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7. Ship of the Month - cont'd. set to rights in the August 1906 issue of the same publication. It stated: "The Mathews Steamship Co. Ltd., of which J. T. Mathews, Toronto, is Mana­ ging Director, is having built on the Tyne, England, a double deck package freight steamer to run between Montreal, Port Arthur and Fort William. Her dimensions will be: length of hull, 256 ft.; beam, ft.; depth of hold, 23 ft. The engines and boilers will be of the most modern type. She is to be named EDMONTON, and is expected to leave for Montreal early in August. " She apparently was late in getting away from the builder's yard, for the De­ cember 1906 issue of "The Railway and Marine World" reported: "The new grain carrying Str. EDMONTON, built at Hebburn-on-Tyne, Eng., for J. and J. T. Mathews (sic), arrived in Toronto (Thursday) Oct. 25, from Hull, Eng., with a general cargo for Port Arthur, Ont. Her dimensions are: length, 256 ft.; breadth, 42 1/2 ft.; depth, 23 ft. She is provided with double bottom for water ballast, and two complete steel decks (including 'tween deck -Ed. ). There are six hatches on each deck (spaced on 24-foot centres -Ed. ), and ample derricks and winches for the quick handling of cargo. On a draught of 14 ft., she will carry 72, 000 bush, (bushels of grain -Ed. ); and fully loaded, 110, 000 bush. " EDMONTON was registered at Newcastle, England, and she was given British of­ ficial number 122856. Once the Mathews Steamship Company began to manage and own steel-hulled steamers, it formally adopted the naming scheme that saw its ships given names ending with the suffix "ton". Some say that this was a reference to the city of Toronto, Ontario, the home of the Mathews opera­ tions, but we never have seen anything in our Mathews documents to confirm this. It may simply have been that, with a few of its early, venerable, woo­ den ships having come to the fleet with such names, J. T. and A. E. Mathews may simply have liked the sound of such names. In any event, EDMONTON was named for the capital city of the Canadian province of Alberta. Apart from a possible connection with the prairie grain that the Mathews ships frequently carried, we cannot see any particular reason for the Mathews firm to have selected this name. Regardless, it stuck with her for her entire life. The shipping register in Ye Ed. 's collection that is closest in time to the advent of EDMONTON, and thus most likely to reflect her original statistics, is the 1908 Great Lakes Register (Bureau Veritas). Dimensions of ships al­ ways vary a bit from register to register, but the 1908 volume shows EDMONTON to have been 249. 0 feet in length between perpendiculars (the 256 foot figure quoted by the the press was her overall length), 42. 8 feet in the beam, and 23. 0 feet in depth. Her hull had three compartments, and her tonnage was 1982 Gross and 1310 Net. EDMONTON was powered by a triple expansion steam engine built in 1906 by the North Eastern Marine Engineering Company at Newcastle-on-Tyne. It had cylin­ ders of 17, 28 and 46 inches diameter, with a stroke of 33 inches, and pro­ duced 950 Indicated Horsepower at 84 revolutions per minute. The same firm manufactured for the ship in 1906 two coal-fired, single-ended, Scotch boi­ lers, each of which measured 11'0" by 10'6". There were four furnaces and steam was produced at a working pressure of 185 pounds per square inch. EDMONTON was a handsome steamer with a marked sheer to her decks. She had a straight stem, a fully topgallant forecastle with a closed rail sheltering most of the forecastle head, and a flush quarterdeck aft. She boasted a graceful counter stern. Her stockless anchors were suspended from hawseholes set very close to the stem post, and wooden rubrails were fitted along her sides to protect her steel plates from damage when she was canalling or docking. Atop the forecastle head sat a small, turret-style pilothouse with four win­ dows in its front, and a door on each side. There was an open bridge on the monkey's island above, and a texas cabin set crossways abaft the pilothouse contained the master's office and his quarters. There was a closed rail around the open bridge, with a weathercloth provided to extend the shelter