Asking for Abbie: Schooner Days CMXCVII (997)

by C. H. J. Snider

SCHOONER DAYS is something like that ocean box in the Galapagos, where one shoos away sea-lions, iguanas and giant turtles to drop your ship's name and number through the bunghole of a rum keg on a post. At least so we have been told.

The week's passing hails include one from Juneau, Alaska (last port of call) signed by Wm. E. Ember, 1211 East 66th st., Seattle 5. Wash., telling a Toronto friend:

"I want to prove my service as mate of the three-masted centreboard schooner Abbie L. Andrews, Captain Boland, owner and master, around 1907-1908.

"Have you got any records of the old lady, or is there anybody still staggering around who knew me as mate when I stuck her jibboom through an elevator (guess it was a grain elevator) going into Erie one time?

"I was a salt water sailorman, and Capt. Boland was a pious mild-mannered man, never known to swear. But he did snort: 'A salty, indeed! A Lake Huron farmer could do better than that!'

"I thought, of course, that as a freshwater sailor he did not know what it was all about, so I 'used my own judgment,' and nearly took her overland, instead of laying her alongside the dock. Left to him we would have made a good landing. He was a good man, and a fine sailorman and shipmaster, trying to do the right thing in a wrong world.

THE WINTER OR THE CAPTAIN?

"I went back to deepwater that winter, to Australia, to escape the Canada winter, and nearly got lost off the Horn when our grain cargo shifted. On the lakes you don't get the long high seas like Cape Horn, but I have seen some rough water on Lake Erie and Lake Superior all the same, in the fall of the year.

"I wrote to the Welland Canal, thinking they had crew lists of vessels passing through the canal, but this was no help to me.

"I was also on the little schooner Good News, Capt. Appleton owner and master. Wrote to him for years. And another one. I forget her name. But what happened to the Abbie L. Andrews? Her hull was made of oak, with elm knees. She would last a hundred years. Grand Old Lady!"

We like Mr. Ember's approach, and are glad to give his appeal publicity. We hope someone can give him the proof he requires. We have not any here, but in our own time we have poked so many jibbooms into nooks and corners where they didn't belong that we are prepared to take his word that he was mate in the Abbie L. Andrews at the time he says. If he wasn't a good man he would have enough alibis to make it all seem like a pleasant dream even to the captain who had to pay for the damage. But Mr. Ember tells the truth and shames the devil. We believe him, and wish him luck. If there was any insurance claim over the incident an "instrument of protest" might be on file at Erie, Pa., which would give the name of the mate officiating.

The Abbie L. Andrews came to Toronto at the end of the coal strike of 1902 and helped avert a famine. Capt. Boland may have been in her then. We don't know. All her topmasts were housed for about eight feet below the trestletrees, to save weight aloft and stiffen the lower mastheads against the tug of the stays and the peak halliards. She had then no mizzen gafftopsail, and the story went that when she was new her captain's son had been killed by a fall from the mizzen crosstrees, and his father had never allowed a man to go aloft on the mizzen afterwards, and had dispensed with the topsail.

When we saw her five or six years later she was sailed by Capt. John Joyce of Bronte, and perhaps owned by him, and her rig had been further reduced. Her jibboom had been shortened — was this the souvenir of the unhappy landing at the Erie elevator?—and her fore and main topmasts had been shortened too. Her mizzen topmast was gone altogether, and the lowermast replaced by an iron pole mast from a steamer, with an iron pulley block, seemingly there for keeps, above the peak halliards. It clanged like the crack of doom against the iron mast when she was rolling, and so maintained a perpetual knell for the boy who fell from aloft 40 years before.

Capt. Joyce kept her toddling profitably for a number of years, in the Kingston-Oswego coal trade, up to about the time of the Great War. Our impression is that she was laid up at Kingston ultimately and allowed to sink, either at Portsmouth or in the old boneyard above the Tete du Pont bridge over the Cataraqui River. But the Canadian register still carried her in 1925 as "Schooner Abbie L. Andrews of Kingston, built at Toledo, O., 1873, length 138.7, beam 26.1, depth 11.1, 287 tons register, managing owner, James M. Ferguson, Cobourg, Ont."

HE HAS THE ANSWERS

Another hail in our lake letter box is from Windsor, not the royal castle on the Thames, but from Harry B. Smith, 373 Oak ave., in the Canadian city.

"I have long been an admirer of, and deeply interested in, your Schooner Days' articles. Many times I have had the urge to drop a line to you; however, not so till now, prompted by your last issue of March 17.

"Your informant regarding the Empress of India, lastly named Frontier, is quite correct in saying that she was dismantled in Detroit, and that her remains lay in what was a big marsh below Windmill Point at the source of the Detroit River, from Lake St. Clair. She was brought to the city of Chatham with the intention of running her from that city to Detroit, but she lay at the dock for a long time, where she finally sank. It was from here that she was raised and towed to Detroit for scrapping. It was a sorry spectacle for me to see this once proud vessel awash as I knew her well during better days.

"Relative to the Grampian and Scotia, I trust that the following will be of interest:

"Grampian was built in year 1894, at West Bay City, Michigan, by James Davidson. Her keel length was 218 feet; beam 38 feet; depth 14 feet. Gross tons 844 sand net 802.

"Scotia was built in year 1873 at Buffalo, N.Y. for James A. White. Her keel length was 210 feet; beam 34 feet, and depth 15 feet. Gross tons 903 and net tons 858.

"Your reproduction of the painting by Mr. L. G. Wilson. Fair Haven, Mich., of the barquentine Scotia is especially good, proving his ability as you say.

"You may be interested in knowing that the writer was managing owner of the Detroit-Wallaceburg Line, a one-day passenger business out of Detroit, which I opened in 1914 with the Str. Pelee. The following year I put the Olcott on the route, which, you will recall, operated on the Toronto-Olcott run for a number of years previous. She was taken for war purposes in year 1917, when I delivered her at New York, via way of the St. Lawrence, where she was converted into a shole draft tug, for use overseas. In 1918 I brought the "Thousand Islander" here, and ran her on alternate days out of Detroit, to Wallaceburg and Chatham. I sold my interest in the line to the CSL in 1920 and they continued operating on the route for a few years, and for a time I managed the business for them. The Thousand Islander ended her days in Lake Huron, as you no doubt know how and when."

THE ABBIE L. ANDREWS in the Eastern Gap, Toronto, forty years ago.