these the red men set upon them and slew them all. The "Griffin" never
again floated on the lakes.

It is difficult to determine the time when sailing vessels next appeared
upon the lakes, but it was certainly not for nearly seventy-five years.
Captain Jonathan Carver reported a French schooner on Lake Superior about
1766, and in 1772 Alexander Harvey built a forty-ton sloop on the same
lake, in which he sought the site of a famous copper mine. But it was long
before Lake Superior showed more than an infrequent sail, though on Lake
Erie small vessels soon became common. Even in 1820 the furs of Lake
Superior were sent down to Chicago in bateaux.

Two small sailing vessels, the "Beaver" and the "Gladwin," which proved
very valuable to the besieged garrison at Detroit in 1763, were the next
sailing vessels on the lakes, and are supposed to have been built by the
English the year previous. It is said, that through the refusal of her
captain to take ballast aboard, the "Gladwin" was capsized on Lake Erie
and lost, and the entire crew drowned. The "Royal Charlotte," the
"Boston," and the "Victory" appeared on the lakes a few years later, and
went into commission between Fort Erie (Buffalo) and Detroit, carrying the
first year 1,464 bales of fur to Fort Erie, and practically establishing
commercial navigation.

It is hard to look clearly into the future. If the recommendations of one
J. Collins, deputy surveyor-general of the British Government, had
governed the destiny of the Great Lakes, the traffic between Buffalo and
the Soo by water, would to-day be in boats of fifteen tons or less. Under
orders of the English Government, Collins in 1788 made a survey of all the
lakes and harbors from Kingston to Mackinac, and in his report, expressing
his views as to the size of vessels that should be built for service on
the lakes, he said he thought that for service on Lake Ontario vessels
should be seventy-five or eighty tons burden, and on Lake Erie, if
expected to run to Lake Huron, they should be not more than fifteen tons.
What a stretch of imagination is necessary to conceive of the great volume
of traffic of the present time, passing Detroit in little schooners not
much larger than catboats that skim around the lakes! Imagine such a
corporation as the Northern Steamship Company, with its big fleet of steel
steamers, attempting to handle its freight business in sailing vessels of
a size that the average wharf-rat of the prese