"White Shirt Sleeves on the Cabin Top": Schooner Days DCCCXCIV (894)

by C. H. J. Snider

BIG handsome Capt. Charles E. Redfearn, spectacled and weighing 230 lbs., who died at his Colborne, home recently, would of course be best known from his long service the CNR car ferry steamer Ontario No. 2, on the Cobourg-Rochester run, in which he made many friends. He was so well liked in Rochester that, as one of the Flower City's papers said, he was the pilot for nearly every organization which chartered a boat for a cruise to Cobourg. The Shriners, Knights of Columbus, Ad Club, Bar Association, Rochester Club and other local groups began their annual excursions to Canada because of the geniality of this Canadian skipper. And he had a wife and two sons in Rochester.

"Young Charlie," as he was so long known, was a graduate from sail like his father James and his grandfather Edwin before him. He was wrecked with his father in the steamer City of Montreal in Lake Superior in 1888, and marooned on an island for two days and three nights. Father and son went back to sail. By the time Charlie was 23 he was master of the big schooner Albacore, owned by Bradshaw, market grocer in Toronto, and here his own testing time came.

Galveston was destroyed by a hurricane the second week in September, 1900. We got the backlash of it on the night of the 12th. At our end of the lake it began with gentle feeder from the southeast, which wafted the White Wings and the Ann Brown into Port Credit with scarcely a ripple on the brightly moonlit water. But the sea was beginning to heave in from the south by the time we had our lines out, and before midnight it was blowing a gagger, shifting south, southwest, and. west before daylight, with a wild sunrise, molten gold being poured over purple masses of slate, and the lake a lather of white horses racing over jade green hills.

That was "Young Charlie's" baptism of fire and water as a master mariner.

The Albacore had left Hamilton for Oswego the evening before. It was a quiet night, but there seemed a good air aloft, and the big ex-timber drogher tramped steadily down the south shore. Young Capt. Redfearn turned in at eight bells, the first night watch being the mate's. Before midnight the mate tapped on; his door. "I didn't want to call the watch," said he, "but she's going like a son-of-a-gun, and I think we ought to have the mainsail off her. The gafftopsails and jibtopsail are tied up already."

It was so steady in the cabin that Capt. Redfearn, sleeping "all standing" except his boots and jacket, merely stuck his feet into his carpet slippers and stepped out through the stateroom door, which opened forward on to the deck, under a narrow roof projection at the forward end of the house. They had hove the mainsheet in with the donkey engine, and got the boom aft and crotched, and were trying to lower away. The sail, full of wind, lifted like a parachute and would not come down. He jumped to the peak halliards and cleared them from under the thumb-cleat. A harder puff shook the sail, and down came the gaff, threatening destruction to the men pulling and hauling at the loose canvas. To save them he grabbed the halliards with his bare hands, throwing a half-turn around his arm to get a better grip. But he could not get them back to the cleat and belaying pins, and the surging rope tore his shirt off his back and burned his arms and wrist and fingers till the white bone showed under the blood in the moonlight.

But he saved the gaff and the men beneath it.

They got the mainsail tied up, squatted the foresail, and tried to bandage the captain's arms. The Albacore was below Charlotte now, below Sodus before they knew it. These were ports of refuge. Oswego was the only one left. It was Oswego or nothing.

"Well," said Capt. Redfearn through his teeth, "it's to Oswego we're bound."

Giving the breakwater a good berth they hauled up for the entrance a mile outside the piers, and blew for the tug on the donkey-engine's whistle. With the change of course the Albacore's three headsails flew to rags. They hardly hoped the tug would venture out for them, but: "There she comes!" everybody cried at once as a red and green light with white lights above came ducking and diving past the pierhead.

Soon the little John Navagh was alongside, and the towline was passed, and three good turns were caught on the paulpost, and more on the windlass bitts, and the last mile of the voyage began.

The wind was blowing sixty miles an hour now, hurricane force, right on the nose of the laboring tug and the big high wallsided bluffbowed schooner. Empty of cargo she loomed up like a warehouse, and was not much easier to tow. Soon they commenced to feel the force of the current of the Oswego River, running out at 9 miles an hour on the gauge. The Albacore blew off to leeward like a haystack. Tug and schooner seemed standing still. The tug herself could no longer hold her course for the pierhead; she was being dragged to leeward by the current and the weight of the wind on the tow.

Capt. "Hunky" Scott of the tug Navagh was a brave man. But he remembered what had happened when the harbor tug tried to save the Flora Emma, burst a steampipe, and drove in with the schooner to destruction, drowning her captain and engineer.

The Navagh blew a long wail on her whistle and seemed to shoot suddenly to windward and safety. She had cut the towline.

Capt. Redfearn was prepared for that. He had his starboard anchor ready. But it was like anchoring on an avalanche. Before the hook could take hold on the stony bottom the Albacore had run away from it and was climbing the beach under the ramparts of Fort Ontario. And there she stayed, never to sail again.

The lifesaving station was close at hand. They shot a line aboard and took the crew off, and got Capt. Redfearn to the hospital. The schooner drove in so far that the crew could have swung themselves ashore dry from the jibboom end.

The fine big three-master T. R. Merritt drove ashore five miles above Oswego that same night.

The backlash died out quickly Capt. Johnny Williams came sailing in with the Van Straubenzee next day having spent the night in port and encountered no bad weather afterwards. He met Capt. Dolph Corson on the street. "Where's your ship?" he asked. "Five miles up the shore in installments," answered Dolph. Capt. Williams dressed Capt. Redfearn's wounds for him and gave him his own stateroom.

One of the other captains, of the rough (and dusky) diamond type, sniffed. "That's what, comes of white shirtsleeves on the cabin top," said he, alluding to "Young Charlie's" neatness of dress which made him so popular in the passenger trade twenty years later.

"Captain," said Johnny, "It might be our turn next."

Within two months this same captain was also enjoying the hospitality of Capt. Williams' stateroom—a shipless mariner, for his own three-master was pounding to pieces outside on a Canadian beach, and the lifesaving crew had just brought him off be-fore the masts fell.

H.M.S. "NANCY" REACHES A HAPPY HAVEN

MISS HELEN BOYNE (left) and MRS. GWEN BEST (right), admiring the model presented by Schooner Days to the City of Toronto on Monday of this week, to form a nucleus of a Toronto Maritime Museum. Meantime Mayor McCallum assured her of honorable moorings in the City Hall.