Bluebottom of Last Century: Schooner Days DCLXXXIV (684)

by C. H. J. Snider

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FIFTY years ago, turning the southeast corner of Adamson's grain elevator at the foot of West Market street, we came on a great hulk of a canal-size schooner unloading coal for the Elias Rogers upper dock, which occupied about half of the block east of Church street slip. She was three masted and had three yards on the foremast, a squaresail yard with an old black sail bunched to the mast by brails, and two yards above for the sooty upper and lower foretopsails, which, unprotected by sail-covers, gathered more grime with each bucket of coal hoisted aloft to the A-shaped frame then used in unloading.

Square topsails were by this time going out, as they involved too much gear and scared away the degenerating lake sailor who couldn't handle himself aloft. A square-rigger often had to pay 25 cents a day more to get men, and a square rigged foremast cost as much to rig as the four-and-aft bowsprit, mainmast and mizzen combined, with their eight or nine sails among them. So the prospects were that these blackened square topsails and bulging squaresail would be the last of their kind in this vessel, and when they wore out the upper yards would be taken out of her, and at most a bat-winged raffee would be left for "square" canvas, to box her off when she hung in stays.

Her bows were bluff, her stem straight up and down and her stern overhung her rudder hardly at all, so that when the canal gates closed on her she would fill the lock so completely that there would hardly be room left for water in it to float her out. The register gave her length as 140 feet between stem and sternpost, her beam 23 feet, her depth of hold 11 feet 7 inches and her tonnage as 384, about as much as the Welland Canal could accommodate until the locks were enlarged.

What made her different from others then carrying coal to Toronto — apart from her square topsails — was her paint. She was the first vessel we had seen painted blue. And almost the last, for in fifty years there were only two others, a canal boat on the Rideau and a war casualty in the harbor of Hamilton, Bermuda. Blue is a favorite color for yachts and many of them look smart in it. But it is no color for a working vessel. Sailors call it unlucky, and owners know it is, for in large, areas this paint seems to fade and check quickly, perhaps from the reflected light rays, and requires constant renewal.

This schooner wasn't blue all over. Her bulwarks and top planking for three or four strakes down had been white. Below this, down to her light watermark, royal blue had been laid on with a heavy brush. On the schooner's quarter was the name in yellow letters, "GRANTHAM," which in our childish innocence we supposed was pronounced grant 'em.

Such was our first acquaintance with the topsail schooner Grantham of St. Catharines, built by Abbey at Port Robinson for T. L. Helliwell of St. Catharines in 1874. Our last was at the LYRA regatta at Kingston in 1898, where forebodings about the fate of those square topsails were promptly fulfilled. The Grantham's three yards were laid side by side in a junk pile near the Kingston Yacht Club, and she herself, shorn of all tophamper and projecting bowsprit, and even of her bottom-blue, was a dingy lighter at the wharf of the Donnelly Wrecking Co., waiting for the old passenger paddle steamer Eurydice, ex-Hastings, to tow her to the next stranding where a wrecking tug and lighter might be needed. Sic transit gloria navis. For the Grantham, like so many others, "had been a fine vessel in her time" and the pride of Grantham Township, for which she was named.

Schooners were still plentiful at the time of that L.Y.R.A. meet in Kingston. One recalls the jeers that greeted the little Pilot of Pulteneyville, old and green and faded, with ragged sails and paintless spars, as she wobbled past the Kingston Yacht Club balcony and through the trim yacht fleet with a jag of lumber from Deseronto. Also a squall which sent moustached yachtsmen out in dinghies with the morning's lather still on their chins, getting out extra ground tackle for the dragging butterflies, and how Capt. Tommy Slight, of Port Hope, later drowned in the Emerald, brought the black schooner Wave Crest, with 400 tons of coal aboard, through the tossing yacht fleet without a scrape.

In Kingston harbor lay the schooners Two Brothers, Eliza Fisher, F. H. Burton and Annie Falconer, three and four hundred tonners. At the Penitentiary wharf was the three-master C. C. Houghton, and across in the cove at Portsmouth was the "enormous" 205-foot Ceylon, three-masted barge of full schooner rig and 2,000 tons carrying capacity; and several more of the Calvin timber fleet, including the Stuart H. Dunn, with her square topsail, lay at Garden Island across the harbor.

Trading sloops with short topmasts and snub noses were to be found in the market slip, with produce from the Bay of Quinte. All told, small, ex- and active, twenty sailing vessels were then using Kingston harbor, besides river barges for Montreal and the forty visiting yachts. All gone now, like the Grantham, for she didn't long survive the degrading to derrick-barge rank. When the Ceylon was wrecked in 1913 the Grantham was no longer alive. More of her anon.

THRASHING DOWN LAKE ONTARIO TOOK DAYS

SCHOONER "GRANTHAM" as drawn by Joseph F. McGinnes, Brooklyn, N.Y., in 1928. Mr. McGinnes an old sailor, was in the Grantham forty years before and drew her from memory. His picture shows her with squaresail and raffee, but without the double topsail yards which the renowned Sacksy Brooks introduced in the "Old Canalers." She made slow progress full-and-by, or beating against the wind.