Why the Topmasts Were Sent Down: Schooner Days DCCVII (707)

by C. H. J. Snider

SCHOONERS continued to have their uses on Lake Ontario for forty years after the barge era began to clip their wings, but a drastic change swept through the fleet of lake vessels in the 1880's, after the newly formed sailors' union established a minimum wage of $1.50 for full rigged vessels. Down came the topmasts in fleet after fleet, in came the jibbooms, up came timber tugs from their river work, and harbor tugs from their daily chores to begin towing the dehorned drohgers and grain carriers all the way to the head of the lakes and back, and propellers began to be built, to tow "consorts" that once sailed on their own.

KINGSTON FELT THE BLOW

Among the first to feel the axe were the new schooners Hyderabad and Bangalore, built by John Power [sic: William Power] for A. Munn [sic: Alexander Gunn] and Co., wholesale grocers and ship chandlers in Kingston.

"When I saw fine new vessels like that sending down their topgallant yards, topsail yards, squaresail yards, topmasts and jibbooms, and stripped to a foresail or nothing at all," said Peter Beaupre of Portsmouth to the writer this summer, "I said to myself, there's no future in this sailing vessel business, and I went into the prison and didn't come out for twenty years."

Mr. Beaupre did not mean that he committed a crime and got himself locked, up. Far otherwise. As the sailor son of a sailor family—his father built the Oliver Mowat, and he sailed in her and qualified as first mate for bigger vessels—he felt that it was a crime to shear the tall three-masters of their wings. Being of good character and well known in his community, he became an officer in what they refer to in Portsmouth as "the penal institution." Retired after many years of honorable service he now keeps an attractive hotel in that Kingston suburb once known as Hatter's Bay. Slim, erect and still of stalwart frame, he is a fine specimen of the lake sailor of sixty years ago, and qualifies for membership in the Evergreen Club, along with Capt. Johnny Williams of Toronto, Capt. Jim Peacock and Capt. Edmunds of Port Hope, or Henry McConnell of Picton and his pal, Alexander Cameron Taylor.

SAILS VS. TOWLINES

Turning schooners into towbarges was hailed all along the waterfronts of the lakes as a "sharp move" by owners—these "capitalists" to whom is assigned the role of villain in economic drama—to beat the sailors' organization for better wages and better living conditions. There is some truth in this charge, for the new wage scale did not apply to barges and steamers at first; sailors would hire for 25 cents a day less in a vessel where there "no climbin', no work above the deadeyes nor forrad of the knightheads nor aft of the davits," nothin' to do but steer and pump and eat yer meals." But Dave McReynolds of the RCYC launch used to say he would sooner set or furl gaff topsails all day long than drag in one wet towline.

Actually this change to towing was only a part of the demand for speed which has produced the steamship, the express train, the automobile, the airplane, and now the atomic bomb. D. D. Calvin tells, in his interesting exposition of the empire his grandfather, founded and ruled from Garden Island ("A Saga of the St. Lawrence") that as the firm prospered it found that it had to handle twice as much timber in a season, and had to make the choice between doubling its already large fleet of schooners, Oriental, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Siberia, Prussia, which then brought the timber to Garden Island, or making its existing fleet do twice as much work. Calms, headwinds and gales prolonged schooner voyages, sometimes from days to months, and when they had to go to Lake Superior they had to be towed either by tugs or by horses through two canals and three connecting rivers. From 1870 onwards the Calvin firm had made a practice of towing their schooners from Garden Island to Port Dalhousie or Hamilton if the wind was light. Then they chartered tugs to get them up Lake Erie. In 1882 and 1883 they used their river steamer Chieftain to tow all the way to Lake Superior for pine. That year they launched their first propeller, the D. D. Calvin, and in 1884 this vessel, of double the Chieftain's engine power, was carrying more timber herself than any of the canal-sized schooner-barges she towed.

Thus the schooner fleet was reduced to low rig or no rig, for apart from the saving in wage rates and the number of sailors needed in the barges, the windage on yards, topmasts and "light sails" made the schooners harder to tow and was a waste of coal and horsepower. Once the light sails and their spars were removed, the descent to "sheer hulks'" was rapid. The Norway, rerigged without topmasts after her disaster in 1880, continued to sail under "three lowers" while in tow for twenty years. The Oriental had only a foresail when she was lost below Port Dalhousie in 1888. The Denmark was shorn of all her spars and even her decks, and doors cut in her bow fitted her for use as a freight-car ferry between the Island and Kingston in 1896. The Prussia, which once spread fourteen sails to the breeze (she was square rigged on the foremast), was stripped of everything above the deck. So was the capsized Jessie Breck, when she survived as the barge H. M. Stanley.

TWICE AS MUCH IN HALF TIME

By 1890 or thereabouts the steam barges Armenia and D. D. Calvin, and tow barges Valencia, Ceylon and Augusta, five vessels in all, carried twice as much timber as the schooners employed between 1875-83, and in almost half the time. So the change from windjammer to towbarge, while properly regretted by all true sailormen, justified itself in economics - although we sometimes doubt whether economics, like other fine words, butter any parsnips. Ontario lost something when men like Peter Beaupre turned their backs on the lake.

BUT SCHOONERS SURVIVED

Towards the end of the century good old lake carriers like the Muir schooner Antelope, the Conlin and Norris schooner Augusta, the St. Catharines schooner, T. R. Merritt, and the American schooner, Reuben Doud, all of which had been cut down to barges at one time or another, were refitted as full-rigged schooners and enjoyed a few years of full-sailed happiness, carrying coal to Toronto. It was hard to find spars for them and sailors to climb the spars, and the spurt did not last long. The big old Lake Erie schooner G. C. Trump, which had sailed to South Africa forty years before, and fallen to barge rig by 1913 (she was then the Arthur of Toronto, carrying coal for the Elias Rogers Co.), was refitted as a schooner again during the Great War. Before it was over she had made three round trips between Halifax and South Africa with lumber. Though she was aground for a week in the St. Lawrence rapids on her way down from Lake Ontario. The Great War sent many of our surviving lake schooners to salt water. Few got there, and none came back.

THE "PRUSSIA" OF GARDEN ISLAND

She once spread fourteen working sails on eighteen spars but ended her days with nothing of either left above her rail.