Cooking on an Acorn: Schooner Days MLIII (1053)

by C. H. J. Snider

WHEN I was fifteen," Constable Samuel Charles McIlwain, of the Ontario Provincial Police said, "when I was 15, I signed on with Capt. Sainsbury on the schooner Acorn, 92 tons register, owned by John Lydon the mayor of Port Hope.

"I was the cook, at $5 a month, and a dang good one, too, if I do say so, while I had anything to cook with. We lived like fighting cocks, better than in the $1 a day hotels in those days; three hot meals a day and a midnight lunch.

"This old Acorn was a standing-keel vessel, being built in 1844, before centreboards were much used. Hacker of Port Hope, grandfather of Controller Albert Hacker of Toronto, built her. Having no board she would make leeway to beat the devil in a headwind. It was quite a job to make her tack at all, with a high deckload of lumber holding her back.

LIGHTNING BURNED WATER

"It was in the spring of 1864, and we were carrying lumber from Port Hope to Clayton, N.Y., on the other side. On our way were struck by a squall and had to run under bare poles. The lightning was tremendous. You could hear it sizzle as it struck the water all around us.

"When the squall blew out we were caught in a calm and fog settled down for hours. It was on a Sunday, and we could hear the church bells ringing on shore, but we couldn't get the captain to risk trying to get in by going it blind.

"When the fog lifted we were right in close to the bluffs. We had run past the harbor, wherever it was, and had to turn around and head back. Before we could make it the fog came down again, and again we were caught blindfold, and beaten about in squalls, calms and fogs, until we didn't know where we were. We ran out of food, and were living on boiled turnips and salt and pepper. Something went wrong with the compass, so that the needle just spun around. And on top of that we bad burned our last drop of oil, had neither binnacle light nor sidelights or even a torch.

"At two o'clock in the morning, with it blowing hard, we piled on rocks with a crash. Our deckload shifted and washed overboard, the Acorn pounded up and down and burst like a nutshell under a hammer. We could see big low rocks in the glare of the lightning, and managed to reach them, Capt. Sainsbury, Al Sainsbury, the mate, three men and myself.

STARVING ON DUCKS

"In the morning we saw the lake covered, with our wreckage and lumber scattered all over, and nothing under us but rocks, bare as a desert. The Ducks, the captain called the place. Main Duck or False Duck, I don't know which, but there was just nothing there but lake water. The main shore was miles away.

"We had been without food for sixty hours when we sighted a sidewheel steamer coming. She was either the Spartan or Corinthian of the Royal Mail Line. They all burned wood then to make steam, and she had put in at a woodpile, either Presquile or Point Traverse, to fill up. We hooted and yelled and tied a shirt at the end of a plank and stood it up on top of the rocks.

"They saw us, but couldn't get in close enough to take us off. But they lowered a boat, and we were picked up, but they couldn't give us much to eat. We were famished when they landed us in Kingston.

GIVEN UP

"When I came back to Port Hope everyone was surprised to see me. They thought we were all drowned. I did some dockwalloping and lumber shoving at 15 cents an hour; $1.50 for a 10-hour working day, and I mean working. Capt. Haddon of the schooner Admiral which we were loading, a big black 3-master that took 250,000 feet of lumber, told me Capt. Williams was looking for a cook.

"So I signed on with Capt. Bob Williams (he was later the Toronto ferry commodore) on the Homeward Bound of Newcastle. She was a 3-masted schooner, square rigged forward; had a captain, first and second mates, and nine men including me. It was a pretty big job; to cook for that lot, but I had a cookee to help me, and got $15 a month. We always had good meals, and plum duff on Sundays. It was too much work to stone the raisins, so they just had to spit out the seeds. The boys were all fond of my shortbread, too.

"The Homeward Bound would carry 160,000 of lumber, while the Acorn only carried 60,000. We were running lumber from Toronto to Clayton, and we took a lot of oak timber too, from the Oak Ridges up Yonge st.

BOUNTY JUMPING

"In Clayton next spring—this was just at the end of the American War—I did a foolish thing. With another lad we skipped out of the Homeward Bound and bummed our way to Rochester, where I had a brother living. They were still offering a bounty of $300 for recruits for the Northern armies, and we thought it would be a good idea to collect it. We knew fellows had done that over and over again, jumping the troop trains and deserting, to join again at some other place, get the bounty, and desert again. And some got shot or killed at this dirty trick, and I must say it served them right. But lots of others gave Uncle Sam good value for his $300, for they served faithfully in a tough war they didn't have to fight in, being Canadians. Eighteen thousand Canadian volunteers were killed in the war, and these boys weren't bounty jumpers.

"It took us three days to go from Clayton to Rochester, but we had a good trip. We hadn't a cent when we left the Homeward Bound. We would walk, or hook a ride on the railway, and beg our meals, and we were never once turned down. We were going to enlist in Rochester and get $600 between us.

"We promised ourselves we would give value for the money and not be bounty jumpers or deserters, but I can't say whether we would have stood out against the temptation or not. Because when we got to Rochester the bounty was off. Lee had surrendered and the war was over!"