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

7. CELTIC Ship of the Month No. 203 On quite a number of occasions, we have me n t i o n e d in these pages the various members of the Mackay family, of Hamilton, Ontario. Frequent mention of the Mackays is not in the slightest way unusual, because their shipping i n terests were very extensive and spanned considerably more than a halfcentury. Indeed, the Mackays probably could be considered the most i n f l u e n tial Canadian shipping entrepreneurs ever to ply their trade on Lake Ontario, which always was the centre of their activities. The patriarch of the Mackay family was Aeneas D. Mackay, Sr., who was born in 1825 at Golspie, in County Sutherland, Scotland, and later emigrated to Canada. He married Elizabeth Hughes in 1852, and this union produced three sons, Robert Osborne Mackay, Aeneas Donald Mackay and Adam Brown Mackay. Like their father, Robert and Adam were to become very heav i l y involved in the lake shipping business, and they were aged 24 and 11, respectively, when their father died on May 14, 1877. Aeneas Mackay, Sr., was instrumental in forming the Lake and River Steamship Company, of Hamilton. Adam Hope was president of this concern, while John Harve y was s e c r etary-treasurer and Aeneas Mackay was manager. On Aeneas Mackay's death, R. 0. Mackay succeeded to the position in the firm w hich his father had held. Aeneas (Senior) also was a principal in the Merchants Line consortium, which also included Capt. John Balmer Fairgrieve, of Hamilton, G. E. Jaques & Company, of Montreal, and James Norris, Sylvester Neelon and Capt. P. Larkin, all of St. Catharines. The Merchants Line provided daily steamer service between Montreal and Chicago, and also a similar service between St. Lawrence River ports and those of Lake Ontario, which route later was e x t e n ded as far as Cleveland, Ohio. During the 1870s, there were a p p r oximately 25 vessels in the Merchants Line fleet, all of which were owned individually and were chartered to the line. By the 1890s, the Merchants Line was operated by the Ma c k a y brothers, Robert and Adam, in a ssociation with Capt. Fairgrieve, still of Hamilton, Jaques & Company, of Montreal, and W. A. Geddes, of Toronto. The shipping interests of R. 0. and A. B. Mackay were greatly expanded in the early years of the new century. A l t h o u g h R. 0. Ma c k a y retired from the shipping scene about 1908, A. B. Mackay was still connected with certain lake shipping interests as late as the 1920s, although by that time he was a resident of the Isle of Wight, off the English coast. These latter a c t i v i ties of the Mackays do not have any relevance to the ship which we have chosen to feature here, and so we will not attempt to enlarge upon them at this time. More to the point is the fact that on Tuesday, May 6th, 1874, at 3 : 25 p. m., Miss Eugenie Owen Mackay christened the n ewly-built c ombination passenger and freight propellor CELTIC at A r chibald M. Robertson's shipyard on the waterfront at Hamilton, Ontario. After her launch, the new steamer was taken in tow by the steamer CORINTHIAN, and she was moved around to Mackay's Wharf, Hamilton, for fitting out. CELTIC was enrolled at Hamilton, and she was to carry Canadian official number 71151. Constr u c t e d to the order of Aeneas D. M a c k a y at a cost of $48, 0 0 0 . 00, she was designed with what in those years were full "canal-size" dimensions, being the m a x i m u m that the smallest of the old Welland and St. Lawrence canals then could accommodate. She was 1 31. 0 feet in length (and we believe this to have been m e a s u r e d between perpendiculars rather than o v e r all), 2 6 . 0 feet in the beam, and she had a depth of 1 4 . 7 feet. Her tonnage was calculated as 698 Gross and 440 Net, although the 1874 listing of the A s s o c i a t i o n of Canadian Lake Underwriters showed her tonnage as 399, based on a survey repo r t e d l y done in F e b ruary of 1874. However, as the ship was far from complete at that time, we believe that we can discount the C . L. U.