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Ship of the Month - cont'd. 8. upwards. There were stretcher poles to carry an awning overhead in order to shade the officers on watch, and a stretcher also was placed over the fore­ deck, so that an awning could be hoisted there. Right forward, there was a hinged spearpole to facilitate the steering of the vessel. An open post-and-wire rail ran down either side of the spar deck, and aft there was a steel deckhouse with the boilerhouse in its forward end. There was an overhang of this cabin's roof (the boat deck) down the sides and out over the fantail, and a closed steel taffrail provided protection from boar­ ding seas. There were large windows in the aft cabin, but as on many lakers, they were replaced by portholes as a safety measure following The Great Storm of 1913. A fairly tall smokestack, without much rake, rose out of the boilerhouse abaft the coal bunker hatch set in the forward end of the boat deck. Two prominent ventilator cowls were set just ahead of the smokestack and to either side of it. The lifeboats, one on either side, were placed on the boat deck overhang, and they were worked with radial steel davits. EDMONTON carried two heavy pole masts. The foremast was stepped immediately abaft the break of the forecastle, while the main was set directly forward of the boilerhouse. Each of these masts was fitted with one cargo boom to assist in the loading and unloading of heavy general cargo. Ports were fit­ ted in each side of the vessel to permit direct access to the 'tween deck. They are difficult to make out in some of the early photographs, but it would appear that there were two cargo ports in the port side of the hull and three in the starboard side. We cannot imagine a reason for such a dif­ ference, and must assume that we are being misled by unclear photos. EDMONTON's hull was painted black, while her forecastle and cabins were white. The masts and booms were buff. The smokestack was black, with two narrow, closely-spaced, silver bands. The bands often were obscured by soot, and the paint on the forecastle frequently was scraped away by mooring lines. The latter problem was solved in latter years by the fitting of two small vertical rubrails. EDMONTON was not long on the lakes before she took part in a major rescue operation on Lake Superior. On the night of December 6th, 1906, the Northern Navigation Company's wooden-hulled passenger and freight steamer MONARCH, downbound out of Port Arthur on what was to have been her last voyage of the season, encountered blizzard conditions and missed the channel between Pas­ sage Island and the northeastern tip of Isle Royale. She ran hard into the bluffs just to the west of Blake's Point on Isle Royale, lifting the bow out of the water, buckling the hull amidships, and leaving the ship lying up by the bow at a dangerous angle. All but one of the crew eventually managed to make it to shore, where their predicament later was discovered by the keeper of the Passage Island Light. His assistant, together with MONARCH'S purser, took a boat out into the shipping channel, and eventually managed to hail the passing EDMONTON, which was downbound but returned to Port Arthur for assistance. The tugs JAMES WHALEN and LAURA GRACE were then dispatched to Blake's Point, and they managed to rescue all but one of MONARCH'S crew; a watchman had drowned when the crew first abandoned the stranded MONARCH. EDMONTON seems to have operated successfully for the Mathews fleet, so much so that just two years later, Mathews returned to the Robert Stephenson shipbuilding yard on the River Tyne for a vessel that was very nearly a sistership to EDMONTON. However, she was ordered not for the Mathews Steam­ ship Company Limited, but rather for the Merchants Steamship Company Limited of Toronto. This was a Mathews affiliate which had been incorporated at To­ ronto in 1907 under the Ontario Companies Act, with capital of $150, 000. J. T. Mathews was president; W. H. Moore, vice-president; A. E. Mathews, secre­ tary-treasurer and manager, and F. H. Richardson and F. B. Osler, directors. The directors later were listed as A. G. Ross, J. F. H. McCarthy, B. Osler and J. M. Ewing. As far as we know, the Merchants Steamship Company only ever owned two ships; one was EDMONTON's near-sistership, built by Stephen­