Nova Scotia (34 page)

   
On Christmas Eve, the crew attempted to get the
attention of a passing ship by lighting impromptu torches made from
jackets soaked in oil, but failed. The weather improved somewhat,
however, and they found some bread, carrots, turnips and tinned
water on board. The ship was still afloat, thanks to the lumber
below, but there was no way to steer it. Miraculously, the galley
stove had been above deck in the forehouse, and as the water ran
out, the men figured out how to capture the steam of boiled salt
water, and painstakingly distilled desperately needed fresh water a
few drops at a time. Each of the men was allowed four teaspoons of
water a day as his ration. Luckily on December 27, the liner
Olympia
arrived, having been blown far off course herself.
Soon after the men were safely aboard the
Olympia
, another
gale came up and bashed what was left of the
Louisa
to
pieces. So the crew was saved by a fluke of fate. Had the
Olympia
remained on course, all aboard the
Louisa
would have certainly perished.

   
After the loss of a ship, the captain was obliged to make a
formal report to the Nova Scotia “Wreck Court” and in it Captain
Bain stated that any sailing ship should have withstood the storms
he encountered and “no wood en ship of her age should have gone to
pieces, if she had not been suffering from some defect of
workmanship in her building or some defect of material.” He did,
however, praise his men for their “stoic demeanour” and said, “they
even showed cheery defiance to the cold, the hunger, the thirst,
the menace of annihilation.”

   
The captain had high praise for all aboard the
ill-fated
Louisa
and he surmised that they survived
because each of them “held onto their manhood”  d– an
ambiguous but lyrical phrase that sums up much about life aboard a
sailing ship when caught in the grip of some tumultuous exercise in
maritime survival. All one could do was to “hold onto one’s
manhood” and hope for good luck, a passing ship or a painless
watery death.

Chapter 30

Chapter 30

One Big Ship Instead of
Two

The
Golden Age of Sail was fuelled not only by wind and a quest for
adventure. It was driven by greed, or at the very least, a strong
desire for profit. The
W.D.
Lawrence
was one of the
largest sailing ships of her time, or any time for that matter. She
was built by William Dawson Lawrence in the small, sea-sheltered
village of Maitland on the Fundy Shore. Lawrence had begun his
shipbuilding career by cutting his own frames for his first ship
and hauling them by hand out of the woods. He had prospered and
gone on to build a number of ships but, thinking that one large
ship could be operated more economically than two smaller ones, he
set about constructing a vessel larger than any that existed. He
first carved out the traditional miniature model and then proceeded
to build the monster-Tsize ship that he would modestly name after
himself. The enterprise attracted fame for Lawrence and
curiosity-seekers from near and far descended upon the little
village. Lawrence disdained the critics who showed up to suggest
that such a large vessel made of mere pine and spruce would not
weather rough seas. Some thought it would be too unwieldy and hard
to steer and they told Lawrence this to his face. Some simply came
to laugh at him. Whenever Lawrence tired of his critics or the job
of overseeing the massive con struction pro-ject, he would escape
by locking himself away in his study and playing the
fiddle.

   
The
W.D.
Lawrence
was launched in
October of 1874 and according to the Halifax
Morning Chronicle
, 4,000 people came out to watch. She weighed in at 2,459
tons, at a price tag of $107,453, a pretty penny in those days and
much of it was Lawrence’s personal investment. Lawrence himself
sailed her to Liverpool, then on to Aden in the Middle East and
back to France. In 1882, he sold the big ship to some Norwegians
for $140,848, realizing a hefty profits which, of course, was why
he had undertaken the massive endeavour in the first
place.

“Boundless Fleets of Magnificent
Steamers”

If the emergence of the steamship
rang the death knell for the Nova Scotian sailing industry, it is
somewhat ironic that the entrepreneur who was so successful at
embracing the new technology and making a great fortune  from
it was a Nova Scotian. Samuel Cunard was born in Halifax in 1787,
the son of a Philadelphia Loyalist who had moved north during the
American Revolution.

