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 theNorthern 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.
Slocum’s wife and children settled into life ashore in East Boston, but Joshua was feeling unsettled and depressed over the loss of his first wife, the wreck of his ship and his faltering finances. In 1892, he got his hands on an old sloop and decided to rebuild it into something that would be uniquely his own. He also got it into his head that he should sail it around the world, with no one but himself on board. Eleven metres long and four metres wide, the Spray was designed to be a ship that could pretty well sail itself for long stretches at a time.
So this very confident, somewhat alienated fifty-one-year-old master mariner set sail from Massachusetts in April, five years before the turn of the centuty. “A thrilling pulse beat high in me,” he wrote. He also admitted, “I had taken little advice from anyone for I had a right to my own opinions in matters pertaining to the sea.” The obvious advice he was ignoring from everyone was that he would be completely crazy to undertake such a treacherous adventure.
Slocum took his time getting adjusted to his craft and sailed first to Gloucester, where he bought an old dory which he cut in half to use as a dinghy. Next he went home to Westport in Nova Scotia and on to Yarmouth for final provisions, including a tin clock with a smashed glass that he bought for a dollar. It would be his only man-made reference point for time on the trip.
Slocum had no particular interest in the shortest, fastest route around the world. First he sailed from Nova Scotia to Gibraltar. On his way he stopped in the Azores, where he contracted some form of food poisoning. Sick at sea, he had a vision of Christopher Columbus guiding him on. After Europe he sailed back across the Atlantic to South America. He probably figured a couple of trans-Atlantic crossings was a good warm-up for what would come next. He nearly drowned off the coast of Uruguay trying to get his vessel unstuck from a reef. Keep in mind that, like so many Nova Scotian sailors who spent their working lives at sea, Slocum had never learned to swim.
Passing through the Strait of Magellan, he had a rough time tacking through the stormy and difficult passage. He was also boarded by some of the local Native population who failed to sneak up on him asleep because he had mined the deck with carpet tacks as protection against intruders. He claimed that the leg from Thursday Island to the Keeling Cocos Islands, a distance of 4,300 kilometres, was accomplished with the need for only one hour manning the helm. His design of a sailing ship that could very nearly sail itself had paid off. As he arrived at ports in the South Pacific he was often treated royally by governors and kings and given presents of food and supplies.
On July 3, 1898, he sailed back into harbour at Fairhaven, Massachusetts, but there was no one there to make a fuss over his return home. When he finally made it ashore, people asked him who he was and where he had come from.
Joshua Slocum must have had a hard time readjusting to landlocked life as he moved into an apartment in New York City and then back to East Boston. He sold his story of sailing alone around the world to the magazines and then book publishers and tried to settle into a small farm on Martha’s Vineyard. A few trips sailing south didn’t seem to cheer him up enough and he grew cranky and silent. In November of 1909 he set sail from Martha’s Vineyard in the Spray, an aging, out-of-shape vessel with an aging and unhea
lthy captain. He was never seen again.
Chapter 31
Chapter 31
Yarmouth’s Unsung Inventor
Nova Scotia has often been fertile ground for inventions, particularly those related to ships and shipping. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it was common practice for someone to simply dream up some new, innArovative device for a practical purpose and then build it for himself or share it with his neighbours. Patents were rarely considered, often because the patent office was too far away or because the formality was too es xpensive for a fisherman or sailor. Occasionally, a Nova Scotian sailor or shipbuilder would create an ingenious improvement in ship design or fashion a completely unique maritime device. If either worked well, it found its way into sailing technology worldwide without any great rewards for the inventor.
Such was the case for John Patch of Yarmouth, who invented the marine screw propeller, a major advance in ship technology. Patch had also come up with some improvements for steam engines and paddle wheels, but it was the propeller device that would revolutionize the shipping industry. Patch had created a wooden model of his screw propeller as early as 1833. It was powered by a hand crank that turned wooden gears. Patch tried it out at night in Yarmouth Harbour with a handful of witnesses nearby to watch him propel himself across the water by turning a hand crank that in turn rotated a prop at the back of his boat. In 1834, his new-fangled propulsion system was installed in the schooner Royal George, and the grateful captain, Silas Kelly, found that he could now move his boat around even when the wind had gone dead on him. Patch went off to New York to apply for a patent but was denied. He was told his invention was worthless and that he would just be wasting his money. He tried again in Washington but was turned down there as well.
It was probable that the patent offices were manned by corrupt employees who took advantage of their positions to seize on a good idea and try to make money by getting a patent for themselves. Patch was an uneducated seafaring Nova Scotian who looked like an easy mark to the shrewd American patent officers.
The patent design finally did get registered in England but not by Patch. It’s possible that this English design was invented quite independently of Patch. This doesn’t change the fact that the Yarmouth resident had come up with the idea on his own, had tried to register what had previously not been registered and was turned down. By 1858 poor old John was seventy-seven, crippled, broke and living in the Yarmouth poorhouse. The good folks of that port had watched John’s invention become a vital tool of marine technology and they were outraged that Patch had not received credit or money. They made a solid case to the Nova Scotia legislature fork compensation, but it was turned down and so John Patch went to his grave without ever getting much in the way of credit or cash for his invention or his inventiveness.
