Saga of the Schooner St. Peter

 Toronto Telegram, October 4, 1947

Schooner Days DCCXV  (815

ST. PETER WALKS The WAVES

By C. H. J. SNIDER

     “When Peter teas come down ^ out of the ship he walked on the water to go to Jesus, but when he saw the wind boisterous he was afraid; and beginning to sink, he cried, saying, ‘Lord, save me!' And immediately Jesus stretched forth His hand . . . and when they * were come into the ship, the wind ceased ”

          —Matthew XIV. 22-33.

 THE 26th day of October, 1898, found the St. Peter of Toledo laden with coal at the Oswego trestle, with her long fly struck for the tug to tow her out. Capt. Wm. “Hunky” Scott puffed up alongside in the harbor tug John Navagh. It was a mild October I morning, with warm sun, and a gentle breeze from the eastward.

    “Ready to go, captain?” he inquired of Capt. John Griffin, the St. Peter’s master.

    “Sure,” said the latter. “Will you pull up our sails for us, Hunky, and get us out in the lake? I’ve had trouble enough with my crowd, and I’m scared they’ll be off for The Kitchen if they get out on the dock to single up our lines.” Hell’s Kitchen in Oswego was a bad place for losing sailors.

    “Hunky” was used to this request. Fifty years ago good sailors were scarce and sober sailors scarcer. It often happened that the tug had to tow a vessel clear of the port and teave her out in the lake without a stitch of canvas set, while the forecastle hands were recovering from a binge. Sometimes the tug would take the throat and peak halliards aboar$,! and, going ahead slowly, lift the heavy gaffs of the lower sails to the mastheads, leaving the sober men on board to rack off the halliards and belay them when the sails were high enough. There had been trouble with the St. Peter’s crew over wages.

    The tug man did not know whether Capt. Griffin had  been driven to the expedient of locking a new crew in the forecastle to keep them on board, or what.

    From the tug only three persons were seen stirring aboard the  St. Peter as the Navagh towed her out.

 Capt. Griffin had thrown off  his shorelines himself, and the mate had hauled them aboard. The mate was an old captain, John McLennan of Deseronto, a ship carpenter who had commanded schooners, but preferred in his old age to go as mate; seasoned, sagacious, not very strong.

    The third person was Mrs. Griffin, the captain’s wife and nominal owner of the vessel. She appeared to be supplying the place of a cook. A young fellow nicknamed Frenchy, had been seen aboard earlier and a boy. Both had seemed good.

                                        AMONG THE SAINTS

   This St. Peter was a “three-and-aft” schooner of 290 tons register, built in Toledo by Edwards in 1873. Perhaps because of the St. Andrew, St. Louis, St. Lawrence and other fat-cheeked schooners built by Shickluna at St. Catharines, she was sometimes confused with the “Maltese saints” among the Old Canallers. She was of similar dimensions—135.7 feet length, 26 feet beam, 12 feet 1 inch deep in the hold-—but measured about 50 tons less than those “Canadians” averaged.

   She was a good carrier, but not boxy like them. She was painted black with slate-colored bottom, with yellow beading and bright red eyes of hawsepipes. She had a little cutwater knee at her stemhead and her quarters “tumbled home,” that is, rounded in, in approved Toledo fashion. Capt. John Griffin, her master, kept her moving on long voyages, which were the best payers, as long as two-way freights were obtainable. Down to Fair Haven, or Oswego for coal from Lake Ontario for as far west as Chicago. There he might pick up grain or lumber for Lake Ontario ports, or even Ogdensburg on the St. Lawrence.

   Born in Youngstown, N.Y., Capt. Griffin was now an established citizen of Toledo, O., that city of the Blade. He had a daughter 19 years old. Wife and daughter kept telling him it was time to give up sailing but he told them he was as young as he ever was and liked sailing better than ever. If he could only get crews—but steamboat deckhands who wore gloves to keep their hands from getting calloused were replacing all the rip-roaring hairy-chested, collarless he-men in schooner caps and leather boots who had made the lake boil in the palmy days of the “barques, brigs and fore-and-afts.”

                                            NEXT CUSTOMER

   “Hunky” towed the St. Peter past the old Inner Light, once a notable lake mark, but even then outdated, and past the Outer Light on the west end of the old wooden breakwater, which looked so different summer and winter. Well clear of the breakwater, he blew his whistle and cast off. He had well earned his $12 fee. He watched the jibs slowly rise to the drag of those on board and the towline as slowly hove in, and saw the St. Peter steadily drawing away to the westward as he ranged back to the Oswego trestle for the next customer.

    The Toronto three maser Keewatin was lying ready to go out next, fully loaded, with her sail covers off. He saw Capt. Jim Redfearn coming down the street from the harbor office with his clearance in his hand. He heard him call to his mate, “Put those covers back on, and heave her around the end of the trestle! Weather bureau says it’s blowing 70 miles an hour in Chicago, and snowing a blizzard!” So “Hunky’s” question died on his lips. He knew the Keewatin wasn’t going out.

                                BACK TO BOYHOOD

    Yet all day and all night the easterly wind held moderate. It floated the St. Peter as far west as the Niagara River, to within 12 miles of Port Dalhousie and the shelter of the Welland Canal. Net fishermen out of Niagara came alongside in a brooding calm on the morning of the 27th and sold her fresh lifted fish, descendants of the Niagara “whitings” Father Hennepin parsed in 1678.  Capt. Griffin, brought up on  Niagara whitefish, was delighted to go back to the food of his boyhood. He had no been trading to Lake Ontario for some time.

    It did his heart good to chat with men whose fathers had told them of the little John J. Hill of Pultneyville that made the Niagara River in safety in that April norther of the 1870s. It had come whirling in furious snow squalls, which drove the big American schooner George Foote on Fort Mississauga a complete wreck, and tossed the Canadian  Joshua G. Beard, with her Indian figurehead, up on the beach opposite Queen street, Niagara, where she lay for years afterward. For he was then the boy made of the John J. Hill, once “sailed by Captain Todd, bigod,” as the old lake rhyme said, and if Capt. Masters of Niagara-on-the-Lake, his veteran Canadian mate, had had a big share in bringing her in safely, that time,, with her decks and sails tilled with spray-sodden snow, he didn’t begrudge him the credit. There was plenty to go around, he knew.

                                  JUST A FEW MILES MORE

    The St. Peter slowly drew away from the fishermen with her captain in a  comfortable frame of mined. In one hour or so a tug would be panting out from Port Dalhousie to take him in and up the 26 locks of the old Welland to Lake Erie. Then home. He recalled the old days when they would race all he way to Niagara to pick up an unbound tow.

… He had turned over $280 in bills to his wife from this trip. It was safer in her possession with any of those hounds from The Kitchen afoot. Besides she was the registered owner.

…The  to lay up for the winter. Perhaps for good. Why not? The schooner classed high still, A2, insurable value $6,000. Might be a good time to sell her -

    One doesn’t buy whitefish for a phantom crew. Capt. Griffin must have had a quota of mouths to feed. This might be remembered in view of what happened next. Which will be told next week.                     

            “Past the old Outer Light which looked so different in summer.

                               and in winter.