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 to a poor and thinly peopled country. But none of them ranked as a pioneering achievement in the world at large. This kind of achievement was reserved for the _Royal William_, a vessel of such distinction in the history of shipping that her career must be followed out in detail. [Illustration: TRANSPORT _BECKWITH_ AND BATEAUX, LAKE ONTARIO, 1816. From the John Rose Robertson Collection, Toronto Public Library.]