Hot on Scent 100 Years Ago: Schooner Days DCCCLXIV (864)

by C. H. J. Snider

THINGS so broke that we had just eighty hours left to find our vanished Sylph in, if we were going to do it this year. So with storm warnings swinging from the signal mast at the foot of Bay street, and a preliminary south wind piling in a rough sea over the breakwater, we cleared for Clayton, N.Y. where she was reported sunk in 1843, and went out—not recklessly, deliberately, with a reef in the mizzen, mainsail stowed, and two headsails straining like runaway horses.

We started thus at 4 on a Friday on a voyage of some 420 miles. The observatory promised a shift to the west and a blow of 35 m.p.h, at 8 o'clock. Outside, in the lake, the sea was pretty bad, but we added the reefed mainsail to our modest spread. That evening after a heavy downpour of rain a tornado roared through Daytonia Beach on Sturgeon Lake near Lindsay at 90 m.p.h. and wrecked the Holiday Inn, four miles away, and several cottages, farmhouses and trees. V. C. Davis, a Tooronto chain store executive, our Indian road neighbor, was killed in he collapse of the Inn. Mrs. Hilda Fowler and others were injured. At Clayton, where we were going, four yachts were wrenched from their moorings and blown down the St. Lawrence, trees were uprooted, and a building collapsed. The twister was the preliminary of the coming gale.

All this went over our heads thirty miles to the north. We popped into Oshawa that night and got our sleep. That does not sound as heroic as untiring pursuit, without food or rest, driving her watch-and-watch with unshut eyes riveted on the dancing horizon. But it was more practical. On into the lake again at 5 a.m., with the morning star chasing the crescent moon up the dark hill of the sky. A rough uneasy sea announced the coming of the real gale. It was a dry blow with bright sun. Soon we had all the wind we wanted, and were scudding before it with only the two headsails. Craft we met west bound were stripped to bare poles and hurdling the the headsets like grasshoppers, under the drive of their auxiliary power. By dark we had left Lake Ontario behind, run the Murray Canal in 37 minutes, and were well down the Bay of Quinte, and making sail again, even to the topsail, though the gale was only pausing for breath.

The Quinte route to the St. Lawrence is longer than the direct run down Lake Ontario outside Prince Edward County, but had the advantage of smoother water. This shelter meant speed. By the time it was really dark night again we were up to the Brothers, those three islands west of Kingston, in the mouth of the St. Lawrence. Four hours more would take us to Clayton—but what could we do there after midnight in the dark? So "we retired according to plan," again, went to bed in a good anchorage in Collins Bay, and were out and on our way in the darkness of the next dawn.

Still lots of wind with the sun, among the Thousand Islands, and we ran under half sail, down the Canadian channel, around Quebec Head, and across the river and so into Clayton on the south shore, on a bright and sparkling morning, with forty of our eighty hours gone.

AT THE END OR BEGINNING?

CLAYTON, N.Y., is a pretty little place on the St. Lawrence River, about fifteen miles down from Lake Ontario. End of a ferry line from Kingston. Its principal wharfage is on the river front, but it has a fine big bay for a harbor to the west, sheltered by a headland called Prospect Park and Bartlett Point. Around this headland on the 1st of Nov., 1813, swept small vessels of the British fleet—two brigs, two schooners, four rowed gunboats—to break up the American rendezvous for the capture of Montreal, at French Creek. This creek enters the bay south of the high land on the west shore, and a causeway leads from its marshy mouth to the town of Clayton. The earliest settlement was at the creek mouth which formed a corner of Penet Square, a ten-mile tract "bought" from the Oneida Indians by Peter Penet in 1788. Clayton came into being later.

Around this same headland, only this summer, the great-grandchildren of men who 135 years before traded red-hot cannonballs for roundshot belched in broadsides were trading tack for tack with the great-grandchildren of invaders around gaily striped buoys in the annual international regatta of The Lake Yachting Racing Association. The Clayton Yacht Club, under the headland, was host to four hundred sailors under the two friendly flags, the Stars and Stripes of the U.S.A. and the red or blue ensigns, each with the Union Jack in the corner, and varied according as the Canadian club was a "royal" or not. The Canadians were given an even warmer reception than their British ancestors in 1813. It was as good as a play; or a sermon.

In November, 1813, the Royal Navy had come across from Kingston to break up the American concentration at French Creek and fought a battle in a snowstorm, as soon as it was light enough to see. Isaac Chauncey, the American Commodore, tried to send this very Sylph which we were seeking and other American men-of-war against them, but they got back to their base before he could get his heavy guns through the reefs and islands to smash them. This battle of French Creek, fought with a loss of twelve killed or wounded, was as important to those twelve as Stalingrad, Okinawa or Queenston Heights, and was, properly, "mentioned in dispatches" on both sides.

SYLPH, SYLPH, WHO'S GOT A SYLPH?

LIKE the Saracen lady who sought Thomas a-Becket's father in London by crying his name, the only English word she knew, we went about Clayton calling "Sylph! Sylph!" No one understood us.

Yet we were encouraged to find a Hugunin Street and a Merrick Street. Manifestly Capt. Van Cleve knew what he was writing about when he mentioned Clayton. Merrick was a vessel owner and timber trader a hundred years ago, and Capt. Robt. W. Smith was one of his captains. Together they had owned the Sylph.

