Canadian Coast Guard

Ships under Contract

With the advent of the Quebec Trinity House in 1805, which looked after the lights and buoys from Montreal Harbour to the Strait of Belle Isle, questions of supply and communication naturally arose. Confederation was yet a long way off, but considerations such as these encouraged co-operation between Canada, the Maritime Provinces and Newfoundland. In this aspect of marine administration Lower Canada early assumed a forward looking point of view, and the Legislative entered into cost sharing arrangements which led to the establishment of such lights as Cape Ray, St. Paul's Island, Magdalen Island and Bird Rocks.

Similarly, the Legislative of Upper Canada had recognized the impending growth of Lake shipping before the start of the 1812 war, and an act was carried into effect in 1806 by which a levy was applied to vessels for the erection of lights. As the taxes were applied before the lights were built, ship owners received them with some misgivings and the act was modified in 1808. However, a start had been made, and some lights were built in this period, notably Gibraltar Point at the entrance to York Harbour.

The growth of settlement and merchant shipping, which was the driving force behind there improvements, was greatly accelerated by the coming of stream, which changed the face of the pre-railway phase and made possible, for the first time, a dependable means of communication for more than half the year. The Governments of Lower Canada and Nova Scotia were very much alive to this question and, in 1825, both Legislatures voted money to encourage the construction of a steamer which, after some delay and the formation of the Quebec and Halifax Steam Navigation Company, resulted in the building of the Royal William for that purpose. After some vicissitudes the Royal William was sent to England to be sold in 1833, and became one of the first steam vessels to cross the Atlantic solely under power; the passage took 18½ days. One of the directors of the owning company was a Halifax coal merchant by the name of Samuel Cunard.

Until mid century, servicing of the sparse and scattered lights had been carried out from local resources or by means of schooners or steamboats chartered for the purposes. This arrangement was to hold good in the Great Lakes until after 1900 and newspapers often carried advertisements with invitations to tender for "best quality non-explosive coal oil" and for the services of a steam vessel to deliver lighthouse supplies. In Newfoundland, chartered vessels were used until Confederation with Canada a century or so later except for certain major lights, notably Cape Norman, Cape Rich and Cape Ray which were erected and maintained by Canada, with the permission of the Newfoundland and British governments, to light the gateway to the St. Lawrence.

The area to be covered in the Gulf was immense and as lights increased in number with the upsurge of shipping and the deepening of the River channel, better arrangements became necessary. After the Union of Upper and Lower Canada in 1841 the Department of Public Works took over the lights and buoys above Montreal and, in 1849 the Trinity House of Montreal was formed to handle the aids between that port and Sorel. To carry out this work, the Montreal Trinity House acquired the iron side wheel steamer Richelieu, built at Montreal in 1845, which was adapted for buoy work and lighthouse supply.

By 1853, this growing need for better service to aids to navigation had been emphasized by a general dissatisfaction on broader marine issues by the shipping community. Freight rates were rising in the Canadian trade and, because of a rash of shipping casualties, insurance premiums on St. Lawrence traffic were high. In particular, it was apparent that towage and salvage services were far below the needs of the day. With these matters pressing on his department, the Commissioner of Public Works advised the Government that tenders should be raised for the provision of a "superior class of Tugboats", both for the speeding up of sailing ships making the Gulf, and for general duties in a Government Marine Service.

The successful tenderer was Francois Baby, a prominent contractor who was to exert great influence on the floating equipment of the Department of Public Works for the next few years. The paddle steamer Doris which, it will be recalled, had been purchased for the fisheries service in 1850, had been managed by Mr. Baby under contract to Trinity House for buoy work and, in addition, he owned the steamers Admiral and Advance which were used in towing and pilot service and, as occasion arose, for the conveyance of passengers and freight in the lower St. Lawrence and the transfer of immigrants from deep-sea ships. Baby now undertook

"to establish and maintain, during the term of seven years, from 27th., February, 1854, a line of Steam Tug Boats to run between Quebec and Bic, for the purpose of towing and aiding vessels coming up and down the St. Lawrence, and of relieving wrecks when directed to do so by the Commissioner of Public Works."

