End of the "Non": Schooner Days MCCXVI (1216)

by C. H. J. Snider

"WHAT became of the Nonchalant, that RCYC Queen with lightning grease on her keel?" was asked the other day.

The querist was correct in the description. This Nonchalant in 1948 established a record under sail unequalled in the 277 years in which the "inland ocean" of Ontario has been navigated. She made a circuit 400 miles by the taffrail log, up and down and around and across the lake in the Snyder Trophy international race of seven years ago, maintaining a speed of 9 knots for 42 hours, finishing the race hours ahead of her nearest competitor.

Commercial schooners, other yachts, and the Non herself have of course often gone faster than 9 miles an hour. But to our knowledge no sailing vessel on the lakes ever sailed 400 miles in 42 hours before, and it is good betting none ever will.

At the Shellbacks Club recently a quiet well-spoken guest unconsciously gave the answer to the opening question. He was Capt. Arthur Scott, well-known master of one of the RCYC passenger launches. Something like this:

"Best break I've had in 28 years seagoing was in '52 when Commodore Hahn let me have the Nonchalant's hull very reasonable, after dismantling her. His health had forced him to give up sailing.

"I took what was left of her to Fortune Bay in Newfoundland - that's my home, or near it - in a voyage of 1,800 miles, under a jury rig and engine.

"With my brothers we did well with her coasting next year. So well that next year we put in a new and more powerful engine and re-rigged her.

"I came back to the launches here for the summer season and they worked her carrying fish and freight and survey parties and on fishery inspection service so that she grossed $12,000 last year.

"At the end of the launch season I went back to Newfoundland, for we had some more work for the Non that promised to be profitable, getting out survey parties and their equipment at the end of the year.

"We were making slow time in a December gale, blowing 45 miles an hour, on the way to Grand Bank.

"After dinner the engineer said he smelt smoke, as if the muffler was running hot. The exhaust was cold, but when we looked below there was smoke all right, so thick you couldn't see anything else.

"We jumped for the fire extinguishers, both hand and power. We had had to make a right-angled elbow for the exhaust when the new engine was installed, and that was where the trouble was. The exhaust worked all right all season, but the elbow was red hot now and had set fire to a mattress.

"We played the extinguishers until they gave out. Then we tried the fire pump. There were fuel tanks below, and a drum of oil on deck. We kept the fire from the tanks and dumped the drum overboard. But in doing that some oil must have been spilt, for the deck began to blaze furiously.

"Then the engine conked and the firepump gave out, and we had to abandon ship.

"It was blowing hard from the nor'west, snowing, and the thermometer at 25 degrees. We got the dory over the side and all four of us jumped into it just as we were - no time even for oil skins. As we pulled clear the tank below exploded, flying through the deck 90 feet in the air.

"All we could do after that was watch her burn.

"You can't leave your vessel to become a menace to navigation. We had to wait until she burned and sank. She was making so much smoke we couldn't lie to leeward of her, we had to keep on the windward side.

"It was really dreadful to watch her burning agonies, like Joan of Arc at the stake. It was horrible that she burned so long before she died. Her lovely mahogany planking burned fastest and fell away from the flaming ribs in hissing embers.

"Then we cold see her frames burn down, down to the water level, and drop off as she rolled. Her main timbers, like the stem and clamp and covering-board, lasted longer. She rolled and writhed, shipping water through the gaps the flames had made in her sides, until all at once seemed to try to leap out of her torment.

"Her flaming stem shot up like an upflung arm, and she fell over on her back and went down stern first.

"There we were in a 16 foot dory, twenty miles from anywhere, in a December gale, filling up with snow and icing with spray from every wave.

"But we were lucky. Had we made better time and been ten miles farther along no one could have seen us from the land. Had we made less flame and smoke they couldn't have got a bearing on our position.

"But two fishing boats did and they were coming for us all out, though of course they couldn't see us, nor we them. Our dory was just a small dot in the Atlantic-but they picked us up.

"None too soon, for the gale shifted and blew from the nor'east, 60 miles an hour, and the temperature dropped to 8 above zero. That would have done for us."

"Well- that is what became of the Non, as all who knew her and loved her called her. She was originally a "New York fifty" in a one-design class of tall racing sloops of 50 foot waterline. They were designed by the great Nathaniel Herreshoff as a half-scale study for the defender Resolute in the impending American's Cup contest. In the interim these "fifties" had some wonderful racing in the New Yacht Club on Long Island Sound. After the war the class was broken up being rerigged for cruising purposes as ketches and schooners. They changed their names as well as their rigs. The sloop Harpoon was changed to the ketch Nonchalant. So she became the property of Major Jas. E Hahn, DSO, MC,and was brought to him to Toronto and raced with increasing success for 20 years.