Aboard the TECUMSETH: Schooner Days MCXXXI (1131)

by C. H. J. Snider

"ALL ABOARD" His Majesty's breast-pocket battleship Tecumseth! She lies now at the old Red Wharf, once the naval department jetty, at Penetanguishene.

She was built in the war of 1812 and could be rebuilt in 1954. All of her below the bilges is intact, and a good deal of her larboard topside. The rest of her is still at the bottom of the harbor.

The Royal Canadian Navy, represented by Historian E. C. Russell, with constructor and photographer dashed to Penetang this week for examination of this authentic ancestress, and here is something of what they learned:

Some of her timber is so clean and smooth and fresh that, it shows the lead-penciled angles for the cant-frames, marked 140 years ago. And some planking is so checked and chipped with age and ice and long submersion that it looks, when again wetted, to have been charred by fire for half its thickness. Spikeheads once flush, or countersunk for plugging stand out like rusty goose pimples.

She is 76 feet in length over all and 57 feet in the keel "in the straight," That keel, cut from Welland County white oak 140 years ago, dressed to 11-inch width and 16-inch depth, is today a solid stick of timber as hard as iron, bent only 6 inches with all time's mauling. The only scars on it are where the vanished shoe, or false-keel, held with iron clips, has been torn off in some forgotten stranding.

The rabbet or V-shaped groove in the upper edges of the keel to take the garboards, is as clean cut as though chiseled yesterday. Across the keel, centered on 30 inches, ride 20 pairs of floor timbers, each 11 inches wide, making 22 inches of solid oak and a "room" or interval of 8 inches, and then another pair. Over these the foot square keelson, in three pieces of scarphed oak curving up at stem and stern. The entire strain of recent lifting was on that one timber.

Strong, yes very strongly built is this pocket version of Britain's 19th century wooden walls. Her "scantling" is double that of a commercial vessel of the same length. Her principal deckbeams were a foot square, and all solid oak. Good reason, too, for, being embryo turret ship, her deck had to be framed like the foundations of the Rock of Gibraltar.

Contemporary men-of-war had guns on each side of the ship, their muzzles pointing outboard through ports like thick doors. The schooner Prince Regent, built at Toronto in 1812, had a dozen 6-pounder guns so arranged. She needed a crew of 80 men to handle them. Only half of these guns could concentrate on a target at one time, and their arc of fire was limited to 30 degrees. A whole broadside was only 36 lbs.

This new pocket battler was intended for two heavy long-guns Weighing a couple of tons apiece, throwing 24-lb balls two miles. The guns were "staggered," one on the starboard bow, the other on the port side, almost amidships. They controlled an effective arc of fire of 300 degrees. Both could be swung completely around. They traveled on "circles," tracks 10 feet in diameter, centered on the heaviest of the deck beams. This is the essence of the modern turret system of naval gunfire, where the heaviest guns are fired singly or in small groups from heavily armored revolving platforms in different parts of the ship.

Farther aft our pocket model had two 32-pounder carronades of heavier calibre and shorter range and arc of fire.

All four guns were fired over, not through, the bulwarks. There were no heavy-lidded ports to be opened and triced up, or closed and secured, or to catch fire. None of the guns had to be run in or run out for loading or reloading.

There were no heavy bulwarks, either, walling in the fighting deck shoulder high with solid wood a foot thick — stopping grapeshot and musket balls but showering gun crews with equally deadly splinters every time a broadside landed.

Like Hitler's vest-pockets this new-looker ignored comfort. There was no provision in her plans for even a capstan or a windlass for weighing the anchor or the guns. Officers, sailors and gunners fought exposed to their shoe tops.

All this ship had around her was a "roughtree" or open rail, supported on stout stanchions. It was not more than two feet above the deck. The deck was girdled with heavy waterways, worked hollow like gutters. Leaden scuppers drained the surplus water, but a sea sweeping the deck could pour out the other side through the open rail as easily as running off a whale's back.

This ship was intended to fight at long range, and she was given a large schooner rig to enable her to choose her own distance and outpoint and outweather a larger enemy if square rigged.