Peacock's Pride: Schooner Days CMXX (920)

by C. H. J. Snider

Lumber Shoving

THE LUMBER TRADE - called "lumber shoving" by those in it, although that strictly applies only to the handling of the lumber on the dock or the deck - including boards, posts, ties, shingles and stave bolts, was on schooners and hard on men, especially when the trips were day's runs, and the crews had to work cargo. The vessel would haul alongside at daylight, with hatches off, booms topped up ten feet high on lumber-saddles, and an empty hold.

The mate would serve out canvas aprons and harvest mitts before sun-up and, without sparing a moment to light a pipe, all hands including his own his own would be laid upon the top courses of the fresh sawn pine, spruce or hemlock plank, piled in rectangular crags overhanging the dock.

Down the boards would come end on to the schooner's deck, from the the piles, to be caught and carried to the hatches, passed down to splinter-filled fists in the hold, and laid along carefully on the floor-ceiling, starting at the bilges and sides, until they mounted up to the deckbeams, like haystraws in a mow.

PARTNERS

The men worked in pairs. When they had the hold "full to the guntline uptime," they jammed that space with boards of appropriate length, to keep the long piles from shifting, and started on the deckload.

Upended planks inside the bulwarks enabled them to pile the lumber from five to ten feet high above the deck, until it smothered the cabin top and overhung the forecastle. Chains were then toggled from rail to rail, to keep this mountain from shifting. Wells would be left to get at the steering wheel and cabin companionway, the centreboard winch, and the pumps.

If the wind was fair the vessel would cast off at once, set her lumber-reefed sails above the high piled deckload, and blow off for her destination, some south shore port. The great box factory at Oswego, N.Y., denuded old Ontario of softwoods for a hundred miles inland.

SAILORS WORK NEVER DONE

Dock workers and lumber shovers only worked from daylight till dark, but the ships crew who had been working that long already would have to get what sleep they could on the passage down the lake — sometimes twelve hours, sometimes twelve days, but never, by reason of the watch-and-watch system necessary to keep the vessel moving, could they sleep more than four hours at a stretch. If they made a good passage they might be in Oswego next morning, unloading all day, out again into the lake at night, and back again to load next morning.

Such a grueling grind of toil could not be kept up. In Whitby, Port Hope and the sawmill ports of the Bay of Quinte and the Georgian, there grew up gangs of lumber shovers from among the mill hands, who greatly lightened the labors of loading. Vessel owners were no longer able to wring this stevedoring out of sailors without paying for it as overtime or supplement to their princely wages—$25 a month, without layoffs, or $1 a day and upward subject to being paid, off if the vessel had to wait for cargo.

Capt. Jas. H. Peacock, who died last year, aged ninety-five, once made three round trips in a week between Port Hope and Oswego, which are a hundred miles apart. In the three trips he carried over half a million feet of pine lumber in the two-masted schooner Mary Everest, 109 feet long, scow-built and from this square shape a good lumber carrier.

THE INNOVATOR

Capt. Peacock's freights for that week grossed almost $500, but netted very much less, for besides the normal running expenses this young skipper paid his crew a bonus of so much per hour for working at loading and unloading, and "sweetened" the lumber shovers in both ports, to give him good despatch.

He also fed his crews well, and found that a good cook saved money on his provision bills. With Mrs. Tom Padgington in the galley the Peacock crew lived well at a cost to the skipper of 25 cents a day per man. Meat was then to be had at four cents a pound; eggs were dear at 15 cents a dozen. Mrs. T. P. baked her own bread and cake.

Paying a crew for working cargo was regarded as rank heresy by owners at that time. They would have called it Communism, if they had known the word. What did they feed these men three meals a day for—and a midnight lunch, mind you—besides paying captains $60 a month and mates $40 and cooks and sailors $25—if it wasn't for full time service, day and night and Sundays? As for holidays, and an eight-hour day and a five day week they would have thought themselves candidates for the asylum and the poorhouse if they paid any wages at all for work on those terms. In fact they would have considered the "free" meals and "free" straw mattresses in the forecastle bunks for such sailors just so much charity, and would have wanted to deduct the grocery bills from their income tax—if there had been any income tax in those days of plain living and high thinking.

Capt. Peacock's innovation was not from philanthropy, put because he had just bought this vessel and wanted to make her pay for herself — and also the Port Hope harbor board had offered a hat for the first captain to make three round trips in seven days with lumber out of the harbor, and Jim Peacock wanted that hat. There was great rivalry then between Port Hope and Whitby.

LOST THE HAT

Perhaps, because of his "dangerous innovation" in the wage structure, Capt. Peacock was refused the hat when he claimed it, on the ground that it was intended for Port Hope men in Port Hope vessels. He had just bought a house and moved his home there. He was actually a Cat Hollow bay from twenty-five miles away, and the Mary Everest had been built in Belleville and owned in Brockville before he got her for C. A. Robinson in Toronto.

Capt. Peacock retaliated by going to Whitby for his next loads, and the Port Hopers reconsidered their decision, gave him the hat, and took him to their hopeful and frugal bosoms. He became a leading citizen, and was ultimately Port Hope's greatest vessel owner, having rebuilt the Everest into the three-masted Sarepta, by the proceeds of his industry, and owned in succession the Flora Carveth (or a part of her), the Oliver Mowat, Emily B. Maxwell, Arthur, and Julia B. Merrill— besides a prosperous coal yard, when the grain and lumber trades had vanished.

THREE-MASTED SCHOONER "SAREPTA" EVOLVED by hustling young captain from two-masted scow good at lumber carrying.