Dead Reckoning and Island Life

Willis Metcalfe and Allan Capon were two authors of our region that have left us a trove of early stories that make up the larger account of this place. From time to time I’ll take one of their works off my bookshelf and read passages, especially if I’ve been somewhere that has prompted curiosity, somewhere like old cemeteries where shipwrecks are referenced on grave stones.

If you stand at any part of County shoreline that faces the sunset, especially at this time of year, the headwind coming from the south west across Lake Ontario is a wind of legend, a wind that was feared by captains and crews aboard sailing ships of old. This is how an unnamed female cook who worked aboard the schooner Annie Minnes described an event that happened in 1900: “The [sailing ship] Picton was fast—she ran like a scalded cat—still and all, I don’t think we were any more than fifteen minutes behind her, and the Acacia a half hour behind that. We were well out into the lake and making good time when all of a sudden we saw the Picton’s topsails coming off, and then her lower sails settled, and then, while we stood and watched, the Picton just disappeared.”

In the era 1799 -1929, 415 ships drowned in the big lake waters; of those, the majority foundered in what came to be called the Marysburgh Vortex off Cape Vessey and Prince Edward Point. Mariners aboard wooden vessels spoke of the County as being hell’s invention.

The bottom of Lake Ontario rises from its deepest point of 800 feet to a shallower depth in the passage between the US and the County. Where the rocky ledge of limestone rides beyond County shores, below in shallow waters is a gouged lake bottom with immeasurable deposits of sand, shoals and craggy reefs; the shifting sands underwater are elusive to map. These factors plus the wind pushing the water eastward creates a scenario of unpredictable currents and tides. Interesting is that it was the Montreal Board of Trade in response to the ongoing loss of vessels and cargo that lobbied the hardest to see the Murray Canal built. The canal allowed ships travelling east/west to sail in the shelter of the Bay of Quinte.

Walk the hidden cemeteries at places like Port Milford, Northport or North Beach and see the names of the men and women who worked as ship’s crew members that were lost with the sinking of vessels. Today, scuba divers consider the lake bottom in the region as a ship’s graveyard where history can be learned.

The reputation of the sou’west wind is steeped in the seafaring culture of the eastern seaboard of North America with a hat, originally designed to keep ship workers and fishermen dry during heavy weather becoming synonymous with maritime life. Its design transformed through the 1800s to eventually take on the name that prompted its raison d’être—the Sou’Wester.

Originally made using repurposed cotton flour sacks it was then treated with pine tar, linseed oil and lampblack. The Sou’wester had a long overhang at the back, a front peak you could pull down over your forehead and was finished on the inside with flannel. Rain proof and stiffened with the oil treatment and tar, it had ear flaps that tied together under the chin to ensure it stayed with you in foul weather. An icon of seafaring life, the hat is still preferred by many commercial fishermen today.

On the small rise of hill where the Christ Church cemetery is in Hillier, there is a marker with the name of Robert Pye. Pye was a blacksmith and farmer who lived in Hillier village and became the seasonal lighthouse keeper on a reef near Nicholson Island and Pleasant Bay in the western County. The reef rises only seven feet out of the water but, like an iceberg, below the surface it spreads far and wide and a serious danger to ships.

Legend has it that it was a sailor in the early days that came from Scotland who described the egg shaped reef as resembling the style of another kind of hat—the Scotch bonnet. The fifty-four foot stone tower with a fixed white light that was put up in 1856 became known as the Scotch Bonnet Light. The early lighthouses burned kerosene lamps and needed tending daily to clean the lamp and to refuel. Pye reported at the end of one sailing season that he had gone through 76 wicks, eleven lamps and 120 gallons of oil as it was, “a season of seas and gales breaking the lighthouse windows.”

Like the markers in a cemetery, today’s ruins of the Scotch Bonnet Light and the still erect lighthouses around our shoreline are historically important reminders of a long-standing seafaring past, vital to the County’s development from colonial times. All of it deserves preservation as pages out of our collective story.