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June TELESCOPE 124 Ship register books for the past fifteen years tell a Horatio Alger tale for Upper Lakes Shipping Ltd. Once, like many other Canadian fleets then, the Toronto firm owned a collection of canallers and of aged upper lake freighters and bargâ€" es discarded by U. S. fleets. Now, with the Seaway's coming, the canal- lers are gone from the fleet. The old upper=lake=size ships begin to follow, more than replaced by new vessels. Today, postwarâ€"built ships account for about seventy-eight per cent of the fleet's gross tonnage, and the other major Canadian fleets are not far behind that figure.* The old - timers of Upper Lakes Shipping are historically more in- teresting than any other fleet of old lake ships. They date mostly from the 18905 when freighters first began to be recognizable as we know them today. In these pages, Tele- scope offers views of these ships as photographed by Emory Massman. They are supplemented with data from the Dossin Museum files as compiled by Father Dowling. Upper Lakes began in grain trade in 1931, then known as Northland Steamships Ltd. Its first ship was the steel freighter Sarnian, built 1895 as Chili. Sarnian had already been salvaged once from shipwreck, and ultimately to shipwreck she re- turned--on Lake Superior in 1943. The firm was renamed Upper Lakes & St. Lawrence Transportation Company when it began to buy other ships in the thirties. Most numerous were the twenty canallers bought from a Canadian fleet managed by Boland & Cornelius. A group of upper- lake-size freighters and barges came from James Playfair. Immediately before and after World War II, pur- chases from the Pittsburgh and the Interlake fleets rounded out the upper-lake-size portion of the com- pany. '(See Detroit Marine Historian for January, 1951, for a list of the fleet up to that time.) MUSEUM FLEET IN PASSING The new construction program began with the freighters James Norris and Gordon C. Leitch of 1952. Excepting these sisters, all the new ships were built by Port Weller Dry Docks Ltd., alongside the Welland Canal. The shipyard in time became affilia- ted with the Upper Lakes Shipping interests. In all, seven bulk cargo hulls have been built for Upper Lakes Shipping, and four others have been adapted from lengthened tanker hulls originally built between 1943 and 1953. After a fifteen - year lapse, Upper Lakes recently reverted to buying old U. S. ships--two ves- sels operated under British Common- wealth registry. Best-known of the old-timers was the whaleback John Ericsson, retired in 1964. Her almost perpetual con- sort since 1896, the whaleback barge Alexander Holley, is soon to be scrapped at Hamilton, along with the fleet's other whaleback, 137. These leave the American tanker Meteor as the lakes' last whaleback. Upper Lakes was perhaps the last major lake fleet to use steel barges as consorts for freighters. The inventor Alexander McDougall first devised his whalebacks as a form of seaworthy steel tow barges (see Tel- escope, June-July, 1960). As con- sorts for steambarges, they were an improvement over the worn-out wooden sailing ships then used as tows in the late 1880s. In the late 18905, lake fleets ordered a number of con- Illustrations Opposite: (Above) John Ericsson towing Alexander Holley (Below) Douglass Houghton * New tonnage is 74% of Canada Steamship Lines' fleet, 66% for Paterson and 63% for Mis- ener as computed from the current Greenwood's Guide. For U. S. registry fleets, only Hanna scores near these figures; with 66%. But other U. S. fleets have instead been upgrading their older ships with new engines, new mid-sections. etc., which Canadian fleets have not done. And the 47-ship Pittsburgh fleet, which would score a low percentage. has no ships under 600' long.