The following text may have been generated by Optical Character Recognition, with varying degrees of accuracy. Reader beware!

12 MARINE REVIEW. DEVOTED TO LAKE MARINE AND KINDRED INTERESTS. Published every Thursday at No. 409 Perry-Payne building, Cleveland, Ohlo, ~ by John M. Mulrooney and F. M. Barton. Supscriprion--$2.00 per year in advance. Single copies 10 cents each. Convenient binders seut, post paid, $1.00. Advertising rates on application. Entered at Cleveland Post Office as Second class Mail Matter. The books of the United States treasury department on June 30, 1895, contained the names of the 3,342 vessels, of 1,241,459.14 gross tons registerin thelake trade. The | number of steam vessels of 1,000 gross tons,and over that amount, on the lakes on June 30, 1895, was 360 and theiraggregate gross tonnage 643,260.40; the number of vessels of this class owned in all other parts of the country on the same date was 309 and their tonnage 652,598,72, so that half of the best steamships in allthe United States are pyle' on the lakes. The classification of the entire lake fleet on June 30, 1895, was as ollows: ; Gross Number. Tonnage. LOAM GVESSC] Sir cccaccacceccsoiescccsysiasccsececdessacstavos caneone 1,75 : _ 857,735.13 Sailing vessels .... a a 1,100 800,642.10 Wintel ope diescsssteccccrctsasceses Re 487 83,081.91 Total 3,342 1,241,459.14 The gross registered tonnage of the vessels built on the Jakes during the past ye sens according to the reports of the United States commissioner of navigation, is as follows: Year ending June 80, 1891............sccssccesseesscceeeseseeseeees 204. 111,856.45 By ca 'f OO Das acs Ee can! eosechsdethaee 169 45,968.98 me Be ss SI BOS PR SRM ase eke Sree A cccsecese 175 99,271.24 s a cs SOA Re Neo ee EE ATI, cect aeeccte 106 41,984.61 i 'a £8 1895.... 93 36,352.70 ITN Oo tM se ees ooa giasee PR cap snsens tydesevastcasctcses 347 335,433,98 ST. MARY'S FALLS AND SUEZ CANAL TRAFKIC. (From Official Iteports of Canal Officers.) St. Mary's Falls Canal. Suez Canal. 1895* 1894 | 1893 1895 1894 1893 No. vessel passages.,............ 17,956 14,491 11,008 3,434 8,352 3,341 Tonnage, net registered...... 16,806,781] 13,110,366] 9,849,754|| 8,448,383] 8,039,175] 7,659,068 Days of navigation.............. 231 234 219 365 365 365 % *1895 figures include traffic of Canadian canal at Sault Ste. Marie, which was about ¥% per cent. of the whole, but largely in American vessels. ' \ As a trade publication the Review has from the date of its first is- sue avoided all reference to politics; not that we do not recognize the importance of many political questions when applied to lake shipping, especially in these times of depressed business on account of disturbed finances, but it will be admitted that the successful trade journal is the one that deals with business matters entirely; that aims to lead in the special line to which it is devoted, not by parading its own opinions, but by collecting and publishing reliable information from the best sources in the trade which it seeks to represent. The best trade jour- nal is the one that the business man finds time to read during business hours. But in the present national campaign the question of finances appeals so directly to men in all lines of business that fixed rules and customs are being broken and everybody is something of a politician. The correspondence of business men all over the country is full of argument against any change in our system of finances, and the object lessons brought out are numerous and convincing. One of these comes from the Berlin Iron Bridge Co. ef East Berlin, Conn. 'This company has received from its representative at C. Lerdo, Mexico, the contract for an iron market house at Guadalajara. If this market house were built anywhere in the United States and paid for in our own money, the contract price would be $5,615. The Berlin com- pany is, however, to receive in payment for this building Mexican silver dollars, and their contract price with the city of Guadalajara is, on this account, $11,230. This prompts the Berlin company to ask some questions. "If Mr. Bryan and his populistic platform should prevail,'"' they say, "and there should be free coinage of silver on the basis of 16 to 1, what is to prevent the Berlin Iron Bridge Co. from taking the dollars which they receive in payment on this building, each one of which contains more silver than the American dollar, take these to the United States mint and, free of expense, have them coined into American silver dollars? Under free silver they will then re- ceive for their building 11,230 Bryan dollars, which Mr. Byran claims will be worth as much as gold dollars, consequently they can be used in paying the employes, thus leaving the company a clear profit of over $5,000 on this one contract. Or, again, they can take these same 11,230 standard silver dollars