Over the Horizon: Schooner Days DCCCLVI (856)

by C. H. J. Snider

Captain Kelly and his Dundee

ONCE, in the Caledonia, Michael Kelly, for 50 years a Toronto mariner, had to slip his anchor and chain to save going ashore on Nine Mile Point on Simcoe Island in a sudden shift of wind. It was a well-known shelter anchorage for schooners, but not safe in all weathers. Next time he was coming to Kingston, in quiet weather, he steered to the same anchorage, having taken cross-bearings before, and let go another anchor. Then, with a heaving line over his shoulders he dove overboard, followed the cable down, found his lost anchor where he knew it was, slipped the heaving line through the ring and back over his neck, and popped up to the surface like a bubble. He was almost bursting with holding his breath, but came up over the side. Bending a stout rope on to the heaving line, he hauled it through the anchor ring, and took a turn around the windlass. So the Caledonia recovered her lost anchor and chain cable, worth at that time about $75, or a good sailor's wages for two months.

COVERING AND RECOVERING

Another time, when an express package containing documents and securities was lost from a steamer's gangway at Yonge st. wharf, Michael was appealed to.

"What's in it" said he pertinently.

"Ten dollars—if you bring it up.'

"Putt the tin on the wharf and I'll cover it," said Michael.

He went down with his usual diving equipment, a heaving line and his bareskin suit. In 30 seconds he broke water and hailed "Heave away!" They pulled, and up came Michael, box and all. He picked up the $10 bill, and started to put it in his pocket, when he realized his trousers were in the cabin.

TIME'S REVENGES

These triumphs, like his swimming ashore from the wreck of the John A. Macdonald with his trunk and the ship's money, were at a price, charged against brave Michael at high interest.

At sixty he seemed in his prime, and riding the crest of the wave; his son Eddie (Knucker) grown up to be a big help—mate, in fact, and able to take charge of the vessel—the Dundee doing well, the family well settled and respected in their community.

Leaving the Dundee after mooring her with another cargo for the waterworks engines Knucker noticed that his father lurched against the rail and recovered himself slowly.

"What for did ye that, Michael man?" demanded his elder brother Hugh, who had come down to meet them.

"Lave me be, Hughie," said Michael in a strange voice. He dragged himself slowly along. Eddie put his arm over his shoulder. Hughie did the same. They stumbled as far as Dr. Thorburn's office.

"We'll go in here," said Eddie.

Against incoherent protests they got him up the steps. The doctor knew him. He made a swift examination and shook his head.

"He's had a slight stroke," said he. "Get him home and keep him quiet."

Entering his home behind St. Mary's Church, Michael said: "I'll never set foot on the Dundee again. Hughie, you take her out next trip. Eddie, you go along and keep her moving."

He recovered, after a few days, but he kept his word. He would come down to the vessel when she was in port, but never came aboard. For two years, he lived quietly at home. In the period he had several little strokes, none very severe, but with increasing frequency. Then one from which he died. The stout Irish heart which had carried him through the hardships of the potato famine in the black 1840's in Ireland, and of an immigrant's life in old Canada West, and had brought him to command of vessels, and borne him through great waves and bitter storms and shipwrecks for fifty years, just ceased to beat. Young Eddie, now eighty and a grandfather, summed him up well in a sincere Irish phrase:

"He was a grand mon."

He was that. He was one of the foundation stones on which the Victorian city of Toronto — without movies, motors, radio, hydro, mining markets, mass manufacturing, closed shops, forty-hour weeks, comic strips and chronic "relief" — was built. "Industry, Intelligence, Integrity"—Michael had these three qualities prescribed in the civic crest and seal. To them he added thrift, cheerful piety, and the courage of a heraldic lion, which were also the virtues of his time.

AND HIS DUNDEE?

ALONG with the rest of Toronto, we knew the Kellys' Dundee well, almost all her Toronto life. She was the fourth vessel we saw reloading coal at the old Waterworks Wharf at the at the foot of John street, and we often admired her well-kept white paint, with green stripes and dark lead color bottom, her name painted brightly and boldly on the quarter, and the honest alert expression of her red-rimmed hawsepipes and her long high sleeved bowsprit, like a lance in rest. She only needed a figurehead or cutwater knee to make her really handsome.

Later, when she was painted black, with red bottom and a white stripe at the covering-board, she was still handsome, though her spars and sails were getting old, and she had "gone into stone," and was engaged at filling in the first breakwater in Humber Bay, where she dragged ashore.

That was in 1907. Soon afterwards she was bought by Capt. Wm. Smith, of Belleville, and a sorry sight she was to see there in 1910, with one quarter so twisted and drooped that the starboard end of her taffrail was two feet lower than the port one, and her yawlboat hung that much aslant, though both davit tackles were chock-a-block.

They recalled the time when a sea smacked her posterior so hard that the yawlboat was capsized on its hinged davits over the head of the man at the wheel.

"If she wasn't a good vessel she couldn't 'av stud it," reported old Hughie Kelly. Such a smack would have knocked the stern off her in 1910. She was burned next winter in Belleville harbor.

THIRTY YEARS IN FAMILY

It was in association with the Dundee that the Kelly family was best known in Toronto. No one else ever sailed her in her thirty years' lifetime here. Michael got his death stroke in her; Hugh, his brother, then sailed her; Michael's son Edward (Knucker) was mate and sailing master to both his father and his uncle.

Under Knucker Kelly and his uncle Hughie the old Dundee carried on. Judging from the time the name occurs first on the records, 1856, when she was said to be eight years old, she would be fifty years old at the time of Capt. Michael Kelly's death. Assuming that the Dundee first mentioned was an earlier vessel, and his, the second one, was new when launched at Port Dalhousie in 1870, she would still be a veteran of twenty-seven. Either way she kept going until was over forty, for she was burned at Belleville in 1911. The Kellys had sold her before when there was nothing for her to do at this end of the lake, except to haul stone. Her masts were spring, her topsails and light sails had disappeared, and she was really on her last legs. She was good for a few more seasons in the sheltered Bay of Quinte and when she did meet her fiery fate she merited Eddie's final sums up just yesterday.

GLIMPSE OF NOW FORGOTTEN WATERFRONT

CAPTAIN KELLY and his DUNDEE

THE DUNDEE always laid up in the western part of the harbor when the Kellys had her, for they were westerners themselves, living on Defoe, Tecumseh and Wellington streets beyond Bathurst street, an old boundary. Here their schooner is shown berthed where Fleet street now seethes with traffic, at old Brock street ferry wharf at the foot of Spadina avenue. The easternmost of the Northern Railway elevators is in the background. The picture is an early study by R. W. Murphy, OSA, the time not long after 1900.