Daily News (Kingston, ON), 11 Jul 1885

p.1 Floating Facts - The sloop Pilot is discharging lumber at Rathbun's.

-The schr. Oliver Mowat has arrived from Charlotte with coal for Swift.

-The schr. Annandale has arrived from Sodus with coal for Crawford.

-The steamer Rideau Belle left for Westport and Portland this morning.

-The sloop Rainbow discharged a cargo of bunch wood at the Groveyard yesterday.

-The steamer Algerian, Toronto; prop. California, Chicago; and steamer Corinthian, Montreal, called at Swift's.

-Several crews of the M.T. Company's barges have been paid off. They were sent to Montreal on the tug Bronson.

-The Recorder says: "The new barge Dakota has leaked badly ever since being loaded and is now at Ogdensburg, where she will be placed on the dry dock."

-The Canadian schr. Clyde is ashore on the southeast reef of Mohawk Island and about two feet out. The vessel went on during very foggy weather on Wednesday last. She was bound from Toledo to Kingston, loaded with lumber.

A WAIL FROM ACROSS THE LAKE

Among the relics of a quarter of a century of Republican rule inherited by the Democratic party now in power, says the Rochester Union, are the absurd navigation laws that lumber up the statute book, and the equally absurd rulings of the Treasury Department, that will not permit American citizens, destitute of vessels of their own, to employ a foreign vessel for excursion purposes! There does not sail on Lake Ontario, so far as we know or can learn, one single American steamer of sufficient tonnage and seaworthiness to be safe in attempting to cross the lake, or even to venture any considerable distance from shore. Certainly no such American steamer enters the port of Genessee. But there is engaged in regular daily trade between our ports and the Canadian ports on the opposite side of the lake a staunch Canadian steamer, the Norseman, which, between arrival and departure, has a sufficiency of time at her disposal to serve our citizens for lake excursions during the heated term. But she will not be permitted to do so, and the people are, therefore, by stupid navigation laws and regulations, deprived of needed recreation and desired pleasure. Last year application was made by the Collector of the port to the Treasury Department for permission for the Norseman to take the children of a Sunday School ten miles out into the lake and return, and it was denied. Last week the captain of a Canadian steamer, the Empress of India, advertised an excursion from the port yesterday, in ignorance of the law and regulations, and it was prohibited under heavy pains and penalties. If there is any way of escape from a law that has been construed to make such despotic decree Secretary Manning will find it and follow it. He is a broad-gauge man; and entertains a healthy contempt for the dog-in-the-manger statemanship that has so ordered affairs as to destroy the American steamer traffic of Lake Ontario. On the other hand, this is a matter of purely American concern....

ad for steamer Norseman on Thousand Islands and Rochester route.