The Ghost at the Door: Schooner Days MLX (1060)

by C. H. J. Snider

Old Warior's Young Cruise - VI.

THE departure from Toronto of the "missing" yacht Mary in July, 1891 was much less dramatic than her arrival during the bad gale. On the morning of the third day, the Mary pushed out of her former berth, astern of the hospitable Oriole. They tried, with their dinghy, to recover the anchor they had buoyed and slipped. The buoy which was only some scraps from a packing box, snatched up in a hurry, had come adrift, and the anchor rope had sunk. Good old Capt. Dick Fugler of the Oriole, however, lent them a grapnel, and after a while they picked up the mooring line and anchor. Then they were invited to lunch aboard the Oriole, and after that with tight belts, and little breeze they steered out of the Eastern Gap for home.

They were becalmed all night in the lake and did not get into Port Hope until eleven the next night.

"It was so dark," recalls Major Farley, the only one of the RMC cadets left aboard, the others having gone to their homes, "that you could not see a thing till you hit it. Having moored at the wharf, by feeling we hung up a riding light and trooped up to the town to see if we could get some milk, for we wanted to make cocoa.

Nick and George Henderson, the captain brethren, knew Port Hope so well they could have found the place blindfold. There was not a light showing, but after a furious hammering on an invisible door a head popped out of a window above and a voice wanted to know what was wanted. The Hendersons had come to the right place, for they got the milk, and the party stumbled back to the waterfront and the Mary's guiding lantern. This was, of course, years before the invention of flashlights and electric torches.

LET YOUR LIGHT SO SHINE

The riding light was the only lantern the Mary had, Nick took it down for just long enough to see to make the cocoa. He told the young cadet it was not a sailorly thing to do, but there was no likelihood of danger, no shipping entering or leaving harbor, nothing moving, and they were perfectly safe.

So by the light of the glim the cocoa was made. One of them had just picked up the saucepan to pour it out when the Mary received a terrific blow, as from a giant pile-driver. She surged forward several yards and everything in the cabin shot everywhere. Billy Bates, the hired boy, grabbed the lantern as it was going over, and young Farley valiantly saved the hard won cocoa. Followed a crash, on deck as the topmast and a tangled mass of rigging dame down.

All scrambled out of the cabin to find a huge mass like a house or a mountain towering over them. It was the 300-ton lake schooner Vienna of Port Burwell. Her crew had been warping her out with ropes along the wharf, and saw nothing of the Mary in the pitch blackness. The Vienna's anchor, hanging over the port bow, caught in the Mary's topmast rigging and tore the topmast down.

There was no sailor talk, blasphemy or bad language. Everybody was in the wrong, and knew it, for neither vessel was showing any light. Billy Bates, fending off with a pikepole and the strength of ten men, turned a somersault into a school of dead shad. That broke the tension. Everybody laughed and kept on laughing. Except Cadet Farley, when he discovered that William had been wearing his, Farley's, one dry shirt and his newly polished shoes.

CLIMAX OF DISASTER

This was forgiven, but worse was yet to come. Reaching Belleville two days later, the Hendersons ran the Mary aground trying to reach the wharf. Many strangers do, entering Belleville, but Farley, who knew the harbor, had just warned of the danger.

He was dressed for going ashore, his new suit of blue serge never before donned covering the deficiencies of his soiled shirt. While trying to help heave the yacht off, a rope slipped and it was his turn to go base over apex into the drink. When he scrambled out the captain told him to climb to the crosstrees to help rock the yacht while they hove on her. It was bitter cold up there in wet clothes in the chill breeze of dawn, but after some more efforts she slipped off, Farley was put ashore in the dinghy, and the Mary, as if affronted at Belleville's rude treatment, stood on for Kingston.

To his uncle's home in. Belleville young Farley, repaired, still dripping, with his hair plastered over his forehead. The sun was scarcely above the horizon when he rang the bell. The maid came, hastily adjusting her cap. She turned the knob, took one look at him, and, bolted for the kitchen, screaming. "Master Jim's ghost's at the front door!" They all thought he had been, drowned in the Mary.

It was only then that he learned that the Mary's nameboard had been found, and that she was supposed lost with all hands. Poor Col. McGill, commanding at RMC, still had the flag at half mast for his cadets when the Mary, herself, minus all her cadets now, sailed jauntily into Kingston next morning.