The following text may have been generated by Optical Character Recognition, with varying degrees of accuracy. Reader beware!

Ship of the Month - cont'd. 8. sum of $2, 955, 667. The actual appraised value of those particular ships was $4, 390, 000. Several of the steel-hulled boats already had been sold by the liquidators prior to the auction, and a few others were sold after the McIn tosh acquisition, but twelve of the older, wooden-hulled boats were not bid at all. It is said that what goes around, comes around, and so it often has been in the lake shipping business. Just as the Gilchrist fleet was being broken apart, another lake fleet was being created, one that still remains in existence today (although under different management). The year 1913 saw the Cleveland iron mining and vessel management firm of Pickands Mather and Com pany consolidating its various lake shipping interests into the newly-formed Interlake Steamship Company. It was back in 1883 that Pickands Mather and Company had been formed as an iron ore commission agency by Colonel James Pickands, Jay C. Morse and Samuel Mather, and its vessel operations began the same year when the firm acquired a part interest in the wooden-hulled steamer V. H. KETCHAM. Other wooden ships followed under Pickands Mather pa rt - ownership, but about 1890, the company became operating managers for the Minnesota Iron Mining Company's shipping affiliate, the Minnesota Steamship Company. In subsequent years, PM entered into management agreements with other fleets, notable among them being the American Steel Barge Company, owner and builder of a large fleet of whaleback steamers and consort barges. In 1913, the decision was made to consolidate all of the shipping interests managed by Pickands Mather, and the Interlake Steamship Company was incorporated for this pur pose. It first president was Henry G. Dalton, who had been an associate of Pickands, Morse and Mather when they first went into business in 1883. The first general manager of Interlake was Harry Coulby, a Pickands Mather partner who had joined the firm in 1896. At the time of its formation, the Interlake fleet consisted of 37 steamers and two consort barges. Of these, fifteen were vessels already managed by Pickands Mather, seven were ships acquired from the Wolvin interests, and the largest group was comprised of seventeen former Gilchrist steamers which were amongst the 22 ships that H. P. McIntosh had purchased at the Gilchrist auction on March 6, 1913. The formalization of the Interlake acquisition of these ships came in April of 1913, and the shareholders gave their approval on April 17th. Accordingly, in the spring of that year, R. L. IRELAND joined the Interlake Steamship Company fleet, and for more than a decade she was to wear its co lours, with a red hull and forecastle, white cabins, and black stack with an orange band. The steamer entered service under the command of Capt. Andrew Cowie, and with Charles Shields as chief engineer, but when she did so, it was under a brand new name. To trace the derivation of the new name, we must digress a bit. The first "class" of steel steamers that had been built for the Gilchrist fleet was a group of six 346-foot, 5, 500-ton capacity ships that came out in 1901. They were known as the "Planets", because they were named JUPITER, MARS, NEPTUNE, SATURN, URANUS and VENUS. Of these, three (JUPITER, NEPTUNE and VENUS) were included in the transfer to Interlake in 1913, and from these three boats, Interlake management seems to have developed a fondness for the names of "heavenly bodies", for thirteen of the remaining fourteen Gilchrist acquisitions were rechristened with such names, as were eight of thirteen steamers which Interlake acquired on December 30, 1915, from Capt. John Mitchell's Cleveland Steamship Company. R. L. IRELAND was renamed (b) SIRIUS in honour of the brightest star visible in the heavens, and perhaps this was appropriate in that the steamer was the last of all of these ships to remain in active service (albeit later with another name). Sirius, whose name is of Latin origin and taken from the