Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 781
Meantime the government with imperial consent threw ship building and navigation on the lakes wide open with the Inland Navigation Act of 1788. This became a sort of charter document of the Lakes; provided officers of supervision, ports of entry, harbour dues, clearance papers for all departing vessels, even for the timber rafts that now began to make their appearance, slow enough in clearing to give time even to the tardiest official.
Lake ship building moved speedily forward, breaking away from the deep sea models on which it had been based. The topsail schooners of the Provincial Marine were in a sense still square-rigged vessels of the ocean type, for they carried a main yard that could replace the fore-and-aft mainsails with square sails, and the two topsails above were those of a square rigged brig. The government stuck to its pattern: governments are apt to: and in any case these vessels on patrol work on the open lake could take full advantage of the prevailing western winds that could drive them foaming down the length C. H. J. Snider, “Yachting on Lake Ontario” (Sailing Craft) 1937 of Ontario and Erie. But for dodging about the channels, twisting in and out of harbours and river mouths, the cumbrous square rig was nowhere as beside the fore-and-aft rig, the topsails, staysails and jibs of the schooner.
The schooner came into its own as the typical vessel of the lakes, a thing of great beauty as it developed into the capacious and luxurious schooner yachts of Toronto and Oswego; and not without beauty even in its humblest form that some of us can recall, the “stone-hooker,” carrying on its menial work of carting stone from the lake beaches before the rising structure of the cement mill blanketed its sails for ever. With the fore-and-aft rig came the ingenious device of the “centre board” which combined the ability to beat up to windward with a power to avoid shoals. Without it the choice had been between leaway in a shallow boat or wreck on a shoal in a big one.
We may take as a type of the opening period the topsail Nancy built in 1789 whose poor old hull raised up from the mud of the Nottawasaga River, still stands exhibited nearby. From these ancient timbers the eye of imagination may reconstruct the ship in her pride, and the eye without imagination can reconstruct the Nancy as well or better from the spirited pictures reproduced by Mr. Cuthbertson from the archives of the Canada Steamship Lines. There she sails, riding the blue and green waves and the long white foam into which they break on Lake Ontario, with every sail drawing as she heads — what is it called? — two points into the wind? — at any rate where ever it is that a schooner heads when she is heading at her best. The great fore-and-aft foresail and mainsail are sheeted in and drawing full: so are the two square topsails above the foresail and the three jibs — or is the first a staysail? — between the foremast and the outer end of the jib boom. From the peak of the mainsail gaff flutters the Union Jack. We can only hope that it is correct for 1789: the artist may have forgotten to forget Ireland. From the top of the mainmast there flutters a long streamer, flag or wind vane, such as lake vessels came to use — we cannot in our ignorance tell which it is.
A brave picture the vessel makes. The Nancy was built of oak, had a keel length of 68 feet, a beam of 20 feet. She served as a transport in the war of 1812, was later burnt and sank and in due course resurrected.
The war of 1812 found a large fleet of these Lake ships already in being, ships of war of both countries and trade ships of each of them. It is no part of the present record to follow the varying episodes, the intricate details of the naval operations on the Lakes in the War of 1812, all the more intricate from their close connection with operations on land. The curious may read it all, as in connection with naval war at sea, in the scholarly pages of Kingsford’s History of Canada, in Captain A. T. Mahan’s Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812, in Theodore Roosevelt’s admirable volume The Naval War of 1812, and in particular, as a specific story of the war on the Lakes, in Mr. George Cuthbertson’s Freshwater, where it occupies some eighty pages of close print.
