From "16" to Africa by Brigantine: Schooner Days MCXLI (1141)

by C. H. J. Snider

HAPPIEST discovery of 1954 is that sympathetic saga of an Ontario port, "Oakville and the Sixteen" by Hazel C. Mathews. With its frank recognition of the part little harbors and wind-filled sails played in making our province the core of Canada.

That is not Mrs. Mathews' thesis, but it is implied in it. She charmingly develops all the factors which made out of a bar bound creekmouth the coming city of Oakville. She has neglected no feature in the 150 years of the area's development, least of all the human element. She has assembled the materials of a great Canadian novel. What appeals most to the compiler of Schooner Days is the forthright treatment of topsail times on the Great Lakes.

This starts with the very cover, at the very top of the cover, even above the title. There blazes, in full color, another brigantine.

This one is dashing past a signal mast on a height, with the, British ensign, flaming at her main truck. She is evidently coming into a strange port from afar—how far?—and identifying herself.

Fifty years ago any Ontario sailor would have told you: "Darned if I know what that place is, but that's a brigantine, and I'll bet you she's an Oakville vessel. Look at the spread between the spars, and the mainmast raking more than the foremast! Look at the paint—all white, but with five stripes of green and red between her rail and her fender-strake! And look at the trailboards sweeping back from the figurehead on the long clipper cutwater! That's the way they finished vessels from the Sixteen in the good old Reciprocity Days after the Crimean War. Why—"

And he would be so right.

The cover design is a contemporary picture of the 105 ft. brigantine Sea Gull, built in Oakville in 1864, which sailed a thousand miles around the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa, and was back in Toronto in thirteen months. Frank Jackman, Sr., of Toronto, and John Murray, founder of the present Murray House, Oakville, were her owners. Both were lake master-mariners. Jackman went as captain, Capt. Murray as mate.

The picture is a reproduction of one of second engineer Charlie (C. I.) Gibbons' many colored crayon portraits of that famous vessel. This one belongs to Mr. George Ingleby, Toronto. It was drawn by Gibbons after the Sea Gull came hack. It has lost none of its brilliancy and none of its accuracy in the reproduction. Gibbons had to be correct in every detail, or his connoisseur customers, all sailors, would not buy. He sometimes got $5 for a picture as large as this; sometimes $1.

The Sea Gull, first rigged as a schooner, was re-rigged as a brigantine in 1865, for ocean navigation. The difference was that he had a tier of square sails on the foremast, and a tier of triangular staysails on the main replaced the gaff-and-boom foresail arid triangular gafftopsail with which she was schooner? rigged.

The brigantine took a cargo of farm implements, prefabricated houses, buggies and lumber out to the settlers in the new British colony of Natal, beyond Johannesburg, on the east coast of Africa. The consignors were Davids and Co., of Toronto, and she loaded at the old Queen's Wharf.

Gibbon's portraits of her show her crossing the bar at Port Natal, the first vessel to do so without a pilot and under her own power. That was something the two lake captains, who had never been on saltwater before, were very proud about; much more than about the long successful voyage of thirteen months. They came back to Boston with molasses, sugar, wool, pepper and a little ivory. Also a little South African rum. They reached home, Toronto, with a cargo of cordwood from Kingston, then used for steamboat and locomotive fuel. They were out for freights, not high adventure, though they had plenty of both.

This Sea Gull picture keys the approach of Mrs. Mathews to the life of Oakville and the important little creek whose very name is now only remembered by a few. Her book "has everything" for everybody, yachts for yachtsmen, shipping lists and masters' enrollments for the sailors, family and economic history for the student, adventure and interest for all. It is waterborn and waterborne Ontario, in 500 pages packed with pictures by word and pen and brush and camera. The University of Toronto Press which published it scored a triumph in attractive bookmaking.

A page from the log of the SEAGULL's voyage home from South Africa.