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7. Ship of the Month - cont'd. sold CONDOR to the Mathews Steamship Company Ltd. for $125, 000 shortly b e fore the company's bankruptcy, and this sale naturally attracted con siderable "official" interest after the firm's failure. Amongst the new ships built for the Mathews Steamship Company Ltd. in the 1920s were the sistership canallers LIVINGSTON and WATERTON of 1928, and another pair of sisterships, FULTON and SOUTHTON, built in 1929. Both pairs of steamers were built on credit long after the principals of the Mathews Steamship Company ought to have been aware that the company had over-exten ded itself on new construction, and would be in dire straits if the economy took even a small downturn. Of course, the downturn that occurred during the autumn of 1929 was anything but small, and it sealed the fate of the Mathews fleet. In fact, it would have taken Mathews so long to pay off the cost of all of its new construction in the 1920s that the fleet's failure was a cer tainty, the only variable being the timing of the default. The March, 1928, issue of the "Canadian Railway and Marine World" reported that the Mathews Steamship Company "has ordered two Great Lakes steamships to be built in England by Sir W. G. Armstrong, Whitworth and Co. They will be 253 ft. long, 43 1 / 2 ft. wide and 21 1 / 2 ft. deep moulded; the deadweight will be 2, 350 tons on 14 ft. draft. They will be of the single-deck type, with poop and forecastle, and will be built to Lloyd's classification requ ire ments. They will be fitted with 2 masts, 2 derrick posts and 4 derricks, also steam windlass, 6 steam winches, and Wilson-Pirrie steering gear. A c commodation will be provided in and above the forecastle for captain, (deck) officers and crew, and for the engineers and firemen in a steel deckhouse on the poop deck alongside the machinery casings. The ships will be fitted with single-screw propelling machinery at the after end, steam to be supplied by 2 single-ended boilers. They will be named LIVINGSTON and WATERTON, r e spe c tively. " The Mathews fleet by then had long been known for giving its ships names ending in the suffix 'ton', this name sequence having started, apparently, with the operation (and unfortunate loss) in 1879 by J. and J. T. Mathews of the schooner-barge TRENTON (John Simpson had built her at Trenton back in 1864). It was carried on in the steam barge CLINTON (I), built in 1874 at St. Catharines by Melancthon Simpson, which the Mathews fleet operated in the 1890s. Many more famous 'ton'names were to follow. Where did Ernie Mathews get the names for the LIVINGSTON and WATERTON? The first one is easy, because Mathews made quite a fuss about naming that ship in honour of Capt. A. B. Livingston, who had been in command of the Mathews canal steamer LAMBTON (28), (a) GLENAFTON (25), (c) S A L V U S , which had stranded tragically on a shoal near Ile Parisienne in Whitefish Bay on December 8, 1927. Two lives were lost in the accident, and Capt. Livingston had been instrumental in bringing his surviving crew members in safety to Sault Ste. Marie after an eleven-mile lifeboat journey and a long overland tramp through the woods in below-freezing conditions. In fact, Capt. L i v i n g ston was given command of the new steamer which bore his name, and he kept that command as long as the ship remained in the Mathews fleet, even when it was operated by court-appointed receivers. As for WATERTON, it has been said that she was named for Waterton Lake N a tional Park, in southwest Alberta, but we tend to doubt this. Ernie Mathews (and later Capt. R. Scott Misener, who maintained the 'ton' naming tradition for a number of years) often had to make a major stretch to find an ap pro priate name with the suffix for a fleet vessel. In this case, however, we have sincere doubts that Mathews searched so far afield to find a name for his new steamer, and we believe that he found it closer to home. It may, in fact, have had no particular derivation at all... In any event, the order for the two new ships, which were better than any other Mathews canallers, and superior to those built for almost every other