"Hands Across the Lake": Schooner Days DCCXIV (714)

by C. H. J. Snider

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THERE was for long a lake trade between Whitby, Ont., and Wilson, N.Y., 30 miles south across Lake Ontario. Two Port Whitby boys, Tip and Billy Wilson, went across the lake many years ago and settled in the American port and some Ontario old-timers think it was these Wilson boys who gave it its name, but the port was called after the little town, which is a mile and a half inland.

The late Capt. Richard Goldring, of Toronto, who settled in Port Whitby long ago, and died there recently, did some trading to Wilson and it was always in sawn wood of some sort. He first went there as a little boy in the family scow Betsey, when they lived in the Etobicoke in the '60's. Perhaps this was in one of the many rehabilitation periods in which the port of Wilson indulged.

BUMPING OVER THE BOTTOM

As a young man Capt. Goldring carried lumber and 30-foot crib timbers from Port Hope to Wilson, in competition with the schooner Parthenon. Sometimes the harbor entrance was so barred by sand he could not get in and had to go to Olcott or Niagara and wait for smooth water and come back and throw his deckload overboard and tow it in and then heave the schooner in with the windlass. On one occasion he arrived as the Parthenon was coming out for another load. He got good despatch and was soon outward bound again and reached Port Hope at noon. He had the luck to find a lumber shover at loose ends and with this reinforcement got the Maple Leaf loaded by dark. It was a dead calm, so he told the boys they could have the night in and he would call them for breakfast, for it had been a long, hard day for all of them. At 7 a.m. he got up himself and the fly at the masthead was beginning to tail off from the northeast. Off went the mooring lines and out turned the crew and away she went for Wilson before breakfast. She was there by noon with another full load, to the amazement of the harbor contractor. He scratched his head and asked, "Weren't you here yesterday? Is this the same load you brought in then, and where have you been since?"

THE $64 QUESTION

"Where's the Parthenon?" asked Capt. Goldring.

"She had to go into Charlotte for shelter and that's where she is. I've just had a wire. She won't be up this week."

One of the windfalls Capt. Goldring had in the Wilson trade was to find, at dawn of a calm morning, that the Maple Leaf was in a small archipelago of bunches of shingles. It was a deckload swept from a barge days before, which had drifted up the lake. He salvaged twenty-six squares before the breeze sprang up, and the harbor contractor bought them. He had to pay duty on them, which he did with a very wry face.

OTHER TRADERS

The Marcia A. Hall, of Windsor, was another Wilson trader, perhaps the last out of Toronto.

Another Canadian vessel to share in the rebuilding of the harbor at Wilson Creek in the 1890's was the British Queen, from South Bay, a schooner of about 300 tons carrying capacity. She carried square timber for the cribs from the Queen's Wharf in Toronto fifty years ago.

It is a tradition of Port Credit that one of its buildings crossed the lake twice, once in cargoes of lumber shipped to Wilson and once, and more likely oftener, in deckloads stolen from the new Wilson piers by returning hookers.

As late as 1909 the Toronto steamer A. J. Tymon ran to Wilson in the excursion trade at 25 cents a head.

Wilson is said to have been a rum-running port in the prohibition era, but of that, of course, Schooner Days would know nothing, that traffic being confined, it is understood, to launches and trucks. Now there is not a vestige of piers, lighthouse or harbor works at the port.

"BRUNO" AND "BUTCHER BOY"

—AND A TRIP SO LONG

THE CARGO SPROUTED

Sir,—Was pleased to read in The Telegram of Oct. 13th, in the schooner days section.

G. A. Peters questioned of the steam barge Bruno, of Nov. 5th, 1890, on the Magnectic Reef, at the southeast end of Cockburn Island.

I am sorry I cannot help you in dimensions of the boat, I was only 16 past at that time.

I was engaged as fireman on steam barge Butcher Boy, of Port Arthur. We had a very stormy trip from Collingwood to Meldrum Bay, with cahip supplies for lumber camps on Manitoulin.

