Winter Sports Old and New: Schooner Days DCCCXXVIII (828)

by C. H. J. Snider

TORONTO just missed being wintering harbor of the first Great Lakes ship of burden, the barque or brigantine Frontenac of "ten Tuns," in 1678. At this beginning of 1948 we have wintering here 270 craft, of around 200,000 tons, depending on how the ton is calculated, and including two passenger liners, 36 freight steamers, 11 tugs, two dredges, 12 scows and contractor's plant units, and about two hundred yachts, ranging from ex-war craft to sabot prams. But not one commercial sailer.

As schooner days progressed through the centuries more and more sailing vessels laid up in Toronto for the winter. The grain trade of the 19th century increased the winter-storage use of vessels. Schooners would freeze in at anchor and their grain cargoes would be teamed over the bay into the Gooderham mill and distillery as required.

As late as the beginning of the 20th century as many as twenty trading schooners might be found in winter quarters here—the St. Louis, Augusta, Emerald, E. H. Rutherford, Keewatin, Van Straubenzee and so on, three-masters in the coal and grain trade; Antelope, Albacore, E. A. Fulton, Speedwell, Annandale, big two masters; Lillian, Wood Duck, Viking, Hope, Island Queen, Newsboy, Paddy Young, Helen, Snow Bird and Highland Beauty, smaller fore-and-afters. All gone long ago.

Now steamers line the wharves. The laden ones berth where they can get their lines out at the end of the last trip, and tugs break the way for them to the grain elevators, to unload all through the winter as there is space for their cargoes in the elevator birfs. Maunaloa II, 4,677 tons gross measurement and carrying 240,000 bushels of wheat, 7,200 tons deadweight, is our largest winter guest at present. The biggest grain carrier to berth here last year was the Gleneagles, a frequent visitor which can carry 13,650 tons of wheat, or 455,000 bushels; a million dollar cargo sometimes. She is a thousand times the ten-tonner Frontenac's burthen and four hundred times more.

FOLLOWING FRONTENAC

The Frontenac, first recorded Great Lakes ship, broke her way out of the Humber ice Dec. 5th, 1678, reached the Niagara River in twenty-four hours or so, and wintered there, near the present Queenston Lewiston bridge. Last fall, before navigation closed, we visited the little runway or ravine where she berthed so long ago.

The bank rose cliff-like, above us for two hundred feet. Barely discernible among the waving trees was a notch, a gully, running back two or three hundred yards to the general level of the American shore. It seemed to have some connection with the municipality of Lewiston, N.Y. A battered sign above a path of flat stones set in one side of the ravine warned that employees use these steps at their peril.

The trees met overhead from both sides of the dark glen. In its mouth on a tongue of earth accumulated by rains and snows of centuries (and perhaps the scoopshovel) was planted an American mansion labelled modestly The White House. It was fifteen steep feet above the water. There was a concrete pillbox or pump house beside it, and behind this a curious lump of an iron boat.

CENTURIES AFTER

The funny little craft, not more than 20 feet long, built of battered iron plates, was shaped like a power launch. But, as though the designer had suddenly changed his mind, a thick excrescence extended below the garboards, like a hollow fin-keel for a sailing yacht, into which ballast could be poured.

At the sight of this boat the 17th century seemed to rush up from the river. Here on Dec. 15, 1678, came the Sieur de la Motte's brigantine, the shallop Frontenac. Father Hennepin, as he took pains to record later, at the helm, three or four men scrambling along the steep bank, slipping into the water, fleeting tow-lines from tree to tree, perhaps a dozen others on board pulling with sweeps against the current or hauling on the warp. From the Sulpician father's narrative it must have been a call for "all hands" which gave him him his opportunity to timoneer the first white man's ship to her first berth on fresh water. They had battled the current for hours, not getting enough help from sails or oars to stem it. This was the very farthest up they could get, abreast of a "Rock of prodigious height" now buried, as is supposed, under the bridge fill on the Canadian side.

One had only to close the eyes in this leafy-roofed cave to hear the shouts and ho-las and grunts and curses, now 270 years cold, or to see a dozen bearded seventeenth century Frenchmen, straining as in a tug-of-war. For here they broke the cable with which they were trying to drag their barque into a winter berth safe from the "vast pieces of ice that were hurled down the River."

One could imagine the hiccups of the four "well fortified with brandy" making light of the 400-lb. anchor for the fatal Griffon, as they later dragged this and all her stores, sails, guns and equipment up this same runway to the building place on the river above the Falls of Niagara, over the "three mountains."

Or see sandalled Father Hennepin—was his habit, really brown or grey?—and his black-robed Jesuit colleague, and the Sieur de la Motte in plumed hat, panting upwards by the ravine path to pow-wow with the Senecas at Rochester, and be sickened by their hosts' hellish exhibition of torture of prisoners.

