First Ever? Green Bay - Toronto: Schooner Days DCCLV (755)

by C. H. J. Snider

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Anyway, Old Wake Led New Ship Merry Dance Over 2242 Miles of Lake Water Last Month

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ALLAN WARD, Inspector at His Majesty's Customs in this harbor, stared when asked for a clearance for Green Bay, Wisconsin a little over a month ago. So far as he recalled no Toronto ship had ever made the voyage. But he obliged with his customary alacrity.

At Green Bay, Wis., Howard M. Kalupske, collector of U.S. customs and harbor officer, stared too when asked for the return clearance. He knew Toronto well. Of Bohemian birth, he had lived here. But he had never known a Toronto vessel to come to Green Bay, nor any vessel to ask for a clearance from Green Bay to Toronto. He granted the document with great courtesy, and came down to see personally what manner of craft this was.

This was the story:

WILD GOOSE CHASE?

When officers at Tete du Pont barracks at Kingston allowed me to finger the foundation walls of old French Fort Frontenac, which they had discovered in trenching exercises, I resolved to follow the wake of the intrepid explorer Robert LaSalle, if took me to China.

That is where he meant to go, as the name he gave the Lachine rapids testifies. "A la Chine!" he cried there, "On to China!"

Fort Frontenac on Lake Ontario was his jumping-off place for Cathay in 1678. Green Bay, Wisconsin, was where he landed. Toronto was a way port. A cruise from Toronto to Green Bay seemed the simplest way of treading the uncharted wastes where this un-haloed saint had trod.

For the purpose we had the 65-foot sailing ketch Kingarvie, 23-tons register, 14 ft. 6 beam, 8 ft. draught, total dead weight 66,000 lbs., of which 14 tons is fixed ballast. Kingarvie was designed by G. Herrick Duggan, the great engineer whose bridges span this continent. She was the 123rd yacht he had designed for his own use, or his friends, and he had sailed her eight seasons when he sold her. We had a crew of five, Albert Simms and William Garland, Newfoundland fishermen, worth their weight in folding money, Norman D. Tyler, Toronto barrister, my brother Sage Snider, and myself.

La Salle had some twenty men in a craft of about the same overall length as Kingarvie, wider, higher, and shoaler. His barque Griffon was like a Dutch galliot, and maybe 18 feet beam, and 6 ft. draught or less; pretty flat in the bottom and built up at the ends for cabins; hardly able to sail with the wind forward of the beam, from her clumsy body and clumsier rig, mostly square. She had five or seven "guns," tiny cannon, or arquebuses mounted on stocks or crutches. In her company of twenty was a friar, and they were all needed, including the priest and St. Anthony of Padua, when they had to tow her against the river currents, or weather a Lake Huron storm. We had no cannon, but we had a camera. We had five minutes of church on deck every Sunday and sang 'The Lord is My Shepherd' when we got to Green Bay, and the same when we got home. And we were filled with great respect for La Salle.

ONTARIO'S FIRST 'SCHOONERS'

La Salle had to import all his ship material from France, except the timber for her, which grew in the wilderness. He carried it up Lake Ontario from the fort at Kingston in small sailing shallops, the first schooners on the lakes, named Frontenac and Cataraqui. One of them put in at Toronto, in the mouth of the Humber, for shelter. The other was wrecked on the south shore of the lake around Christmas time. Every spike, cable, anchor, sail and rope had to be lugged on men's backs up the steep Niagara escarpment, for La Salle had to start his voyage to China from the level of Lake Erie. There was no other way then to get over Niagara Falls—except down.

We, in contrast, went up Niagara Falls in eight gigantic steps, the 100-ft. deep locks of the Canadian Welland Canal. This brought us to Port Colborne on Lake Erie, where our voyage, like La Salle's, really began.

He built his discovery ship at Cayuga Creek on the Niagara River, above the Falls, and had Helen's own time finishing her, in August, 1679, between Indians and the difficulty of getting out of the river and on to the lake-even with wind pushing against the current; twelve men out on the bank with treck-ropes, and the rest sweating at kedge and capstan or running warps and anchors ahead with the longboat.

NO CAN DO

We would have liked to follow every bubble of the Griffon's wake, from her very launching ways, and perhaps we shall yet, but since 1679 the river has been spanned by bridges denying clearance for our 80-foot mainmast, and the current runs 9 knots in places. We can only make 6 under power. The nearest we got to the Griffon's birthplace was between Fort Erie, on the Canadian shore and Buffalo breakwater. There seemed no point in going down the canal channels built two centuries later between Buffalo and the Erie Barge Canal, for the Griffon never came near them.

So while Mississagi Passage in Manitoulin, Niagara, Kingston, Toronto, Oswego, Pultneyville and Rochester, all of which have some connection with La Salle and the Griffon, were points of pilgrimage not omitted, our voyage really began at Port Colborne. And this was the timetable of our "through line":

DAY BY DAY

June 29—Port Colborne to Port Stanley, Lake Erie.

June 30—Port Stanley to Amherstburg, mouth of the Detroit River.

July 1—"Running the rivers"— Detroit, Lake St. Clair, river St. Clair — as far as Stag Island below Port Huron and Sarnia.

July 2-3—To Sarnia for fuel and supplies and up the west coast of Lake Huron, across Saginaw Bay, past Thunder Bay Islands and Presqu'isle, to Middle Island at the east mouth of the Straits of Mackinaw.

July 4—To Mackinac Island where we British built the Gibraltar of the North in 1780, gave it up in 1796, captured it without a blow in 1812, held it three years against army, fleet, and starvation, and returned it politely when the war was over.

July 5—To St. Ignace where La Salle brought the Griffon, anchoring her off the Jesuit Mission, where our anchor too went down.