and with these pay the labor and 'ex- pense of building another market house, another bridge or building of any kind for the Mexican market, and receive for the same 22,460 Mexican dollars. They can then recoin these, free of expense, into American dollars and thus by each transaction double their money. Does any laboring man in this country believe that labor paid for in money of that kind will have the purchasing power of our present dollar? Would there be any difference in paying labor in these dol- lars and in reducing the present rate of wages 50 per cent? Who, under the circumstances, will be benefited by free coinage, capital or labor?"' One after another the inventors of deep sea diving apparatus go on spending money in attempts, to locate the steamer Pewabic, sunk years ago in Lake Huron. Scarcely had the effects of the Myers ex- pedition been sold for debts contracted in a vain attempt to find the boat, when Capt. Geo. P. McKay of Cleveland, who was in command of the Pewabic. when she was sunk, had an inquiry about the boat _ from John D. Beebe of Columbus, who says, "he has spent the past year experimenting on deep-water work, and will soon be in position to put his new creation into, execution." He wanted information as to dimensions of the boat, her probable location, ete. Capt. McKay answer all such communications in a courteous and straight forward manner, but it is probable that some of the people making inquiry are inclined to doubt him when he surprises them by stating positive- ly that a quantity of copper was the only thing of value that went down with the boat. The suggestion, made by some of the lake captains, that all boats bound up through the Sault river, when running light, use the old channel at Sailors' Encampment, leaving the new cut to the deep- laden down-bound boats and to boats carrying up cargoes, is certainly worthy of consideration and will be carried out by some masters. It would seem that a suggestion of this kind should receive consideration from the Lake Carriers' Association during the coming winter when the matter of changing the Sault river regulations, if they are to be changed, is under consideration. The deep-draft vessels will locate "new obstructions in the Sault river, just as they did at Ballard's reef and near the Lime-Kilns in the Detroit river, and too much care can not be taken in making navigation as safe as possible until the pro- jected deep draft is uniform throughout the connecting rivers of the lakes, With November, the closing month of the lake navigation season, at hand, a few losses in vessel property that will fall quite heavily on the underwriters are recorded, but it is pleasing to note that these ac- cidents have not been attended by any loss of life, and unless the property losses from this time on prove very heavy the underwriters will mark up big profits on the season's business. Increased Use of Open Hearth Steel. Andrew Carnegie is quoted as saying that the rapid growth of the open hearth process of steel making is changing the character of the output. Engineers are now all specifying open hearth steel. It is im- possible to sell Bessemer steelfor ships, bridges, boiler plates, or even for those enormous twenty-two story steel structures which are going' up throughout the country. Open hearth steel is now sold almost, if not quite, as cheaply as Bessemer. 'This is rendered possible by the lower price of the Mesaba and non-Bessemer ores of Lake Superior than the ores necessary for the Bessemer process, the ores being suitable for open hearth practice. If the movement continues, he says, we are likely to see less demand for Bessemer ores, and therefore the tendency will be for the 'Bessemer and non-Bessemer ores to become nearer an equality in price, and this may give the Bessemer steel a slight advan- tage in cost. If so, it will continue to be used for billets, anda thousand and one ordinary purposes. But there will still remain a large market for open hearth variety. So confident is one of the leading concerns in the United States of this that today it is erecting sixteen forty-ton open hearth furnaces, having already twenty in operation,~so that this concern will have thirty-six open hearth fur- naces, capable of producing 90,000 tons of open hearth ingots per month--say about 1,000,000 tons per year. This shows wonderful confidence in the market for open hearth steel. It is but proper to say, however, that this concern has large interests in Mesaba ores, and has also command of very cheap gas coal as well as of natural gas, which is found to be remarkably well adapted for open hearth practice. An advertisement elsewhere in this issue calls for proposals on 12,500 feet of breakwater extension at Buffalo. Hunters' excursion rates are offered by the Nickel Plate road to points in Michigan, Wisconsin and the southwest. 339 Nov. 1.