Or the great La Salle, not plumed and booted and spurred or scarlet-cloaked for the movies, but girt as C. W. Jefferys or Capt. Van Cleve have drawn him, as a man on a journey, his face set "a la Chine"—on to the ultimate west, which is their farthest east. That was why he had built the Frontenac. That was why he was beginning the Griffon. That was why he would begin another barque at the fort of Heartbreak. And that was why, should he reach the mythical Vermillion Sea, he would build another ship there. For Japan, and world empire for France, was for him forever around the corner.

Had we not seen that heavy little iron boat stowed behind the pump house in the gully, we would have said that it was impossible to have got the Frontenac up so high, and concluded that she was left at the water's edge at the mouth of the ravine.

Rain and snow water trickling down since creation had cut this gash to bed rock in places. At the bottom accumulated earth and debris—and perhaps the scoop shovel—had formed a tongue or platform for the White House. The tongue tip gave a very steep descent to the water 15 feet below.

However, the Frontenac was got out, and Father Hennepin and Sieur de la Motte went off as far as Rochester—or its vicinity—to explore the country above the falls of Niagara and to bargain with the Senecas. The crew of the Frontenac may have built the "magazine" or cabin for their stores on the site of the present White House or farther up on the high ground at the head of the ravine, for there were bones; and arrowheads there in Capt. Van Cleve's boyhood. He left a picture showing an old ferry house and roadway at the head of the ravine road in 1859; now vanished.

There is no other place in the vicinity where a 30-foot shallop could be hauled out, or cargoes carried up. That is why the ravine was used a hundred years ago as a ferry landing before the bridge was built.

The spot is just around the corner of the highway into Lewiston. Nothing marks the first French landing place nor the old ferry house site, but one placard warns to beware of the falling rock from the mountain above and another says

"FORT JONCAIRE

Second building in Lewiston built 1719 near this spot a palisaded trading post. First French fort on Niagara."

There was, however, a French fort built at the mouth of the river in 1688, and destroyed in 1689 where the "great stone house," or present Fort Niagara was later begun in 1726, and still stands.

TORONTO'S FRENCH FORT

Joncaire's "fort" was built at the same time that one was begun in Toronto, not Fort Rouille, but a "magazin royal" or king's shop From Percy J. Robinson, who in his excellent Toronto During the French Regime and similar works, has taught us all we know of early Niagara history (as well as Toronto's), we gather that Joncaire built a king's shop at Lewiston in 1720 (perhaps on the ferry house site Van Cleve explored a century and a quarter ago) and that it soon became a palisaded, portholed, musket-proof blockhouse, and might therefore be properly called a fort. The Toronto one is believed to have been either behind the palisades remaining on Baby Point in the 1880's, or at the mouth of the Humber, where Portneuf built a fort in 1750. Fort Rouille, in the Exhibition Grounds, would be, as we understand the record, the second fort and third trading post at Toronto, and not completed until the spring of 1751. It would seem that the inscriptions on the boulder and monument in the Exhibition Grounds would stand redating.

1678—ICE SAILORS—1948

HERE is, believe if or not, COMMODORE GORDON REID, of the International Skeeter Association, whose annual regatta begins on Burlington Bay this month. His craft sings through the air at a mile a minute and sails faster against the wind than with it. His costume is not swank but practical armor against the razor-keen attack of the ice mosquitos, which we understand are most virulent in January. - Thanks, Commodore, for the warm good wishes behind your ice mask.

AND HERE is that modest five-times-acclaimed RCYC champion sailor of 1947, SKIPPER N. W. GOODERHAM, hiding from the camera in the cockpit of his skeeter. Thanks, Bill, for the Christmafc card but next time turn round when your picture is being taken. May the ISA regatta add to your well-earned laurels.

AND HERE is that modest five-times-acclaimed RCYC champion sailor of 1947, SKIPPER N. W. GOODERHAM, hiding from the camera in the cockpit of his skeeter. Thanks, Bill, for the Christmafc card but next time turn round when your picture is being taken. May the ISA regatta add to your well-earned laurels. -

AND THIS, also believe it or not, is Capt. J. C. Van Cleve's practical conception of ROBERT CAVELIER SIEUR DE LA SALLE, who started from Kingston at the end of 1678 in a 20-ton "barque" which could only make eight miles an hour at best with a strong wind behind her and nothing at all with the wind ahead. She was sq slow that he got off and walked, and reached Niagara first, early in 1679. Meantime his barque had been wrecked. He walked back over the snow and ice later from Chicago to Kingston, in less than three months, a snowshoe journey of nearly a thousand miles. Stout fellow. Capt. Van Cleve devoted a page to him in his book.