Heah Dem Bells: Schooner Days CMLIII (953)

by C. H. J. Snider

WHEN the old Albacore would be going quietly across the "deep hole" of Lake Ontario--there's 130 fathoms, well out off the south shore, as you get down towards Oswego--a boy used to listen to the sob of the scuppers and the tinkling of the water around the rudder gudgeons and imagine he was hearing the watch bells of the vanished navies which fought on our lake in the Seven Years War and the War of 1812, in the crystal depths below.

Were you told that he heard the bell of the vanished Scorpion when looking for her hull last week - particularly since that hull has been sunk for a century - you might set it down to mere imagination.

But you would be wrong.

This is not imagination nor fiction. The bells of both the Scorpion and her captured consort the Tigress have been heard by many now living tinkling over the mirroring waters of the great harbor of the Place of the White Rolling Sands. That is the English "short form" of the Indian word Penetanguishene, which has been snapped off at Penetang for the convenience of the tourist and typewriter.

When the Scorpion-Confiance and Tigress-Surprise were dismantled after the first reduction of the Establishment from its war footing their bells were given to the Anglican Church of St. James on the Lines, and to St. Annes' Jesuit Memorial Church, like battle flags of disbanded regiments.

These particular vessels went out of commission in 1826. They were not among those offered for sale-with no takers-in 1832, when a great quantity of nautical odds and ends went at junk prices. Britain was going into iron and steam for the protection of the Canadian colony. Wood and canvas were in the discard. Armed iron steamers, Experiment, Mohawk and Minos, replaced the wooden walls at Pentang.

The present St. James on the Lines will be 115 years old next year. The bells, one may assume, were not disposed of before 1836, at least ten years after the ships were dismantled. At the time there was no distinguishing mark on either of them.

Rev. Mr. McLaren, the clergyman of St. James is of the opinion that St. James has the Scorpion bell; probably on the information of Rev. George Hallen, whose parish register begun in 1840, makes fascinating reading.

Mr. McLaren climbed the building ladders when the church was being repaired and examined the bell in position in the belfry. There is no other way of getting to it. It has no name on it but the name of the bell founders, a New England firm in Massachusetts, is proof that this bell was a trophy from an American prize. There were only the two, Scorpion and Tigress, in the Penetang Establishment. Their bells were cast in New England, for them or for some other vessels, and sent by boat and pack train to the newly commenced U.S. Navy Yard at Erie, Pa., where the two war schooners were built in the winter of 1812-13.

The rest is history. Both bells have knolled for wedding and funeral, for coronation, and jubilee, for vespers and matins and morning and evening service, for a century since they ceased to strike "Eight bells and all's well!" in the wilderness navy with which broad-bosomed Britannia nursed that infant Hercules Canada toward manhood.

Kicking Rule, Britannia! out of the Royal Canadian Navy does not seem proof that manhood has yet been attained. O Canada may suit those who do so as an anthem but Owe, Canada, is a national motto of which we need only be ashamed if we repudiate it.

Who is ashamed of the debt he owes his mother? Or his foster mother. If he wishes or repudiates that he should be ashamed of himself. But the debt and the fact of owing it remains an honor of which he should strive to be worthy.

For me and my house, who have benefited by your bounty for a hundred and fifty-three years here in Canada, go on Ruling, Britannia, Rule the Waves as well as your can, on lease-lend and Marshal aid and borrowed dollars, and may the Royal Canadian Navy do as good a job at ruling when its turn comes. Meantime, your prompt generosity to the tune of £100,000 Britannia, for the relief of Canadian victims of the Red River flood makes more faces than the Hon. Jos. Stalin's Red.

The Old "Establishment" at Penetang-- H.M. Brigantine NAAWASH and the schooner TECUMSETH, which came there from Lake Erie. Drawn from their British Admiralty plans.