The Richelieu Steamboat Company was {149} formed in 1845, and took its other title thirty years later, when it made its first great 'merger.' It began in a very humble way, by running two little market boats between Sorel and Montreal. From the first it had to fight for its commercial life. The train was beginning to be a formidable competitor. But the fight to a finish was the fight of boat against boat. Fares were cut and cut again. At last the passengers were offered bed, board, and transportation for the price of a single meal. Every day there was a desperate race on the water. The rival steamers shook and panted in their self-destroying zeal to be the first to get the gangway down. Clouds of fire-streaked smoke poured from their funnels. More than once a cargo that would burn well was thrown into the furnaces to keep the steam up. The public became quite as keen as any of the crews or companies, and worked excitement up to fever pitch by crowding the wharves to gamble madly on this daily river Derby. The stress was too much for the weaker companies. One by one they either fell out or 'merged in.' After the merger with the Ontario Company in 1875 things went on, with many ups and downs, more in the usual way of competition. Finally, in 1913, a {150} general 'pooling merger' was effected by which practically all Canadian lines came under one control, from the lower Great Lakes, down the St Lawrence, through the Gulf, and south away to the West Indies. The title of this new merger is the Canada Steamship Lines Limited. The Canadian Pacific Railway Company has half a dozen different fleets at work: one on the Atlantic, another as a trans-Pacific line, a third on the Pacific coast, a fourth on the lakes of British Columbia, a fifth on the upper Great Lakes, and a sixth as ferries for its trains. Thus, by taking the upper Great Lakes and the West, it divides the trans-Canadian waters with the Canada Steamship Lines, which latter take the lower Great Lakes and the East. A company whose annual receipts and expenditure are balanced at not far short of two hundred millions of dollars might well seem to be all-important in every way, especially when its shipping tonnage exceeds that of the Allans by over thirty thousand. But this Chronicle is a history of at least four hundred years; while the famous 'C.P.R.' has not as yet been either forty years a railway line or twenty years a shipping firm. There is only one great C.P.R. disaster to record. But that is of appalling magnitude. Over a thousand lives were lost {151} when the Norwegian collier _Storstad_ sank the _Empress of Ireland_ off Rimouski in 1914.