Tryout After 90 Years Wait: Schooner Days CMXVII (917)

by C. H. J. Snider

THE MURRAY CANAL, saving a hundred mile open water voyage around Prince Edward County for anyone wanting to go from Lake Ontario to the Bay of Quinte, was surveyed and laid out on paper in 1797.

But like the equally desirable St. Lawrence seaway, the project disjointed a few noses, such as those of Asa Weller's oxen, who got their fodder and stabling by hauling boats or a wooden railway across the neck of land at the Carrying Place.

It was ninety years after the oxen had become glue and army beef and shoe leather before the steam-shovel got to work on the much needed improvement. It was as simple as digging a ditch. By 1889 a Belleville yacht had sailed through the cut, after 1890 traffic was roaring through it like a millstream. Lines like the Royal Mail, the Richelieu and Ontario, and the Gildersleeve steamers, which plied the north shore, found that it shortened their time between Hamilton and Montreal, for their vessels were in smooth water once they passed Presquile. Passengers loved it. A "river route" for them, all the way to the sea, with lovely scenery.

All the smaller Ontario sailing craft found they could make more trips from the head of the lake to the foot and get more cargoes in a season, once the stormy hundred miles of open water had been eliminated. But the old heads who had never gone to Oswego from any place in the Bay of Quinte without steering east down the bay, were not so quick at trying out this newfangled short cut which started off the wrong way, to their mind.

There was a big trade then from the north shore of Lake Ontario with lumber for that great Oswego Box Factory, Trenton, in the extreme west end of the Bay of Quinte, shipped millions of feet from its Trent river sawmills. To get the lumber schooners had to come up the Adolphus Reach of the Bay of Quinte, through the Long Reach, around Captain John's Island, up the Belleville Reach, through the Telegraph Narrows and the Belleville Narrows and the Nigger Narrows, past all the pleasant islands, and up one of two narrow channels to Trenton. They used to go back down the way they came, down the Bay to Indian Point and down the Upper Gap to Point Traverse, and then forty-five miles across the Lake to Oswego. The zig-zag course of about a hundred and thirty miles was quite exasperating if the wind was ahead, and a vessel had to beat all the way.

But they had been doing it for years and years. The Bay of Quinte bottom was grooved with the scraping of their centreboards over the high spots, and the minds of the older skippers were worn into the same ruts. All their lives this had been the only way to get from the Bay to any port on the south shore of Lake Ontario, or for that matter on the north.

WINDBOUND by a longish spell of easterly weather three or four schooners had lain in the mouth of the Trent for days after completing their loads of lumber, waiting for a shift of wind to the westward, to let them away for Oswego. Then young Will Ostrander brought in the big new Flora Carveth, light, and got her loaded with an enormous lumber pile in the hold and on deck.

The Flora Carveth and her sister, the L. D. Bullock, were not handsome vessels, being plumb-stemmed, straight in the sheer and flat in the floor, and full in the bows, with long low-set bowsprits, long topmasts and long mainbooms - 67 feet, as long as a full canal-sized schooner's - although these vessels were only half the tonnage of a canaller and 115 feet long. They are great carriers, both for grain and lumber, for they could be loaded down until their decks amidships were wet and still retain their stability. And they sailed well.

Young Will wasted no time once the chains had been toggled across the Carveth's deckload. He hauled out from the dock, put headsails and a piece of the mainsail on her, and steered southwest for the entrance to the newly finished canal while this east wind lasted,

"Guess he don't know Oswego's sou'east of here," chuckled some of the old heads.

"Bet he'll fetch up in T'ron'o," said others.

But Will kept steering west through the six miles of the canal, without hitting one of the four bridges, and on. for another mile to Brighton Wharf, where he jibed over and stood southerly three miles down Presquile Ray.

Before he got to the tall lighthouse on the Point the wind had veered to the westward at last. He took full advantage of it, and was in Oswego and unloaded before the first of his rivals showed up. It is fifty miles shorter to Oswego from Presquile, crossing by the open lake, than it is from Trenton, following the winding Bay.

Making Sail on the Flora Carveth