He had passed hours before into the arms of our Heavenly Father.

The Anna Bellchambers parted her cables as the day wore on, and drove up the lake. Her broken hull washed in on the beach under the tall lighthouse whose far off ray the night before, sole comfort of the perishing, had been smothered by the November snow while four poor fellows died.

Such was the wreck of this Lake Ontario Hesperus in the midnight and the snow seventy years ago. The facts are as given by Capt. Jack Marks, Capt. Wm. Ward, and Mrs. Edith Southgate, 1096 Queen street east, who had them from her mother, a sister of Capt. Edwards, who survived the wreck. Capt. Edwards married twice, and had a second son Joseph, who lives at 83 Greenwood avenue, and has been very kind to Schooner Days. The date of this was Oct. 30th, 1873.

OLD CALLERS AT FRENCHMAN'S BAY - "LILLIE," "ENTERPRISE," "OLYMPIA"

Eastern Gap, 1944