For more than 100 years, the tubby, utilitarian Saint John River woodboat was a familiar sight up and down Canada’s Saint John River. In those years before serviceable roads and a railway were constructed, the river was the only means of easily transporting bulk commodities. As a result the woodboats, like the river barges of Europe, England, and America served as a combination railway boxcar and truck - hauling anything and everything. Their cargos ranged from farm produce, hay and cattle to the ever present slabwood, pulp wood, firewood, coal or lumber. Often the boats were so heavily laden with wood that their decks were awash . At times like these, all that was keeping the boat afloat was the cargo lashed to the deck.

The woodboat design, originated with the New England “dogbody” of pre-revolution days, and the Loyalists, coming north after the Revolution, modified the design to suit local conditions. In time, the woodboat evolved into a form unique to the Saint John River: A broad flat hull fitted with bilge keels to keep the boat upright on the Bay of Fundy mud at low tide. A simple two-masted, fore and aft rig with two gaff sails that was easy to handle with a small crew. And a foremast that jutted from the deck smack in the middle of the forepeak. In size a typical woodboat had a displacement of 68 tons, a beam of 25 feet (7.6 metres) and a length of 71 feet (22 metres) and drew 6 feet (2 metres) of water.

The broad beam and full, round, bluff bow gave tremendous cargo capacity. This capacity increased even more as the cargo was usually piled as high above the decks as the booms would allow. And while the woodboat was usually known for hauling cargoes up and down the Saint John River, adventuresome captains headed out along the coast, bound for the New England trade. A few of them even ventured as far south as Philadelphia.

Today, most of us, when we think of the Saint John River Woodboat, visualize that beautiful, yacht-like creation, the Brunswick Lion, sitting sedately mirrored in the water at New Brunswick's King's Landing Historical Settlement, her russet sails hanging limply from her gaffs.

A 2/3rds size replica, this woodboat was built in the 1970’s and has been well publicized by Tourism New Brunswick - but just how much she resembles the old woodboats (outside of her general form) is a moot point. Few, if any, working woodboats possessed such fine sails or fancy appointments.

This was certainly underlined in conversations I had with an elderly neighbor of mine before she passed away several years ago at age 96. For me, at least, her comments dashed a good deal of cold water on those "good old days of sail" at the turn of the century.

Lizzie's father owned two woodboats between 1890 and 1930 and one of her greatest regrets was that she never allowed him to name one of the boats after her. "At age twelve," she said, "I was so shy that he had to name it The Raven instead of the Lizzie G. My, I wish that I'd let him name it after me..."

"I can remember standing with my sister on the hill by the house. We’d wait, watching upriver for father's boat to come round the Point so we could go running down to the shore to meet him."

Often the boat would be so heavily laden with wood that "All you could see, were the sails and the wood which was piled up high on deck." At times like these the woodboat was conned by a man or, more often, a boy standing on the cargo directing the helmsman.

Lizzie's descriptions of conditions aboard her father's boats would curl the hair of any weekend yachtsman of today. In those days, before Coast Guard regulation and inspection, maintenance, when it was done at all, was of a most rudimentary and casual kind. In fact, as long as the boat floated or, perhaps more truthfully, the wood cargo floated, the vessel was used until it literally fell apart.

This is amply illustrated by a few of The Raven's wooden blocks that Lizzie gave me. These had been lying, forgotten and gathering dust in a dark corner of her barn loft for some fifty odd years.

What a sight! Seldom have I seen such an eclectic mishmash of shapes, sizes, and designs: With bronze bearings and without; some with galvanized fittings; some with grooves for rope beckets; some with galvanized hooks swinging from clevis pins at one end. One and all, rusty, dusty, weathered, worm eaten and crumbling...

A few of these blocks are beautifully made examples from ocean carriers while others are of a more plebeian nature. All were evidently scrounged from whatever secondhand source the captain found at a price he could afford.

"In those days, we never had much money. We made do instead."

As for their condition - no man in his right mind would ever put to sea with such patched-together tackle! The split and rotten cheeks of some of the blocks are repaired with bits of tin and nails - depending on the iron beckets to support the lignum vitae sheaves. Still others have their sheave pins held in place with cracked and swollen squares of leather tacked over the hubs with carpet tacks. As for the ones with bearings, well, most of the bearings are missing and, as evidenced by the wear on the bronze races, most of these appear to have been used long after the bearings fell out! Unbelievable...

"Father always had trouble getting a crew for his boat. He had to make do with a boy or two. But they seldom lasted for more than a trip or two..."

Lizzie's father had trouble getting a crew for one simple reason: While conditions onboard most woodboats were primitive at best, the conditions onboard her father's were so bad - he hated housekeeping - that no one wanted to sail with him. (It may be said in passing that this must have been a family trait as the spinster daughter's house was in a most indescribable state.)

Besides never cleaning his boat, the captain purchased his food in barrel lots: one barrel of potatoes and one of salt gaspereaux at a time. (Gaspereaux, for those unfamiliar with it, is a herring-like fish so full of fine bones that "normal" people find it almost impossible to eat.) The barrels of provisions were placed in the center of the woodboat's cabin and served up three times a day until both were finished...

And, as if this wasn't bad enough, the Captain always drank his water raw from the river - despite the fact that one of his sons died of typhoid contracted from drinking unboiled river water. The good captain claimed: "River water can never harm me!" and he continued to drink his river water, unboiled, until his dying day at a ripe old age...

I must say that Lizzie's stories made me stop and think about the good old days of sail. About how rough and ready things really were under canvas. And how much her tale sounded like something out of Richard Henry Dana's Two Years Before the Mast rather than something that happened in the first half of the twentieth century. All I can say is that I sure hope Lizzie's father was an exception and not the rule...

The last Saint John River Woodboat was constructed in 1917 and the design disappeared with the breaking up of the last remaining woodboat in the 1930's.

The Raven ended her days wrecked less than a mile from where I sit as I write this, driven ashore in a storm. Since this is less than half a mile from where Captain Alfred anchored his boat, it's logical the boat was at anchor at the time. In my files I have this grainy photocopy of an old sepia photograph showing a woodboat anchored in the channel off Alfred's house. The question is: Which of his two woodboats is it? It might be The Raven but then we'll probably never know, as the photo is undated, and Lizzie, who might have known, is long gone.

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