Richard de St. Croix
6473 Second Line Road S. RR#1
KARS, Ontario
K0A 2E0 Canada

At a Navel Mess dinner aboard the brigantine Fair Jeanne, which was anchored in a quiet bay on Lake Ontario near the city of Kingston on Friday September 13, 1998, I told the following story.

The Brigantine Hibernica and a Young Boy of Fifteen

This week we have heard much about the brigantine Fair Jeanne and we have had the priviledge of sailing on her. This is a story of another brigantine called the Hibernica.

The Hibernica was built in 1863 by James Henry in Shippagan, New Brunswick. She was 105 feet long,with a beam of 22 feet and weighed 165 tons. The Hibernica was owned by a Jersey Island firm called the Fruing Company that operated fish stands on the Baie Chaleur area of New Brunswick. This company traded codfish from the local fisherman and shipped salt cod back to Europe.

The Island of Jersey in the English Channel is 9 miles long and 5 miles wide. It is about 20 miles from the coast of France and the home of the well known Jersey cattle. The State of New Jersey was named after the Island of Jersey.

In 1888, a young boy of fifteen, who saw no future for himself in Jersey joined the Fruing Company as an indentured clerk and sailed to Canada on the Hibernica. The trip to Canada from Jersey would take about eighteen days and sometimes took a month. Over the next few years this young man sailed back to Jersey but returned each time to Canada. He later became the manager of the company store in Caraquet New Brunswick.

 In 1906 this young man married a beautiful twenty one year old woman of Scottish descent whom he had known since she was twelve years old. This coat that I am wearing was part of the wedding suit of the groom. The wedding couple, of course, was my mother and father.