Three Hugunins were Oswego vessel captains. One of them, Daniel, and probably the father of the family, was master of the schooner Penelope before 1812. Another, Robert, had refitted sunken warriors for the timber trade—the old brig Oneida, earliest American man-of-war on Lake Ontario, in 1827, and the ship-sloop Madison in 1833. The Oneida also ended at Clayton. He or his brother Leonard, who had his arm shot off by the accidental discharge of a gun while he was getting out of a boat, might have been concerned in the refitting of the Sylph for commerce in 1830, and might have sailed her.

IN the shade on his lawn sat Clarence Kendall, retired captain and, river pilot. "Sylph? Never heard of that one," said he, thinking back, "but"—

His good neighbor across the lawn, Miss Gertrude Longton, inquired hospitably, "Would you mean the Old Wreck?" and that unlocked a flood of information from the pilot, and from Nolton Longton, who was also a pilot, and from a number of friends; some in their eighties.

Substance of this was that there were two or three wrecks in Clayton bay, one the schooner Gipsy's, and one a steamer or barge, but the Old Wreck was one which had lain off the old Casino Dock, a paper company's wharf later, and had torn off steamer wheels for generations. One lady of 80 remembered her lying on her side—and that is significant— with three or four ribs showing, when she was a little girl.

A freshwater ship which lies on her side is likely to have been a standing-keeler, with sharp deadrise and therefore of early construction and meant for speed. The later full-bodied commercial schooners were flat-floored centreboarders. The landing keel and sharp deadrise fitted the description of a fast man-of-war of the early 1800s.

This lady, and other ladies and sailors, thought the Old Wreck—and they all called her by this same name —might have been a man-of-war, "like the one they have sunk at Sacket's Harbor, the Jefferson. You ought to see her, if you're looking for an old man-of-war."

We had seen the Jefferson. She was the first Eighteen-Twelver we did see, and the sight of her, when we came storming into Sackett's thirty-seven years ago, on the wings of another gale, set us on fire for the Sylph. In fact we then hoped she was the Sylph, and were disappointed to find that she was not, but a contemporary with less exciting war record. That did not prevent us getting some oak and copper from her.

But the name of the Old Wreck no one in Clayton remembered. Why should they? She was a forgotten hulk only visible in occasional glimpses even eighty years ago, before any of them were born.

Someone said the Old Wreck had been dredged out when they went to build subchasers for this last war. Others said it was earlier. Others didn't think she was all gone, but were sure one couldn't see anything of her if there was anything left, the water was so high.

We tried with a boat hook and 14-foot sounding pole and found traces of nothing but the concrete-base blocks of the dismantled wharf supposed to have been built over her.

HAH!

Either Capt. Kendall or Miss Longton or both had mentioned the Chamber of Commerce. It knew not the name of Sylph.

"Ten or twelve years ago," said W. S. Brookes, of the Otis-Brookes Lumber Co., with a yard, wharf, and fine old stone mill on the waterfront, "as president of the Chamber of Commerce I succeeded in getting the government to dredge out the Old Wreck, as an improvement for our harbor. Steamers and launches had been losing propeller blades on it from my boyhood, and it lay right in the track of small craft to the new boatbuilding shops. I always thought it was some old abandoned timber drogher, worn out years ago, for that part of the bay used to be full of timber booms and lumber and timber yards lined the shore. Grandfather Otis built our stone mill shop eighty years ago, and our yard has been there a very long time.

"Well, the government dredged up the Old Wreck chunk by chunk with a steam dredge, and dumped the weed-grown, water-soakecl wreckage — some of the pieces were very large — on the foreshore of our yard and some vacant land belonging to the town. The town went after me when the improvement was effected and said 'You can't leave the waterfront cluttered up with that rubbish. You got it dumped there. Take it away.' So I had to pay out around $100 to have it broken up and carted off. It was no good for firewood or anything else, except scrap iron, for there was a lot of iron fastenings in it, hand-wrought spikes and nails, round and square bolts and bars of iron, some an inch and a half thick. It was so strong and so heavy and so bulky that we had to have the heap dynamited, to break it up into pieces that could be handled. Even so, there was some of it too big to be trucked off."

"Is there"—breathlessly—"is there any of it left now?

The answer?

Next week

POSSIBLE RESTING PLACE OF TWO WAR BRIGS — CLAYTON WATERFRONT NOW AND 90 YEARS AGO

CASINO WHARF SITE

SHOTBAG ISLAND

To the left is thet old engraving from a sketch in 1860 by Lossing for his "Field Book of the War of 1812. " Clayton harbor was then a great rafting and timber depot. The Sylph was probably sunk near the shore in the foreground. In the distance the battle headland of Bartlett Point, on the right of the engraving Shotbag Island in the St. Lawrence.

WHAT THE SYLPH MAY HAVE LOOKED LIKE—A large topsail schooner of her time, from an interesting sailmakers advertisement, showing "bonnets," meant for reducing the area of the jib, forestaysail and foresail without reefing them. The lower part could be detached by unlacing. The squaresail shown is very large, like an America's Cup yacht's spinnaker. The Sylph would have quarter boats as shown, and a gig or jolly boat on the stern davits and she would be built "straight as a gun barrel" like this schooner, for speed and the better laying of her guns. But she would show almost twice as many ports to a side, for she was pierced for 24 guns and ultimately carried twenty-six.