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Ship of the Month - cont'd. 8. praisers of the vessels in the fleet. During August of 1912, acting under order of the District Court of the Uni ted States, Eastern Division of the Northern District of Ohio, Garretson and Shane offered the fleet for sale. The thirty-three steel-hulled Gilchrist boats were divided into ten separate "fleets", each representing a different class of vessel, and offers were solicited for each of these "fleets". In most cases, all of the vessels in a particular class were placed in the same fleet; in this manner, all of the "Planets" were spotted in Fleet No. 7 , while all of the 380-footers (such as FRANK W. HART) were put in Fleet No. 8 and all of the 416-foot steamers (like FRANK W. GILCHRIST) formed Fleet No. 1 . Strangely, LAKE SHORE and GILCHRIST, the two 6, 000-ton capacity sisterships, were placed in separate one-vessel fleets; GILCHRIST stood alone in Fleet No. 4 , while LAKE SHORE was the only member of Fleet No. 6. We have never seen any explanation as to why this might have been, but we suspect that it had something to do with the manner in which the construction of the sisters had been financed, or with subsequent mortgage arrangements. Other vessel operators did not exactly fall over each other in a rush to buy the Gilchrist boats, and very few of them were sold. Accordingly, on January 1 5 , 1913, Judge Day ordered that the remaining ships be sold at auction on on March 6, 1913. On that Thursday in March, H. P. McIntosh, president of the Guardian Savings and Trust Company, acting as trustee for four Cleveland banks and other creditors of Gilchrist, purchased twenty-two of the steel ships for the sum of $2, 95 5 ,667. (The actual appraised value of those parti cular steamers was $4 ,390, 000. ) Several steel-hulled Gilchrist boats had al ready been sold by the liquidators prior to the auction, and a few others were sold shortly after the McIntosh purchase. Twelve of the older wooden hulled boats were not bid at all. (In case the names of Garretson and McIntosh should seem familiar to marine historians, it is because the two largest vessels ever operated by the Gil christ fleet, 520-foot, 10, 000-ton capacity steamers built in 1907 at West Bay City, were named GENERAL GARRETSON and H. P. McINTOSH, in honour of the gentlemen who headed the syndicate which arranged the financing for their construction. In fact, the financial load placed by the building of these ships on the struggling fleet during a year of depressed business conditions probably did more to precipitate the downfall of the Gilchrist fleet than any other factor, except for the illness of the company's founder. The GAR RETSON and McINTOSH had long lives, however, and finally went for scrap in 1973 under the names (e) B. F. JONES (II) and (b) EDWARD S. KENDRICK, res pectively. ) As the Gilchrist fleet was being split up, another lake fleet was being crea ted, one that still remains in existence today. The year 1913 saw the Cleve land iron mining and vessel management firm of Pickands Mather and Company consolidating its various lake shipping interests into the newly-formed In terlake Steamship Company. Into this new company's ownership were placed fifteen ships previously owned by other firms controlled by Pickands Mather, seven steamers purchased from the Wolvin interests of Duluth, and seventeen ships which were acquired from amongst the twenty-two Gilchrist boats that H. P. McIntosh had bought at the auction. LAKE SHORE was one of the steamers which made the transition into the Inter lake fleet in 1913, and she soon was painted up in the new fleet's colours, with a red hull, white cabins, and a black stack with a broad orange band. From the three ships out of the six original Gilchrist "Planets" which In terlake acquired (NEPTUNE, JUPITER and VENUS), Pickands Mather adopted the practice of naming most of its vessels for "heavenly bodies", and this tra dition was to last for many years. In 1913, LAKE SHORE was rechristened (b) INDUS, a name which referred to a constellation appearing in the southern sky in the vicinity of Sagittarius. Her sistership, GILCHRIST, also became a member of the Interlake fleet, and she was renamed (b) LUPUS. Both of these steamers operated regularly in Interlake's various trades, spending most of their time carrying iron ore down the lakes and coal up-