A Professor in the Great Gale of 1880: Schooner Days DCCLXIX (769)

by C. H. J. Snider

SOU'-BY-EAST across the Lake Road from the lighthouse with all the old captains' names on it in Pultneyville, two mellowed mansions have been watching the traffic roll by for a hundred and fourteen years. From the land their windows twinkled at shank's mare, stage coach, democrat buggy, apple cart, velocipede, horseless carriage, automobile, bus, and now rubber-tired freight train. From the lake they have reflected white-sailed schooners succeeded by smokey sidewheel steamers, and propeller steamers followed by barges, motorships and airplanes. Also some yachts.

One is the tall-chimneyed cobble-walled home built by Samuel Throop's eldest son, Horatio, after he had recovered from the boyhood disaster described in Schooner Days some weeks ago. This is walled with small, round beach or field stones of red granite and yellow sandstone, set in mortar, like bricks or the flints in 18th century walls in England, and its corners are decorated in long-and-short work of chiseled freestone.

Next door, with a gracious sweep of lawn and garden intervening, is the white house Horatio's "little brother," Washington Throop, built, about the same long-time-ago. These homes are older than the" city of Toronto, which dates from 1834.

The two houses are on the same original lot (title from Sir Wm. Pulteney, 1805), where Capt. Samuel Throop built his first log cabin. The cabin has gone, but Samuel's pioneer well still yields sweet waters, as the green lawns and gardens testify.

Ring at the modest door of the kindly white house and you may have the good fortune to be answered by the present proprietor in person; a boyish looking gentleman with a cheery twinkle of welcome in his mildly questioning blue eyes. His scrutiny bespeaks an attitude towards life—welcoming it, curious about it still, after eighty-two years' experience of what it has to offer. For this is Dr. Henry E. Lawrence, professor emeritus of the University of Rochester, retired after forty years' distinguished service in that institution.

Of all the lakefarers' and seafarers' descendants now living in this pleasant port, the only one who has come up from schooner days as we might say, "through the hawse-pipe," is this gentle scientist whose great grandfather built the pioneer log cabin and sunk the still yielding well, on this lot from the English baronet's American wilderness estate. Dr. Lawrence is one of the few living survivors of the Great Gale of 1880, which on Nov. 6th and 7th of that year, spread death and destruction on the Great Lakes.

That was the storm in which the heroic "Annavann," Mrs. Alex Birnie, wrought manfully for the salvation of the Otonabee, as told recently; the gale in which Capt. McSherry of Toronto perished with his crew and three of his sons, and Capt. Zealand, in his propeller with all his men, and the Norway drowned all her crew, and so on.

Dr. Lawrence, as a lad of 14, had shipped as cook in the Pultneyville schooner Rival, built by his kinsman, Horatio Nelson Throop, and in the course of four years, rose to the rank of able seaman—and an able seaman in a lake schooner then meant a strong, skilled, competent mariner, superior to the foremast hands in ocean square riggers because better fed, better paid and better educated.

They had salt-water men in the Rival that night in Lake Ontario. They were good enough, but contemptuous of this "millpond sailing." Until it came on to blow hard at midnight, and mountain seas filled the decks with surging water, and the Rival lurched and reeled and plunged before the smiting blast. Then Capt. Holling couldn't drive them aloft to save the flogging gaff-topsails. All they could do was hang on, on deck, and pray. That helped some, but as Byron said of other sailors:

"They promise to reform their ways but don't,

Because if drowned they can't, if saved, they won't."

They had left the Welland Canal that morning with 13,000 bushels of wheat for Ogdensburg, and stood across the lake almost to Toronto, against light baffling easterly airs. They crossed the tracks of the Speedwell, Twilight and the T. C. Street, which had loaded in Toronto and waited for a rise in water to get out. The Norway had left Port Dalhousie, ahead of them, and she was the first one they passed, for she was loggy with heavy timber, when the wind came free. The gale came on after dark that early November day, following weather much like we have been having this week.

Sixteen vessels were in sight from the crosstrees on the south shore of Lake Ontario, at dusk that evening before the gale struck down, Capt. David Reynolds used to say. He was in the schooner Baltic of Wellington Square. By morning half of them were gone forever and the others were cripples, limping in to port. The Rival was out that night, and if she suffered less damage than others it was by the grace of God and the skill of the Pultneyville men who designed, built and sailed her.

The Rival, the first, fastest and final three-master owned in Pultneyville, was a real clipper, with, sharp lines, and a good sheer. She was not as bulky as the "Old Canallers," and could only carry 13,000 bushels to their 18,000 or more, but so heavily sparred and well proportioned that she made more trips than they, and in her first season - 1856 - she paid the whole cost of her building, by her fast passages. She was first commanded by Capt. Armine Holling, succeeded in 1862 by Capt. James T. Holling, both uncles of Dr. Lawrence on his mother's side. The Rival was designed by Horatio Throop, of whom much more is to be told, to surpass his Challenge, which was also a successful vessel.

Well it was for all on board that he gave her such clean lines and such, a good sheer, for she came through the Great Gale unharmed. After they got her reefed down without losing any of the salties overboard there was an anxious hour while she was being hurled towards the Prince Edward County shore by the giant seas and all were in doubt whether she would be able to clear Point Peter. The big ocean-crossing barquentine Thomas C. Street, in company, failed to do so and became a total wreck, near Wellington, Ont. Long did grey headed Capt. Holling hang in the weather rigging watching the bearing of the Scotch Bonnet's yellow light, Wicked Point's red, and Point Peters white flash, slowly change on the compass.

Looking back at the appalling mountainous seas as they reared up and ahead at them blotting out the blackness of the night sky with their foam, with the light on Point Peter visible fifteen miles but blotted out every time the schooner dipped off the rushing crests, young Lawrence wondered if it wouldn't be better to beach the vessel than try to ride out the gale in the raging lake. Without venturing to suggest such a course he asked his uncle, shouting against the wind: "What would happen if we ran the vessel ashore?"

"We'd all be in hell in less than fifteen minutes," said uncle with conviction. The future professor did not pursue the subject.

They saw the lights of a steamer rolling as though she would loop-the-loop, in the welter of seas between Cobourg and Presqu'isle. Then they saw nothing, and knew she had foundered. This was the propeller Zealand. But the Rival went clear of the Bonnet, clear of Wicked Point, clear of Point Peter, clear of the Little Red Onion which now shines green at Point Traverse. And so on down the lake to Kingston, and tore through that harbor and down the St. Lawrence River to Ogdensburg, whither she was consigned. She took the Canadian Channel—not by choice but by necessity, for they couldn't get over into the American one. On their way down the river they passed wrecks, some making better weather of it, some stranded, some schooners that had cut themselves open riding to their anchors, the chain cables sawing through their bows. And there was one big one that had been tossed up on a rocky island so high and dry her crew were leaving her by a ladder over her stern to the rocks below.

DR. HENRY E. LAWRENCE, Nov. 6th, 1946, professor emeritus Cornell and Rochester. On Nov. 6th, 1880, he was a seventeen-year-old able seaman in the Pultneyville schooner Rival, helping to bring her through the Great Gale.

"THE LIGHTHOUSE WITH ALL THE OLD CAPTAINS' NAMES ON IT IN PULTNEYVILLE"