80 ALL AFLOAT 



skipper both. With the help of a friend he 

 began by cutting down the trees and doing all 

 the rest of the work of building a forty-five-ton 

 schooner. By 1850 he had built a fourteen- 

 hundred-tonner,the famous Hamilton Campbell 

 Kidston, which greatly astonished Glasgow, for 

 she was then the biggest ship the Clyde had 

 ever seen. His last ship was launched in the 

 ' record ' year of 1865. The Salter Brothers 

 did some fine work at the ' Bend,' as Moncton 

 was then called. Their first vessel, a barque 

 of eight hundred tons, was sold at once in 

 England. Next year they built a clipper 

 ship called the Jemsetgee Cursetgee for an East 

 Indian potentate, who sent out an Oriental 

 figurehead supposed to be a likeness of him- 

 self. A peculiar feat of theirs was rigging 

 as a schooner and sending across the Atlantic 

 a scow-like coal barge ordered by a firm in 

 England. 



The decline of Canadian sailing craft was 

 swifter than its rise ; and with the sailing craft 

 went the Canadian-built steamers, because 

 wood was the material used for both, and the 

 use of iron and steel in the yards of the British 

 Isles soon drove the wooden hulls from the 

 greater highways of the sea. Once the palmy 

 days of the third quarter of the century were 



