Nevertown Chronicles - Pirate at Presquisle: Schooner Days DCCCLXXXVII (887)

by C. H. J. Snider

THE spiking of the Speedy on the night of Oct. 8th, 1804, was also the spiking of the project for making a provincial or district capital out of the infant settlement at Presqu'ile.

The Upper Canada legislature, at the very next session after the bizarre attempt to secure the selection of Newcastle-Never-to-be as the district seat by having a hanging there, allotted the disputed jail and courthouse to a hamlet called Amherst in Northumberland County—which was the making of Cobourg.

Ironically, the Cobourg jail had to wait half a century for its first hanging and has never had another. This was the execution of Dr. King of Brighton in 1859; and Brighton was the successor of the ill-starred Newcastle Nevertown.

The disappointed Presquisle settlers had a hard struggle through the War of 1812, with raids by the enemy and requisitions by the government taking away their men and provisions and finally the last cow in the settlement, for which a British officer paid the widow of Capt. Selleck handsomely in inedible gold.

PIRATE RAIDS

Pirate Bill Johnston of the Thousand Islands, Irish storekeeper with a grievance who deserted the British cause and joined the American, used to lurk in his long rowing gig under St. Nicholas Island and the Scotch Bonnet until he saw a convoy of bateaux creeping across to Presquisle from the Carrying Place, and then he would swoop down and rob them before they could get to Salt Point. He dumped Thomas Parker, whose boat brigade he plundered, on Point Traverse, thirty miles away. Once, at night, he landed and robbed the hen-roosts of the Sellecks and Gibsons, and set on fire the small schooner grandfather Gibson and his sons were building, amid wartime interruptions, inside the Calf Pasture. By the light of their blazing property they saw the pirate rowing away, in a long sharp galley with six oars to the side. Pirate Bill boasted to his American friends that he had destroyed a new schooner being built for His Majesty at Presquisle, pierced for fourteen guns!

Gangs of American prisoners-of-war, on their way to Quebec, also ate the settlers out of house and home. It was a hungry time.

DRIVEN ACROSS THE BAY

So hard was life in the mythical metropolis, which was five miles by a bad road from the only highway, that the settlers in 1828, by petition, had the townsite moved to Gosport on the mainland shore, three miles north across Presquile Bay, making a fresh start with a prosperous waterfront village which became the port of Brighton, and was later called Brighton Wharf, with Richelieu and Ontario Line steamers calling daily. Brighton village at the jog in the old Danforth road to Kingston grew rapidly after the removal from the site planned for Newcastle.

The Murray Canal, for which 6,000 acres were granted in 1796, did not become a reality for almost a century. Presquisle's hopes, pinned as much upon that canal as upon the jail and courthouse, withered, A few homes were built on the sandy peninsula, and fishermen hauled their nets there, but the Cove, the "Newcastle Harbour" of the plan, became a smuggler's roost, and a nest for making counterfeit money to be passed at fairs and gatherings on both sides of the lake.

When the stone lighthouse was built on the Point in 1840, and Salt Point light established, and the range lights put in, Presquisle became a harbor of refuge and of commerce, one of the best on the lake, used by hundreds of vessels; but it was Brighton and Cobourg that were built up by this, not Newcastle the Never-to-be.

The old range lights faded and were replaced by new ones leading of[f] the new Murray Canal in 1890 and Salt Point light was pulled down after 1910, and nothing was left of the original plan but the tall stone lighthouse on Presqu'ile Point itself. The site, government property, was neglected save by fishermen and a few campers and Cat Hollow schoonermen, who laid their vessels up annually on the mud. Some of these built substantial homes on the Point. Seventy years ago Capt. Malcolm Shaw of the Fleetwing built the brick house still standing there.

LIVING REMINDER OF OLD PRESQU'ILE

Harbormaster's house above the Cove where still may be found the base of one of the range-light masts. The famous courthouse-jail-tavern was to the left.