"Brittania" To Rescue MacKenzie's Press Went Into Bay: Schooner Days DCCXVIII (718)

by C. H. J. Snider

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HOW far the ripple rings widen and-spread when a stone is tossed into smooth water! On what distant margins of tradition and history lap the little wavelets of memory when an unidentified old tintype is published for the interest and amusement of Telegram readers!

This unoriginal reflection is prompt by what has happened to the schooner picture published first on July 7th, 1945, as a quiz on subject and setting and now found to go back to the stormy days of York (Muddy, Little or what have you?) and the wreck of Makenzie's printing office when the Colonial Advocate made the Family Compact very, very mad, a hundred years ago or more. Little or what have you?) and the wreck of Mackenzie's printing office when the Colonial Advocate made the Family Compact very, very mad, a hundred years ago and more.

First the setting was identified by Park Whistler, of Niagara Falls, Ont., as the mouth of the Welland River at Chippawa, Ont. From this and internal evidence of the picture and descriptions in the memoir of Alexaner Muir, founder of Muir Bros, dryaock, the unknown ship was identified with considerable probability as the early clipper packet Britannia, built at Wellington Square by Capt. Roberts in 1819--

"The Britannia, Capt. Miller, was a visitant of York harbor about the same period (1819-1828); a topsail schooner of about 120 tons, remarkable for her specially fine model. She was built by Roberts, near the site of what is now Wellington Square, and was the property of Mr. Matthew Crooks, of Niagara."

--Scadding's Toronto of Old.

And now the Britannia is linked up with the vanished "port of call" at Stoney Creek, southeast of Hamilton, where a battle was fought in 1813 which saved Upper Canada from conquest by American invaders. The creek mouth was a landing place for early masters with their wares — sometimes smuggled — and a loading place for the small timber droghers which cleaned out the lakeshore timber in the first half of the 19th century, and for the grain vessels which picked up part cargoes where they could find them.

TYPE HIDDEN IN HAYMOWS

"YOUR story about the Britannia," writes Mr. Chester B. Hamilton, Jr., "takes me back to stories my grandfather, Peter S. Van Wagner, told me half a century ago. His farm was on the south shore of Lake Ontario, at Van Wagner Beach, four miles east of the Burlington Beach Canal, that is, at the foot of the Stoney Creek road. This, as you say, was a port of call for the Britannia.

"Your description of her as a sharp deadrise model with fine lines and raking spars checks with what he told me. You say she marked the end of the standing keel era. She did more, according to grandfather, in that she was the last ship for many, many years with really fine quality of lines and modeling. Where her lines came from he did not know. Certainly she was not of the same family or breed as the husky lake carriers by local ship builders, which you have so ably described. He assumed, and I think rightly, that someone from salt water, perhaps the Old Country, who was acquainted with the design and lines, of the fast clipper ships had a hand in her, plans. The photograph you printed (Aug. 18th) would seem to bear this out.

"One of the most interesting exploits of this fine ship had to do with the fevered politics of the time. When the printing shop of William Lyon Mackenzie at York was raided and wrecked by hot-blooded young Tories, the press was broken and thrown in the bay. Next day his friends gathered up all that could be salvaged, including the type, boxed it and loaded it on an exceptionally fast ship which was then lying in the bay. This was the Britannia, which could outsail anything else on the lake, particularly to windward, and so they set sail at midnight for the other side of the lake, or some point where they and their mouthpiece, the Colonial Advocate, would be safe from destruction.

"My grandfather was at the point of landing, the foot of Stoney Creek road, and saw the remains of the wrecked printing shop brought ashore, loaded on farm wagons and hurried inland. There it was hidden in haymows and other places of concealment, by Liberal friends. I believe later it was reassembled at Thorold. My grandfather had some of the type that had spilled from a cracked packing case."

PUT MACKENZIE IN FUNDS

MACKENZIE'S press was more than a piece of mechanism, it was the springboard of the agitator who attempted the leap from the mayor's chair of the infant city of Toronto to the rostrum of revolution.

"We saw," recounted dear old Dr. Scadding, writing of the Public Place of York, which was also the Jail Square, "Mr. W. L. McKenzie assailed by the missiles which mobs usually adopt." (Had he been less Victorian Dr. Scadding might have said eggs.) "From this spot we had previously seen the same personage, after one of his re-elections, borne aloft in triumph, on a kind of pyramidal car, and wearing around his neck a massive gold chain and medal (both made of molten sovereigns) the gift of his admirers and constituents; in the procession at the same time was a printing press, working as it was conveyed along in a low sleigh and throwing off handbills which were tossed right and left to the accompanying crowd in the street."

This may have been the very press which the outraged Tories threw into the bay, for the hand press on which the Colonial Advocate was printed, would not be too large to be hauled about on a sleigh, or on a wagon when it made its voyage to the Bay. It was probably a mass of wood, stone and iron that could be packed in a four-by-six box.

Mackenzie was out of town when this outrage happened. He had a gift for being the little man who wasn't there. That his friends feared pursuit and further violence is shown by their packing the remnants of his printing plant aboard the fastest sailing packet of the time and rushing with them over the horizon to a secret hideout.

Mackenzie printed the Colonial Advocate in a house at the northwest corner of Frederick and Front street — opposite the West Post Office in York — and it was there that the young bloods of the old Family Compact, on June 25th, 1826, raided his office and destroyed his press, throwing parts of it into the bay at the Merchants' Wharf at the foot of the street. The wharf was the property of Mr. Allen, collector of customs, inspector of flour, pot and pearl ash, shop, still and tavern duties.

Charles and Raymond Baby, Henry Sherwood, Mr. Lyons, secretary of the lieutenant-governor, Samuel Peters Jarvis, Charles Richardson, James King, Charles Heward and Peter Macdougall had to pay £625 damages for injury to property, proving that the law was no respecter of persons even in those days.

This picture is from "Landmarks of Toronto," of either the Colonial Advocate press itself, or one very much like it, used at Niagara, where the Advocate was printed before coming to Toronto.

ONCE MORE, THE "BRITTANIA" - This is the "mystery vessel" tintype, in an old-fashioned daguerreotype hinged case, which led to the identification of the Britannia and her interesting story. The thick hemp rigging, which began to be replaced by wire in 1856, is proof of the age of the vessel and her portrait. The tintype must be one of the earliest Ontario vessel photographs.