Tows, Tugs and Three-'N'-Afters: Schooner Days DCCXXXI (731)

by C. H. J. Snider

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TIME meant money in Schooner Days, as now, for wages and upkeep ran on by the day whether the vessel was earning anything or not.

A simple illustration is the experience of the schooner Antelope. Once, when Muir Bros., who built her, still owned her, she was chartered to load grain in Chicago for Kingston at the phenomenal price of 27 cents a bushel. It took her ten days to reach Chicago from Lake Ontario, another day to load and twelve days more to scurry down Lakes Michigan, Huron, Erie and Ontario to Kingston. She had first-class luck with her weather all through. Her freight ran over $5,400. Her expenses for wages, groceries and tow bills for the 23 days were under $700. It was a profitable trip. It paid one-third of the cost of building the Antelope a few years before.

Years later, when the Conger Coal Co. had her, she was lying idle because coal was not coming up from the mines, when she got a chance at a load of corn from Toledo to Kingston, at 1 1/2 cents a bushel. Capt. Wm. Wakeley calculated closely and told the owners that with average luck they might make a profit of $8 on the voyage, allowing two weeks for it. That was better than paying the crew off, letting her lie idle and having to fit her out again and find a new crew when the coal began to move. But she didn't have average luck. An accident to the Welland Canal gates tied her up in the canal for a week. She got as far as the Mohawk light in Lake Erie and had to run back because of a strong headwind although he carried sail on her till the provision box and hawser box on deck started their moorings. When they got to Toledo there were more delays loading and more headwinds in Lake Erie on the way back. The voyager took longer than the trip to Chicago and down to Kingston, and instead of taking $8 she was several hundred in the hole.

BROUGHT IN TOWING AND BARGES

It was experiences such as the last which drove owners from sail to steam, for while wind was free and fuel cost money and steamers needed larger crews than schooners, their performance was to a greater degree calculable. No one, not even the meteorological bureau, could tell how long a sail voyage would last. Our lake winds are not trade winds, of regular force and direction. They blow from all points of the compass (if at all) and if you are depending on them they are pretty sure to be ahead, which means slow time, lots of fun and no money. So sails slowly gave place to steam.

In between was the towing era, commencing with tugs being used to overcome the handicaps of headwinds and calms, and developing into towboats as large as the vessels towed and so able to pay for their own upkeep by the freight on the cargo they themselves could carry. The schooners which towed stowed their sails in headwinds and set them when the wind was fair, to ease the towline. Sometimes, with a strong breeze on the quarter, they cast off the line and ran away from their towing consort. There is the historic remark of Capt. Hughie Kelly, when he sailed the John Bently into Toronto ahead of the W. T. Robb which had been cowing her—"Yachts don't wait for barges!"

Stunts such as this meant carrying full crews. To economize, light sails and the topmasts which spread them, were left ashore. Fewer men were needed with no topsails and the vessels towed more easily. Then the lower sails were not replaced when they wore out and the remaining masts were unstepped because they were not needed and thus big three-masted schooners—known locally as "three-'n'-afters," from a false application of fore-and-after to two-master schooners only—and barquentines, with from ten to seventeen pinions of canvas, became "dumb" barges, without even a flagpole.

TUGS AND TOWS EIGHTY YEARS AGO

OF 175 barges named in Thomas' Register of Shipping on the Lakes and River St. Lawrence in 1864, only, five were intended for lake towing and these all had sails. The others were "river barges" of from 7,000 to 20,000 bushels capacity and light drafts, being intended for the St. Lawrence canals. All were owned down the river.

Both the Clyde and the St. Lawrence, mentioned by Capt. Graham in Capt. Norris' experiment at towing schooners with grist for his St. Catharines mills in 1869 or 1870, were built in 1864 and were classified in the register as barges of 407 tons, with "a first class vessel hull; to be towed through the lakes." They were built by Shickluna for Norris and Neelon, and insurable for $13,000 when new. They had only one mast at first, but in 1866 they were fully sparred and rigged with three masts. So had the barges England, Ireland and Scotland, built at Brockville in 1863 for Geo. Chaffey and Bros, of Kingston, with topsails, centreboards and a complete threemaster rig. Their tonnage was 448, and their grain capacity 22,000 bushels. Their insurable value was $8,000 each, possibly being lower than that of the Clyde and St. Lawrence because being built' lighter for the river.

Of the 186 tugs of all kinds mentioned in the same register for 1864 thirty-seven are specified as harbor tugs, propeller driven. Among the twenty river tugs were several paddlewheel steamers. No harbor tug listed had been built before 1850.

FIRST TORONTO TUG COULDN'T FIND BUSINESS

IT was only in 1857 that the port of Toronto got its first harbor tug, Capt. James Moodie's Fire Fly. There was a big schooner traffic then—but not enough business to make a tug pay. The harbor commissioners gave Capt. Moodie $100 to compensate him for his loss in the first year's business and the Fire Fly was used as an island ferry. She was built of iron, at Montreal, by Wm. Perkins, in 1850. The sailing men thought it cheaper to wait for a "fair wind" to get in or out, or to laboriously kedge their way, but the owners who had to pay the wages knew better.

River and harbor towing, however, was early an established business. Oswego had five tugs kept busy towing vessels in and out. Sometimes they would range miles for a pickup, and in the grain rush before the McKinley tariff they crossed the lake for customers, at appropriate fees.

Mr. D. D. Calvin, in his admirable history of the Garden Island timber industry—"A Saga of the St. Lawrence" — cites the Calvin firm's experience. They found they made better time towing by steamers their rafts of timber, made up at Garden Island, down the St. Lawrence to Quebec, than floating them down, although wind and current were free. Owing to the increasingly longer haul required for their timber from where it was cut in the woods and the inelastic limits of the navigation season they found it would be necessary to double the number of vessels they employed or else make those they had do twice as much work. They had from very early times, used tugs or steamers for towing for their rafts on the river and canals and had extended this to towing the schooners to and through the Welland Canal when they had to go to Lake Erie and the Upper Lakes for cargoes. They experimented with sending their little river tugs like the Chieftain all the way to Lake Superior with schooners in tow. It was not perfect but an improvement on schooner time. So they laid the keel of a propeller or steam barge capable of a load as big as any of the sailing vessels, and, with this additional carrying capacity, and the altered time, their problem was solved, for a propeller towing a schooner or barge made as good average time as the schooner alone, or better. So they by degrees removed the sails of all their schooners and built nothing but barges, steam or tow.

THE ANTELOPE—laid up in the pond at Port Dalhousie with her topmasts cut, in preparation for towing. She was afterwards rerigged and sailed for several years, but finally became a tool barge and capsized with contractors' machinery.

THE ANTELOPE - Starting out to make a $6,000 freight.