'Silent St. Lawrence' Deserves a Shrine: Schooner Days DCCCXCII (892)

by C. H. J. Snider

NOAH and Shem and Japhet had no better use for the Ark after it had wrought so great salvation for the human race than to turn it into a winery, perhaps. The grandfathers of Confederation made a cordwood dock of HMS St. Lawrence, that great and silent ship without whose conception and services there might have been nothing to confederate. Dismantled by the permanent peace she brought about she was gutted of everything, even her ballast, ninety years ago and towed from Navy Bay by a sidewheel tug and beached west of Kingston harbor. She was a fuel wharf for the steamers of the new era, which, from necessity, waddled from woodpile to woodpile on their early low-pressure voyagings. Salvaging and restoration of HMS St. Lawrence as a memorial to that amazing ship and her more amazing achievements was given further impetus this month, and we cheerfully interrupt Schooner Days to tell something about her.

Without firing one cannonball from her three decks mounting 112 guns the Silent St. Lawrence in 1814 drove the whole hostile fleet on Lake Ontario, nine large ships and eleven small ones mounting 282 guns among them, into self-imposed blockade. This done she enabled the British army and Canadian militia to clear Upper Canada of invaders, and so she brought about uninterrupted peace and a mutual voluntary disarmament agreement for the whole of the Great Lakes which will last as long as the good sense of two great peoples dictates.

This flexible disarmament agreement has saved the inhabitants of this continent billions in taxation, and had done as much for the peaceful development of the provinces of Quebec and Ontario and the states of New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois and Michigan, as the international canal system of the Great Lakes or the St. Lawrence Seaway is bound to do. It is directly because of HMS St. Lawrence that this agreement was made, because her successful creation and performance showed all right-thinking men that the alternative to peaceful cooperation was a ruinous armament which would have wrecked the development both of Canada and the United States.

This so sensible and so unique adjustment of human relations without recourse to force is as remarkable in the age of power policies as the ship was in her age of wooden walls.

She was in her day a world's wonder, a battleship larger than Nelson's Victory, built and equipped from England in the backwoods of a Canadian wilderness province only then being organized for settlement; and navigated on fresh water of unknown soundings where only two harbors capable of receiving her, Kingston and possibly Niagara; the latter bar-bound and in the hands of the enemy when she was launched. Her great draught, 21 feet fully armed, manned and stored, forced her to live in the open lake when on service. She was the only ship of her kind in the western hemisphere. Attempted rivals promptly begun, never reached the launching stage, but we have a. photograph of one which was unfinished. It was taken about 1880.

Enough of the ship lies bedded in the limestone yet to produce a memorial that would shine as a beacon light for world peace. There is as much of her as there was of the Nancy, now enshrined at Wasaga Beach; or of the U.S. brig Niagara, resuscitated for memorial purposes at Erie, Pa.; or of the Marquis de Malauze, blown up in the Seven Years war in the Bay of Chaleur and recovered and preserved by the little mission of Ste. Anne de Restigouche, Ontario; or, probably, of the original Victory, now perfectly enshrined at Portsmouth Royal Dockyard.

Ontario has done little to proclaim the fact from this province men-of-war have been built for the French since 1678 and for the British since 1763 - a hundred of them in the last decade - and thousands of sailing vessels and steamers, some of which have gone to South Africa, the Indies and Europe (among the sailing vessels, that is) and others, among the steamers, have gone to the Pacific. What more fitting than that Ontario should replace the remains of the St. Lawrence upon tne launching ways at Point Frederick, which she left for glory in September, 1814? Those ways are still traceable, below the old "Stone Frigate" at the Royal Military College at Kingston. What remains of the St. Lawrence is not mouldering bits of rotted wood, but stout timbers of Canadian white oak and white pine, rock elm and maple, some of them 16 inches square. She was a very large ship for her time - the largest then in the western hemisphere - and her planking was eight inches thick.

Americans have preserved some of their historic ships, rigged or rerigged completely as they were originally, among them Perry's flagship Niagara, of the Battle of Lake Erie; the frigate Constitution, "Old Ironsides" and her sister the frigate Constellation, and the New Bedford whaleship Charles W. Morgan, and England has preserved—and completely rerigged as originally—the famous Victory.

John Dennis, master builder at the Royal Dockyard at Point Frederick (his descendants are now living in Mount Dennis on the outskirts of Toronto), had fewer than two hundred shipwrights, but completed the St. Lawrence in nine months. Pressed to overmatch this astonishing creation, Henry Eckford, employing a force of five hundred shipwrights, had the U.S. battleship New Orleans planked and ready for caulking in three months from the day he started work on her, and in another month she would have been completed, had not the word arrived that the war was over. If five hundred carpenters with handsaws and broadaxes could build a larger hull than the St. Lawrence's in three months by daylight, how many would be required to make a reasonable reproduction with present power-tools and processes?