Nevertown Chronicles — Spiking of the SPEEDY: Schooner Days DCCCLXXXV (885)

by C. H. J. Snider

HIS MAJESTY'S schooner Speedy, of the Provincial Marine, took on board important passengers for the new district capital and harbor to be named Newcastle at Presqu'isle in honor of a duke, and sailed from Toronto (then York, U.C.) on a Sunday evening, Oct. 7th, 1804, with "a moderate breeze from the northwest."

Quietly, quietly she slipped through the rippled water all night. The slumbers of Mr. Justice Cochrane and the members of Parliament and dignitaries in the quarterdeck cabins, were undisturbed even by a thought of the wretched Indian shackled in the schooner's forepeak, whom they were going to try for murder and hang at Presqu'isle.

By morning the vessel was floating in a calm off Oshawa thirty miles on her way. Canoes put out from me creek mouth there, with Indian witnesses and with trappers and traders who had employed John Sharpe, late of the Queen's Hangers, the man for whose murder the Indian was go'

The Speedy was already so full of passengers and their baggage and equipment for the new capital that there was no accommodation for these further passengers even on deck. After a colloquy William and Abram M. Farewell, of Oshawa, the furtrading brothers who had employed Sharpe as their factor and storekeeper at Ball Point on Lake Scugog, cheerfully agreed to paddle on with their witnesses and join the others when the schooner reached Presqu'isle. In the light weather the canoes moved faster than the vessel, and if the lake became rough they could be beached, or run into a creek mouth, and the hardy hunters would make camp, waiting for better weather. So they proceeded, hugging the shore, sometimes ahead of the Speedy, sometimes behind her.

As the schooner floated by the magnificent front of Raby Head, admiring her own face in the mirror of Lake Ontario, one of the gnarled crimson sumachs beneath the oak on the height seemed to wave about come to life. Yet the oaks were motionless, and no breeze stirred.

It was only Bitterskin, the crazy mother of the crazy Indian Ogetonicut.

She was making medicine against the white men who had taken her son. Because of her evil tongue she had been left behind when the tribe of Chippewa Muskrats paddle to York to surrender him to the Governor. His brother, Whistling Duck, had been killed by unknown white men the year before, and Ogetonicut, crazed with drink, had boasted that he had killed an unknown white man to still the voice of his brother's blood crying from the ground.

Now Bitterskin hated all men white or red, save one. She was invoking the dark powers of woods, wilds and waters against these great ones of the Governor, who were carrying away her last child to hang him with a halter and build a city on his bones.

But her spells and incantations, drowned in distance, perished unheeded and unknown, even by the son she loved. He, in the black forepeak of the schooner, shut off from light and air, had found occupation in his solitude. A bolt in his wooden walls had yielded, and he was scrape, scrape, scraping with it where he found the wood soft, hoping to dig his way out. Into what he could not guess, for he was in total darkness. If his tool made any sound it was like the gnawing, of a rat.

So passed the short October day. As darkness fell from the Speedy's deck could be seen the candles lighted by Major Keeler's black slaves in the holding he had hewn out high inland above Lead Creek, at the present Colborne. The 60-foot bluff which the French had named Isle of the Hat drew nigh. The schooner was in sight from Presqu'isle, and the community of Simpsons, Sellecks, Gibsons and Rogerses was agog to welcome her and see proclaimed the new capital upon which they had staked everything. The wind was still light.

The fowls in the pens for the court's refection began to preen themselves and oil their feathers. The cocks crowed repeatedly. Change of weather, shift of wind, forecast the mariners. The breeze lulled again. Snowflakes slowly filtered down. Then the autumn wind bit in hard from the northeast, right in the teeth of the Speedy, when she was within four miles of her desired haven.

There was furling and reefing and pulling and hauling, much discomfort for the passengers driven below, much berating and bawling for the four sailors and the mate on deck. The Speedy's 80-ft. length was cluttered with her two guns, the longboat on skids over the main hatch, her anchors and cables, roused out for mooring, the spars and gear of her fore-and-aft rig, the trunks and baggage of the officials, the livestock pens for their table fare, and furniture for the courthouse. It was hard to reach and work her pumps. She was a-leak, her usual condition in a headwind, for she suffered from dry-rot. The water was coming in faster than the pumps could throw it out.

Commander Paxton's first thought was how might he avoid the unmarked Devil's Horseblock in the snow and the dark? It stood like a hidden lion in the Speedy's path, a submarine crag 40 feet across, eight fathoms of water right up to it, only eight inches or so over it. He knew the shore ranges and compass bearings for it perfectly, but how apply them in the dark?

"Fire the starboard gun!" he ordered.

After delays over wet powder, damp cartridges and sodden linstock matches a flintlock pistol flashed over the powderpan ignited the charge, and the 6-pounder roared. The passengers below thought the vessel was signaling her arrival and began donning their greatcoats in preparation for landing.

"A few moments yet, your Lordship, a few moments yet," called down Lieut. Paxton. More truly than he thought.

A light blazed redly. Capt. Selleck, on the Point in answer to the gun, had set fire to a great pile of brush, logs, and chips from the new-built courthouse, to guide the vessel in.

Lieut. Paxton breathed freely. He could now calculate his position from the fix on the Point, so he flogged the ill-named Speedy towards it in wing-weary zigzags, adding the clang of the overworked pumps to the roar of the sails, the sobbing of the scuppers and the hiss of the seas and the mingling snow.

No one heard Ogetonicut's drowning gasps on the lake-filled forepeak. His patient scraping away of the rotted wood splinter by splinter, hour after hour, has been rewarded first by a wetness, then a sudden gush, through plank, rib and ceiling, all honeycombed with rot and pierced by his slow toil. With his feet shackled to the floor of the flooded prison he drowned in the dark.

After much tacking the Speedy was beyond the Horseblock, Lieut. Paxton could tell by the compass bearing on the bonfire, now on this quarter. "Stations forward!" he called. "Standby for stays! Helm a-lee!"

She came up into the wind and hung in irons, her snow-filled sails flailing widely. She was so water-logged she would not steer. She he wore her around before the wind, hauled her up on the other tack as she gathered headway, and bore away for the blaze of the beacon light. She could reach it in ten minutes.

In the maneuver the Speedy had drifted to leeward, and she fell farther to leewards as she plunged suddenly through the snow with the muzzle of the lee gun level with the water. Even as he estimated the ten-minute interval she smashed squarely on the hammerhead of the unseen Horseblock, and her masts went overside. With a rumble felt rather than heard, that spike of limestone split into fragments and collapsed, carrying down in its ruins the shattered vessel with all on board.

The dark gods had heard Bitterskin. The Governor's new town was never to be, blighted ere birth with living sacrifice, a human hecatomb. But her son was free, free to fly with Whistling Duck in the airy spirit land.

"He flogged the ill-named SPEEDY towards it in wing-weary zig zags.