Whale bones, stolen cars, and trains in the lake: if anyone knows the mysteries of Toronto Harbour, it’s harbour master Angus Armstrong.

Born and raised in Toronto, Armstrong has spent the majority of his life working in the city’s harbour. At 17, he was a lifeguard at the eastern beaches, and became head lifeguard of Toronto Island in 1970. He worked for the Toronto Police Service Marine Unit in the summers of 1970-76, becoming an officer before moving into his current role as Harbour Master and Chief of Security for the Toronto Port Authority.

Armstrong recently sat down with the Star and revealed some of the little-known secrets of Toronto Harbour.

The original harbour used to be much larger, right?

Almost all of Front St. used to be the front of the harbour, if you can imagine. Most of that is land created by the Toronto Harbour Commission over the last 100 years, pushed all the way down to Queens Quay. You find a lot of things that are old in the harbour, just because of its history. There are also lots of weird and mysterious findings here, since the port has been around since the late 1700s.

What kind of strange things have you found?

I’ll give you an example. This used to be a landfill created by the Toronto Harbour Commission in about 1918. When they were digging the LRT tracks for Queens Quay, they dug up whale bones. They brought people from the Royal Ontario Museum down, and they said, “There should be no whale bones in Lake Ontario — but these are whale bones!” We found out that a little private zoo that was up on Front St. had gone bankrupt, and took all their exhibits — including a whale in formaldehyde — and dumped it into the landfill. For a while, people thought the whale that was dug up might be the one from the zoo, but it’s never been conclusively proven where the bones came from.

When was the zoo running?

I think about 1880 or so. We’ve also found parts of ships that had run aground. All they used to do was put dirt over top of them and use them as part of the landfill. When they put the landfill in, the citizens of Toronto would come down and use it as a garbage dump.

In your time working with the Port Authority, what incidents really stand out in your mind?

We do a lot of dredging to make sure the navigable channels stay clear. We were dredging the Keating Channel (which connects the Don River to the inner Toronto Harbour) using a big bucket that goes in, brings soil up and then puts it into a barge. They pulled up the bucket, and at the end of it was a Porsche! Just before we could take it over to the barge, the Porsche fell back into the water. We had to call the Toronto Police Marine Unit to pick it up.

Many years ago, when I was a senior diver with the police department, we ran across what looked like a miniature locomotive. And we realized it was one of those trackless trains from the CNE, do you remember those ones when you were a kid? The little train you could jump on for free and go around the CNE? Well, somebody had stolen it in the mid-1960s in the middle of the night, got it all the way down to the east end of Toronto, and then shot it into the water.

In the old days in the ’60s and the ’70s before all this waterfront development happened, a lot of stolen cars would be brought down here and put into the water. But nowadays that doesn’t really happen. The area is pretty populated and there’s lots of fencing, and so the access is kind of gone. But when it was the old port area we used to try and get rid of criminal activity.

Do you ever find bodies in the water?

Occasionally. Certainly that is not an issue now. There are, unfortunately, drownings, but that’s very rare nowadays because of the amount of condominiums and people we have around the area. I would say in the last 15 years, with the improvement in vessels, life jackets and safety equipment, certainly it has taken a huge plunge.

Is there anything going on in the harbour that you think is really unique or important?

Well, last year we moved almost 1.6 million tonnes of goods into Toronto Harbour. That is the equivalent of taking 37,540 semi trucks off the road. So we’re an industrial port that really does a lot of the work on the building industry in Toronto.

We also remove about 150 million pounds of debris from the harbour each year. And that’s stuff we have to get out of the harbour, because it would impede navigation. This harbour has about 7,000 pleasure boats that use it every year — it’s the most popular pleasure-boat harbour within the Great Lakes.

What exactly does the harbour master do?

Toronto’s harbour master is responsible for the safe navigation of the Toronto Harbour Port, promotes commercial shipping, and protects the environment.

How clean is the water in the harbour today?

Boy, it’s cleaned up in the last 20 years! When I started diving in the ’70s you could never see anything on the bottom. It was like the moon — there was nothing alive. And now there are all sorts of fish down there, and there are all sorts of habitats. It really has improved.

Is the water in the port safe to swim in?

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We don’t have any swimming in the port. We do have swimming on the Island itself, on the beaches, and it certainly has improved vastly. We have a bylaw saying you can’t swim in the harbour because of course it’s a commercial shipping lane!

It sounds like there’s some fascinating stuff going on at the harbour, both historically and currently.

It’s a harbour with history. But it’s also a harbour that has a brand new future. Everybody in Toronto should come down and enjoy the waterfront. It’s still a work in progress, but it’s just a fabulous place to be. It’s a resource that’s out there for the citizens of Toronto.