We had the hold full of oats and a deck load of camp supplies. When we got home the oats had grown through the sacks an inch long, as they got wet, and we were so long on the way.

This steam barge was captained by John Pearson, of Owen Sound, and we were over two weeks from Collingwood to Meldrum Bay. I was too young to know the dimensions of any boat, but that was the night the Bruno was wrecked on the Magnectic Reef.

The shaft on our boat the Butcher Boy worked loose just as we were coming into the harbor at Meldrum Bay, and it was my job to go tighten the bolts on the coupling, so we could work into the harbor. We must have been two weeks from Collingwood to Meldrum Bay.

I do know what happened to the whistle; it was preserved by William Cullus, Mississaga lighthouse keeper. He had it attached to the foghorn boiler, and Everyone knew the Bruno whistle.

I'm sorry I can't give any dimensions of the boat, but remember the name Captain Peters quite well.

—ROBERT BAILLIE,

201 Atherly Road, Orillia.

Mr. Peters, whose original query prompted the above lively sidelight on the Bruno, asks the difference between a steam barge, which the Bruno, was, and a river barge, which it happened, also bore the name Bruno.'"Steam barge" was an early description of those cargo vessels propelled by a steam-driven screw — in other words "a propeller."

An early distinction, purely arbitrary, confined the term "propeller" to those screw-driven vessels which had passenger as well as freight accommodation. This was soon dropped, and the term steam barge has almost passed out as well, the screw propeller being in such general use. Literally speaking, a "steam" barge; now would mean a cargo vessel which had to be towed by another, and had auxiliary steam gear for its lines, anchors, etc., as against auxiliary oil or gasoline engines for the same purpose. We now often hear of "diesel barges," meaning diesel-driven cargo hulls, and some tow barges have auxiliary diesel equipment.

River barge, in the old insurance classification, meant a barge dependent upon some other vessel, a tug, or steam barge, for propulsion, and used only in enclosed waters. River barges from the lakes seldom used even auxiliary sails, a point in which they differed from the "pinflats," or square-rigged barges of the St. Lawrence, and the big barges of the Great Lakes, some of which had as many as four masts completely rigged with sails.

WRECKERS LOOT LOST SHIP

Sir,—Your "Schooner Days" article of one week ago on the loss of the "Aggie" was a fitting memorial to a gallant ship. It blew through the fog of conjecture and rumor up here like a clean breeze. Living just one mile from this gap, I know it well, as I so often use it. Your comments regarding the multiplicity of lights as one approaches from the lake end at night are quite correct. One must approach the gap with your eyes wide open and alert. I can well imagine that the helmsman on the Aggie the night she foundered would be cold and wet, therefore less alert than normally. He also had to battle a terrific following sea, not an easy task at any time.

In connection with this tragedy, I feel I must condemn the action of no inconsiderable group of people who came from near and far to help themselves to all the removable gear and furnishings on the Aggie, even before the seas which wrecked her had fallen. This vandalism revolts the good sailors of this part of the lake.

It is reported that men with axes chopped at her decks and under structure the better to completely strip her. Surely there is a marine law which protects a boat in distress and the owner from such acts as this, which in the case of the Aggie's owner, must have resulted in considerable loss quite apart from the ship itself.

If there is such a law, it should be widely publicized and the proper authorities in our lake port towns acquainted with it and made to enforce it.

Your very truly

N. R. VINTON.

28 Hager Avenue Burlington.

Mr. Vinton's manly protest recalls the traditional Cornish parson's prayer: "God send a good wreck ere morning" and the disappointment of those his parishioners of little faith who did not get up early enough to reap their harvest of the sea.

A week after the wreck the Aggie was in four pieces—keel and ballast a hundred feet out under water, bow and stern both pointing the same way on the beach, and half the deck a hundred yards away on the sand. One water-soaked cushion was all that remained of lier cabin furnishings.

AN OLD SHIPPING BILL-HEAD—It had little to do with either Whitby, Ont., or Wilson, N.Y., but it depicts an English Channel or East Coast port vigorously if crudely. It was used in Lake Ontario traffic eighty years ago.