Chasing a Lithophone: Schooner Days DCLXX (670)

by C. H. J. Snider

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One of the many adventures of one of the many Credit worthies, Capt. A. E. Hare, stonehookerman, baker, and boat livery keeper, evergreen at eighty-two

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EVER hear of a lithophone? AL Hare, of Port Credit, caught the only one on record in April, 1899.

Up in Bronte there used to be two Bob Joyces, Fisherman Bob and Organ Bob. They were both good sailors, but not related. Being, as one might say, inclined to the water, Organ Bob played the organ in the Baptist Church, and so got his name. He was a good hand at ship carpentry, and designed and built two very fast stonehookers on the scow model. They were about 55 feet long, 17 feet beam, and not more than four feet deep in the hold.

They were shoal, shapely and smart, but not strong, for they carried their weighty cargoes on deck. This made them easy to load and unload, but hard to hold together. The bottom of one of them, the Olympia, was concaved up towards her deck with the pressure. The other one bowed so under her burdens that she had to be trussed together like a bucksaw frame, by wire cables lightened with turnbuckles over her centreboard box. Her lines were neat and clean, and her name was interesting—Lithophone. She was launched about the time Graham Bell amazed the world by the telephone. The same classic influence which had named her sister Olympia may have reasoned that if the new telephone carried sound far and fast, stone would be carried farther and faster by the new Lithophone.

FORTY-AND-A-FEW years ago the spring freshet took the Lithophone out of the river.

Walter Hare had sold her to Walter Naish the fall before and the second Walter cut a hole in the river ice and plopped the anchor through it, with a good scope of chain. The rest of the chain was on board, with turns around the windlass barrel.

When the March-mad Credit broke up and hurried lakeward in pans and sheets of sand-stained ice, it parted the mooring lines and took the Lithophone away from her anchor without delay, for the dog had been knocked off the paulpost and the windlass barrel revolved like a spool of thread, till all the turns were unwound. The barrel kept on turning, and the bitter-end of the chain having been made fast to nothing, the last of the cable quickly plopped overboard through the hawsepipe, and the Lithophone went out past the lighthouse into the lake as fast as the icecakes themselves.

Wal Naish shouted for Wal Hare and Wal Hare hailed Jack Cummings and Jack Cummings got Newman, and among them they dragged the Lithophone's four lower sails into a Goderich model fishboat. Walter's brother, Al Hare, came along and they importuned him to lend a hand, for it looked like a blow from the northwest.

"You'll never catch her in that little thing," said Al to his brother. "If you wait twenty minutes the river'll be clear enough of ice for us to get Bill Newman's big boat out and then we can do something."

The Hecla was a big mackinaw fishboat with two masts and three sails and could make three feet to the smaller boat's one. But they argued that the little boat could get out to the Lithophone in the twenty minutes the ice was clearing, and meantime the Lithophone was blowing offshore fast.

So Al jumped in and took the tiller, and two of the boys rowed. Going out of the channel they were almost swamped, and Al said they had better turn back while they could, but they said they were half way to the Lithophone now, and it was harder to pull back than go on, so all settled down to the chase.

She was light and high out of the water, having been stripped of everything for the winter, and her centreboard was up, so she blew off like a barrel. The more it blew the faster she went. But the poor little skiff, loaded deep with four men. four sails, four hundredweight of gear, and forty gallons of lake water, waddled slowly, even with the wind's assistance. By the time they had got the first lot of water out more was coming in, for the waves were running higher and higher.

Sweating like firehorses they got to within a hundred yards, of the Lithophone, but closer they couldn't come. They had to keep bailing and began to lose ground. So, none too soon, they tried to pull back.

Then they saw a cheering sight. The Hecla, under reefed sails, was tearing out from the river. Dan Sharp, the harbormaster, was at the stick. He had sized up the situation and got her out as the ice drifted clear. But the Hecla, all eyes for the Lithophone, passed the little skiff without noticing her. In vain the boys yelled and waved after she had gone; no one saw or heard them as their low craft wallowed in the sea.

They pulled in to the lee of the old pier at Long Branch. That was the nearest they could fetch the land. They were wet, chilled, four miles from home, and no way of getting back but by shank's mare.

