Flying Scud Flew Far: Schooner Days MCCXXV (1225)

by C. H. J. Snider

"FLYING SCUD, of Bath," she was christened, about the time the American civil war was making money for Canadian lake schooners.

She was one of the many shoal vessels built at the old Loyalist settlement of Bath, on the Adolphustown Reach of the Bay of Quinte, across from Amherst Island, and only nine or ten miles from Kingston.

She came out as a green-hulled, two-masted seven-sailed scow, with a make-believe clipper stem. Capt. John Y. Palmateer, of Point Traverse, of a Guernsey family (his mother was a cousin to Sir Isaac Brock) owned her in 1869. His oldest boy Albert was captain of her, though not yet 21, and Albert's younger brothers, Ephraim and Nelson Palmateer, were his crew.

Nelson, who died 20 years ago, was only 15 when he sailed in the Flying Scud from Picton to Lake Erie. Little vessels made long voyages in those days. The boys went to Ashtabula or Lorain for a cargo of corn, and got it, but were mudded in by a sudden drop of water. This was no great problem for the Flying Scud, a shoal draught scow, drawing four or five feet when loaded. She had a full crew, six all told, two sailors and a woman cook besides the Palmateer boys, and they went to work with long-handled shovels and dug her out.

FREED BY THE SPADE

Lake life was simpler then. Such vessels as the Scud had no log to stream, and went by dead reckoning. The masters of such needed no papers, though Albert got his before he was 21. They carried big crews (the Scud had to get along with three men before she died and was even sailed single-handed) for manpower was the only force except the wind, and a lot of muscle was needed to extricate a vessel from her various predicaments. And to load her and unload her, as crews then did, instead of stevedores.

On the way the Flying Scud seemed lost in a Lake Ontario gale. They had to put into Niagara for shelter. The sea was running so high on the bar that she dipped her flying jibboom into the waves when she plunged though the boom end was 15 feet above the normal waterline. Billows burst on board until little Nelson was up to his waist. He cried out he was pretty young to have to die.

"Pump then!" shouted Albert up to his neck as the waves washed over the cabin top.

Albert stuck to the wheel, and after three miles of the wildest tossing, the Scud plowed into the smooth of the river, and breasted the current up to a mooring under old Fort George. The corn, battened down under tarpaulined hatches, was all right, and they got it to its destination safely after all.

TRANSFORMATION

Capt. Palmateer sold the Flying Scud in 1871, and Albert and his brethren went into larger vessels. In 1881 the Scud was rebuilt at Picton. Her spoon bow with its cutwater knee was replaced with a plumb stem, and her square transom with a full schooner stern which made her longer, and disguised the hard bilges of her scow origin. She had new decks, bulwarks and rail. And new paint - black above, with a green rail, white hawsepipes, white coveringboard stripe and green bottom. We saw her at once, with a long scarlet fly at the main topmast head and two colored stars on her white painted boom ends. She was scarcely recognizable for she had on top of all the changes a new name - to be revealed next number.