And Coulby is only one of many. The fleet he controls is only one of many. The Lakes breed great men--and they breed great fleets. How many of our millions have heard of J. C. Gilchrist and the Gilchrist fleet?--a man in one way unique in the marine history of the world, and a fleet which, if plying between New York and Liverpool, would be one of the present-day sensations. Gilchrist, like Coulby, “worked up from the depths,” and to-day, as the head of the Gilchrist Transportation Company, he holds down seventy-five distinct jobs! Seventy-five owners have placed seventy-five ships under his generalship, and from each he receives a salary of one thousand dollars a season, or a total of seventy-five thousand dollars. He is one of the Napoleons of the Lakes. He handles ships and men like a magician; his holds are never empty; his dividends are always large. There was a day when one thousand dollars looked like a fortune to Gilchrist, and when eight dollars a week was an income of which he was mightily proud. That was when, from away down in Michigan, he turned his face northward toward the Lakes, filled with big ambition and a desire for adventure, but with little more than what he carried on his back. He got work as a sailor before the mast at forty dollars a month and board. From there he graduated to “bell hop” on a passenger steamer, and continued to graduate until the owners of great ships began to see in him those things which they themselves did not possess, and so handed over to him the destiny of the second greatest fleet of freight carriers in the world. Such men as Coulby and Gilchrist and the ships they have would make the fame of any nation on the high seas. They and men like Captain John Mitchell, who is the head of a fleet of twenty ships, J. H. Sheadle, G. Ashley Tomlinson, and G. L. Douglas, are of the kind that are choking the Great Lakes shipyards with orders, while along the ocean seaboards stocks are rotting and builders of ocean marine are starving. Cleveland claims the headquarters of both of these immense fleets--and Cleveland is fortunate in many other things. She counts her strong men of the Lakes by the score. She is a great owner of ships, a great buyer of ships, and a great builder. [Illustration: The Launching.] But when it comes to the production of “bottoms,” Cleveland and all other Lake cities must give way to Detroit. There was a day when Detroit was one of the important ports of the Lakes, but that day is long past. Now she is the centre of shipbuilding. In 1907, there was built at Detroit more tonnage than in any other city in the United States. Of the vessels launched, twenty-one of the largest took their first dip in or very near Detroit. The tonnage of these vessels aggregated over one half of the total tonnage of the forty freighters constructed for the season’s delivery.