in Lake Ontario
[from “The Picton Times”
November 10 1932]
It is going on forty-five
years since the Blanche of Colborne, vanished with all hands. Yet still Cat Hollow men stare hard towards
the Scotch Bonnet of moonlight nights, to catch, if may be, the gleam of her
bone-white hull under the proud arching of her silver-sable sails.
The Bonnet is a little block of an island outside of Nicholson’s
off the Prince Edward County shore. It
flashes nightly across the water to the tall lighthouse at Presqu’Ile, where
the bay runs up to Brighton and swings east to the Murray Canal, replacing the
old Carrying Place, which once afforded access to the Bay of Quinte. Colborne and Cat Hollow are to the west of
the little peninsula which gives Presqu’Ile its name. A famous corner for
wrecks, since the government schooner Speedy’s finding of the Devil’s
Hitchingpost there in 1804. The Belle
Sheridan’s was another famous wreck near by, eighty years afterwards. Among them all, the Blanche’s will be
remembered long, both from the mystery of it and from the completeness of the
tragedy it involved.
It was fitting out time, in the spring of 1888, and Captain John
Henderson, of the schooner Blanche of Colborne, was outward bound from his
winter home in Cat Hollow. Colborne
lies inland from Lake Ontario, a little town of importance, named after the
lieutenant-governor of Upper Canada, whose name was later tagged on to Gravelly
Bay on Lake Erie; making it Port Colborne,
to some confusion with the Ontario place.
From Colborne a road winds down to Cat Hollow, the settlement by the
shore, which has since become the village of Lakeport. Officially vessels from this vicinity hailed
from the Port of Cramahe, but Cramahe or Cramha was only the Highland name for
the township. Harbor there was
none. Once they had to scuttle the
Katie Eccles where she lay loading at the pier there, to save her from pounding
to pieces in a westerly. Schooners did
a brisk trade in grain and lumber from the two wharves and storehouses at Cat
Hollow, but they wintered in Cobourg or Brighton, sheltered in the Bay of
Presqu’Ile.
Captain Henderson’s bag and his seaboots and oilskins had gone on
before, and he was striding uphill through the thawing slush to meet the
Brighton stage. This would carry him to
where the Blanche lay, shimmering in her new white paint, at her winter
quarters in Presqu’Ile Bay, eight miles away.
At the hill crest, Captain Henderson turned. He untied a parcel he had held tightly in
his young brown fist. A pair of heavy
woollen socks sprang from the released covering. They were gay and hand-knitted;
sailors’ socks, the kind that keep sea boots from “drawing the
feet.” He whirled them high above his
head.
“Good-bye, mother, good-bye!” he called, in a voice of spring
gladness matching the cheery chirrup of the roadside robins.
At a door down in the Hollow a grey haired woman waved a freshly
ironed apron of pink and white checks.
Tears brimmed her eyes. Captain
Henderson could not see them. But he
could see, or believed he saw, the glad smile behind them. A sailor’s eyes are keen. A lover’s eyes see farther. Johnnie Henderson was a good sailor and a
loving son.
Then he went over the hilltop and out of his mother’s sight, and
out of the ken of the small boy who passed him, whistling. It is from him comes this tale, forty-four
years afterwards. He is Harold Batty,
and he helps get out the Port Hope Guide.
The facts are his. Whose the
telling does not matter.
Two months later, Captain Tom Matthews was swinging down the lake
in the old black-and-green schooner then in her prime. Older Toronto folk may remember her when she
used to bring stone for the cribs of the Eastern Gap, in the 90’s, when Captain
“Mack” Shaw had her. Younger Toronto
folk may remember her putting in here in distress one August day in 1906, when
she was on her very last legs. Her
sheer was humped then, and her mastheads sprung and she had a permanent reef in
her much patched mainsail. She had been
to Charlotte with a load of cedar posts, and ran for shelter here in the light
half of a summer gale, with eighteen inches of water in her hold and her crew
in despair. She was owned then in South
Bay, and after she limped away for home with moderating weather no one on the
waterfront here knew what became of her.
In 1888, however, the Fleetwing was still a good vessel, and her
master was proud of her. Captain
Matthews was Harold Batty’s uncle. Mrs.
