Found: Relic of 'Toronto Yacht', 1799: Schooner Days CMVIII (908)

by C. H. J. Snider

WALKING along Toronto Island shore near St. Andrew's-by-the-Lake to feed the wild ducks, Mrs. W. M. Hardy, 408 Lake Shore ave., saw in the sand a little ball, no bigger than a baseball, but surprisingly heavy when she stooped to pick it up. It was solid iron, and it weighed three pounds, even though its surface was pitted with long rusting. A cannon ball. How came it there?

It was close to the waters edge. It must have been under water when the lake rose in 1943, and ever since till this spring. It was then that the "high water," chronic for six years, ebbed away twelve inches below last year's level, and exposed several yards of the beach and brought to light again some old timbers which had been covered for five years, and are now almost high and dry.

Mrs. Hardy had noted the emergence of the timbers before she saw the ball. She wondered whether there was any connection. Her husband consulted Schooner Days, and Schooner Days is of the opinion that there is; and that Mrs. Hardy has made a discovery of sufficient historic importance to merit the attention of the Toronto Civic Historic Committee.

Plank by plank, the wreckage mentioned has been familiar to this writer for over fifty years. It has not always been in its present position. It now consists of fourteen worn planks, spiked to six or seven close-set ribs, and the remains of the apron or backing of a stempiece. It is squarish in shape, as though broken off violently all at once. It is a fragment of the starboard bow of a wreck which has lain for a very long time farther west on Gibraltar Point, almost due south of the great stone lighthouse whose tall shaft still sends its warning gleam in its 141st year of service.

The rest of the wreck may still be there, buried under sand and gravel pushed up by scourging sou'westers and winter ice shoves. It has come and gone like a ghost in a graveyard a dozen times in the last century, covered by the lake in high water periods, and emerging filled with sand and shingle in the slow recessions to low levels which come seven to eleven years apart. Its last disappearance was in '43, when the high water bit so deeply into the Point that the concrete sidewalk at the turn, once a hundred yards inland, was swallowed up in southwest gales.

This bow portion was later seen nearly half a mile east of the "main body," pushed by the breakers and sucked along by the undertow, till it grounded where it now is. There is no question of it belonging to that wreck, for it was examined in detail before it was torn away. Every spike head in its warty surface can be recognized, and particularly the irregular curved grooves made in the planking, perhaps a century and a half ago, by the scrape of anchor bills, or grinding on pointed rock.

There have been many wrecks on Gibraltar Point. Within the memory of a few now living were the Jenny Jones, the Glover, burst after stranding by the swelling of her load of peas, the Admiral, the Anna Bellchambers, and the Mary Amelia, the last so long ago that she is only a supposition. Seventy years ago Capt. Murray, of the Royal Artillery, had a happy summer experimenting in demolitions by blowing up the remains of these wrecks, so the point was cleared. There was even one in the lagoon or old filtering basin. But this wreck of which we are speaking particularly escaped his fuses, probably because she was at that time covered by periodic high water. She had been there before any of her grave-sisters, and she survived all.

It was the belief of many at that time-the year was 1880-—that this wreck was the very first upon which the old lighthouse on the point, completed in 1808, cast its warning glance.

An old gentleman whose father came out from England in 1831, told the writer that his father's early exercise was riding "on the peninsula," as Toronto Island was then properly called, and that his favorite turning point for his canter was between the lighthouse and this ship's skeleton, old even then, and identified by the inhabitants as that of a local celebrity, the first armed vessel built by the home government for the protection of the town York, capital of the new province of Upper Canada.

A gunboat was authorized by an order in 1797 and this was the outcome in 1799. She was armed with six small guns, 3 or 4 pounders, for the peace establishment and used for the conveyance of the various governors and their suites. Officially she was registered as "His Majesty's armed schooner Toronto, yacht," the last word then indicating not a pleasure vessel, but a despatch ship used by the navy or the government for purposes of communication or exploration.

Naturally enough the sesquipedalian mouthful of title was abbreviated to "Toronto, yacht," after the usage of the time, which put a vessel's class or occupation after her name, instead of before as we do. From this custom she was known as the "Toronto Yacht" to everybody in York, and usually so appeared in the official Upper Canada Gazette. She was so recorded in Scadding's Toronto of Old, 1873 and in Robertson's Landmarks of Toronto, 1894. Eventually the memory of the wreck and its history died out, with York growing from a little town to the city of Toronto with 800,000 inhabitants. Her disappearance in high-water decades contributed to her oblivion. Finally when the wreck made one of its reappearances no one was living who had seen it from the first, and its identity was doubted and disputed.

It was generally agreed, however, that as no other armed vessel had ever been wrecked on Gibraltar Point, if indication of armament could be found in connection with this wreck it could be accepted as the Toronto Yacht's.

It seems that Mrs. Hardy is to be congratulated upon clinching the case. Her finding of this three-pound ball within a few yards of the last known remnants of this wreck is prima facie evidence that the vessel either carried ammunition, or was shot at and hit by a lightly armed vessel. There, is no record of such cannonading in the vicinity of Gibraltar Point. Cannonballs were flying in 1813 when Fort York was attacked, and in the running battle called the Burlington Races, well offshore from York Roads, but nowhere near this ball. It may have rolled into one of the corners of the Toronto Yacht's hold when the shot-racks were being filled, or it may have been packed between the ceiling and the garboard with others for ballast, and been dislodged when this section was tossed on the beach.

Hand-Wrought Spikes, 7 Inches Long, From the Wreckage, and the Cannon Ball, Reproduced Actual Size Found Twenty Feet Away.