The Deep Divers of Pictou
Another more worldly-wise Nova Scotian inventor was John Fraser of Pictou County. While his brother, Dr. J.D.B. Fraser, was the first physician to make use of chloroform in Canada, John was the first man to use a diver’s helmet in North America. While this may not sound like a monumental “first” to a landlubber, it was a pretty big deal in the salvage industry. As the stories in this book reveal, a multitude of sailing ships and uncountable tons of valuable cargo ended up on the bottom of the sea, and any means available to return such goods above sea level would earn significant rewards. o
Fraser had been doing salvage work for Lloyds of London off the European coast. When he came home to Nova Scotia in the summer of 1842, he had the gear necessary to descend to the bottom of the sea while still breathing air. Along with another Pictonian, Alexander Munro, he set off to Cape Bear, P.E.I., where, in 1839, the Mallabar had once floundered, dumping her seventy-four guns and tons of valuable “shot” to the bottom. Munro and Fraser were able to raise thirty-five of the cannons and a few tons of the shot to produce a good profit for themselves. After that they set up operations in Pictou, where they demonstrated their bizarre-looking new equipment to the wide-eyed fishermen and townspeople. The diving device was large and unwieldy, weighed down by ninety kilograms of lead. The hood had three windows and the “suit” was made of India rubber. Air was pumped into the helmet by way of a long tube. To the amazement of the Pictou crowd, Munro stayed under for more than a half hour and then went down a second time to bring up some ornaments – an anchor and a chain – to show off.
Undersea Messages to Europe
In 1849, Nova Scotian Frederick Gisbourne thought that the island of Newfoundland should have a more dependable communication link with his own province and the outside world. His plan involved a land cable and a steamboat connection to Cape Breton. The Newfoundland legislature gave him £500 to perform a survey of the land route which would carry the cable from St. John’s to Cape Ray. That venture in itself was dangerous, leading to the death of one man and near-starvation for the rest of the crew.
Not one to be discouraged in pursuit of profit and better communication, Gisbourne went to New York to find investors to back him for yet another project, the first successful North American submarine communications cable. In the summer of 1852, it would link P.E.I. to New Brunswick, giving Charlottetown instant telegraph communication with the mainland for the first time.
The troublesome Newfoundland project, however, eventually led to bankruptcy for Gisbourne, but he didn’t let that get him down. Instead, he enlisted the support of big money man Cyrus Field, and together they decided to finish the Newfoundland project, complete with an underwater cable to Cape Breton. Next, they grew more ambitious and proposed putting in a submarine cable all the way from St. John’s to Europe. Gisbourne liked big projects and this was an enormous one which took thirteen years to finish and five times the money originally expected. Field and Gisbourne had also enlisted other investors and the help of Samuel Morse, inventor of the electric telegraph.
In the summer of 1854, 600 men were at work on the land leg of the Newfoundland route, cutting a swath a mere two and a half metres wide through the rugged terrain. The first try at putting down the undersea cable from Cape Ray to Cape Breton across the Cabot Strait was scrubbed when a storm walloped the sailing ship that was trying to lay the cable. In the process they lost seventy-two kilometres of costly cable. The next year they succeeded with a steamship to get the insulated strand-core copper wire in place and the telegraph link came into service.
More money was raised, including $70,000 from the U.S. government, and the Atlantic Telegraph Company continued on its way to forge the undersea link with Europe. There were still plenty of setbacks, including cable lost or damaged by storms, and accidents, but by 1866 the transatlantic cable was pulled ashore at Heart’s Content, Newfoundland, and Gisbourne saw his vision fulfilled.
King of Kerosene
While Frederick Gisbourne was concerned with improving communication by laying cables, geologist Abraham Gesner would hope to supply something even more fundamental: a better way to provide light in the darkness of one’s own home. Gesner was born in Cornwallis Township, Nova Scotia, in 1797. He studied in London to become a doctor, but he also had a lifelong passionate interest in geology. In 1836 he published a book about the rocks of Nova Scotia, then moved to New Brunswick to act as provincial geologist. When he was fired from that job, he opened a museum of natural history. It turned out not to be a very good way to make a living, so he returned to Nova Scotia where, in his disappointment, he started to study coal.
During those days many people provided night-time lighting by burning smoky and smelly oil from plants or animals, including whales. The lighting itself was quite dim and the fuel sometimes expensive. When Gesner met the British commander, the Earl of Dundonald, he found a kindred spirit interested in the possibility of providing light from coal. Burning a chunk of coal for light in itself would be a smelly, unsatisfying business but, with Dundonald’s encouragement, Gesner figured out how to distil oil from coal. He made a big demonstration of it in a church in Charlottetown and the even
t was a huge success.
The new synthetic fuel, called kerosene, was adopted for use in illuminating lighthouses. Gesner started the Kerosene Gaslight Company to light the streets of Halifax but there were a few snags in getting the business running smoothly. Gesner’s new fuel was still somewhat smelly as it burned but was a major improvement over the past. Kerosene would go on to be used for cooking, lighting, heating and even to fuel jets, but in his day Gesner never made a big profit from it and moved on to teach natural history at Dalhousie University.
The Bells of Baddeck
In 1885, the greatest of all inventors associated with this province, Alexander Graham Bell, took a vacation in Cape Breton and became hooked on the place. For the next thirty-three years, Bell lived from the spring into the fall at Beinn Bhreagh, his home near Baddeck. For Bell, Cape Breton would be just the place to ambitiously explore new technological possibilities that would help change the world. *
Bell had no real professional training in the area of electricity. Instead, his prime area of interest was sound and vocal physiology. He had been brought up in Scotland and first travelled to Canada in hopes of improving his health. He had an inquisitive mind and was interested in all manner of scientific endeavours, especially something that would improve the telegraph device. In Boston, where he worked at a school for the deaf, he mÿoonlighted in his research and in 1875 patented something called the harmonic telegraph, which involved sending messages at varying harmonic frequencies.
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