Page 5 - Kwasind June 2020 issue

JUNE 2020 HERITAGE • 5
The Last Finishing Line, The Final Cruise - No Vessel Lasts Forever Heritage Committee
Loss of the Provincial, RCYC Clubhouse 1869. Watercolour by William Armstrong (RCYC founding father). Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Toronto Public Archives
The life of a vessel, be she a liner, yacht, or a harbour drudge- of-all work is not fixed, but it is finite. Vessels ends are various. Sometimes there is fire – witness the end of the lake steamer Noronic, which nearly took our Kwasind with her when the lake-liner burned at Pier Nine. Or the Sitarah /Barbara, of which more later. Sometimes there are breakings-up and occasionally there are more ceremonial ends.
Fire, of course, is a consistent refrain in the histories of Toronto‘s harbour and the Club. Our 1881 and 1906 Clubhouses
both burned; Kwasind was only saved from the Noronic
fire by quick action by a Member and the Harbour Police. Sitarah (1905) blew up and caught fire while fuelling; raised and rebuilt, she sailed as Barbara (you can see her in the Model Room). Finally, in 1927 she was the star of one of
those incomprehensible turn-of-the-19th-and-20th-century entertainments like staged train wrecks – she was towed to Sunnyside and burned as a public spectacle.
What certainly should have been much more fun was the 1877 end to our 1859 - 1869 Clubhouse, the “old steamer“ Provincial. The Provincial obviously didn’t take well to being a clubhouse, as she regularly broke free of her moorings. Eventually she escaped and exceeded everyone’s patience by sinking in an inconvenient part of the harbour. Accordingly, one fine June day, they blew her up, which
must’ve been a more exciting event than a mere fire. Remarkably, salvors removed seven tons of copper (we should have hung on to her).
Fire had an indirect hand in the end of the Gooderhams’ Oriole (1871–1885). When a fire on the Esplanade, so extensive as to be visible across the lake in Niagara, threatened the family properties, Oriole and her crew launched themselves homeward into the teeth of an easterly gale. Halfway across, she opened up, but managed to pump her way home. She was beyond salvation, but rather than see a vessel he loved so much end her days as a stone- hooker, Gooderham had her broken up.
His sons had the same impulse with Oriole II (1886-1906). Rather than see their father’s illustrious racer slide into the hands of someone who would not care for her, they had
her broken up. This avoided the fate of White Wings, built
by the renowned Alexander Cuthbert in 1886. Sailed by Æmilius Jarvis, she had enjoyed eight years of victories before the precipitous fall of conversion to a stone-hooker, and a grubby reduction to grappling for slabs of stone from the lake bottom. Remarkably, she was in short order rebuilt as a yacht by Club historian CHJ Snyder and his brother Roy, and sailed by them and by Captain Fowler of Port Credit until broken up in 1910.