But a glance at one or two of the outstanding episodes of the naval war on the Lakes may help to form an idea of the ships of the period and the way in which they had developed up to the war and under the stimulus of the war itself. Let us look back to the capture and burning in 1813 of the little town of J. Ross Robertson, “Landmarks of Toronto” York, the capital of Upper Canada standing on a site selected by Governor Simcoe in spite of its then desolate surroundings for the sake of its protection behind its island sandbar, and its river and marshes on either flank. The site is all changed now. But those of us who can recall the Toronto of sixty years ago can revive the scene as the men saw it from the decks of Commodore Chauncey’s ships in the sunrise of April 27, 1813. The little town, huddled together a little west of the river Don, was built close to the shore of the wide shallow bay. A peninsula of sand shaped like a crescent shut in the Bay leaving a gap on the west end for ships to enter. Covering this gap on the shore was York Fort, which we used to call “The Old Fort” but which was the new fort then. It was protected with heavy earth ramparts, with guns in embrasure-openings, commanding the gap, and on the land side the rampart has the scizzor-blade zigzag of stakes called chevaux de frise. Many of the stakes, original or renewals, still stood out at the Bathurst Street corner of the Old Fort, no longer very formidable, a century after the first construction.
Now look at Chauncey’s fleet as it approaches the Fort from the outer lake, rounding the end of the island, all the ships aslant in the morning breeze, to come up into the wind and anchor off the shore, a little west of the Fort, down nearer to where the old French Fort Rouillé had stood. Compare this collection of ships with the flocks of canoes, the yelling savages, and the river bateaux of the Old Régime.
Chauncey has twelve ships of war and three transports. Hauled behind them as they threshed across the lake are a number of open boats — large flat bottomed bateaux. These are the ones used as “landing barges” — how easily we read and understand it now. The sailors and soldiers number 1,800 men. The flag ship is the Madison, built as the war threatened, a frigate, meaning thereby a three-masted ship of war, square rigged and only second to a man of war as a cruiser is second to a battleship — less weight, more speed. The Madison in any case has weight enough for Fort York — 560 tons, 44 guns and a crew of 200 men. She carries the generals of the expedition, Dearborn and Pike. With her are the Oneida, a brig of 250 tons, 16 guns and a 150 crew, and nine schooner gunboats (meaning schooners converted into ships of war), which range from 50 to 110 tons, carrying from one to ten guns each. With them three lesser transport vessels, a swift despatch boat and the flock of empty bateaux threshing on the waves on the towing lines ready for the landing. All this in sunrise of an April morning in a fresh breeze. It must have been a grand sight — the ships rounding into the wind to anchor, the loosened headsails of the schooners rattling — all light and colour. It all happened off the shore where now the Canadian National Exhibition views the marathon contests of lady swimmers, coated in grease.
The ships pounded at the ramparts, the Fort, with but few guns and outranged, pounded at the ships for an hour and a half with no harm to either side. But the flock of crowded bateaux landed its men on the Humber beaches and when they came driving through the woods there was no force to stop them. The British blew up the main magazine of the fort, bringing death to a crowd of defenders and attackers, among them General Pike, carried to the Madison to die. The few British soldiers in the town retreated eastwards. A capitulation was arranged with all the courtesy of the day between General Dearborn and a deputation of townsmen. Then General Dearborn’s sailors and soldiers got drunk and spoiled the courtesy of the capitulation, pillaged and burnt down the Parliament Buildings and many warehouses and residences. In the sequel this helped York to move up to better ground and leave its original aristocratic quarter to become a dingy, drab corner of the rising city of Toronto and later to be flattened down again to railway sidings, lumber piles and junk yards.
The victors sailed away with the schooner Duke of Gloucester from the harbour as a prize, its work done — another “famous victory” as old Caspar would have said.
Take again the most heroic episode of the whole naval war, George A. Cuthbertson, “Freshwater,” 1931, Chap. VII Perry’s famous victory of Lake Erie (Sept. 10, 1813). Here again were ships worthy of Rodney and Nelson. Captain Barclay’s British Detroit and his Queen Charlotte were both frigates, 490 and 400 tons. They were each (exact figures are disputed) about 100 feet along the main deck with a beam of 27 feet. With them Barclay had two brigs, a schooner and a cutter. Perry outnumbered Barclay with nine ships of war to six. He had no frigates, but his Lawrence (from which, when she was smashed almost to a wreck, he shifted his flag to the Niagara) although rigged as a brig was a powerful ship of 450 tons and twenty guns: so too was the Niagara; both were more heavily armed than Barclay’s Detroit. As to who should have won the battle, naval experts disagree and patriots dispute. But there is no doubt who did win it — Perry did.
