M. D. Commodores Century Apart: Schooner Days MLXI (1061)

by C. H. J. Snider

IT would be worth being 120 or 130 years old now to have sailed with Commodore Hodder, chief of the Royal Canadian Yacht Club in 1856, one of the original members and commodore afterwards at intervals up to 1878.

Dr. Hodder was a physician and surgeon. By a happy coincidence his 18th successor in the long line of flag officers of this club, which became 100 years young on the 20th of March, 1952, is also an eminent disciple of Aesculapius, Dr. H. K. Detweiler. He flies his broad-pendant, white with blue cross and red crown and beaver in the good ship Daphne.

Commodore Hodder was a grand figure of a sailor, and a gentleman of the old school. Broadshouldered, broad minded, bearded from ear to ear, heavy moustache. He painted well in his uniform of blue and white silk with the gold shoulder-knots.

He also looked, well in seaboots and sou'wester, for he furrowed Lake Ontario under a press of sail in all weathers—a hundred years ago—in his yacht Cherokee, then in his Breeze, a sloop, which was lost off the mouth of the Humber-nobody drowned—and then in the schooner Geraldine, his last.

There is a model of her in the club. She won the Prince of Wales Cup in 1868, the race being from Toronto to Port Dalhousie and back, it was Dr. Hodder's great pride that Geraldine had downed the Ripple, which had twice won the same race for the Hon. Edward Blake. There were, as may be seen, giants in yachting in those days.

Commodore Hodder's private flag might well have been the skull-and-sawbones, for he came to Upper Canada as Eward M. Hodder, MC, MRCS, and took a part in the advancement of medical science as leading as was his Geraldine in the race for the historic Prince of Wales Cup.

Medicine and hospitalization were both in the rough-and-tough stage when the first York Hospital flourished at the corner of King and John streets—where the graceful Arlington hotel stood later.

We quote: "Dr. Jas. H. Richardson removed by ecrasion the cancerous tongue of Old Tom the janitor, who refused anesthetics, seeing he had borne amputation of a leg after Trafalgar with a nail between his teeth. He gave a responsive groan as the twisted instrument severed the tongue, "You can see the stuff our sailors are made of," remarked the operator. Next morning Old Tom was sitting under the trees smoking his pipe.

"An old soldier acted as dresser. Old Sam, an English jockey with a chronic ulcer and incurable thirst was dispensary roustabout and poultice maker. The two of three experienced nurses were terrors to the patients ... Eliza was the senior on night duty. The patients would allow her to sleep and never say a word.

"An orderly dragged a sufferer exhausted with disease across the threshold and violently dashed water on his person. The same orderly was reprimanded for roughly removing the clothing from a patient with a fractured limb. A monster like this ought not to be tolerated for one day. A nurse whose forte lay in abusing her patients often put an ebemy to her mouth to steal her brains." (Middleton: "Toronto, a History").

Dr. Hodder brought a new and happier note. In 1848 he fought the cholera epidemic in Toronto with intravenous injections of warm milk. He lost one patient, who was moribund when brought to the old hospital, but he saved two by this treatment. From 1834 onwards cholera and ship fever were such a plague in this city sporadically that at times the mayor had to turn out with other volunteers to drive the cholera carts, with sufferers to the hospital and with corpses to the burial pits.

Dr. Hodder founded the Upper Canada College of Medicine in 1850. It was affiliated with Trinity University as a medical faculty. He published the first medical journal in Ontario in 1853. In 1862 he was president of the Medico Chirurgical Society. He was a general practitioner with a very large practice, and specialized in gynaecology. There are living Torontonians in their eighties who are proud of having been brought into the world by Dr. Hodder. He was skillful and most reassuring in the treatment of mothers, and his judgment as to whether a child would live or die was as infallible as Solomon's, though his method was different.

How he found fame between fighting cholera with warm milk, bringing babies into the world, editing a medical journal, and presiding in a surgical society and a university medical faculty, to get sailing in even edgewise, is a mystery. But he did it, and it kept him young.

Once I saw a little book—I would give my last tooth to see it again—in which Dr. Hodder described, port by port, every harbor on Lake Ontario, with practical directions about how to get in or out in different winds. He was, of course, purely a sailing man. In the book he said he had sailed into every harbor on the lake except Port Ontario, and that was decayed and sanded up. It is yet.

Capt David Reynolds, ferry-master of the RCYC, described him so well as he knew him, when he was a young sailor in the 1870's, that one felt he might come aboard the launch for the next trip.

My nearest actual approach was discovering the cabintop of the Geraldine doing duty as a verandah or porch roof over a front door in Port Credit where the old yacht had been broken up. It was about fifteen feet long and half that width, with rounded ends and a scalloped rim below the flat deck of it.

And that was fifty years ago.

COMMODORE DR. HODDER 1856-9, 1862-72, 1874-78

COMMODORE DR. DETWEILER 1951-52