History

On September 8, 1923, seven US Navy destroyers rammed into jagged rocks on the California coast. Twenty-three sailors died that night. Five years earlier, the Canadian Pacific passenger ship Princess Sophia steamed into Vanderbilt Reef in Alaska’s Lynn Canal. When she sank, she took 353 people to their deaths. From San Francisco’s fog-bound Gol …

A Mind at Sea is an intimate window into a vanished time when Canada was among the world's great maritime countries. Between 1856 and 1877, Henry Fry was the Lloyd's agent for the St. Lawrence River, east of Montreal. The harbour coves around his home in Quebec were crammed with immense rafts of cut wood, the river's shoreline sprawled with yards w …

During the latter part of the nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth century, a number of local Newfoundland writers did much to preserve many of the old stories and traditions that had been handed down by word of mouth from past generations of Newfoundlanders. They published their stories and articles in the Newfoundland Quarterly, …

It was a snowy, stormy night, that February 23, 1918, when the sturdy S.S. Florizel steamed out of St. John’s harbour, bound for Halifax and New York. Captain William Martin, a cautious and competent skipper, encountered thick ice and heavy winds as he headed down the treacherous Newfoundland coast. But these circumstances did not account for the …

The Alligator was an amphibious machine designed and patented in Canada in the late 1880s. This warping tug was capable of towing al og boomk across a lake and then portaging itself to the next body of water. Steam-powered and rugged, it was one of the pioneers in the mechanization of the forest industry and for more than thirty years was ubiquitou …