Sail's First Flight on Lake Ontario: Schooner Days DCCCXXIV (824)

by C. H. J. Snider

(days 2 to 9 perhaps)

THIS last week, with blown spray freezing in crystal curtains on steamers' bridge wings and bearding with icicles the bedded anchors of those which had laid up for the season, has lent realism to the first voyage under sail in any of the inland seas, in 1678 at this very time of year. This was begun at Kingston on November 18th and not completed until Dec. 7th, at Niagara. The way-call at Toronto was not earlier than Nov. 27th and there the lonely voyager remained stormbound for a week.

TAKING A MIGHTY PLUNGE

Sail's first unfurling under the axe-new palisades of Fort Frontenac began with prayer and religious rites, and very properly so.

The Sieur de la Motte, commander of the 10-ton shallop Frontenac, one of four little "barques or brigantines" begun that year, faced the winter wilderness, peopled by suspicious savages, and hostile traders, with a 30-foot craft which might run eight miles in the hour with the wind behind her, but was practically unable to make any speed if the wind was ahead and water rough. He may have had the latest map of "Lac Ontario ou de Frontenac," attributed to Joliet, 1673, but on the lake it showed no scale, no compass rose, no soundings, no lighthouses, no aids to navigation, for of these there were none, and its shore contours were inaccurate and misleading.

It was a good-enough sketch map for a walk on land, but any sailor would rather sail an unknown lake with no chart at all than attempt to navigate Lake Ontario by this one. De la Motte probably stuffed it in his sleeping bag and told his pilot to use his eyes, nose and ears, and call him when they heard the thunder of Niagara. In the 17th century navigation was often left to the "lower orders," for whom hanging was good enough if they escaped drowning. Champlain and La Salle seem to have been exceptions, but La Salle lost his first two vessels from leaving, perforce, their navigation to others.

As Father Hennepin recorded, The winds and the Cold of Autumn were very violent, insomuch that our Crew was afraid to go into so small a Vessel. This oblig'd us and the Sieur de la Motte, our Commander, to keep our course on the North-side of the Lake, to shelter ourselves under the Coast against the Northwest Wind." This was certainly the long way round for Niagara.

ANCHOR'S A-WEIGH

We can see them creeping out from the lee of Fort Frontenac, where the Tete-du-Pont barracks now cover the old foundations, at the mouth of the Cataraqui River in Kingston, and, perhaps helped by oars in the smooth water, working out past the present martello tower and Macdonald Park and old distillery, up to where the great elevator now stands at Cataraqui Bay, and on up to the westward, leaving all islands on the port side, or left hand, till they had Le Moyne Point and the three little Brothers astern.

These few miles may have taken the whole of the first day, if the wind was northwest or west. It would be dark by six o'clock, and they would moor for the night, perhaps in Collins Bay or Parrott Cove, sheltered by the thick fir trees, and able to make a fire, cook and camp. It was certainly harder lying on board the crowded Frontenac in the cold than it would be on the land around a fire.

NO ELECTRIC HEATING

Cooking on board a thirty-foot boat crammed with fifteen men or more and a miscellaneous cargo, including a knockdown chapel, must have presented great difficulties at all times. Their "stove," if any, would be an open hearth of sand, brick or flat stones, on deck or in the ballast below.

This channel up to the Bay of Quinte would not be navigable for them in the dark. They might start at dawn next morning, seven o clock, and toil all day again, with twelve-mile Amherst Island (long called Isle of Tantee because La Salle's lieutenant, Tonti, held the fief of it), now on their port side, shutting out the boisterous lake, and the mainland to starboard.

By dark they might have crossed the tossing three miles of the Upper Gap which lets in the lake at the head of Amherst Island, and worked up to the lee of what is now Indian Point. Here the ways still divide; a long, long zigzag westward up the Bay of Quinte until 1889 ended in a blind alley at the Carrying Place; and an indented widening stretch of open water, Lake Ontario itself, with Amherst, La Force and Nut and other islands to the east, went to the south. On its west side it was sheltered for twenty miles by the southerly projection of Prince Edward County peninsula.

They would surely lie over here for daylight, perhaps again camping ashore and limiting afterwards, with morning, if the wind was "fair" — for them, now any direction but south, for they had to change their course — they would steer for the dim treetops of Timber Island and the False Ducks, just visible on the southern horizon. When they came up on them they might leave them to port and nip into the notch in the very end of Point Traverse, the southeastern extremity of the Prince Edward peninsula.

This slit into a pond, used by the Royal Canadian Air Force in the last war, and by fishermen now, would be good for holing up for the following night. If unable to get so far, there was shelter on the east coast of Prince Edward, under mulberry hued Cape Versey, or The Rock, with its profile of Victoria, or fertile Waupoos Island with its seven farms, or down into South Bay. But eventually they would have to come out and round Point Traverse.

Well named, Point Traverse, for here four crossroads met. Turn east, and, clearing the False Ducks and the Duckling and the Main Duck, the Frontenac would fetch the foot of Lake Ontario and the head of the St. Lawrence, whence she had started; south, cross Lake Ontario towards Oswego; north, go back to the Bay of Quinte; west, and Skannadario and the ultimate Niagara would be reached.

The south shore of the peninsula here turns west sharply, and for perhaps a whole day's sailing the Frontenac would have shelter from a northwest wind. While under favorable conditions she might run eight miles in the hour, for her length three miles an hour is good average speed. Yachtsmen who peel off fourteen knots in 14-foot dinghies when they plane, will laugh at this estimate as the mean cruising speed for a 30-footer, but experience with a cruising yacht of twice that length shows that an average of 5 miles for every hour under weigh is the most that can be hoped for. We have often run sixty miles in six hours; and through lack of wind have occasionally taken six hours to make one mile, and found three miles gain an hour the best we could do in a hard headwind.

So the Frontenac may have spent another day, or longer, working along the southern face of Prince Edward peninsula, as far as the present Point Peter, once St. Peter, or to Wicked Point, northwest of it. Here the peninsula trends back northerly for twenty miles or more to the mainland of the Province of Ontario.

With St. Peter, or the Wicked, we must now leave the Frontenac, to continue sail's maiden voyage next week, though she completed it two hundred and sixty-nine years ago tomorrow.

SUNRISE of SAIL

TEIAIAGON TODAY

Perched above the Humber, brawling now over ice-glazed bluff of stone, Baby Point mansions have replaced the palisaded castle of the "Iroquese Tsonnontonons" as old Father Hennepin called the colony of Senecas that preceded the Mississagas on the Toronto site. Inset are some of the earliest depicted sails on the Great Lakes, two little English schooners drawn by La Brocquerie in his map of Lake Ontario, 1757, and the old drawing of La Salle's Griffon, 1679, adopted by the Great Lakes Historical Society with good judgment as their crest. It gives a good general idea of the brigantine of the Sieur de la Motte whose sails were the first seen on any of the lakes.