Last of the Last: Schooner Days DCCXXXI (781)

by C. H. J. Snider

Cruise in the Wake of Five Great Lakes Sailing Vessel Uncovers Resting Place of Last Schooner to Ply Them.

IT was now sunset and we had been toiling all day against the currents since leaving Amherstburg in the rain drenched dawn. We were following the Griffon to Green Bay. Like LaSalle, we were ploughing this furrow for the first time.

Every ferry landing we came to, after entering the St. Clair, we looked for Marine City. And now, at the end of the day, we found the landmarks - a fire-swept factory, windowless as a ruined castle, a handsome church. And something else we had not bargained for - three 100-ft. schooner masts stark athwart the sunset flame.

All five of us, the two Newfoundlanders, the three Toronto oldsters, were schooner men, brought up from boyhood on the exciting savor of fore-and-afters. My own interest had been awakened at seven, when Capt. Mallott, per Bob Cross, told Percival Keene how to sail his first command - a schooner, "sharp, low, broad in the beam, with a great spread of canvas."

All five of is knew that schooners - cargo schooners - had vanished from the Great Lakes as completely as the Griffon herself.

"We must look here," all hands agreed.

We nosed up with caution, being strangers. The three masts were in some sort of slip, cut off from the St. Clair River by a long green tongue of land.

The entrance was narrow, but if deep enough for a big three-master surely with water to spare for little Kingarvie. We held her on the current as we sounded and got two fathoms, plenty for us, but on a whim we anchored where we were. Good thing we did, for a six-foot block of concrete had slid off the point like a word on the very tip of the tongue, and we would have been atop of it had we gone the length of our bowsprit farther.

We put our longboat down and rowed over the obstacle, entering the picturesque reflection-crowded inlet, a river mount overhung with noble trees above charming bungalows, one of the many little Venices we were to know on the St. Clair, fit ran back two or three hundred yards to a bridge.

A few rods inside the opening our three tall masts leaned from the bank. The hull that supported them as canted on her starboard side until the deck was almost in the water. She was sunk to her covering board and only kept from capsizing by two stout steel cables, taut as fiddle strings, stretching to the trees.

She was a big vessel for a lake schooner, over 140 feet from stem to stern, 33 feet 6 beam, 14 feet deep in her water-filled hold; as long as the Bluenose or any of our "old canallers," fifty per cent. wider than them and a little deeper. She had a beautiful raking stem and clipper bow, with scroll and trailboards, and her long quarter-deck was protected by an open rail with turned stanchions like balusters for the last sixty feet of her length. That, and the large box forecastle and long low deck houses, raised davits on the taffrail, and mizzen mast as lofty as the other two, stamped her as a salt water man, more specifically, a Down East tern schooner, a three-masted vessel typical of the maritime provinces of Canada and the New England coast.

That had been manifest from the first glimpse of her masts of equal height. On the lakes the mizzen was always the smallest and the mainmast usually the highest of the three. Lake topmasts were also proportionately longer than in use on salt water.

There was no surprise in recognizing the vessel, nor in the nameboard crudely nailed on her decaying transom, "J. T. WING of SAULT STE. MABIE." The surprise lay in finding her in this place. The elephant is more likely to forget his last peanut than a fresh water sailor is likely to forget his first glimpse of a tern schooner. Those equal spars had first been seen in 1936, after the lake born two-master had been burned on Lake Ontario and the last native three-masters on all the Great Lakes had been sunk. The three spars from salt water were then heading for the Welland Canal, above a cargo of pulpwood. For the J. T. Wing, built at Weymouth, N.S., in 1919, had, after a lengthy career to the West Indies and a brief one has a rum runner in the prohibition era, come up to fresh water with a cargo of pulpwood from Rimouski, Que.

She was then bound for Port Huron, Mich., - which was still ahead of us on our voyage to Green Bay, Wisconsin. Knowing that she had traded for years to Green Bay after reaching the lakes we looked in the desert regard the bleaching bones of a camel in the sand - a warning and a challenge.

FINDING THE J. T. WING, of Sault Ste. Marie and many other hailing places, sunk at Marine City Last July.