Mr. Allan Cameron, who has had very wide experience in several departments of railway service in different parts of the world, is now in charge of the Oriental end of the Canadian Pacific Steamship Service, with headquarters at Hong-Kong, and is making special study of inter-trade relations between Canada and the Far East. At the Vancouver end of the business no one of the old-timers is better known and better liked than the highly competent ships-husband, Mr. James A. Fullerton. He is now retired, but still haunts the waterfront and takes great interest in the fleet that he has seen grow from very small beginnings. Captain Beetham, a practical sea-faring man himself, is in control of the Pacific shipping, with headquarters at Vancouver, while Captain Troup, who knows the coast-wise and inland lake and river business like a book, is in general charge of that important department. With efficient help in the offices and special agents at home and abroad, the business in a generation has kept constantly expanding, as the next paragraph specially notes. In the meanwhile, as the years passed from the arrival at Port Moody of the first “tea clipper” from Japan, the Company’s trans-Pacific business had grown by leaps and bounds. Following the “tea clippers” from the Orient to Port Moody, the Company in 1887 chartered three steamships, the _Batavia_, _Parthia_ and _Abyssinia_, from Glasgow ship-builders, to go on a regular trans-Pacific run from Vancouver; and the latter’s first outbound cargo was only forty tons of freight. In 1890 the British Government contracted to give the Company a subsidy annually, on condition that three twin-screw steamers were put on the route between Vancouver, Japan and China. It was to fulfil this contract that the famous _Empresses_ first made their appearance from the Glasgow shipyards, specially built for the Canadian Pacific, namely the _Empress of India_, the _Empress of China_, the _Empress of Japan_, and they began their work in 1891.