   
Samuel Cunard worked as first clerk in the Royal Engineers’
lumber yard and in 1813, along with his father, opened a shipping
business by purchasing a sailing ship from the “prize court” – that
is, a ship that had been hauled to port by privateers. They
succeeded in landing His Majesty’s mail business between Halifax,
Newfoundland, Boston and the West Indies and later nailed contracts
to protect fishing rights and perform customs inspections. Pretty
soon, father and son had nearly forty vessels at work and they were
involved in everything from mail service to sealing and
whaling.

   
A razor-sharp businessman with an instinct for making money,
Cunard also had a passion for navigational aids and became the
first Commissioner of Lighthouses. It made good sense: he had a lot
of vessels afloat and wanted to protect his own interests. Cunard
had his hand in all sorts of things from charitable soup-kitchen
work to military activity and fire protection for the city. He
became involved with an early insurance company and helped to
establish the first bank in Halifax. After all, he needed some safe
place to keep his money.

   
The really big deals were in London and so
Cunard made a number of trips across the Atlantic to compete with
the big English shipping firms. He successfully landed a contract
with the East India Company and sailed his ship the
Countess of Harcourt
into Halifax Harbour amidst
considerable fanfare as it carried 6,000 chests of tea from China.
By forty, Cunard was a wealthy man and had negotiated more English
contracts, including one withd the General Mining
Association.

   
A fan of new technology, he became enamoured of
the steamship and fostered a dream to create a kind of “ocean
railway.” He became a central figure in forming a company to build
the
Royal
William
, the first ship to
cross the Atlantic entirely by steam. She was launched in Quebec in
1833 and made port in Halifax, then went on to Pictou where she
took on 300 tons of coal, and then proved herself by crossing the
Atlantic in three weeks.

   
Cunard tried to ignore the opposition of the naysayers who
believed the big sailing ships run by the Shakespeare, Dramatic and
Black Ball Lines were the epitome of oceanic travel. Even though he
had proven that the steamship could be used for reliable
trans-Atlantic travel, he was scoffed at. Sadly for Nova Scotia,
Cunard was right and the die-hard sailing men would see progress
outstrip them, robbing many of them of their dignity and
income.

   
Wheeler-dealer that he was, Cunard and his ever-growing body
of associates took on more mail contracts, including the big one
with the English government to shuttle mail across the Atlantic on
a fortnightly basis. The service proved to be successful and Cunard
courted passengers as well, once offering 2,000 free dinner
invitations to the people of Boston. He found plenty of people
willing to take passage across the Atlantic and provided plenty of
high quality food and spirits. At one point, he found his
passengers consuming too much of the free-flowing wine so, like the
airlines of the 1990s, he reluctantly decided to charge extra for
wine.

   
In 1859 Cunard was knighted by Queen Victoria – for shipping
all that mail, capitalizing on steamships and, presumably, making a
fortune. He died in 1865 at age seventy-eight. A verbose and
slightly skewed biographer of a later day, Abraham Payne, would
write, “Let the mind’s eye survey the boundless fleets of
magnificent steamers traversing the seas at this very hour in every
quarter of the globe. The first standard bearer of this host eof
leviathans was Sir Samuel Cunard, who remodelled the Ocean
Navigation of the world.” *

Steel, Not Wood

To some, Cunard may have been a
heroic figure, a forward-thinking pioneer of world shipping. But to
those who lost their livelihood on sailing ships, he may have
appeared more like an enemy. One might wonder why the seven seas
were not immense enough for both sail and steam to prosper. How
exactly did steamships diminish the sailing industry so quickly and
why couldn’t Nova Scotia have prospered and adapted, as Cunard and
his company d*id, to the new technology? It should have been a
natural evolution.

   
Shipbuilding in Nova Scotia was greatly diminished by the
fact that the new massive vessels were made of steel, not wood.
Most of the ships plying northerly waters were built in England in
huge shipyards. This factory production was a stark contrast to the
craftsmen of tiny Nova Scotian villages who carved wooden models,
cut the trees from their own forests and built handsome schooners
with local labour and minimal capital
expenditure.

