Salute to the Brave! - "Bluenose" - Backed by the King's Head: Schooner Days DCCXXX (730)

by C. H. J. Snider

_______

SHED no tears for the Bluenose, grinding to chips on a Caribbean reef. She never wanted that, either tears, reefs or chips. Dip your hand into your pocket and toss a dime to a gallant soul that is gone, and then, as Angus Walters would say, "Draw away the jumbo-stopper and see if you can leave as straight and clean a wake!"

It doesn't matter if you don't understand the language. Why should you? Make as much of your life as Bluenose did of hers and you won't fall far to leeward of the pearly gates.

Bluenose was a soul.

She was more than queen of the North Atlantic, more than international racing champion, more than high line salt-banker, more than a barnstormer, more than a West Indian freighter. She was of the spirit of Canada that came out of the Great War twenty-seven years ago, believing all things, hoping all things, enduring all things. When young men were seeing visions of a world safe for democracy and old men were dreaming dreams of a land fit for heroes to live in.

The new Canada did not see why codfishing should be all work and no pay, or why Kipling and Connolly should lavish their best sellers on fishermen out of Gloucester, Mass., so young Billy Dennis (Senator now, the Hon. W. H. Dennis) of the Halifax Herald, set up the International Fisherman's Trophy on a grand scale and Canada went after it on a scale still grander.

Some good Halifax sports joined with thrifty Lunenburgers and a few central Canada angels like Aemilius Jarvis and To-hell-with-profits Sir Joseph Flavelle and Herrick Duggan, the bridge builder—and behold there came out this Bluenose.

She was built at the peak of an ascending postwar price spiral, costing an average of one thousand smackers to each of the thirty-five shareholders, $35,000 for a fisherman! Americans had paid and had to pay $60,000 for something not as good, but the price staggered the old maritimers who were still dazed at being asked $20,000 for vessels that could be built for $10,000 five years before—"it's the war, you know, everything's scarce and dear."

But she staggered more than the penny pinchers. The Halifax men who started it all took the unprecedented step of engaging a naval architect. Heretofore fishermen were built from the whittled models of long established builders, modified to suit the particular ideas of the captains who were going to sail them. The Americans had been consulting yacht designers. The Halifax men took a long shot on a young Halifax technical school student with a strange Huguenot name, Roue, pronounced Rue-A, now W. J. Roue, NA, with all the work on his hands two men can handle. He was then just Bill Roue who had turned out a couple of little boats for the Royal Nova Scotia Yacht Squadron, that were pronounced "not bad, for an amateur, and him just out of school."

Smith and Rhuland, who had built a hundred schooners already in their Lunenburg yard, were aghast at the blueprints. They sent for young Roue and told him that he had made a mistake and drawn his rudder wrong end to. Not to go at the bow instead of the stern, but instead of being flat it was thicker at the forward edge than at the after one. Everybody know it should either be perfectly flat, or else thicker at the after edge. They had often had to spike cleats on to flat rudders, to make vessels steer better. But they would make the alteration for Mr. Roue without saying anything about it.

Young Mr. Roue said gently to make the rudder exactly as he had designed it. He would be responsible for the vessel steering properly. He started to explain that he was employing the principle of streamlining, but he stopped when the builder said, "All right, all right. Mind, we warned you."

Result, Bluenose steered like a gull.

My own experience has been limited to steering five fishermen. Bluenose was best of the five; better than ten other commercial vessels I have steered; better than any of the hundred yachts I have sailed, except Gardenia; and as good as Gardenia.

Another horror to the builders and even to Angus Walters was the narrow stern, almost canoe-like, into which Bluenose tapered away. Just wide enough for the wheel and the mainsheet bitts. But when the helmsman was in water up to his knees on the lee side of other fishermen's wheels, in Bluenose he was working dryshod. Perhaps, the helmsman shouldn't be to leeward of his wheel, normally. But you can't steer a race from the weather side always. When the Mahaska or Henry Ford or Columbia or any other racing fisherman would get a knockdown, the water would rise twelve feet up the deck to leeward and pour aft in a raging torrent completely filling the gangway between the lee side of the cabin house and the lee rail, and swirling up to the wheelbox. Bluenose would be going along just scuppering it, her lee rail out, and the tumble-home and tuck-in of her long tapering quarters keeping everything aft dry. I sailed twelve hard races in Bluenose, and three in her opponents, as official observer for Bluenose, and had an intimate inside view of behavior both ways.

