"Toronto Yacht" First of All: Schooner Days ML (1050)

by C. H. J. Snider

WHEN did yachting begin, in Canada? The Royal Canadian Yacht Club's celebration of its centenary this year seems to make the question pertinent.

Ip the 18th century Col. John Graves Simcoe, first lieutenant governor of Upper Canada, ordered a yacht for Lake Ontario, for the use of the civil administration of his newly constituted province. Simcoe had to go home to England in 1796, and the yacht was not completed until 1799.

This yacht was built at the mouth of the Humber River, at the King's sawmill, which supplied the plank and timber for the fort and town of York, established in 1793. She was schooner-rigged, with square topsails, and is believed to, have been a centreboard vessel. If so, she was the first centreboarder on the lakes. She was at least 50 feet on the keel, and was armed with six 4-pounder guns. A small cannonball was picked up in the sand beside a portion of her wreck on the Island shore three years ago.

For twelve years she carried dispatches, troops and stores, judges, generals, and the administrative officers of Upper Canada on their duties. More than once she whisked the gallant Isaac Brock across Lake Ontario. She was wrecked late in 1811, and His Majesty's schooner Prince Regent was built from her salvaged ironwork.

The proper title of this vessel was His Majesty's Provincial Armed Yacht Toronto. Commodore Grant, Administrator of the Province, so referred to her in 1806. But by the official Upper Canada Gazette, and by common usage this had been shortened to the "Toronto Yacht," and so she has been known for a century and a half.

By 1828 the Provincial armed yacht Bullfrog, a cutter of 40 tons, was the Government messenger. This was still "yachting" in the general 18th century acceptance of the term, a royal or official usage begun by Charles II. In Britain few private citizens had their own pleasure craft before the 19th century, although Thomas Bowrey cruised, to the Netherlands in his own yacht, the Duck of London, in 1698. Still fewer had pleasure craft in America before the year 1800.

But by 1832, and perhaps earlier, private yachting had developed on Lake Ontario. In that year Capt. John Elmsley, RN, of Clover Hill in York, son of Chief Justice Elmsley, advertised in the York Sapper and Miner: "For sale, the fast-sailing cutter Dart, 22 1/2 tons burden, with or without rigging, sails and other furniture." She had been built in this town by master carpenter Purkis, from oaks growing on the site of present downtown Toronto. York was so renamed in 1834.

The first captain, or as we would now call him, commodore, of the local yacht club, Thomas J. Robertson, of a present Toronto family, had a cutter named Dart when the club was organized. This may have been Capt. Elmsley's advertised cutter, which would be 20 years old or more in 1852 but still serviceable, being built of oak. We have one fine yacht in the RCYC 40 years old and in A-1 condition. Commodore Robertson also had the yachts Witch and Wave in the first decade of his club's history.

Halifax had organized a yacht club and held a regatta by 1837. By 1852, when the sailing fraternity of the Queen City of the West formed a club in Toronto there were enough yachts already to hold a respectable regatta, and enough members to require club quarters.

The fact that there were 23 yachts ready for enrollment when the present RCYC was organized, March 20, 1852 — we gave their names two months ago — suggests that there may have been a sizable fleet of yachts, unorganized, on Lake Ontario for the preceding twenty years, and perhaps before 1830.

H.M. PROVINCIAL ARMED YACHT TORONTO, 1799