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The Robert Kerr on the Ways at the Esquimalt Marine Railway Ltd.

by John MacFarlane 2017

Robert Kerr

The Robert Kerr was the first vessel to go up on the ways at the Esquimalt Marine Railway Co. Ltd. (Photo from the John MacFarlane collection.)

W.F. Bullen, who was formerly the General Manager of the Albion Iron Works joined with his brother–in–law George Bushby to go into partnership in a ship repair facility at Esquimalt BC. In 1893 they formed the Esquimalt Marine Railway Co.

The chief asset of the yard was a 700 foot marine railway constructed by the Boston contractors H.I. Crandall & Sons. They constructed a cradle which could handle vessels up to 2,500 tons. The engine was constructed at the Victoria Machinery Depot and the gears were constructed locally. Sayward’s Mill provided the lumber and a repair shop was constructed.

The first vessel the yard handled was the Robert Kerr which went up for scraping and painting. The Robert Kerr was constructed in 1866 at Canada East (a Crown Colony now the Province of Quebec). She was operated by the Hudsons Bay Co. between the UK and the west coast. In 1887 she was taken over by the Canadian Pacific Railway, Montreal QC as a coal barge. She was wrecked near Danger Reef while in tow of the tug Coulti while traveling from Ladysmith to Vancouver with a cargo of coal. After stranding off the west coast of Vancouver Island she was purchased by Captain Soule then manager of the Hastings Mill Stevedoring Co. Afterwards she was a coal hulk in Vancouver harbour. She provided refuge for people in the Great Fire of 1886 at Vancouver BC.

Almost all of the early work was scraping, painting and re–sheathing hulls with copper. The yard was not on the approved Admiralty list so the valued naval work did not come at first. But there was plenty of local and US ships requiring repairs and refitting. When the Klondike Gold Rush started the company became a ship builder with the construction of the Casca.


To quote from this article please cite:

MacFarlane, John M. (2017) The Robert Kerr. Nauticapedia.ca 2017. http://nauticapedia.ca/Gallery/Robert_Kerr.php

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Site News: December 21, 2024

The vessel database has been updated and is now holding 94,824 vessel histories (with 16,274 images and 13,929 records of ship wrecks and marine disasters).

Vessel records are currently being reviewed and updated with more than 45,000 processed so far this year (2024).

The mariner and naval biography database has also been updated and now contains 58,599 entries (with 3996 images).

Thanks to Ray Warren who is beginning a long process of filling gaps in the photo record of vessel histories in the database. Ray has been documenting the ships of Vancouver Harbour for more than 60 years.

Thanks to contributor Mike Rydqvist McCammon for the hundreds of photos he has contributed to illustrate British Columbia’s floating heritage.

My very special thanks to our volunteer IT adviser, John Eyre, who (since 2021) has modernized, simplified and improved the update process for the databases into semi–automated processes. His participation has been vital to keeping the Nauticapedia available to our netizens.

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