esent and the immediate future. Moreover,
sailing craft helped to make turning points of Canadian history as only
a single steamer ever has. Sailing craft made Canada known
distinctively among every great seafaring people as steamers never
have. {130} And while the building, ownership, and actual navigation
of sailing craft once made Canada fourth among the shipping countries
of the world, the change to steam and steel, coinciding with the
destruction of the handiest timber and the development of inland forms
of business, put no less than eight successful rivals ahead of her.

Every one knows that James Watt turned the power of steam to practical
use in the eighteenth century. But it was not till the first year of
the nineteenth that a really workable steamer appeared, though the
British, French, and Americans had been experimenting for years, just
as ingenious men had been experimenting with stationary engines long
before Watt. This pioneer steamer was the _Charlotte Dundas_, which
ran on the Forth and Clyde Canal in Scotland in 1801. Six years later
Fulton's _Clermont_, engined by the British firm of Boulton and Watt,
ran on the Hudson from New York to Albany. Two years later again the
_Accommodation_, the first steamer in Canada, was launched at Montreal,
and engined there as well. She was built for John Molson by John
Bruce, a shipbuilder, {131} and John Jackson, an engineer. She was
eighty-five feet over all and sixteen feet in the beam. Her engine was
six horse-power, and her trial speed five knots an hour. She was
launched, broadside on, behind the old Molson brewery. She was fitted
up for twenty passengers, but only ten went on her maiden trip. The
fare was eight dollars down to Quebec and ten dollars back. The
following is interesting as a newspaper account of the first trip made
by the first Canadian steamer. It is taken, word for word, from an
original copy of the _Quebec Gazette_ of November 9, 1809.

The Steam Boat, which was built at Montreal last winter, arrived here
on Saturday last, being her first trip. She was 66 hours on the
passage, of which she was at anchor 30. So that 36 hours is the time
which, in her present state, she takes to come down from Montreal to
Quebec [over 160 statute miles]. On Sunday last she went up against
wind and tide from Brehault's wharf to Lymburner's; but her progress
was very slow. It is obvious that her machinery, at present, has not
sufficient for