Cannon Packing Grandma of RCN?: Schooner Days MCXXXIX (1139)

by C. H. J. Snider

Unburied at Kingston

HAPPY NEW YEAR—Still, we hope!

If, and it is a little if, the ship's prow fortunately recovered by Ronald Way, director of Fort Henry museum, from under the ruins of Cataraqui Dec. 16 last, is not the French schooner La Hurault's, whose is it?

Only reason for hesitating to accept the prow fragment as the remains of the 12-gun Hurault is that the step of the foremast does not appear. The fragment is only 8 feet long, and the explanation could be that the mast step was farther aft than that, and now buried under concrete.

Labroquerie's careful sketch of La Hurault, his own command, shows her foremast, like the foremasts of all the French schooners and captured English two-masters in the drawing, to be perpendicular and "right in the eyes of her." This would bring the mast-step within three feet of the stem of the vessel.

The foremast step of the Tecumseth, raised last summer at Penetang, was in that position. It, had disappeared, but where it had been was discernible.

Labroquerie's sketches of four sloops on his chart, including the captured Ontario, show all with sharply raking masts, stepped considerably farther aft from the stem than the schooner's. If the eight feet of the prow recovered does not show a mast step in that length, may it not, then belong to a sloop rather than a schooner?

RCN's GREAT GRANDMOTHER

Could this fragment be the forefoot of His Britannic Majesty's 60-ton sloop Ontario, first of several warships and many commercial vessels to bear the name?

That 10-gun sloop was the canvas-backed godmother of this province, earlier called Canada West and still earlier Upper Canada. She was also the grand ancestress of the Royal Canadian Navy, and of its 1954 pride and joy, the world-girdling 10,000-ton turbine driven cruiser HMCS Ontario, queen of the Pacific since the Korean war began.

The sailing sloop Ontario, with one tall raking mast, a cocked-up stern overhung by a long mainboom, stretching a big mainsail matched by a high-steeved bowsprit with three jibs on it, was the first British decked vessel on any of the Great Lakes of America, the firstborn cannon-carrier of HM. Provincial Marine. That force, after fighting four wars in sixty years submerged under the Royal Navy and disarmament agreements early in the 19th century. It surfaced as the RCN through the Statue of Westminster in 1925.

This first Ontario was launched from the King's shipyard at Oswego, then a British post, on June 28, 1755. She had been intended for a 14-gun brig, square-rigged on two masts. The historian, Mante, indeed, says she was launched as such. Too many square patches of canvas, too much hardware, for her 43-foot keel. It was resolved to make a schooner of her, but Gen. Shirley ordered her to be a sloop.

Backing and filling like this on everything was, what cost Britain Oswego, but the Ontario sailed so well that Broadley, the new-come commodore, had his flagship, her sister the schooner Oswego, re-rigged as a sloop, too.

SPITFIRE

When the French attacked Oswego, the Ontario went out and engaged their siege batteries. She had only five 4-pounders instead of her proper armament of ten 8-pounders. She had been robbed to fit out the still incomplete brigantine London, which needed 16 guns. She did what she could with her popguns, until a French 12-pound shot went through the main beam which tied her together, and she was barely able to crawl back into the harbor. Here she was surrendered the next day, with the London and the whole of the mishandled fleet.

That is how the Ontario came to be at Cataraqui, under the guns of Fort Frontenac, when Bradstreet took the place by a lightning stroke two years later, and squared the yards for the Oswego disaster. The Ontario was one of the British prizes, lying dismantled at the wharf whose charred ruins are being explored by Ronald Way. He has had glimpses of three charred hulls among the concrete piers of the rising Defense College. There is probability that the Ontario's is one of these, and a possibility that hers was the hull from which the prow fragment was recovered. Because—

WHERE ARE THESE PLANS?

Commodore Keppel, later Viscount and First Lord of the Admiralty, supplied the plans for the Ontario and Oswego. They were criticized as being "so full-built that they will not sail (but) before the wind." The sloops worked to windward so poorly that false keels did have to be added; after which they were able to outsail the larger French vessel.

The prow fragment recovered at Kingston Dec. 16 is noticeably "full built" or blunt, and the piece of keel recovered projects so little below the bottom that an extension or false keel seems necessary. One might be found, if excavation farther back were possible. The keelson above the keel has been traced for 40 feet. It had to be cut through there. Examination of the underside of the keel is impossible because of new-laid concrete piers.

Here comes a flaw in the Ontario suggestion. The cutting for the piers shows that the sides of the ship were 20 feet apart. As the Ontario's shattered "main beam" was only 15 feet across, either the loosened hull has spread 5 feet under the pressure of time and the 10-ft fill superimposed by a hundred years of dumping-or it is not the Ontario's.

It could be the London's, if it is not La Hurault's. That possibility will be explored next.

60-TON ANCESTRESS OF 10,000-TON CRUISER

SLOOP ONTARIO, with two small schooners, as indicated by Captaine Labroquerie in 1757. Labroquerie fought the Ontario in his own ship, La Hurault, in 1756.