Bateau Days in Dundas, 1837: Schooner Days CMLXIX (969)

by C. H. J. Snider

ALEXANDER MUIR, not the Maple Leaf author, but builder of Muir's Drydock, which has now flourished at Port Dalhousie for a full century, wrote thus about Dundas navigation in 1837, the year the canal was completed:

"At Prescott, in April, 1837, I shipped on board of the new schooner Sir Francis Bond Head, Capt. W. Taylor, wages $15 per month. I found the schooner discharging flour. She was an early bird, for she had made one round trip of nearly 500 miles already this season, up to Hamilton on Lake Ontario, and had returned. She was named after the then governor of Canada. This vessel had been built at Prescott, and was owned there by Hooker and Henderson, forwarders.

"The mate of the Bond Head was Capt. J. Jones. There was also on board two young men from Prescott, Matthew Bondman and Hugh Newman. We sailed the following day for Hamilton with a part cargo of goods, and when we arrived there at the head of the lake we unloaded it at a large dock on the far side of Burlington Bay, on the Hamilton waterfront.

SOFT JOBS

"Our return cargo of flour was boated down to us from Dundas, three or four miles farther on, by two bateaus, each of which was 90 feet long and carried 300 barrels. The wharfinger owned the dock, the bateaus, and 200 acres of land. He had several daughters and one son, a young man of about my age, 18."

The son had charge of these two boats, each of which carried four men.

"In one end of the warehouse there was a barrel of whiskey, with a tap in it and a tumbler on top. Every man who wished helped himself, and these boatmen every morning before daylight filled a gallon jar from the barrel and then started for Dundas, rowing if the wind was ahead or scanty, sailing if it was favorable. They returned every evening with their bateaus laden with flour, and unloaded, their cargoes of 600 barrels before they were through. This constituted their day's work."

They had the rest of the day—or night—to themselves, till next daybreak. Sometimes it took 18 hours out of the 24 to row or sail up and back and load and unload 600 barrels, with no tools but nine pairs of muscular arms. A barrel of flour weighs 196 lbs. They manhandled 60 tons of flour a day and took two days to load the schooner.

PIONEER'S MORAL

"Mr. Wharfinger stood by witnessing all this. Little did he think that he was encouraging his only son in the broad way to the drunkard's grave.

"This son, after he had squandered all his father's property left to him at his death twenty years later I afterwards met in Port Dalhousie in front of Ceal's Hotel. (The narrator was then a master mariner, the proprietor, with his five brothers, of the first drydock on the Welland Canal and was completing "our first schooner the Ayr, value $18,000").

"He asked me for three cents, and his hand was shaking like the hand of a man with the ague. Moderate drinkers, think of this! I believe that every moderate drinker is on the broad road that leads to a drunkard's grave. I never met him after, but I heard that he died about a year later. I might say here that I did not give him the three cents."

UNRECORDED HISTORY

Alexander the Great with typical reticence, failed to mention that he looked very hard in the direction of the newbuilt schooner Ayr for a long while so that he would not see his good lady giving the wretch a full meal and sending him away after with a dollar in his agueish hand.

END OF AYR—AND HER AUTHOR

Schooner Days Ahoy!

I live in Detroit and look for your Saturday show first thing when I get The Telegram. Dr. Muir of the Muir shipyard family at Port Dalhousie gave a very interesting talk to our Marine Historical Society this spring, on the Muir shipyard. The Ayr, the first ship they built, is laying on the head of Horsen's Island, just awash, yet. He had a cane made from a piece of timber he sawed from it a year ago.

—RUSSEL C. MORTINGER,

806 Philip avenue,

Detroit, 15.

Thank you, Mr. Mortinger, I never heard where the Ayr ended her days, but knew she was sold to Detroit. She was a profitable vessel, costing $15,646 to build and earning $22,897.43 "neat" as Alexander put it, that is, net profit, in four seasons. Alexander took sardonic delight in recording losses, and grimly reported that she ran ashore at Port Union with his own brother Bryce master, and it cost $2,000 to get her off the beach, at the end of November. Moreover Capt. McDonald, who succeeded in command, had to throw overboard his deckload of lumber in a gale when bound from the Georgian Bay to Cleveland, and this cost another $2,000. Next the Ayr ran ashore, light, at Oshawa, and piled up another $1,000 loss.

Alexander would not carry insurance. Neither would he drink whiskey. He swore off in 1841. Fifty years later, at the age of 80, and fighting pneumonia, his doctor told him that if he would not take the whiskey prescribed he might die. "Verra weel" thundered Alexander, reverting to his native Ayrshire dialect, "A wull dee." And he did, sober and happy.

—Schooner Days

BUILT TO LAST

This fine old stone building in Dundas, Ont., was once a foundry, then the gas works, and now houses modern industries.