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June TELESCOPE 132 THE OCEAN LINERS OF THE LAKES Almost-legendary splendor surrounds the memory of the twin Great Northern Railroad liners North West and North Land. Now and again one hears that they were the most magnificent passengeer liners the Great Lakes have ever known. Other lake people measure them against features of more recent, more familiar shipsâ€"-public rooms of City of Detroit III or the Assiniboia dining room--and wonder how this could be so. But North West and North Land were built about a decade before this more abundant group of lake ships. In 1895 there was nothing in their class on the lakes. Their promoters turned instead to the grandest ocean liners of the day for a yardstick of superlatives. North West and North Land passed separately from passenger services by the First World War, so few remember their cruises today. Little in print substantiates their claim, other than handsome views in Dana Bowen's books, or Ken Smith's account in Ships That Never Die. In one sense, however, they are still with us. One person who spent childhood vacations on North Land summer cruises boarded South American for the first time four decades later, and felt immediately at home. For the Georgian Bay liners were born close to the image of North West and North Land just when those ships were ending their own brief passenger careers. It is fascinating to rediscover these handsome ships in some- thing more than their external aspect. In the mid-nineties wherr they came out, their cabins were well illustrated both in the Marine Review and in the bound monograph of 1895, The Northern Steamship Co.'s North West and North Land. Until the Seaway came, the Great Lakes enjoyed a rather self- contained shipping history. Few lake ships came from beyond or went elsewhere to trade. It has thus been easy for historians to keep track of them. In its isolation the lake trade created its own patterns of ships. The best known of these were the engines-aft"propellers" and"steam barges" and"whalebacks'fi and their descendants, the ore carriers of today. But there have been times when lake men looked eastward to the Atlantic and beyond for inspiration. The Lake Erie night steanuars took their form from Fall River Liners of Long Island Sound. Niagara Navigation steamers of Lake Ontario had a touch of Britzish Channel ships. Recent ships have shown ocean manners~-Aquarama and the new Canadian package freighters like Fort York. One early example of ocean fashions on the lakes was Lake Michigan's pair of 250-foot ferries Detroit and Milwaukee of 1859 (see illustration). They seem to have been the lakes' only sidewheelers having paddle boxes fully exposed in the manner of contemporary Cunard or Collins liners of the Atlantic. In such fashions, their cabins were contained within the shape of the hull, with little more cabin work than the pilot house standing exposed to the weather.