Matthews, Harold Batty’s aunt, was the cook of the Fleetwing. Captain Matthews had with him as mate, James
Henderson of Cat Hollow, a brother of Captain John, of the Blanche. Jim Henderson later became Captain of the
steamer Macassa and carried thousands of Toronto and Hamilton passengers
between those two ports. Poor Jimmy is
no more now, and his well-known command went to the bottom of Georgian Bay two
or three years ago under the name of Manasoo.
At midnight on May 27th, Captain Matthews was called to
relieve the mate, it being the custom in lake schooners for the captain to
stand watch at night. In salt water
ships, the second mate does this work for the Old Man, and the latter only
turns out when he feels like it – which is pretty often.
Captain Matthews glanced at the barometer and it seemed to him the
glass had dropped materially since he had gone below. He emerged to find a perfect moonlight night with a fine steady
breeze blowing and the schooner gushing along quietly in smooth water. The Scotch Bonnet was winking away in the
moonlight bearing north-north-west, about five miles distant.
“I haven’t been drinking, Jimmy, but my eyes must be playing
tricks on me,” said Captain Matthews to his mate, as the latter prepared to go
below. “I thought the glass was away
down, but I come up to as fine a night as man ever set eyes on. Wait a minute till I have another look at
her.”
He popped into the cabin.
The glass was assuredly “down.”
The mercury had sunk even while he was talking.
He emerged in a moment.
All hands were now on deck, standing by for the order “Go below, the
port watch.”
“Get the gaff topsails and jibtop sail off her,” shouted the
master to the waiting mate. “Haul the
flying jib down too, and we’ll reef the mainsail!”
“What’s wrong, captain?” asked the mate, amazed.
“Plenty,” said Captain
Matthews. “The glass is down all right,
as if the bottom had dropped out of it, and I never knew her to fool me yet.”
With a rattle of complaining blocks, hoops and downhauls the light
sails were clewed up and furled, and the main sheet was hauled aft for reefing
the mainsail, when a vessel hove in sight.
“It’s Johnny, in the Blanche.
He’s got a load of screenings from Oswego for Brighton,” commented Mate
Henderson.
“He may make it before anything hits him,” agreed Captain
Matthews, “Two hours will about put him
inside Presqu’Ile Light. Look at him
come!”
The Blanche was booming along, her sails sharp black and white in
the moonlight, wing-and-wing with the breeze, a white roll of foam sparkling
like diamonds before her white bows.
She had a saucy sheer, and she swam towards them like a snowy swan in a
hurry.
Captain Matthews hailed, “This is a fine night, Johnny!”
“Yes,” hailed back Captain Henderson, “It’s a dandy. We’re making hay while the moon shines. Is everybody all right?”
He could not understand the Fleetwing shortening down in such fine
weather. His question showed it. Capt. Matthews called something about the
glass having dropped suddenly. Captain
Henderson, now almost beyond earshot, hailed back. “Goodnight Tom! Goodnight
Jimmy!” and vanished from sight and
hearing.
Half an hour later the squall struck without notice form the
northwest. It was a gagger. The Fleetwing was not a stiff vessel. She was a shoal American bottom, built at
Wilson, N.Y., near Niagara. In 1863, for Captain Quick, and she capsized and
drowned her crew while he had her.
After that she had her masts shortened, and passed into Canadian
ownership.
She rolled down under this squall till they thought they’d lose
her, although she was already shortened to the reefed mainsail, foresail, and
staysail. She came through safely. The same squall must have caught the Blanche
with every stitch set, her boom guyed out to the soft southerly “feeder” that
was bringing on this tiger out of the north west. It must have driven her clean
under for nothing was ever seen of her or her crew after she passed the
Fleetwing.
Months afterwards the lake gave up one body. It had been battered by so many weeks of
tossing that it was quite unrecognizable.
Even the clothing had been torn from it. All except the boots and socks on the swollen feet.
They brought the pitiful pieces of knitting to a grey-haired woman
in Cat Hollow. She dried her hands on a
pink-and-white checked apron before putting on her glasses. The pink-and-white checked apron had faded
with many washings since fitting out time in the spring. So too had the grey-haired woman’s eyes,
since Captain John Henderson passed over the hill.
She looked at the socks and her fingers shook as she held them.
“Yes,” said she, “it must be Johnny, I knit them.”
One tombstone in Lakeport, gives the names of all the village
sailors lost in the Blanche. They are:
Captain John H. Henderson, William Seed, mate, Wm. E. Haynes, before the mast, Annie Smith,
cook.
The other man before the mast was William Auckland. He came from Trenton, on the Bay of Quinte.