That summer, the three Baby ships were put to work in fulfillment of the contract. The old sea-going paddler Doris was not powerful enough and, although she had been re-engineered after a stranding, had been little improved; the Advance and Admiral were wooden river boats, of traditional type, with side wheels and walking beam. The combined efforts of these three fell short of the hopes for "a superior class of Tugboats" and served only to emphasize their deficiencies. The Quebec Board of Trade hastened to complain, and it was realized on all sides that nothing short of specially designed equipment would be able to cope with the traffic. This time there would be no doubt about the ability of the ships, and a revised contract was therefore negotiated for the provision of "two first class iron screw steamers" which were to operate in accordance with a fixed tariff of towing rates which was specified. The contractor was to be paid $45,200 annually and the fees of office for towing as laid down in the contract.

Wood side wheel steamer Admiral
Note the walking beam.
(Notman Archives)

Resulting from this arrangement, the Department of Public Works commissioned the first steamers to be especially designed for Canadian service as lighthouse and buoy tenders. They were also estuary tugs for sailing ships, and could handle passenger or freight service as required; the possibilities of steam icebreaking were then somewhat limited and, as most merchant ships were under sail and unable to help themselves, would hardly have been realistic. The combination of these tasks resulted in a mixed duty specification which might well have daunted the naval architects of a later day, but in 1855 ship types were not as specialized as they are now, and it resulted in the Queen Victoria and Napoleon III, two ships which, in different ways, were to be remembered for many years to come. Both were built in Scotland by Napier, who was then achieving fame in the development of steam machinery for use in ironclad men-of-war and, with such a background, our new ships were assured of superior mechanical performance.

However, if the new steamers were of "superior class" in the eyes of proud observers, some hard lessons were to be learned in the economic running of steamships which, from generation to generation, continue to arise in different forms. With a boiler pressure of 25 lb. per sq. inch and two oscillating simple cylinders of enormous bore and stroke, the coal consumption was high and it was difficult to make profits without charging exorbitant fees. Baby soon found that the demand for towage at the going rate was somewhat limited.

Although by far the greatest part of sea-going tonnage was then under sail, the economies of wind ships, in those days of many wages and every kind of trading uncertainty, were such that many of them could ill afford to absorb heavy expenses extra to their normal voyage disbursements. The charges being too high, another contract was signed in 1857, by which the contractor agreed to lower his rates in return for a refund, by Government, of the difference between tariff and cost. In one form or another, shipping subsidies have been a feature of the Canadian scene at different times and for different reasons.

Despite the Government subsidy, and notwithstanding genuine reductions on the part of the con-tractor, ship owners failed to make as much use of the service as had been hoped, and the prospects for a contractual form of marine activity declined. Meantime, it was found that the conveyance of passengers, troops, mail and goods between Canada and the Maritime Provinces, which had been started by the Royal William, demanded a regular steamer service. In 1859, the Baby fleet was again called upon, and the steamer Lady Head was engaged to make seven annual trips between Quebec and Gaspé, Paspebiac and Carleton or Dalhousie, for a fee of $10,000. The Lady Head had been built by Napier in 1857, and was a smaller edition of the Queen Victoria and Napoleon III.

With the Lady Head in the passenger business to the Lower Provinces, Francois Baby now had four main contracts running, worth some $81,000 annually, and a total of five ships valued at $384,000, amounts which were large sums in the values of the day. However, despite the best efforts of administrators and contractor, it was evident before long that the service was being run at a loss; Mr. Baby then proposed to offer his fleet to the Government, and to abandon his contracts for towing, Trinity work and mail, on terms which were found to be mutually acceptable. This proposition was accepted by Order in Council of August 1859, and the five ships passed under the direct control of the Commissioner of Public Works.

The Admiral was sold in 1861, but the side-wheeler Advance, with her wooden hull and walking beam, and the screw steamers Napoleon III and Lady Head, were to form with three others, the nucleus of a fleet which would develop into the Canadian Coast Guard after a hundred years of evolution. The three other ships were the Richelieu, already in the service of the Montreal Trinity House, the Druid which supplied the lights of Nova Scotia in the service of the Provincial Board of Works, and the Sir James Douglas in British Columbia.

