Old Oakville Ships and Sailors 1.: Schooner Days DCXCIX (699)

by C. H. J. Snider

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Twenty-seven spread their canvas wings from the little creek under the hill and one went to South Africa and came back to fiery death—Something about some of them

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SOME WHERE on the walls of an old waterfront warehouse in Oakville there used to be—perhaps they are there yet—the names of half a dozen schooners trading regularly to the port. The Red Rover, it is remembered, was one of them. Fenimore Cooper was still writing thrillers when she was launched, one would judge by the name. She would be a hundred years old by now.

Tucked away in the Dominion Archives at Ottawa is an Oakville port list much fuller, than anything yet heard of, and yet probably not complete. These old registers never were. There were so many reasons why registration was neglected, deferred, or completed elsewhere.

This list may not show all the vessels built in the little hole in the bank where the Sixteen Mile Creek meanders to the lake, but it does show all that had been registered up to 1874. After that schooner building and registration both fell off all over the lakes. By 1880 it had almost ceased. The great 4-master Minnedosa, about which we have been writing recently, was the last of the Canadian lake sailing fleet. She was launched at Kingston in 1890. After her a few sloops were built in the Bay of Quinte, but sail was dying. It survives to this day in one representative, imported from salt water, the tern schooner J. T. Wing, but the thousand sailing ships which ruled the lakes for a century have dwindled to this solitary curiosity, last heard of as an American training vessel.

Every lake sailor knew the Oakville breed of schooner and acclaimed it.

"It used to do my heart good," Capt. Dave Reynolds would tell us on the R.C.Y.C. launch forty years ago, "every time I came into a strange port, to see a pair of topmasts looming up at a wharf, spread pretty far apart, with the mainmast raking aft —for that would be the sign of a vessel with 'of Oakville' on her stern. You'd find them everywhere on the lakes. They built five one winter when I was a boy—three above the bridge and two below. And they went everywhere, yes, around the world. Well, everybody knows the Sea Gull, built in Oakville, went to South Africa from Toronto in 1864 and came back to Boston the next year with sugar and gold and ivory to show how far she'd been. Oswego parties bought her, and she was burned at East Tawas in 1888."

The port list uncovered at Ottawa names twenty-six vessels, all built in Oakville but five. They were all owned and registered in Oakville at one time or another.

First named is the two-masted schooner Amelia, built by Jacob Randall, pioneer builder whom Randall street commemorates, in 1836, a year before the Mackenzie Rebellion. She measured 105 1/2 tons, and Hiram Williams was her master. Philadner Train, Oakville farmer, was her first owner and he sold his 64 shares to Alexander Pomfret, gentleman, of Oakville, for £400 sterling in 1850.

She disappeared and some have thought the ancient wreck on Gibraltar Point, identified as that of the Toronto Yacht, might be hers.

The dimensions of the wreck might fit her, for her registered length is 90 feet 6 inches, beam 18 feet 10 inches, depth 7 feet 2 inches. The wreckage, which only broke up two years age, measured 50 feet back to the after end of the centreboard log, and was broken off at that point. The keel might have been 20 to 40 feet longer. There's no telling now, and opinion, backed by tradition inclines to the Toronto Yacht identification. The wreck was on the point earlier than 1850, when the Amelia was alive.

The other Oakville vessels, of which we may be able to give more particulars later, especially if kind friends come forward with what they know, were two-masted schooners like the Amelia, larger or smaller, with the exception of two three-masters, known to lake sailors as "barques," but really being barquentines, having only the foremast square rigged. One schooner became a brigantine, for South Atlantic voyaging, and another, built in Bronte and brigantine rigged, may lave been schooner rigged after being rebuilt and passing to Oakville ownership.

There was probably shipbuilding in Oakville before 1836, and there certainly was after, but there is a hiatus of sixteen years in the registered record, the next date being 1852. Jacob Randall may have built several vessels besides the Amelia by that time, and Melancthon and John Simpson, and John Potter, Oakville shipwright whose name survives curiously in "The Folly," an ancient Oakville house, were commg into their stride. Potter was a good builder, and went where the job called. His finest output was the big brigantine Queen of the North, which he built in the bush at the mouth of the Nottawasaga River— Wasaga Beach to the summer colonist. His first Oakville vessel recorded was a schooner of 116 tons named after himself. Builders often did this with a vessel built on speculation. She was launched in 1854, but two years earlier Melancthon Simpson had launched the Champion, of 114 tons, in Oakville. He and his brother John built dozens of vessels in the last half of the nineteenth century, in Oakville and elsewhere.

Vessels after the Amelia on the register were:

Champion, 114 tons, 1852.

Flying Cloud, 143 tons, 1852, Bronte built.

Peerless, 172 tons, 1853, Bronte built and brigantine rigged.

Lily, 143 tons, 1853.

Sutton, 111 tons, 1854.

John Potter, 116 tons, 1854.

Three Bells, 221 tons, 1854.

Belle, 32 tons, 1855.

Canadian, 160 tons, 1856.

Coquette, 176 tons, 1857.

Royal Albert, 165 tons, 1858

Victoria, 238 tons, 1862.

Monarch, 348 tons, 1863.

Sea Gull, 238 tons, 1864; afterwards brigantine.

Kate, 100 tons, 1866.

Smith and Post, 255 tons, 1866.

Peerless, 222 tons, rebuilt at St. Catharines, 1866.

Albatross, 142 tons, 1867.

Dauntless, 179 tons, 1867.

Henrietta P. Murray, 166 tons, 1867, built at Wellington Square.

White Oak, 213 tons, 1867.

Wood Duck, 77 tons, 1868.

Brothers, 31 tons, 1869, Bronte built.

May Wiley, 61 tons, 1873.

Coral, 26 tons, 1874.

Highland Beauty, 64 tons, 1876

OAKVILLE HARBOR IN THE LATE 1870's—THE VESSELS RECOGNIZED ARE: COUNTESS of Napanee, JENNIE MATTHEWS of Ogdensburg, HOPE of Hamilton.