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More Nautical Christmas Cards

by John MacFarlane 2016

A pre–war card from the captured German freighter in 1939 at Manzanillo Mexico. (Photo courtesy of MMBC. )

Nautical Christmas cards originated with naval personnel using cards personalized to their ships.

Capital Iron and Metals Ltd., ship breakers in Victoria BC, issued cards featuring a vessel they had acquired and probably broken up in their yard. (Photo from the collection. )

Unusually a commercial firm, Capital Iron and Metals Ltd. featured naval vessels on their annual Christmas cards.

HMCS Oshawa (Photo from the collection. )

The cards always contained a detailed message about the featured vessel. (Photo from the John MacFarlane collection. )

Black Fir from Texada Towing Co. Ltd. (Photo from the Nauticapedia collection. )

To quote from this article please cite:

MacFarlane, John M. (2016) More Nautical Christmas Cards. Nauticapedia.ca 2016. http://nauticapedia.ca/Gallery/Xmas_Cards_2.php

Site News: March 24, 2025

ANOTHER MILESTONE REACHED

The vessel database has been updated and is now holding 95,326 vessel histories (with 16,457 images and 14,217 records of ship wrecks and marine disasters).

The mariner and naval biography database has also been updated and now contains 58,600 entries (with 4,003 images).

My thanks to Ray Warren who is beginning a long process of filling gaps in the photo record of the vessel histories in the vessel 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 continues to contribute 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.

Thanks to John Spivey who is in his 4th year of fact checking all of the entries in the vessel database, one-by-one.

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