Notched Ledger of "The Dummy": Schooner Days CMLXIV (964)

by C. H. J. Snider

MOST forecastles were better than the chamber of horrors last described. None was worse.

If the vessel was an old one — they all were, it seemed!-—each bunk edge or deckbeam might be serrated with a series of notches.

These were the tally-sheets of departed mariners, who kept their "time" by cutting a notch for each day. Another day, another dollar.

"Look here, captain, you can see for yourself above my bunk in the forecastle, they's eighteen notches cut, and that's my time since I j'ined her, a notch for every day an' no more. I don't care what your book says."

So the captain, sick and tired of trying to chisel days out of sailors for owners who were sick and tired of the vessel always being in the, hole, might give up, and call it eighteen days, and perhaps be rewarded with a fair wind and a fast passage at last, for there is such a thing as justice in this world as well as in the next.

This notch-cutting was never disputed. It was not a form of cooking the books that could be practiced with much success, for payoffs came too frequently.

GOOD SIGN

Some captains and owners liked this saw-tooth decoration in their forecastles. The more the merrier. It showed their men stayed with them a long time, instead of "jumping" at the first port. They could point to a comfortable, well-fed schooner, with steady employment and steady fellows in the forecastle.

Capt. Abram Farewell of Newcastle had such a vessel in the Ariadne, and her forecastle documentation proved it. Her notches were all the work of one man, who had been in her for years. Nobody knew his name, and he himself could not tell it, because the cat must have stolen his tongue when a child, and he had not learned to write. He was known all over Lake Ontario as The Dummy, with two capitals, and a smart sailor he was, steady as the clock and reliable as the barometer. He earned a good livelihood for himself and his sister and never said a word. He kept his time as indicated, and his notches were more reliable than some vessels' logbooks.

LAST NOTCH

Only once did he slip, and that caused a commotion.

They were going down the lake of a dark stormy night with a load of lumber for the box factory at Oswego. The deckload was piled high, for the Ariadne was a great carrier. Below the Devil's Nose she got rolling hard, and the frapping chains parted, and a great section of the deckload rolled overboard.

Someone yelled "My God, The Dummy gone!"

Alas, it was only too true. It was black and blowing, but they got the Ariadne's boat down, and hove the vessel to, and searched for two hours, calling and calling and calling in vain, for the poor Dummy could not answer if he had heard them. So in great sadness the boat returned to the schooner, and she went on under short sail. Everyone on board felt as if he had lost a brother. When Capt. Farewell took a look at that last fresh-cut notched in the beam over The Dummy's bunk he choked up.

It proved a slow voyage to Oswego, for the wind died out and came ahead light, and it was three days before the Ariadne got in flying her colors, out of respect to The Dummy, all half-masted. As soon as his lines were out Capt. Farewell hastened to the harbor office to report.

"What d'you mean, you've lost The Dummy?" demanded John S. Parsons, who knew every lake sailor, Canadian or American. "I saw him just an hour ago at the Reciprocity House, and I asked him how the had got there so quick, for I had seen you coming in, and your sails were not yet tied up. He tried to tell me, but I couldn't understand his signs."

"It was his ghost, poor Dummy," said Capt. Farewell, and his rough hailing-voice shook. "He'll never cut another notch over his bunk. We lost him overboard off the Devil's Nose three nights ago."

"The devil you did, Captain!" shouted in the harbormaster from his desk. "The Dummy's at the Reciprocity House now, at your expense, and has been for three days. The old Anglo-Saxon steam barge picked him off a mess of lumber that must have been your deckload, and brought him in here the same day and left him. She was bound down to the 'Burg. They knew you'd be along."

"I'll cut more notches in his deckbeam for him myself!" said Capt. Farewell. "I'd rather cut a hundred, and pay for them, than have to face his sister with the news that he was gone."

The ARIADNE (last vessel on the right) loading at the old Northern Docks in Toronto.