SWEEPSTAKES In the Big Tub: Schooner Days MCCXXXV (1235)

by C. H. J. Snider

THAT old schooner Sweepstakes which John MacLean of the Telegram and Ted O'Neil of the Underwater Club photographed among the speckled trout under Tobermory harbor for Telegram readers recently was not three masted nor a treasure ship nor the long lost Griffon. But she had quite a history.

She was built on the beach at vanished Wellington Square near the head of Lake Ontario, in 1867, the year Canada became THE Dominion. Wm. Buntin of Wellington Square owned her up to 1874, and sold her to John Waldie, the Wellington Square butcher boy who had blossomed into a shopkeeper and vessel owner, with a fleet of three or four schooners.

Capt. Charles Tufford, in the Island ferry service long before it became a motorman's job told Schooner Days:

SMART WORK

"One morning when I was a kid at Port Nelson the Sweepstakes of Wellington Square, a fine big schooner, nearly new, and a great hustler, left Port Nelson's single pier in a hurry. The haste was because the wind was coming in from the eastward, and with ten thousand bushels of barley in her hold she was beginning to bump the bottom in the rising sea. There was only 11 feet of water at the outer end of the dock.

"She got out so quickly that they couldn't get the shore end of a fine big new line off the spile on the dock, and they had to throw the vessel end overboard and let it go. Once clear she made a tack out into the lake and rounded to, and got her yawlboat down, with two men in it, to come back for the line and bring it out to her.

The men in the boat did their job, and the Sweepstakes stood in on the opposite tack to pick them up. But her centreboard touched bottom, and when she tried to tack out again she hung in irons, lost headway, drifted back and grounded close to the pier.

"Tell Mr. Waldie to telegraph for a tug, quick!" yelled the captain.

"I was off like a shot, for I liked John Waldie everybody did. I near burst, running that mile to his butcher store in Wellington Square, and to the railway station with his telegram. Mr. Waldie drive me back with him to Port Nelson with his horse in a lather.

"I wasn't away more than half an hour, but Alex Le Clair the big bearded Port Nelson shipwright, had already saved the day.

"With the Sweepstakes on the bottom and yelling for help, her fly half-masted for a tug, and sails fluttering down, Alex had sung out from the pier head. "Don't lower away, captain, keep all your canvas on her! Slack off your mainsheet and trim all four jibs a-weather, and back out your foresail, too, with your boom-tackle!"

"They'd done that and that, and it canted her head of shore, she'd gathered way and moved out into to deep water. Capt. Thomas had pulled up the fly to the masthead again, to sow he didn't need a tug, and she was making good licks down the lake, when we got to the pier.

"You've not only save me a tug bill, but a schooner as well, Alex,' said Mr. Waldie, and I'll not forget it."

SOME ADVENTURES

The Sweepstakes was either unluckily christened or her captain was too keen on making her live up to her name.

"And the Sweepstakes ran kerslick into

The stern of the Maple Leaf."

That's from the old lake song The Cruise of the Bigler, extant in forecastles' eighty years ago. It commemorated one of her didoes in Lake St. Clair. Also she got ashore at Rondeau in Lake Erie, Sept. 19 1872. And she sank right off the Garrison, when headed for Toronto's Western Gap with a load of coal.

Her great rival was the schooner White Oak, of Oakville, launched like her in 1867, and like her of the same model as the brigantine Sea Gull, of Oakville, which went to South Africa in 1865. Capt. Ted Thomas, of Oakville, sailed her in 1873, with Jim Markham, of Oakville as mate. The late District Magistrate J. J. O'Connor, of Port Arthur, a Whitby boy, was in her forecastle in that year.

GREAT CANVAS CARRIER

Capt. Thomas was a sail dragger if there ever was one. The Sweepstakes was a little longer than the White Oak. She was 119 ft on deck, 22 ft. 8 in. Beam 10 ft 1 in. in the hold and registered 218 tons. The White Oak went 205. Neither vessel would shorten a stitch of canvas in sight of the other. The Sweepstakes had a whopping large foresail, two cloths wider than the White Oak's. This capsized her once in Lake Erie, when the halliards jammed in a squall. But no one was drowned.

She had her slice of the Chicago-Collingwood grain trade and perhaps it was this, or the Georgian Bay lumber trade, that brought about her ruin in the 1880's or 90's. At any rate she drove ashore at Cove Island just below the light. She was got off, leaking badly. She kept afloat until she got into the Big Tub at Tobermory, but there she settled on the bottom, for John MacLean to photograph among the fishes in the succeeding century.