Memorial for a Noble Red Ally: Schooner Days M[C]XXIX (1129)

by C. H. J. Snider

HERE on the beach at Penetanguishene on Georgian Bay lies a rarity—an identifiable pocket battleship, British from stem to gudgeon, and launched 120 years before German naval science "discovered" the idea.

This short, deep, chunky hull at Penetang is one of a pair built at the Navy Yard at Street's Farm, Chippawa, U.C., towards the end of the War of 1812. They served their turn, but were scuppered by the wise and good Rush-Bagot agreement of 1817 and taken to Penetang for burial. We have a picture of them in 1818, mastless and dismantled, right where this one was found this summer. Moreover we have the Admiralty plans, in full detail, upon which they were built. Identification is a mathematical certainty.

BUILT UNDER FIRE

Think, for a moment, how this primal spitfire had to be built.

Canada's situation was as black as the night after Pearl Harbor when the timber for her keel was felled. Britain, hard pressed in the struggle with Napoleon in Europe, had lost every ship she had in the Battle of Lake Erie. Brock, bulwark of Canada's defense, was mouldering in his grave in the captured bastion of Fort George. Tecumseth, his splendid Indian colleague, had been flayed to make razor strops for Kentucky riflemen. The teamsters hauling timber to the improvised navy yard did not know the minute they might be bayonetted by American patrols. The caulkers could not hear the clink of their own mallets for the din of the cannonade and musketry fire of the long siege of Fort Erie, nearby. Britain was holding the line on Lake Ontario, but all west of Niagara was lost without new ships for Lake Erie and the great North.

In such grim circumstances Canadian carpenters, more used to notching log cabin sills than scarphing keelsons began and finished a perfect new edition of "wooden walls" for old England, where ships had never before been built.

This battle hull, staring at us in sturdy survival 138 years after launching, bears the austerity look of Goebel's guns-or-butter gospel. Strong as an ox she gives proof of building virtually under fire. She had to be rushed into the river to avoid capture on the stocks should the enemy break through. When oak gave out chestnut, ash and elm, growing nearby, was shoved in. In place of curved knees slowly shaped from natural crooks, wedges, were used to tie deck and sides together and support waterways and deckbeams.

There was no figurehead in graceful curves and scrolls, no windowed quarter badge, no padded bulwarks, shoulder high, no heavy-lidded ports. She was merely rimmed with an open rail, simple as a paddock fence, and but 2 feet above the one bare flush deck. Her gun crews and everyone else fought exposed to their shoestrings, with no protection from grapeshot or musketry fire. The great guns, 24-pounders pivoting on circles, 32-pounders training on slides, were fired not through ports but over the low rail. They had double the weight of metal, three times the speed and six times the arc of fire of normal guns.

When this hull was raised on August 29, Schooner Days said it was not the U.S.S. Scorpion's, and was either that of H.M.S. Newash or H.M.S. Tecumseth. This was the pair of twins built as described on the Street farm. The Scorpion was of only half the tonnage of these vessels, and of different construction and was sunk a mile away. Cannonballs and equipment marked with the British broad-arrow, British naval buttons, and a British coin or medal were found under the limberboards of this recovered ship.

HONOR TO THE BRAVE

There are reasons, apart from wishful thinking, for believing that this is the Tecumseth, one of the twins, both of which were named for Indian chiefs. One would like to pay honor to the memory of this wise, humane warrior who told a little boy, on the morning of his last battle to "go away far for bad men are coming here."

When writing of Queenston Heights space did not permit justice to the services of the Indians in that tragic triumph for Canadian arms. While Britain and Canada mourned Brock and Canada and York mourned Brock's aide, young John MacDonell, colonel and attorney-general at 25, the lodges of the Long House bewailed their own casualties.

Ta-Kanentyne, war chief of the Onondagas, Ayenate and Kayentatirhon, chiefs of the Cayugas — weary not at the hard names; these men were brave—were killed there. Thenyawegna, another Cayuga, served through the Niagara campaign, and had two brothers killed in it. He became principal chief of his nation, but, like Tecumseth and other red heroes who lived or died for Canada, he never had a vote.

Brock regarded Tecumseth, the Crouching Panther, as a brother. "A more sagacious or a more gallant warrior does not, I believe, exist," he wrote.

Tecumseth said of Brock: "Here is A Man!"

Had this gallant couple lived for even ten years longer this continent's history, white and red, would have been the nobler.

Tecumseth fell in battle against Canada's foes a twelvemonth after Brock. Two of his brothers had already been killed fighting. It was at Moraviantown, Oct. 5, 1813. Here Major General Procter saved his own hide by running away. The Indian casualties were again heavy. There is a chance that the dead chief flayed by the Kentucky riflemen was another, mistaken for Tecumseth, but the white savages who boasted of this indecency insisted that Tecumseth was their victim. The Crouching Panther's body was buried afterwards in Walpole- Island, so secretly that only Indians know exactly where.

Tecumseth is worthy of a resting place beside Brock and MacDonell under the great column lording it above Niagara's flood. Preservation and restoration of the pocket battleship named after him would be graceful recognition of a great hero in Canada's history.