   
Steamships were faster, alas, less dependent on wind, more
reliable and easier to maintain. They made importing and exporting
cheaper. Some sailing ships would navigate on into the twentieth
century carrying whatever cÿargo they could muster, but they could
not compete in the new age of coal, steam and iron. Why, then,
didn’t Nova Scotian shipbuilders, unarguably among the finest in
the world, adapt to the times? One of the big problems was the
tariff structure of the day. You could buy a ship already built in
England and register it in Canada without paying duty. But tariffs
on shipbuilding materials were costly if you wanted to assemble one
in Novat Scotia, and a considerable bulk of the materials involved
would have to be imported. It would just cost too much to build a
ship in Nova Scotia if it wasn’t made of wood and fitted with sails
instead of steam engines.

Around the World Alone

The Golden Age of Sail would
eventually fade but sailing itself would never go away. It was an
integral part of the psyche of anyone growing up in coastal Nova
Scotia. The stories of life aboard the sailing ships involved the
exhilarating drama of the high seas and the sometimes tumultuous
interaction of the high-spirited men aboard vessels. But in the
case of sJoshua Slocum, it was a story of a loner in the truest
sense. Slocum was the first man to sail around the world alone, a
circumnavigation of some 74,000 kilometres.

   
Joshua Slocum was born near the Fundy Shore on the North
Mountain above the Annapolis Valley on February 20, 1844, the son
of a farmer trying to make a living by cultivating some very rocky
soil. After the family moved to the fishing community of Westport,
Joshua ran away at fourteen to work as a cook on a fishing schooner
and, after his mother died, he went off to toil on the big ships
that would travel to foreign ports.

   
Slocum learned everything about ships quickly
and by the time he was twenty-five he was the skipper of a fishing
schooner that sailed between Seattle and San Francisco. The
American West Coast was far from his home in Nova Scotia, but
Slocum found himself drawn to even farther ports. In 1870, he
became the captain of the
Washington
, a barque
that he sailed across the wide Pacific to Sydney, Australia. Here
he met and married Virginia Walker. For a variety of reasons,
Slocum moved on from ship to ship. In 1875, his current ship,
the
B.
Aymar
, was sold out from
under him in Manila and he decided to take a year off to build his
own sailing ship. He sold that one (presumably at a profit) and
used the money to buy another ship to haul freight between Pacific
islands, then sold that one and bought the *
Amethyst
,
which he also later sold as business began to slacken. Next, he
signed on as part-owner and captain of an 1,800-ton ship called
the
Northern
Light
. Working as master of
the
Northern
Light
, he sailed for the
first time around the world and ended up in New York, where again
his ship was sold to new buyers.

   
Always eager to take on new work, Slocum became
captain of the
Aquidneck
and, with
his wife aboard, shipped out of Baltimore in 1884, headed for
Brazil and Argentina. Virginia died from illness along the way and
Slocum was devastated. His son, Victor, would later write, “father
was like a ship with a broken rudder.” In 1886, Slocum married his
first cousin Henrietta. He was forty-two; she was twenty-four and,
unlike Virginia, didn’t adjust readily to life aboard
ship.

   
In 1888, still working off the coast of South
America, the
Aquidneck
went aground and the captain
considered her unsalvageable. He sold what was left of the wreck
and with little money left in his pocket, Slocum, Henrietta and two
sons lived ashore on a strange island with little more than the
tool kit, charts, chronometer and compass salvaged from the
Aquidneck. Ever resourceful, Slocum set about building a ten-metre
canoe-style boat which he rigged like a Chinese sampan. He
christened her the
Liberdade
, launched
the day that slavery was abolished in Brazil – May 13, 1888. The
cost of the boat had been less than $100 and Slocum sailed his
family over 8,000 kilometres to South Carolina and then published a
book about the experience.