Edgar Talbot on his homemade sailboat in 1939 (above)
Edgar Talbot crossed the Atlantic Ocean by ship at least twice, but his greatest voyage was across Lake Ontario. In 1938 Edgar was an unemployed Chaumont electrician. He desperately wanted to see the Canadian National Exhibition in Toronto and he figured that he could get himself there across the lake. He knew how to sail, but not how to swim. And he didn’t own a life preserver. Or a boat. . . . Edgar was born in 1903 in West Ham, Essex, a suburb of London, England. In 1906 his family emigrated to Deseronto, Ontario (near Belleville). They lived in Canada until 1909, and then they moved to Hounsfield. In 1919 the whole family returned to England, but they came back to Jefferson County the same year, this time residing in Watertown. By the mid-1930s they were permanently settled in Chaumont. . . . In the summer of 1938 Edgar began to assemble a sailboat using scrap materials from around his house. He lived in Chaumont near the river, and he built his sailboat in the little cove between Schermerhorn Park and the end of Water Street. He designed the boat along the lines of a St. Lawrence skiff. For a spar he cut down a 14-foot cedar tree; for the rest of the boat’s body he collected household lumber scraps. He put on a false stern made of bent galvanized iron, which he made watertight by soldering it. The extra space was a storage compartment for food and clothing, and it added buoyancy to the boat in the event of capsizing. He sewed the sails out of old sugar bags. In test runs he found that they didn’t catch the wind well, so he coated them with household wax dissolved in hot gasoline. The combination made the sails airtight and waterproof. His last piece of engineering was a compass he constructed with a brass cylinder from an old oil lamp and some “odds and ends” around the house. He estimated he’d spent about $3 to build his boat. Edgar left Chaumont for Toronto on August 1, 1939 with 75 cents in his pocket and no life preserver in his boat. He sailed along the southern edge of the lake in small jumps. Because he had very little money or food, he would stop occasionally and find odd jobs to replenish his stores. He arrived in Sodus Point on August 4th and paused there to work for four days. After he left Sodus Point he went to Rochester, where he was forced to dock for several days and wait out a storm. He encountered strong winds as he rounded the western edge of the lake and water began to leak in through the bow. On his last night in the boat he was forced to bail all night long. At one point he fell overboard, but he managed to pull himself back on by grabbing the boom. When the sun rose he could see Toronto. It had been two weeks since he left Chaumont. When he reached the dock his legs were so cramped, he could barely climb onto the dock. After seeing the Exhibition, someone took Edgar back to Chaumont by car. It’s not clear what became of his boat. Edgar’s son Rowland suspects that Canadian authorities seized the sailboat; Rowland says that Edgar may not yet have received American citizenship, and that he probably traveled into Canada without the appropriate papers. Edgar spent the rest of his life in Chaumont. He made his living as an electrician and developed a reputation as an unusually hard-working man. A few hours before he died, Edgar had been going up and down a ladder removing shutters from a house he was planning to help paint. He was 85. References:
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