Big Yachts in Quinte Bullion and Bills: Schooner Days DCCCXXII (822)

by C. H. J. Snider

IN the Canada's Cup contest between the Herreshoff flyer Seneca and Cawthra Mulock's Adele off Rochester 40 years ago, there was to be seen an old hulk in the boneyard of the Rochester Yacht Club which suggested the Spectre Bark of the Ancient Mariner. When the setting sun shone through her gaping sides (she had been hauled out for years) the breakers on the Summerside beach seemed to croon

"Whose are those ribs

Through which the sun

Doth peer as through a grate?"

GREAT SAILOR'S ANSWER

"Why that's the old Madge!" exclaimed Commodore Aemilius Jarvis, Adele's racing skipper. "She led the fashion of the plank-on-edge English cutter on these lakes when I was a boy. What on earth is she doing here?"

Man of action that he was, he bought what there was left of the old queen for its sentimental value. The Madge's mainmast, fully rigged, stood on his lawn on Prince Arthur avenue, for years afterwards. The teak cover of her steering hatch, with the name carved in an interlaced rope pattern, still serves as a tea table in the Commodore's drawing room at Hazelburn Farm, although he himself has long followed the Madge in the sailor-huntsman's Valhalla. He was, it will be recalled, Master of the North York Hunt as well as Canada's ace mariner, and rode to the hounds on his 80th year and sailed the 12-metre Mitena in the grueling long distance Freeman Cup race.

FIRST PLANK-ON-EDGE

Madge was the imported forerunner of the plank-on-edge English cutter which was represented on the lakes later by Toronto Verve, Chicago Verve, Whistlewing, Cyprus, Aileen, and so on. She was built by George Lennox Watson, greatest exponent of this extreme British type, at Gowan in Scotland in 1879. She was only 46 feet long on deck, having no forward overhang at all, but she was 40 feet on the waterline, eight feet beam and eight draught. That is why they called her a "plank-on-edge." She was narrow, she was as deep as she was wide, and six times as long. Forty-foot waterline cutters like the Gardenia, born thirty years later, were longer than Madge, about 60 feet over all, and 50 per cent. wider and not so deep, and could sail rings around her although they required less sail area. The British pilot cutter was good in the rough tide-torn waters of the British coast, but the extreme racing yachts evolved from her cut a poor figure on the Great Lakes and the Atlantic seaboard. They were deep, wet, elbow-cramping things to live in, and not very fast.

Patriotic sentiment had much to do with the Canadian enthusiasm for them, yet Madge was imported by Americans. (George P. Goulding of Rochester owned her in 1893, but we have lost the name of the man who brought her out.) Whistlewing and Aileen were local adaptations by Aemilius Jarvis and Melancthon Simpson. They were the last of the plum-stern racing cutters. The improved type had clipper or spoon bows, more beam, and easier sailing lines when inclined.

Madge could attain high speed in some conditions because she was so narrow and sharp and had a thundering tall clubtopsail, driving power untaxed in her measurement. But like the other plank-on-edgers her big rig and inside ballast would lay her flat on her side in a hard blow and slow her down. Close-reefed centreboarders, with big crews as live ballast, sometimes beat the plank-on-edgers carrying full sail in a stiff breeze, and usually beat them in light air because of their smaller displacement and wetted surface. The old Aileen, which was more like the original pilot cutters, was a better ship to live in and to sail in, thanks to her Canadian modifications.

BIG YACHTS IN QUINTE

The Madge was pictured in Schooner Days last week with the steamer Quinte passing her off Massasauga Point below Belleville in 1884, five years before the steamer was burned a few miles farther down the Bay, below Deseronto. It may surprise present-day yachtsmen to learn that sixty years ago the Bay of Quinte was the home of such large deep-draught craft. The largest yachts still holiday in it, but few "live" there. They vanish like the swallows before the frost. Sixty years ago the Bay was a great yatching centre. The Bay of Quinte Yacht Club sent a challenge for the America's Cup in 1881. Such yachts as Atalanta, this challenger, or Norah, Iolanthe, Wave Crest, Countess of Dufferin and the first White Wings, Annie Cuthbert and other tall sloops, which frequented the Bay, were larger than the Madge, although she probably drew as much water as any. The centreboard was in fashion sixty or seventy years ago, and the craft mentioned were all of shoal, draught. Commodore George H. Gooderham's Oriole IV, now a Navy League training ship, used the Bay in later years, and was deeper than any of these mentioned, drawing 10 feet. She was no plank-on-edger. Like the steamers she stuck to the channels, and her only serious mishap was when she was sunk in the spring floods at Belleville once, through her scuppers being burst by ice.

MOLTEN MONEY FROM WRECK

Speaking of the steamer Quinte, Mr. Unger, who used to put her late captain aboard the Imperial Oil steamers off Glenora, when he was needed to pilot them up the Bay, speaks glowingly of Captain Duncan B. Christie's cheerful generosity and navigation knowledge, adding "but it was rare to see him crack a smile." Memory of his youthful tragedy, when he lost his mother and brother, never left him. He always paid the boatman $5 for putting him aboard the steamer he was to pilot.

Some of the $2,000 which went down with the burned Quinte is said to have been recovered ten years ago by boys fishing the wreck. They brought up a blackened lump of melted silver and copper which may have been the coin purser's desk. And they fished out a metal strong box which contained charred bills which fell into ashes on exposure to the air. How much the bank gave for the salvage is not known.

Two of MADGE'S bigger sisters sixty years ago racing off Belleville, 1886.—Right: ATALANTA, America's Cup challenger in 1881, 78 feet over all, 19.8 ft. beam, 6.5 ft. draught, owned at this time by W. J. Eyre, Brighton. Left: NORAH, a little smaller and younger, then owned by J. Bell, Q.C., Belleville. She won the race.