The main naval operations of the War of 1812 were fought in the Atlantic Ocean and concern our Imperial naval history at large rather than Canadian in particular. One famous conflict, however, connects closely with our shores.
We all remember from our school days the story of the historic fight of the Shannon and the Chesapeake off Boston on June 1, 1813; the courteous challenge sent by Captain Broke of the Shannon; its acceptance by Captain Lawrence; the terrific battle and glorious victory, Lawrence mortally, and Broke desperately, wounded; a lesson to all the world in the gallantry of honourable war with equal renown to the victors and the vanquished.
Yet very few people know what happened afterwards to the captured Chesapeake; fewer still know that a large part of the historic frigate is still intact, the best of its deck timber, still just as the naval builders first framed them, set up into a mill that still steadily grinds corn in a Hampshire village.
A legend has got into the history books that the Chesapeake was taken over into the British service. This is not so. Terribly battered by the fight (portholes and bulwarks smashed in by the broadsides) she was sailed in the wake of the Shannon in a five days’ voyage (June 1-6) to Halifax harbour. Judge Haliburton, the famous Sam Slick of the clock-maker books, witnessed and described her arrival — the contrast between the gay strings of victory bunting above, and the terrible sights below. The ship’s main-deck he called a “charnel house” of wounded, dead and dying men. Captain Lawrence’s body lay on the quarter-deck under the Stars and Stripes. C. H. J. Snider, “The Glorious Shannon’s Blue Duster,” 1923 Along with many others it was buried in Halifax.
What happened to the Chesapeake afterwards? The writer of this book has been to some pains to find out and expresses here his obligation for the assistance of the Librarians of the Boston Public Library.
The Chesapeake, refitted as might be, was sailed across the Atlantic to Portsmouth. She was never used by the British Navy, nor does there seem any record of her going to sea again. She was sold by the Government intact to a Mr. Holmes for £500. Mr. Holmes did well out of the bargain. He broke up the Chesapeake, sold several tons of copper from the sheeting, sold the timbers for householding in Portsmouth and more than doubled his money. But the best of the timbers were bought up by Mr. John Prior, a miller of Wickham, near Fareham, Hants, who built out of them (1820) a new mill beside that village. Into this went intact as they came from the ship the deck timbers of pitch pine, thirty-two feet long and eighteen inches square. The purloins of the deck went into the mill as joists.
After that oblivion settled on the Chesapeake. A member of the Broke family searching the record of the great sea-fight fifty years later received a letter from the then Vicar of Letter of W. S. Domergue, Vicar of Fareham, 1864 Fareham (1864) to say that the mill, timbers and all, was in active operation and “likely to last yet hundreds of years.”
An entry in a Hampshire Gazeteer of 1901 speaks of the mill at Wickham built of the timbers of the Chesapeake as still going strong.
A letter from Mr. George Orwell, a well-known Hampshire antiquarian, to the writer of this book (April, 1943) says: “I am glad to inform you that the Wickham mill which contains the timbers of the Chesapeake is still in very active operation and is likely to remain so.”
One might think that there would be a national opportunity here for the purchase of the timbers of the Chesapeake, their reassembly as again the deck of the gallant vessel and a presentation to the Naval College at Annapolis, the repository of many trophies.
These vanished fleets, these gallant combats sounded a note and opened a vision of glory in our history: yet sounded with it a note of alarm, opened also a vision of disaster. Would this mean that North America must go the way of Europe, that an unending rivalry in arms must turn the continent to a camp, that the unending conflict between Britain and France was to be converted by the sheer lust and custom of fighting into an unending conflict between two communities of settlers, in whose hearts was peace. The greatest result of the naval war on the Lakes was the warning that it thus gave. It ended war on the Lakes. Many patriotic Americans, as for example John Adams and Chief Justice Jay, had long since reflected on what such sustained armament and rivalry would mean. The war acted as an object lesson. To serve in it people were drawn from both sides of the frontier, taken from their half-made farms, their half grown orchards, the villages still building, to take part in a conflict that was none of their making and in which their own sympathies were divided, many on each side sympathizing openly or secretly with the other side. The Rush-Bagot Agreement of 1818 associates the names of Richard Rush, the American Secretary of State, and that of Sir Charles Bagot, the British Minister at Washington, with the honour of the reduction of naval armament on the Lakes to the mere dimensions of necessary patrol and revenue collection. Only after the lapse of a century can we realize the contribution thus made towards the ultimate peace of the world.
