Brave Boat Work at Century End: Schooner Days DCLXXVII (677)

by C. H. J. Snider

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THE JESSIE DRUMMOND, black above and red below, third and largest schooner to leave the south shore of Lake Ontario with the last coal cargoes for Toronto in the 19th century, was a veteran of the lake marine with thirty-five seasons' service astern of her. She had been to Hamburg and brought back German iron rails to Ontario in 1865. But she never rolled, pitched and plunged more on the Atlantic than she did that Sunday morning of Nov. 25th, 1900. That was when the clearing snowstorm revealed her consort, the Augusta, hard and fast on the north shore, above Port Credit light, and Capt. James Quinn gave the Drummond both her anchors in the raging lake to keep her from the Augusta's fate.

All day, through the glasses, he watched the gallant efforts of Toronto and Port Credit volunteers to take the Augusta's crew off. The Toronto men had much the better boat, but not enough manpower, to get their boat alongside. The Port Credit lads, stonehookers and fishermen from boyhood, had pluck and skill enough to effect a risky rescue in two trips after many tries.

Meantime, five Toronto yachtsmen had sailed up in a skimming dish that never should have been out in that weather. She was the Adanac, a half-decked centreboard sloop, 10 feet long on the waterline and 12 inches freeboard, and she did well to keep them afloat from the Queen's Wharf to Port Credit. All honor to these boys who tried, but all the lifesaving they accomplished was their own.

They managed to catch the stern of the tossing Drummond, with then" boat half full of water and themselves so exhausted with seasickness and bailing that they were not much help to Capt. Quinn and his worn-out crew. The castings of the windlass had been broken when her big anchor took hold, and it was impossible to weigh anchor again.

The Drummond lads had had all they wanted with pumping and steering and handling soaked and frozen gear, and some of them were panicky and had begged the captain to run the ship ashore in Humber Bay when they heard the locomotive whistles through the snow. The welcome they gave the yachtsmen to their own reeling decks and wet bunks was not a cordial one. The whole party spent an unhappy night, the ship tossing and grinding frightfully at her anchors, the men pumping, and pounding all the running gear, and dosing it and the pump wells with coarse salt to keep them from freezing solid.

By Monday morning the wind was going around to the north, while the sea still ran in tremendous grey-backs from the east, and the Drummond was in the trough, rolling her tophamper adrift and filling her decks, so that her bulwarks started to go.

Capt. Quinn hoisted his Canadian ensign at the mizzen truck, in the hope of attracting assistance, either a tug to get the Drummond to Toronto, or someone to get the windlass in working order, and bring food for his too numerous crew.

They could see the signal in. Oakville, eight miles away, but not in Toronto, ten miles off, where lay the only tug then in commission on the north shore of Ontario.

"Nipper" Quinn, Capt. Jim's youngest brother, and Allan Kemp, the Oakville harbormaster, drove down to the Credit to implore the Credit men to help Jim. They did not know how badly off the Drummond might be. Capt. A. E. Hare, who had taken off the Augusta's crew, needed no urging, only a boat. The Grace Darling, Sons of England lifeboat, lay in the Credit harbor, where she had been left after her attempt the day before, her three men going back to Toronto. He first appealed to the crowded bar of the Port Credit hotel to man her, for he thought the Port Credit boys deserved a rest.

This schoolboy effort was made fifty years ago when the "GRACE DARLING" was drying sails at her mooring outside the Sons of England lifeboat house at the foot of York street. Below it is another of the JESSIE DRUMMOND off Toronto Island, five years later, with "positively the last" waterborne coal Toronto received in 1900.