HMCS Canada

CGS Canada (front) at Barrow-in-Furness in 1904
History
Canada
Name:	Canada
Builder:	Vickers, Sons & Maxim, Barrow-in-Furness
Launched:	1904
Commissioned:	1915
Decommissioned:	1919
Renamed:	Queen of Nassau
Fate:	sold for commercial use, sunk 2 July 1926
General characteristics
Displacement:	557 tonnes (548 long tons)
Length:	200 ft (61 m) (as ordered) 206 ft (63 m) (modified)
Beam:	25 ft (7.6 m)
Draught:	13 ft (4.0 m)
Speed:	22 knots (41 km/h; 25 mph)
Complement:	60
Armament:	4 × Maxim guns (as ordered) 2 × 12-pounder and 2 × 3-pounder (refit for naval service)

CGS Canada was a Canadian Government Ship that served as a patrol ship in the Fisheries Protection Service of Canada, an enforcement agency that was part of the Department of Marine and Fisheries. She is considered to be the nucleus of the Royal Canadian Navy for her role in training Canadian naval officers and asserting Canadian sovereignty. Canada saw service in the First World War and was commissioned into the Royal Canadian Navy as HMCS Canada during that conflict.

Following the war, the vessel was sold for commercial use and renamed MV Queen of Nassau. On the verge of being sold again, the ship sank in Straits of Florida on 2 July 1926.

Civilian service

CGS Canada was launched at the Vickers, Sons & Maxim shipyard in Barrow-in-Furness, England in 1904.^[1] Upon delivery, Canada became the flagship for the Fisheries Protection Service of Canada and was instrumental in detaining numerous vessels illegally fishing in Canadian territorial waters. She was equipped with what was then the smallest Marconi wireless telegraph in the world.

She saw extensive use as a training vessel for crew who served throughout the Fisheries Protection Service of Canada squadron.^[2] She also saw use as the first ship to train fishermen to become members of Canada's Naval Militia, before the existence of a Canadian naval service. Her participation in Royal Navy fleet exercises in 1905 is considered by some to be the beginnings of Canada's naval activity.^[3]

The original group of Canadian naval cadets serving in CGS Canada. Among them is future Chief of the Naval Staff Percy W. Nelles (front row, centre).

Until 1910, Canada did not have a naval service and relied upon the Royal Navy for military force on the high seas. However, British military forces had withdrawn from Canada in 1906, therefore Canadian politicians began to call for the establishment of a domestic naval service.

On 29 March 1909, a resolution was passed in Canada's House of Commons calling for the establishment of a Canadian Naval Service. The resolution was not successful; however, on 12 January 1910, the government of Prime Minister Sir Wilfrid Laurier took the resolution and introduced it as the Naval Service Bill. After third reading, the bill received Royal Assent on 4 May 1910, and became the Naval Service Act, administered by the Minister of Marine and Fisheries at the time. The official title of the navy was the Naval Service of Canada (also informally the Canadian Naval Forces). The first Director of the Naval Service of Canada was Rear-Admiral Charles Kingsmill (Royal Navy, retired), who was previously in charge of the Marine Service of the Department of Marine and Fisheries, which included the Fisheries Protection Service of Canada. Several vessels were acquired from the Royal Navy and the Naval Service of Canada changed its name to Royal Canadian Navy on 30 January 1911, but it was not until 29 August that the use of "Royal" Canadian Navy was permitted by King George V.

Meanwhile, following passage of the Naval Service Bill in the spring of 1910 and the pending acquisition of the two cruisers Niobe and Rainbow from the British Admiralty, the federal government sought to begin training officers and crew for naval service. Without a naval academy, Canada looked to the Fisheries Protection Service of Canada and its method of training officers and crew aboard CGS Canada.

Thus CGS Canada became Canada's first naval training ship and was, as stated by naval historians in Canada, the “Flagship of the embryonic Canadian Navy at the time, symbolic of the evolution of Canada from a dominion within the British Empire to a sovereign nation.”^[4][5]

HMCS Canada

As HMCS Canada, during the First World War.

After the First World War broke out in August 1914, CGS Canada was officially transferred to the Royal Canadian Navy (RCN).^[1] She underwent a refit to become a naval patrol ship which saw her forecastle raised and the Maxim guns for fisheries patrol use replaced with two 12-pounder and two 3-pounder naval guns. She was commissioned as HMCS Canada in 1915 and served on the Atlantic coast.

On 6 December 1917 she was one of the ships anchored at HMC Dockyard in Halifax Harbour during the Halifax Explosion. She suffered minor damage and one crew member was seriously injured. The crew was sent ashore to lend assistance to the shattered city.

HMCS Canada was decommissioned from the RCN in November 1919 and she resumed her former civilian fisheries patrol duties as CGS Canada before being retired from government service in 1920.

Queen of Nassau

In 1920, CGS Canada was offered for sale at a price of $25,000.^[1] When no one purchased her, she was laid-up in Halifax.

After four years of neglect she was sold to an American company and then re-sold to Florida real estate entrepreneur Barron Gift Collier, Sr..^[1] Collier renamed her MV Queen of Nassau and pressed her into service shuttling passengers between Miami, Florida and Nassau, Bahamas. Unfortunately, this was a service for which she was poorly equipped, lacking comfortable overnight accommodations for the island cruise, as well as air conditioning. Passengers rapidly lost interest in the service and once again the ship sat idle and rusting, this time for 18 months in Biscayne Bay.

Collier announced some Mexican investors were interested in purchasing the ship for service in the Gulf of Mexico in June 1926. The ship left Miami on 30 June 1926 for Tampa, Florida to undergo a final inspection before the sale. After stopping twice in the Straits of Florida due to problems with her boilers, she began taking on water on 2 July 1926. At first her three pumps were enough to keep her afloat but when flooding reached her engine room, the boilers cooled and then failed, leaving no power for the pumps. The 18-person crew abandoned ship and shortly after 7:00 pm the vessel slipped below the waves stern-first to a watery grave in 35 fathoms (64 m) of water off Islamorada.

Wreck site

The wreck was located by technical divers in 2001 and rests in 235 feet (72 m) of water off of Islamorada, Florida.^[4] In March 2003, the site was the focus of an archaeological investigation by a NOAA team consisting of the Monitor National Marine Sanctuary, East Carolina University, National Undersea Research Center (NURC) at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington^[4] and videographer Rick Allen and Kimberly Faulk^[6] from Nautilus Productions. Nautilus Productions provided site documentation, documented the archaeological survey and recorded diving activities during the dives.^[7] The wreck is encrusted with oysters, as well as sponges, corals, and other invertebrate growth and rests upright on a white, sandy bottom.^[1]

Archaeologists are working toward designating the wreck a U.S. National Historic Site because of the significance it holds in the evolution of Canada's military.^[8]

References

Bibliography

• Macpherson, Keneth R. and Burgess, John. (1982)(Second Printing)The Ships of Canada's Naval Forces 1910-1981. Collins Publishers. ISBN 0-00-216856-1
• Converted civilian vessels
• Canadian Navy Heritage Project: Ship Technical Information
• Canadian Navy Heritage Project: Photo Archive