SAIL AND STEAM ON THE ST. LAWRENCE — THE BYE-GONE FLEET OF YESTERDAY
The Royal William, built at Quebec, crossed the Atlantic under steam as early as 1833. But throughout the nineteenth century sail was not displaced but remained as the auxiliary of steam for ocean voyages. Hence arose on the St. Lawrence the beautiful fleet, as typically those of the Allan Line, of steamers under sail which for two generations were the chief feature of the ocean passenger voyages from Canada to the British Isles.
CHAPTER SEVEN BY THE ST. LAWRENCE TO THE SEA
Canada the Gift of the St. Lawrence — Ascent of the River in Old Days — The Coming of Steam — John Molson Accommodates the Public — Sailing Ships at Montreal — Will Leave On or About — The Lachine Canal of 1825 — Mr. Dickens is Delighted — Ocean Liners and the Allan Line — Sail and Steam Together: Days When a Voyage was a Voyage — The Sarmatian, the First Last Word in Steamers — White Wings that Grew Weary — Beating out Nature — Channels, Lights, Marks, Icebreakers and Flood Walls — The Moving Panorama of the River
THE EGYPTIANS HAVE a saying that Egypt is the gift of the Nile. With similar imagery we might say that Canada is the gift of the St. Lawrence. It is only on reflection that we realize the extraordinary position the river holds in the geographic and political structure of our Dominion. For most of our country it is, if not the only way out, at least the only way without considerable physical difficulty which we hold under our own control. Nature holds the Arctic exit, the United States the forty-ninth parallel; British Columbia and the Maritimes are physically cut off from us. The rest of Canada, to use the term, so happy and now so universal, is “bottlenecked” into the St. Lawrence.
If the sea-coast of the Hudson and James Bay had a mild climate which would open their capacious harbours all the year round; if Ungava were not Ungava and Labrador not Labrador; if the Arctic Coast were as genial as the Riviera and if the United States were not where it is, or rather if the “unguarded frontier” were not a commercial rampart, this would not be so. But, as it is, for anyone or anything once inside Canada, as between the Rocky Mountains and the Gaspé Peninsula the St. Lawrence is the sole way out, or at least the main exit.
It was said in the previous chapter that with the cession of Canada and the extension of British power over the greater part of North America, the St. Lawrence came into its own. The statement perhaps might stand revision: it came into its own in point of opportunity, but in point of actual achievement it was the coming of the age of steam that was the decisive factor. Till that time the ascent of the St. Lawrence above Quebec had been an arduous business — tide and current, shallow and broken water, no great rapids, indeed, all the way to Montreal but stretches of swift current, terminating at the very end, at the foot of Montreal Harbour itself, in the powerful St. Mary’s current almost defying the power of sail. With wind enough a ship might sail up against it, but without wind, or with an adverse wind added to it, a ship from the sea might lie there day by day helpless at the foot of it. Even well into British days, after steam, but not steam tugs, had begun, long teams of oxen were used for this last and final haul of a ship in from the sea.
In the old French days ships from the ocean rarely attempted to go beyond Quebec. For the river voyage they used a special type of bateau, as described above, a long flat boat, shallow, just the thing for scraping over the rocks and hauling and pushing against a current with a shore tow line and pike poles, utterly unseaworthy but never intended to go to sea. This was the special ‘bateau’ of the St. Lawrence, used for a century to ascend the river by fighting the current L. Tombs, “The Port of Montreal,” 1926 and even to get past the great rapids above Montreal, a historic craft that never lost its place till the building of the St. Lawrence canals cut its occupation from under, not its feet, but its bottom. It must be remembered of course, that “bateau” often meant in French any kind of small craft just as “boat” does in English.
