BANSHEE'S End was also the MAPLE LEAF's: Schooner Days DCCCXIV (814)

by C. H. J. Snider

Only One of Her Kind on the Great Lakes

It was a dark and stormy morning in September, 1924, a rising sou'wester getting ready for the sun to cross "the Line"—an equinoctial gale.

A black schooner had slipped into the little horseshoe in the southeast corner of Henderson Bay, New York State, on Lake Ontario the evening before, when all was still.

A motor car had brazenly come to the shore and honked. Men aboard the schooner as brazenly rowed ashore in her small boat, climbed into the car and departed.

Nosey Parkers put 2 and 2 together and made 40. It was the prohibition era. Rumrunners infested the coast, clearing from Canada for Cuba or Cambodia, and landing cargoes the same night on the sacred soil of Carrie Nation. The local yokels hated them. It was ag'in the law and it gave the place a bad name, what with their gunfights, et cetery. An' besides it interfered with private moonshining. So a dim, grim view was taken of "foreigners." And these fellows might be foreigners for all one could tell—

Either that, or some rumrunner had a score to settle. Anyway, in the grey of the weeping dawn two huddled figures rowed out to the black schooner, tailing off on taut chain, from her well bedded anchor, knocked out a shackle pin and rowed away fast.

In a moment she was blowing out past Hungry Bay and Six Town Point, towards Lake Ontario. In an hour she was in the breakers.

"And good riddance, too," grunted Nosey Parker or Grogblossom Bill, or whoever it was that slipped her chain. "I knew for a fact that black schooner was white the year before, and had been seized at Oswego with a cargo of bottled beer and sold by the customs."

This last gripe was true, but he little knew he was killing off a noble-hearted old lady who had had a long and honorable career, and — in spite of appearances — was, at this time as innocent of rumrunning as Carrie Nation herself, and still more innocent of law breaking.

For this was the end of the Banshee, whose capture in Oswego's west harbor was described last week.

Matthew H. Knapp of Syracuse, who bought her at sheriff's auction after she had been condemned, converted her to a yacht and had a happy season with his friends in 1924.

He took over the weather-bleached old girl, in her faded white-and-lead color paint, cleaned her out and smartened her up with cots and such accommodations below decks, and a shining coat of good black paint outside with a band of flaming scarlet at the deck line, and a bright green frail. Inboard he painted her bulwarks, hatches and cabin trunk snowy white, and her broad decks bright buff, with a darker covering-board. She looked so young her original builder would not have known her.

In burning off the blistered paint of her transom during the rehabilitation program they found

"MAPLE LEAF of TORONTO"

underneath it. For this was the original name and hailing port of the mystery vessel which had fallen into the hands of the sheriff and the U.S. customs.

But underneath that again they found another name -

"WILLIAM GOLDRING of TORONTO"

Very few even of the oldest timers had ever heard of that, for it appears in no harbor books. But Captain Dick Goldring of Port Whitby told the writer that when he rebuilt the Maple Leaf in Bronte in 1886, after she had been burned in the great Esplanade fire, he wanted to honor "his father, who had owned her since 1880, and he painted his name, William Goldring, on her stern.

The customs people, always particular about renaming a vessel, told him this could not be registered, so he painted it out and painted back the original Maple Leaf. Scarcely was this paint dry when the customs folk notified him that the rebuilding had been sufficiently extensive to justify a new name, the original keel having been replaced. Richard, fed up with the expense of name-painting at $5 a job, said Maple Leaf she was now and Maple Leaf she was going to be. And so she remained while he had her, which was till 1920. Who got her afterwards and who put her into rumrunning, is a closed book. None of the Goldrings, certainly. They would have nothing to do with the trade.

Mr. Knapp was delighted with the Banshee, as he had named his prize. There was so much room in her, on deck and below, that there seemed no limit to the number of guests who could be entertained, on fishing parties and pleasure excursions. And yet three men were all that were needed to handle her. Capt. Goldring had sailed her for years with only one man, often his brother Charlie.

At the end of the season of 1924, the Banshee was anchored snugly in White's Harbor, a horseshoe-shaped cove at the south end of Henderson Bay. Mr. Knapp and his friends had to go to Syracuse the night before. It was they whom the Nosey Parkers saw going off in the "high powered car," etc. When they drove back to White's Harbor no Banshee was there, though the wind was wailing a high-pitched keen such as banshees are supposed to sing before a death. They drove along the shore to leeward, in the direction of Sackets Harbor. And there on a reef not far from Horse Island (where the British tried to land and left a nag behind in 1813), they saw the Banshee beating her breast on the rocks, her two masts swinging and swaying like writhing arms.

So ended the queen of the north shore of Lake Ontario, the handsome Maple Leaf which was a credit to her country and to the Goldring family for a long generation. "Little Dick" Goldring was still in his teens when he first commanded her in 1880. She had just been built then by Wm. LeClair at Port Nelson or Bronte, and his father had bought her. When he rebuilt her after being burned in the Esplanade fire he had improved upon her. He was becoming an old man when he sold he in 1920 after forty years of use. But he lived to the end of 1945, and always spoke lovingly of his beauty. He never knew what became of her, though he had heard that she sank somewhere at the foot of the lake. He would have been horrified at the suggestion that she'd smuggle beer, but would have been delighted at Matthew Knapp's rescue of her from her low estate.

Two years after these happenings a white-hulled craft neither long nor low, but decidedly rakish, rounded Six Town Point. At first sight she seemed nothing but jibs—and spreaders. One, two, three, four, five triangles of brand-new canvas poked themselves into view past the tree tops, and then a fore-and-aft mainsail. And slashing across the outfit a pair of wide cross-arms which seemed to be just an exaggeration of the double spreaders the later R-boats had introduced!

The double spreaders resolved themselves, on close approach, into two yards on the foremast, braced fore and aft. The triangles of canvas retained their identity—a jibtopsail, jib and forestaysail forward of the mast; between foremast and mainmast a mainstaysail with a boom on the foot of it, and a maintopmast staysail above it without one. The foremast itself was bare of canvas. But as the craft weathered the shoal off the point sufficiently to square away for the anchorage further surprises unfolded. A boy went up the spider-web of ratlines on the foremast and pulled a few strings, and a square foresail and square topsail dropped like a pair of creamy curtains from the two yards. The topsail yard rose, with a rhythmic pull from below, until the foremast was clothed with two quadrilaterals of sailcloth, and the multiple-jibber had vanished into what one with an aptitude for shortcuts described as a "staysail rig."

This was the first glimpse we had of Elizabeth K., Banshee's successor.

MATTHEW KNAPP'S ELIZABETH K., successor to his BANSHEE, above as a brigantine, below in schooner rig. She is now owned in Buffalo. Like BANSHEE, she commemorated a Cingalese brig which took Mr. Knapp's fancy when in the U.S. Navy.

ELIZABETH K. was designed in Florida, built at Tonawanda, hailed from Syracuse, and intended for cruising the Great Lakes and the Gulf of Mexico. Her appearance at the 1926 L.Y.R.A. was Lake Ontario's first acquaintance with the new "staysail rig," and startled the natives.

THE ELIZABETH K. AFTER SHE BECAME A SCHOONER