er under
the direction of any Person, I am agreeable. I should be glad to be
informed if His Excellency wishes or expects that I shall sail in her
myself, whether Government or I furnish the Officers and men to
Navigate and Pilot her, the Engineer excepted, the fuel and all other
necessarys that may be required for her use. I imagine the arrangement
must be for the Season, not by the Trip, as Government may wish to
detain her for particular purposes. Ensurance I do not believe can be
effected for less than 30 p. cent for the Season, therefore I must take
the risque upon myself.

Within five years of this tender Molson's St Lawrence Steamboat Company
had six more steamers running. In 1823 a towboat company was formed,
and the _Hercules_ towed the _Margaret_ from Quebec to Montreal. The
well-known word 'tug' was soon brought into use from England, where it
originated from the fact that the first towboat in the world was called
_The Tug_. In 1836, before {135} the first steam railway train ran
from La Prairie to St Johns, the Torrance Line, in opposition to the
Molson Line, was running the _Canada_, which was then the largest and
fastest steamer in the whole New World. Meanwhile steam navigation had
been practised on the Great Lakes for twenty years; for in 1817 the
little _Ontario_ and the big _Frontenac_ made their first trips from
Kingston to York (now Toronto). The _Frontenac_ was built at Finkles
Point, Ernestown, eighteen miles from Kingston, by Henry Teabout, an
American who had been employed in the shipyards of Sackett's Harbour at
the time of the abortive British attack in 1813. She was about seven
hundred tons, schooner rigged, engined by Boulton and Watt, and built
at a total cost of $135,000. A local paper said that 'her proportions
strike the eye very agreeably, and good judges have pronounced this to
be the best piece of naval architecture of the kind yet produced in
America.'

Canals and steamers naturally served each other's turn. There was a
great deal of canal building in the twenties. The Lachine Canal,
opening up direct communication west of Montreal, was dug out by 1825,
the Welland, across the Niagara peninsula, by 1829, and the {136}
Rideau, near Ottawa, by 1832. A few very small canals had preceded
these; others were to follow them; and they were themselves in their
infancy of size and usefulness. But the beginning had been made.

The early Canadian steamers and canals did credit