Marine and Fisheries Steamers Napoleon III and Druid shown at the Quebec Agency about 1875.
(Notman Archives)

Druid, a name which was to have a long record of service in the Dominion fleet to come, was an iron paddler built in Scotland by Todd & McGregor in 1856. Unlike North American side-wheelers for inland waters, Clyde paddlers of the period were made of iron and, although designed for estuary work, many of them crossed the ocean to distant lands and, by reason of their speed, the type was in demand as the fast workhorse of the day; some of them ended up as blockade runners in the American civil war. Despite this strain of fine breeding and apparent lightness, the Druid paddled her way to Sable Island on many occasions, and faced the foul weather of the Atlantic for years to come.

The third vessel of this trio, the Sir James Douglas, was then virtually unknown. She had been built by the Government of Vancouver's Island in 1864 to attend on the dredgers then working in Victoria Harbour. She would join the Dominion fleet when British Columbia entered Confederation in 1871 but, as yet, the Pacific was another world and no one in the East had ever heard of a ship whose name is borne in the Coast Guard to this day.

Two more events must be recorded before leaving the provincial steamers, both concerning the Queen Victoria. In the Quebec Gazette of August 31, 1864, appeared the following announcement:

"The Charlottetown Conference

The Hon. Messrs J. A. Macdonald, Cartier, Brown, Galt, Campbell, McGee, McDougal and Langevin left on Monday evening by the Provincial Steamer Queen Victoria for Charlottetown, Prince Edwards Island to attend the convention respecting the proposed Union of the Provinces which will take place on the 4th., proximo."

The distinguished group embarked for a round trip extending to Halifax and Saint John, N.B., and the results of their informal conversation in the comfortable smoke room of the Queen Victoria would chart the course for a new Canada. The voyage had its lighter side when the provincial steamer was momentarily mistaken for an elusive Confederate cruiser suspected of lurking in the vicinity of Hills-borough Bay on a misty summer morning of arrival, but the local excitement died down as quickly as it arose, and the now familiar rowing boat, with the lone top-hated figure of the Hon. William H. Pope, Colonial Secretary of Prince Edwards Island, came alongside.

Two years later, in a time of some redundancy, the Queen Victoria was put out to earn her keep, and she sailed for Cuba with a Canadian cargo on charter to Mr. T. C. Duplessis. On October 4, 1866, while returning from Havana, she was overwhelmed and foundered in a hurricane off Cape Hatteras.

In retrospect, the period between 1856, when the Napier ships were laid down, and 1867, when the shipping administration of the old provinces came under Dominion jurisdiction, was really the formative period of our Marine Services. During that time the entire outlook began to change from the lingering ways inherited from the eighteenth century towards conditions which can be identified more easily with those of today. This was not entirely fortuitous, as having acquired better aids to navigation, deeper channels, and ships to support the various services, the Provincial authorities used the intervening period to consolidate ideas and equipment in preparation for federal government which, from 1864, had been probable.

Quite apart from political aspects of the situation, the factors tending to Confederation were equally strong in the practical sense. In the economy of Colonial times, the shipping patterns of the Maritimes, the St. Lawrence and the Great Lakes, had little in common and, of these three, the inland system had been completely isolated. Now, however, a small door had opened westwards from the St. Lawrence by virtue of the new canals and, in theory at least, the way was open for the smaller ships of ocean trading to sail to the heart of the continent. But in cross connecting between the patterns of inland and ocean trading some differences had already become apparent. Nowhere else in the world had a shipping industry arisen so quickly, in such an immense body of water, cut off from the influences traditional to sea traffic, except perhaps in the enormous rivers of the United States. Although some seafarers had settled in the mid-west, either as naval veterans of the old wars, or as merchant seamen looking inwards to a new life, their traditional ways had been modified to suit the conditions of inland waters, and a new generation had arrived which was growing up in techniques more suited to the surroundings.

This divergence eventually led to rules of the road peculiar to the Great Lakes. Although North American inland shipping had been greatly influenced by river navigation, both the United States and Canada applied the International Rules to the Great Lakes until 1895. In that year the United States enacted special rules which Canada was then unwilling to accept. However, as a double standard for use on one or the other side of an unmarked international boundary line was clearly dangerous, Canada gradually modified her legislation until, by 1916, it was identical to the Great Lakes Rules in force in the United States. This process was achieved by mutual agreement but, although both countries are signatories to the international convention, they have not concluded a bi-lateral treaty relative to the Rules of the Road for the Great Lakes.