Rough Night on Lakes Ended a Long Road: Schooner Days CMLXXVIII (978)

by C. H. J. Snider

THAT gale in which the Drummond died Dec. 2nd, 1902, was the worst of the year on the lakes, coming at the end of a surly open fall, with freezing weather. Toronto Bay froze Dec. 6th that year, with some of the strangers from Up Above and Down Below forced to winter far from home.

The night the Drummond struck at Cobourg the steel steamer Bannockburn, 225 feet long, English built in 1893 and the finest grain steamer on fresh water, disappeared on Lake Superior with all her crew. Nine of them were Kingston men, and others were from Port Dalhousie, where a tablet was placed for them in the Anglican Church. No trace was ever found of them.

TWO MORE LOST

The American steamer Charles Hebard, which had three cut-down schooners or barges in tow, struck, the shore at Point Mamainse at the east end of Lake Superior, and broke up, lost with all hands, 14 men. Two of the barges, the Warmington and Francomb, anchored and rode it out. The third tow, the Aloha, which had been cast off earlier or parted her line, disappeared. There was damage all over the lakes that night, for the vessels were ail plying late, because of the ended coal strike.

END OF A LONG ROAD

This was the Jessie Drummond's last voyage, after hundreds of thousands of miles—about 350,000, to be specific—of furrows through waters salt and fresh; on river, lake and ocean. She had thirty-eight years of it.

She went to Hamburg in Germany for railroad iron in 1865, with outbound cargo from Toronto and Montreal for Liverpool, and came back to Lake Ontario in 1866.

She took longer on this voyage than did the Oakville brigantine Sea Gull to go from Toronto to Port Natal in South Africa and back to Boston and home to Toronto again. Capt. Frank Jackman, senior, sailed the Sea Gull. Capt. Henry Jackman sailed the Drummond. The explanation of the greater length of her voyage, apart from some delays unloading at Liverpool and loading in Germany—was that when they encountered a gale Capt. Jackman, familiar with lake tactics, ran her off before it instead of heaving to. He kept on running for a thousand miles south, and then had a hard time making his landfall. His saltwater navigator, in whom he trusted for his sights and positions, was very much under the weather.

The Drummond, however, behaved well. She had several captains and owners. Ross and Jackman were her owners in 1864, when she came out, spick and span and new, from Melancthon Simpson's shipyard on the Welland Canal, and insurable for $19,000, the highest valuation on a Canadian bottom then,

Thompson Smith, MP, was her owner in 1873, when the first Dominion register was published. For the next decade or longer she was regularly plying in the great grain trade between Chicago and Collingwood or Kingston, reporting in frequently with 19,000 bushel cargoes. Later she went to Lake Superior and Lake Michigan for ore.

ST. GEORGE FOREVER

Capt. Robert Maw of Toronto, a saltwater man who terminated a long nautical career with boathouses at the Humber and Sunnyside, sailed her for years, with Mrs. Maw in his crew. We remember Capt. Maw very well—an old north countryman with a deep sea foghorn voice and a passion for old England. The biggest steam launch he had for hire was called the St. George.

Then R. E. Edmunds, of Port Hope, only recently deceased, got the Drummond. Then the Rooneys of the Cobourg family, recently graduated to parliamentary honors, Captain Dan, Captain Hugh and Captain "Little Dan." Finally Capt. James Quinn of Oakville got her, a matter of great pride to his native Oakville, which was also the birthplace of the Sea Gull.

In pathetic reverence for the great, a little stonehooker in Oakville was named after the Jessie Drummond, and in Toronto a little sailing express wagon in which the Goodwin family used to do Island freighting and spring-and-fall moving was named the Sea Gull, after the vessel that went to South Africa.

THE LOST "BANNOCKBURN," from a drawing made by Rowley W. Murphy, O.S.A., in the Welland Canal nearly fifty years ago.