First H.M.C.S. Huron Smashed the Reds: Schooner Days MXVI (1016)

by C. H. J. Snider

An Acorn of the R.C.N.

AUGUST cables from Japan mention HMCS Huron, destroyer, turning up a Russian merchantman in her Korean patrols with the United Nations force consisting of the British carrier Glory, U.S. carrier Sicily and Australian and Netherlands warships.

Fast company this for our young beaver kitten of a navy. But Huron comes of good stock. Her name honors Huron county, and Lake Huron, and the first British war-keel to furrow Lake Erie and the Upper Lakes.

A small schooner named Huron was the first western unit of the Provincial Marine, that nubby acorn from which has grown the Royal Canadian Navy. Her dimensions resembled those of the present yacht Kingarvie of Toronto, 60 feet on deck, 16 feet beam, 7 feet depth. Being sharp she could only carry 250 barrels of cargo, but like HMCS Huron of 1951 she packed an awful wallop.

After much physical and spirituous difficulty — Amherst, commander-in-chief, had cracked down on the rum — our first Huron was launched from Navy Island in the Niagara River in 1762. Just in time for a hectic career, forgotten annals of the Provincial Marine show.

Pontiac had leagued a dozen Indian tribes in an effort to throw off the white collar which was strangling red throats. In a swift stroke in 1763 he captured nine of the 11 British western posts. Only Niagara and Detroit held out. Fort Niagara on Lake Ontario was not attacked, but at the Devil's Hole below the falls a waggon convoy of supplies, with twenty odd soldiers was hurled over the bank and two companies of relief infantry were slain to a man.

Detroit was attacked again and again and besieged for six months and if it had not been for a sloop and a schooner of the Provincial Marine the garrison of 130 men would have been starved and slaughtered, and Britain would have lost the whole of the west.

Major Henry Gladwyn, a tough British fighter yet in his thirties, commanded at Detroit. When the little Huron reached him, with her four four-pounders and six swivels, and crew of 12—not large enough to work them all at once—Gladwyn went aboard with reinforcements; and carried the war into Pontiac's camp—literally.

IT was blowing fresh from the northwest. The Huron cracked on sail till her black gun-lips kissed the dancing river water. Gladwyn flogged her upstream, tack and half-tack, long legs and short ones, with her almost standing on her ear.

The Indians saw her coming, her leaning sails brushing the river like wings of a wheeling gull. They hoped she'd capsize—but she didn't. They hoped she'd run aground, when she came boiling inshore with her bowsprit spearing the bank—but she didn't. She spun 'round, her stout new sails thundering and banging like cannon shots. When she filled away on the new tack offshore Pontiac got more noise and more than noise, a blast from everything the Huron had that would go off—carriage guns, swivels with grapeshot, muskets and flintlock pistols. This hurricane slashed through the forest boughs and wrecked the redskins' camp and village.

Pontiac's squaws had to move the whole works across the river. He established a new camp behind a swamp on the other side, out of gunshot. He built great fire rafts three times, to destroy the Huron as she lay at anchor guarding the fort. Three nights in succession her crew fended them off.

Relieved by the big fat sloop Michegon as guardship, the Huron was sent back to Niagara for reinforcement. She could make the round trip in a week, where the Michegon took a month.

When the Huron got back Capt. James Dalyell and troops he had brought had been cut to pieces by Pontiac in an ambush at the Bloody Ridge above the fort. She had to go right back to Niagara for more powder. This time on her return she was waylaid by 350 Indians in canoes at the river mouth.

The attack was made at night on Sept. 3, as she lay at anchor, waiting for wind to drive her up against the current. Her hatches had been battened down, her bulwarks heightened by a thick hedge of evergreens planted upside down in holes in the rail, and a tarred boarding netting was triced up over her like a circus tent.

The watch saw the red flotilla coming in the dark and fired the four-pounder into it, but the balls flew over and the canoes swarmed in under the bow and quarters, and redskins went up her sides and rigging like ants at a sugarbowl.

Capt. Horst, the master, and his crew of 11, plied spears and pikes and cutlasses and killed fourteen Indians, outside the netting. But some hacked their way through with tomahawks, and a mob reached the deck. They killed Capt. Horst and two of the tars, and four more seamen were knocked out with wounds. When all seemed lost, Jacobs, the mate, roared out in Wyandot: "Blow her up! Blow her up! Blow her up! Jump for your lives! I'm shooting into the powder!"

His surviving crew could not understand—as was intended—but the Indians did. Wyandots, Potawatomi, Ojibways and Ottawas tumbled back into their canoes and paddled off without reasoning why they had understood the supposed order.

The six British tars left able to fight made mincemeat of the Indians remaining on board. Getting a good breeze, they hoisted sail and came storming up the river in the flush of dawn. Their hands and heads and bodies were smeared with blood and clotted with gore, for the clothes had been torn off their backs in the hand-to-hand struggle. The gasping garrison thought the schooner had been captured, and that Indians were using her in a stratagem to take the fort at the water gate. British cheers and eight dead Indians under the torn boarding netting quickly reassured them.

Amherst, far away in New York, made proclamation in the gazette of the "Bravery of the crew of the Schooner on Lake Erie" and each man of the Huron was given a medal to wear around his neck on a ribbon. Officers in the fort stripped off their own medals for the purpose.

Pontiac wilily talked of burying the hatchet, and the siege of Detroit was lifted by degrees, as his horde went off for the seasonal hunting. But the war was not over. Pontiac shifted it to Pennsylvania. It raged for two years longer there, burning and slaughtering in the frontier settlements panicking the people into riots and reprisals and recriminations, nourishing the seeds of the American Revolution. But Detroit was not molested further. The Huron had settled that.

Jacobs, the daredevil mate, succeeded to the command of the Huron. He lost the little ship and his own life by his recklessness. He refused to take in more ballast, being proud of her fast passages. She capsized and went down with all hands in a gale, on the north shore of Lake Erie.

SAFE AT ANCHOR, ESCAPING MASSACRE

His Majesty's Provincial Marine Schooner HURON as drawn by Geo. A. Cuthbertson for "Freshwater."