They saw the Hecla sail around the Lithophone twice. But they knew she could do nothing, for the Lithophone was far too big for them to take in tow, and they had her sails and gear in their boat. The Hecla began to beat back for home. On one tack she headed right in for Long Branch, and hope revived. They began shouting and waving when she was a mile out, and kept it up. She stood in quite close, and then tacked out again, and again without seeing them. In the spring darkness they ploughed homewards through the Lake Shore road mud, sometimes taking to the fields, sometimes to the railway tracks, for this was long before the concrete highway.

Saddest of all was Wal Naish, who had lost his anchor, chain, Lithophone, supper and investment, and found his family waiting for the funeral as soon as his body could be found, for the four of them had been given up as lost when Dan Sharpe reported there was no trace of them, either on lake or Lithophone.

A week later the old Chicora, on her first trip to Niagara reported the Lithophone afloat in the lake, with decks awash, on the south shore of Ontario.

Again a rescue corps was organized. Wal Hare begged to be excused on the ground that he had gone into the butcher business and had never been across the lake in his life; which was true, though he was a post-graduate of the stonehooker fleet.

The revised argonauts included Jack Potter, Lew Naish of the Newsboy, bound to stand by brother Walter, Bill Newman, George Hare, Harry Fowler and Al Hare, who was, by mutual consent, again skipper. They took out the Hecla again, and headed for Port Dalhousie; ran into light airs and thin ice at night and lowered their sails and rolled themselves up in them, and slept through the freezing dark to wake in more fog. The boat was not sheathed for ice work, and to move through the skim-ice would have sliced her at the water-line. Like all fishboats she was open to the sky.

With a breeze the fog lifted and the ice broke and they worked into Port Dalhousie. Al Hare caught a glimpse of two thin lines, late in the afternoon, which must be the masts of the Lithophone. He enlisted the sympathy—and the steam pressure—of Billy Hand, of the tug Nellie Bly, gave him the compass bearing and the assumed distance, five miles, and got him to tow the Hecla that far.

Time up, nothing visible in the dusk. Wal Naish cast off in the Hecla with part of the explorers, and after short time they were all heard shouting, and the Lithophone was found. She was level with the water, her two masts like trees growing in a swamp. All that showed below them was her boxlike cabin trunk and her rail. Most of her bulwarks had been knocked out or washed away and the stern was just hanging on to her. Only the wood in her was floating her. Her hatchcoamings were above water, but not her deck.

The Nellie Bly tried to tow the waterlogged hulk and the Hecla into Port Dalhousie, with the boys vainly bailing with buckets to clear her. But it blew up from the southward hard, and they could make no headway. So some of them got back into the Hecla and three-reefed her sails, and cast off, and Al Hare stayed at the tiller of the Lithophone and steered, and the Nellie Bly sat on her own safety valve and snorted. It was a tight race, and ended in a dead heat at the inner light in Port Dalhousie. Both had to hustle to get in ahead of the steamer Lakeside.

There was a new man in this vessel, and Al remarked to Bill, "He's coming fast!" "You watch the fun when he tries to get his lines out," said Bill. Fun there was. One of the deckhands got caught in the heaving-line, fell off the dock, and was dragged under the ship's stern.

"Steam over and see what we can do, Bill," suggested Al, and Miss Bly at once crossed the creek. Al grabbed a pike pole and thrust along the heaving-line near the screw till he felt the body and moved it. But it wouldn't be brought up.

"Let go the end of the heaving line on board!" he called, and as soon as they did the drowned man came free. They had him out and aboard.

"Just seven minutes by my watch," said a doctor, "but I'm afraid it's too late."

"Let me try," said Al, squeezing the water out of the body in great gouts. He got the boys to work his arms high overhead and press his elbows to his sides in turn. No sign, and again the doctor said "too late." Al and his acolytes kept up the work. Tiny bubbles burst from the man's nostrils. Then he commenced to roar in great heaves as his elbows squeezed his ribs. Soon he was breathing regularly. They carried him to the hotel. The doctor and the captain wanted to buy out the bar for Al and his boys. But all he asked was to have his name kept out of the paper.

The Lithophone was towed home by the Nellie Bly. She continued in her stony avocation for some years and may be at it yet, in spirit, for she was beached and filled with stones to form a private wharf east of the port.

PORT CREDIT HARBOR NOW—ONCE IT WAS SO FILLED WITH THE THIRTY-SEVEN STONEHOOKERS HAILING FROM IT THAT ONE COULD WALK ACROSS THE RIVER ON THEIR DECKS - Telegram Photo by MADISON SALE.