Whose Wreck? Another Found: Schooner Days MXXI (1021)

by C. H. J. Snider

WHO is this sailing along Hubbard boulevard, wung-out with everything drawing? Lifeguard? No, he has no beach parasol. Dick? No, they never move that fast. Schooner captain hustling to get his clearance before closing time?

The quick step, a little wide, to let the deck come to meet it, the swing of the arms, hooked to haul on a rope in a split second, the head held high so the eyes can see the far horizon, all bespeak the schooner skipper. Alackaday, the last schooner clearance for Oswego or "below" was issued forty years ago.

Yet the guess is a good one. This is Kew Williams, youngest of the Williams boys. Joe had the Brothers, Tommy the Highland Beauty, Johnny the Straubenzee, Dave the Speedwell. Kew, the baby, sailed with them all. That's how he got the quick step, the hooked hands, the alert far-horizon look. Touching eighty—you'd never believe it—-after a useful busy life he takes his ease now in doing good to others.

He is the Sage of the Beaches district. Kew Beach bears his name, or he its, for his father, Color Sergeant Joseph Williams of Her Majesty's 100th Regiment of Foot, named both. He had a farm and amusement park there.

He called the place "the Kew" after Kew Gardens, near his native London, and his boys brought stone in their hookers and filled cribs and built a good wharf there from the lake beach, so that steamers could bring down picnic parties from the city and moonlight dance excursions. For people, had to do something with their spare time before they got automobiles, movies, radio or television. Perhaps we should say people had time then to spare for enjoyment.

Kew Williams has been called in consultation this morning on a discovery. He is as prompt as a surgeon in keeping the appointment.

At the foot of Wineva avenue the wash of easterly gales has left visible an area of planking 20 feet long and 10 feet wide, with the promise of more under the sand and the waves.

Can these be the remains of the Fenian Raid tug Robb of which Schooner Days has been talking lately? What vessels were wrecked here, and when? These are questions on which Kew is to be consulted.

The area shows a dozen planks, straight and tight fitted as a floor, with parallel rows of inch-across circles traversing it.

"Those would be the plugs, set in putty or lead, to cover the spike-heads," pronounces Kew. "On the other side of that wreckage you would find the ribs or frames it's fastened to."

"Is it the Robb?"

"Don't look like it to me. See, this is all pine, not oak." He stabs with a sailor's knife and detaches a strip. "Looks more like one of those little hookers that used to work the shore for sand and gravel and hardheads. Some were wrecked along here—the Zebra at Victoria Park, the Defiance and the Rapid City farther down the Highlands, and big vessels like the Dunn and the Sligo were sunk off here when their use was over. This could have washed in from any of them, but it looks like something from one of the scow-built hookers, like the Brothers my brother Joe sailed before I was born. She was blown up at the Exhibition to represent the U.S.S. Maine in 1898.

"There's no telling how far wreckage will travel along the bottom. The bones of the Robb were rooted out by the new waterworks at Victoria Park after being bedded thirty years, and they traveled inch by inch along the bottom till they showed up at the Balmy Beach club, half a mile from where they had been buried. That was in 1942. But this doesn't look like the Robb. Her timbers Were black as bog oak then."

So if anyone has an identification for the Wineva avenue discovery will they please tell Schooner Days?

HAPPY FLASHBACK

MERRYTHOUGHT, R.C.Y.C., Commodore Aemilius Jarvis' cutter, boiling through the Eastern Gap fifty years ago-—This snapshot, handsomely mounted, is a recent present to Schooner Days from a modest admirer whose address we would like.