One thing Smith and Rhuland did put over on Mr. Roue, they built Bluenose twelve inches higher forward than he had designed her. That was really a good thing, for, as he himself said, there is a big difference between a foot of water on your deck and none at all. It was that which gave the slightly Roman-nosed profile which distinguished her. It was grand for keeping her dry when riding to an anchor in a gale of wind, but perhaps it helped make her horse around more, when anchored or hove to, and certainly twelve inches more of wood and iron added weight and windage and held her back that much as a racer.

But she was a racer, and a good one. To win and keep the championship of the North Atlantic she had to first defeat eleven Nova Scotian schooners, some built for the express purpose of beating her; she had to face and defeat four American champions, some built regardless of expense. Meantime she had to earn her living by fishing and freighting, for she was a bona fide fisherman, and not a racing machine. She was twice high-liner of the banks, that is, brought in more fish in a season than any other Canadian. And two winter passages she made to the West Indies with dried fish, after her first season, were so profitable that she paid a 15 per cent. dividend to her thirty-five shareholders.

She was so able that on one of those winter passages she never lowered her mainsail—and she had the biggest mainsail ever swung by banks fisherman or Great Lakes schooner; eighty-one feet on the boom.

Her fight for life from the sands of Sable Island was epic. She won by sheer excellence of handling, building and design, where several other schooners, Canadian and American, one of them a championship opponent, were lost with all hands.

Another great exhibition was when she was caught in a heavy gale 200 miles off the English coast, coming home from the King's Jubilee, with passengers. She rode it out hove to, until seas swept her and washed her crew from the pumps, and battered her quarter seams open. The crew, lashed to their stations, were hauled aboard by their lifelines, and the Bluenose ran back to Plymouth for repairs, and came home to Lunenburg under her own sail, all well on board. It was after that that she toured the Great Lakes. And Toronto.

The sentimental may deplore Bluenose descending to the drudgery of toting freight between West Indian islands, grunting along pushed by a pair of diesels, with her 81-foot mainboom sawed up for stovewood, for all we know, and her ten thousand square feet of canvas - including the mainsail given her from the King's cutter Britannia cut into tarps, and a few hundred feet of riding sail left on the stumps of her hundred foot masts. So do all sailors. She was a queen and it is too bad for a queen to be taking in washing.

But it would be worse for a queen to sponge on Hollywood when her day was done.

Bluenose would never do that. When she was launched the life of a saltbanker was estimated at ten years at the most, if she escaped foundering meantime. Bluenose, built in 1921, had ten years of profitable life, fishing and racing. She held on for another five. Saltbanking was by then outdated, and diesels were put in, but fish which sold for five cents for the fishermen when she was built had dropped to a cent a pound, and there was no change out of that for the shareholders. Bluenose tried exhibition sailing and ocean cruising and exhibition racing, but her life as a real racing fisherman was over on both counts.

It was the luck of the war which found a place for her in the highly useful and necessary field of Caribbean freighting. Angus Walters, who had put $5,000 into her originally and more to pay for those diesels, and so saved her from the sheriff was lucky to sell her to the international trading company that put her on the West Indian route. She lasted there quite as long as could be expected; the reefs or the hurricanes always get schooners.

She had a good life of twenty-five years and she did a lot of good in it, chiefly kindling the fire of hope and enterprise in Canadians of her generation. To have her picture on the ten-cent coins and half-dollar postage stamps was a unique appreciation by Canada of what the ship had done. If more should be shown, Angus Walters, her peppery skipper, and W. J. Roue, her unassuming designer, have my nomination for the next two vacancies in the Senate, They have done more for Canada than some of the occupants of the chamber.

HER MONUMENT IN CANADIAN SILVER

Only a ten cent piece—but behind it royal backing, "GEORGE VI BY GOD'S GRACE KING AND OF INDIA EMPEROR." No ship could have a better memorial - her portrait in permanency on the coinage of her country, a king the only other occupant - and no ship could better earn it, for Bluenose made the nickname of the Maritimes ring pleasantly through the rest of Canada, and and Canada's name ring through the postwar world for twenty years.

GOODBY, BLUENOSE, FOR KEEPS.

This was the first picture drawn of you, 25 years go.