Tales from the Great Lakes

Based on C.H.J. Snider's "Schooner days"

Robert B. Townsend

• Publisher: Dundurn Press
• Year: 1996
• Print ISBN:
  9781550022346
• eBook ISBN:
  9781459713499
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Marine Transportation
• Index: Technology & Engineering

For more than two hundred years, thousands of giant sailing ships traversed the Great Lakes carrying cargo and passengers. The memory of the romance and elegance of these beautiful ships has almost been forgotten in the search for greater efficiency and speed in our modern world.

C.H.J. Snider (1879-1971) chronicled this era in his 1, 303 "Schooner Days" columns for Toronto's The Evening Telegram between 1931 and 1954. A great marine researcher and artist, Snider himself worked aboard schooners in his youth and studied first-hand the development of the Great Lakes region. Coupled with Snider's writings are those of Robert B. Townsend, who, besides introducing Snider's stories, adds some of his own.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Charles Henry Jeremiah Snider, 1879–1971, “The Skipper”
• About the Old Schooners
• Building a Schooner
• Rigs
• Stonehookers
• Registration
• The Fore-’n’-After
• Whatchacallit
• Fitting-Out Time Fifty Years Ago
• Seagoing Teamsters
• Making Hay in December
• Port Credit
• Sunday Scorching
• Last Coal of Last Century
• Brave Boat Work at Century’s End
• Chasing a Lithophone
• Snider Mysteries
• At the Foot of the Highlands
• The Marysburgh
• Perhaps This Solves the Highlands’ Secret
• Little Lady of Fifty-five Years Ago
• Highland Creek and Rouge River
• Port Union
• Frenchman’s Bay
• A “Hesperus” out of Frenchman’s Bay
• A Credit to the Maple Leaf
• Six-Men Lassie
• Gunboat Times on the Great Lakes
• The Hickory Jib Boom
• Port Oshawa
• Port Darlington
• Where “Schooner Days” Come From
• Port Britain
• Millhaven and the Oliver Mowat
• Nosey O’Brien
• New Wine in an Old Bottle
• The Pickled Prince
• Toronto’s Timbermen
• Grafton Harbour
• “Out of Cat Hollow”
• Weller’s Bay
• The Belle Sheridan
• Vienna at Needle’s Eye
• Hunting Out a Hidden Port
• Sails Still Shimmer on Napanee River
• Snow Bird
• Port Milford
• Jib Picnic in the Picton
• A Prince of Prince Edward
• Blue Bottom of Last Century
• Why the Topmasts Were Sent Down
• Oswego – a Dangerous Place
• Wrecked at Oswego Was Fate of Many
• Axe to the Root of a Mystery
• Bridgeport
• Last over Jordan Was the Flying Dutchman
• Riding It Out with the Queen of the Lakes
• What Is a Shellback?
• Lake Fishboats
• Spences of Saugeen
• “Riddle of the Sands” Gave Collingwood a Railway
• The Beaver Mormons
• Passing Hails: The Lyman M. Davis
• Sending a Schooner over Niagara Falls
• Mary and Lucy
• Why Ships Capsize
• Hallowe’en off Point Traverse
• The Persia and Her Pet ’Coon
• Schooners on Lake Simcoe
• Caledonia’s Gear Goes into Guns for Britain and $$$ for Telegram Fund
• Sold under the “Broad Arrow”