In 1884 John Matheson, the son of a shipbuilder from Caithness Scotland, sailed for Canada, eventually settling in the village of Port Carling, then a frontier wilderness settlement on the Muskoka Lakes in northern Ontario. Muskoka was then beginning the transition from logging and hard scrabble pioneer farming to a summer destination for the Toronto gentry then, as now, the Hamptons or Lake District of central Canada.
Matheson ultimately made a name for himself there as a master boat builder who built rowing skiffs, giving way in the teens and 1920s to the beautiful gasoline launches that are now a part of the antique boat sub-culture of Muskoka. Matheson died in Port Carling in 1942 and is still recalled as an expert craftsmen who to the end of his career used only hand tools. Many of his boats are still in use today. I have one of them, the Cygnet—young swan—a beautiful 12 foot cedar rowing skiff. It is a modest craft compared with the power launches of the 20s and 30s built with mahogany wood and brass fittings for the Canadian business and political elite of the era that are minor works of art and now come with eye popping prices to match. But it is every bit as remarkable in graceful simplicity, perhaps made more special for likely being the first boat Matheson ever built in Muskoka.
Matheson arrived in Port Carling in 1890 and, out of work as a boat builder, was hired by my great grandfather, James Herbert Mason, to do the interior wood work and cabinetry on the summer cottage he was then building on Chiefs Island, Lake Joseph. The cottage—a nine bedroom summer home which burnt down in 1951—was built to supplement the original structure, a simple barn beam building sawn from local timber that was the first summer home on the lake, built in 1874; it is still in use by my family today.
Matheson and his wife moved in to the cottage on Chiefs Island and commenced work that autumn, planning to remain for the winter months. This was their first year in Muskoka and, as recent British immigrants, they would have been ill prepared for the harshness of a Canadian winter spent in the wilderness. From December when the lake begins to freeze and until the ice is thick enough to walk on, generally not until late January or February, the lake is nearly impassable and anyone left on the island almost stranded. All went well until the dead of winter set in. With inadequate food or heat—the cottage was designed for summer use only—the Mathesons struggled by all accounts, but were kept going by the assistance of a pioneer family, the Crouchers, homesteading on the mainland not far away at Craigie Lea. As soon as the ice broke up in the spring they fled back to Port Carling where Matheson went on to assume his destiny as a boat builder of renown.
He left behind one artefact—the rowboat Cygnet. By the time this writer was aware of it it was a rickety artefact that had been in the old boathouse for so long no one could recall when it had last been used. As a child I was told that it was “off limits”. I looked at the boat like forbidden fruit and longed to get it working somehow. You could see that in its day it had been a fine vessel and I wondered what it had been witness to in its history: picnic outings, sunset trips around the island with parasols and Victorian garb. Looking at the pictures of the era you couldn’t say they under-dressed.
One summer, I was in my early teens, I got it into the water. It leaked like a sieve but after soaking for about a day the wood had expanded enough that it could be rowed around without sinking. It was a creaky old thing—the oar blocks were loose and the whole side of the boat would heave when you took a stroke. But with gentle, ginger care, we were able to get some use out of it. I’d take it out on the water with a friend or two, a copy of Faber’s Popular Reciter of English verse or a Robert Service collection and a bottle of wine. We’d drift down the shore toward the Paradise Rocks, circle Bulrush Bay, taking turns reading aloud. Someone would hold forth on a favoured topic or, most often, we just said nothing and let the shore go by.
The years I was overseas at university and later working in Africa in war zones and refugee camps I always knew that whatever English damp in a Cambridge college or Sahelian heat and hell conditions around me, at some point I’d be back on Chiefs Island and rowing the Cygnet. It kept me going—the exile’s longing for home.
But it was so old and weak that using it was to live on borrowed time. Parts fell off or were lost. One summer the oars disappeared; no one knew where they’d gone. Dear thief, all is forgiven, just return them!
Finally the decision was taken to have it repaired. A local craftsman was contacted and said he’d do the job. The boat departed at the beginning of September after a summer of fond use. I felt like a father giving up his first born child. It turned up the following spring, but it was a botch job. The sanding was poor and the planks looked like old watermarked furniture. More than that, the boat was still as weak as before. The first turn with the oars and the oar-block came loose. I felt like an art connoisseur whose Botticelli had been butchered by Mr Bean.
It was time to get serious and I turned to the maestro of Muskoka rowboat restoration, Paul Gockel. He looked the Cygnet over like an authority on Louis XIV furniture or an archaeologist at the tomb of a pharaoh. It was a sorry sight. And for the craftsman that he was, it must have been painful to see such a degraded specimen. He said the choice was to scrap it and buy a new boat or undertake the much costlier and time consuming route of a major repair and restoration project.
There was never any doubt about what I had to do.
All that winter he would e-mail me in London with updates on progress. It was almost always bad news: the ribs under the floor boards were “dozy” and would have to be re-ribbed, the oar blocks were “spliced and repaired so many times as to be unusable”, one of the hull planks was in “atrocious” condition, new floor boards were needed, the seat riser was “in three places” and new bilge keels needed.
It went on—I came up to speed on rowboat arcana.
According to my restorer the boat is very old and bears the marks of John Matheson’s craftsmanship. It also has a number of extraordinary design features. The oak ribs are spaced an unusually wide 10-inches apart and the cedar planking is an unusually thin 5/16′ inches. The result is an unusually lightweight skiff for its size and finding another like it would be difficult; it represents one of Matheson’s earliest examples of skiff building in the Muskoka Lakes area.
The thin planking and spare use of ribbing attests to Matheson being the ever-parsimonious Scotsman. But I wonder if this parsimonious cost-cutting wasn’t a way of getting one over on my great grandfather, James Herbert Mason, for nearly having him freeze to death working on the old house that first winter. If this is an early example of his work using an unusual design that was never repeated then I wager that this was Matheson’s first ever Muskoka rowboat. Matheson moved to Port Carling in 1890 as a boat-builder and if the Cygnet is one of his earliest creations, then it can be assumed that he probably begun building it in the spring of 1891, fresh from his hazardous winter on Chiefs Island.
Back in London I’d consider the news of the restoration, write a cheque, look out at the grey skies of St James—every day was a different shade of grey—and think about Lake Joseph. It seemed like a state of mind more than a place. When I saw the Cygnet again and took it out on the waters of Lake Joseph and around Chiefs Island there was never a question that it was worth it.
Douglas Mason
London September 2002