Gale Filled Ocean (It’s a Fact) - in 1891: Schooner Days MLIX (1059)

by C. H. J. Snider

Old Warior's Young Cruise - V.

THE TELEGRAM of Friday, July 3, 1891, said that the waves were 15 feet high on the waterfront that day. This may be doubted, but they did great damage. The wind was strong on-shore, from the south and southwest and the waves came over the island like great snowdrifts. People were blown or washed from wharves. A man named Hynds was so lost from Milloy’s wharf at the foot of Yonge st. New wharfage at Lorne st. was destroyed, and so was the old wharf at the foot of Dufferin st. The CPR had a lot of new crib-work on the waterfront, and the schooner Brothers of Bronte blew on to it and was damaged.

The steamer Eurydice, trying to dock after a vain attempt at salvaging the stranded propeller Ocean, had her starboard paddlebox stove in and had to be drydocked. The Macassa was delayed two hours and lost her funnel when she did start out. The Cibola could not make her trip to Niagara. Many picnics and excursions were cancelled. Lorne Park, a great picnic area, was a shambles of wrecked wharves and yachts. The cutter yacht Cyprus, built in Scotland, parted her moorings in Toronto Bay and blew on to the waterworks cribs. A YMCA yacht was blown ashore at Dean’s at Sunnyside. Highsided ferries like double-ended, double-deckers Primrose and the Mayflower dared not leave their wharves. But the little low Luella and Mascotte and John Hanlan made their island trips.

Down at Port Union, 14 miles east of the city, the large propeller Ocean, which had grounded, podded so hard on the bottom that she had to be scuttled. Waves poured over her, damaging her upper works, and a wrecking tug and lighter were required to get her off the following week. Upbound from Montreal, with thirty passengers, the Ocean had grounded in a fog at evening on the day before the gale. The passengers were landed by the propeller’s boats at Port Union and brought in by train with no mishaps. The Ocean had to be well built to withstand the buffeting she had to take before release.

She was indeed a well built vessel. Much better looking than her picture. She survived to carry passengers to the World’s Fair in 1893, and was burned some years later.

IT was high time indeed that the seven hungry RMC cadets who came into Toronto on the wings of the great gale of July, 1891, should communicate with their friends. The papers were full of the assumed loss of the yacht Mary, with all hands, in the lake. A nameboard with “Mary” on it had been washed ashore, and it appeared to have belonged to a yacht.

There was a Hamilton yacht named the Mary at this time. She became a stonehooker and toiled at that trade until 1896, when she became a boathouse, or a floating paint shop advertising that highly articulate remedy HUTCH.

But the cadets’ yacht was also Mary, hailing from Kingston. The boys didn’t know that they had lost a nameboard in the gale, nor that their friends were frantic, and at this date we do not know what Mary had been robbed of her designation. But the upshot was that six of these RMC argonauts who had friends in Toronto or thereabout, leaving their shipmate Jim Farley — the present Major J. J. B. Farley, of Kenya Colony — to sail back with the Kingston captains who owned the Mary and who had brought them on a cruise.

This fitted his program very nicely, for Farley had friends with whom to stay in the Queen City while the Mary refitted, and she would deliver him at his own home in Belleville on her way back to Kingston. He had no idea that the Mary’s nameboard had been picked up or that his friends were frantic over her supposed loss.