MIND THOSE MORMONS

July 6—To Mackinaw City across the straits, where the French had old Fort Michillimackinac, and where the English, after taking over were tricked and massacred in Pontiac's conspiracy. Supposed friendly, Indians played lacrosse outside the fort, tossed the ball over the palisades, and ran in after it, and slaughtered. Then on to St. James in the Beaver Islands in Lake Michigan, where La Salle took the Griffon to collect furs, and where Strang the Mormon afterwards had his kingdom.

July 7 —Across Lake Michigan to Washington Harbor in Washington island entering Green Bay by Rock Island Passage.

Green Bay is as long as the Bay of Quinte, and wider, twenty miles across, and more open. Its islands are large and small, fine and bold, some of them 700 feet high, crowned with hardwoods and evergreens in all their glory. This makes the bay green, and its water is green too, rich as dark green marble at the upper end, olive green like the Bay of Quinte at the lower, turning to muddy brown in the south end where the waters of the Fox River pour in from the Great Divide.

July 8—To Green Bay city at the mouth of the Fox River, at the head of Green Bay.

HEIGHTS OF HOSPITALITY

Here we were treated like royalty by the Green Bay Yacht Club, and the Green Bay Post-Gazette, and the Green Bay harbor authorities, although we were complete strangers and entirely unannounced. We had been similarly treated at Mackinac and were to be similarly treated again at Cheboygan, Mich., and Amherstburg, Ont.— thanks to John Marsh of The Echo, and at Pultneyville, N.Y., and at Oswego.

At Green Bay we completed an outbound voyage of 897 miles from Toronto.

HOMEWARD BOUND

July 10—To Detroit Harbor, Washington Island, where La Salle completed unloading his stores and loaded the Griffon with furs for the return to pay his bills. He was going to build another vessel to go down the Mississippi. Still on his way to China.

This was the last he saw of his Griffon, On this return voyage she was lost, whether by barratry, piracy, murder, or plain stress of weather none knows. Nor where, although I have seen lead-caulked timbers through which a cherry tree had grown, they were so old, and been told that these were the remains of the Griffon, and that the remaining blacksmith's work in the wreckage and that skulls in a nearby cave, and a large old French watch proved it. Maybe so. This was ten years ago, a mile above the lighthouse in Mississagi Straits at the west end of Manitoulin Island. Let be. My 1946 project was to follow the vanished bubbles of the ship's wake.

We reached this Wisconsin Detroit Harbor after a sail of 80 miles in 12 hours, most of it under staysail and close reefed mizzen only, the wind blowing the hair off our heads like Pontiac's tomahawks taking scalps.

BACK FROM THE DEAD

July 11—Past Death's Door and across Lake Michigan to The Beavers again.

July 12—In Straits of Mackinaw I again as far as Cheboygan, "Sheborgan" of the old timber days.

July 13—Through the Straits to Middle Island.

July 14—Down the west side of Lake Huron to East Tawas off Saginaw Bay, meeting forty racers from Port Huron for Mackinac, carrying full sail and genoas, though we were reefed.

July 15 - Beating across Saginaw Bay to Pointe aux Barques and Harbor Beach on the Michigan shore.

July 16—Sarnia again on the way home—and on the day we said we would.

July 17—"Running the rivers" to Amherstburg.

July 18—To Rondeau Harbor, or Erieau on Lake Erie.

July 19—Down Lake Erie to Long Point and our biggest squall.

July 20—To Fort Erie in another effort to reach the Griffon's launching place.

July 21—Back to Port Colborne, Welland Canal, and Lake Ontario.

July 22—Port Weller to Rochester.

July 23—Pultneyville — because French coureurs-de-bois landed there in 1687. and perhaps La Salle earlier — and Oswego, which La Salle may have visited, and Montcalm certainly captured in 1756.

July 24-5—Great send-off by Oswego's Mayor, Chief of Police Tom Mowat, and the Palladium-Times. We beat all the way back to Toronto, and complete the homeward bound voyage. Including all the wavstops in search of La Salle, our total voyage is 2,242 miles, in 339 hours of sailing.

SO END MANY MILES

Sometimes we anchored in roadsteads or natural harbors for the night, sometimes we slept moored in ports. On lakes Erie, Huron and Ontario we made long runs, sailing watch-and-watch, four on four off, day and night. We crossed Lake Michigan both times in daylight. None of us had been over the road before.

Like La Salle we had all the weather there was, mostly good. Our best day's sailing was 105 miles down Lake Erie from Brieau to anchorage under Abigail Becker's famous Long Point light, in twelve hours, with a strong southerly breeze. The day began in thunder and ended in a buster of a squall in which the 35 head of prize Jerseys were killed by lightning in one field ashore. We took that squall ten miles out in Lake Erie off Long Point. It was heavy, but we had everything off but the jumbo, or staysail, and suffered no damage.

Our longest "day's run" was 191 miles on Lake Ontario from Oswego to Toronto, moorings to moorings, on the way home. We took 32 hours on end for this, watch-and-watch, four on, four off, and finished fresh as daisies, with great appetites for tea, after which we gave three cheers for the ship and each man in her company, and went home.

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AT GREEN BAY, WIS., JULY 10

"KINGARVIE," R.C.Y.C., TORONTO (the ketch, not the colt named after her that won the King's Plate), as photographed by the Green Bay Press-Gazette.

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"INTO THE JAWS OF DEATH"

Background for this snapshot of KINGARVIE mariners is DEATH'S DOOR BLUFF, Green Bay, Wisconsin. The Door, which has given its name to a whole county, is a translation of the French name Porte des Morts, dating from LaSalle's time, and commemorates the drowning of an Indian armada in its wild waters centuries ago.

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You Can Cross a Lot of Water in Four Weeks Going From Toronto to Toronto