Lake Boats: The Enduring Vessels of the Great Lakes.

Gordon Turner is the author of Empress of Britain: Canadian Pacific’s
Greatest Ship and the editor of SeaFare, a quarterly newsletter on sea
travel.

The ships that play the waters of the Great Lakes are a different breed from their saltwater counterparts. Long and narrow, their holds are filled with iron ore, coal, limestone, grain, road salt, or cement, hidden from view under their hatch covers. Lake Boats is a photographic tribute of the highest order to these sturdy vessels that form an essential yet often unsung element of commerce on both sides of the Great Lakes.

Greg McDonnell uses his camera with a lively imagination and achieves admirable results. Sometimes he is ashore, taking full-length shots of the ships underway or tied up alongside a dock, but just as often he is aboard, giving us images of grain pouring into the holds or coal being discharged by ingenious self-unloading booms. The author shows a fondness for the elderly ships that have sailed the Great Lakes for many decades. He takes his camera down into their engine rooms, some of them living museums of long-outdated technology. The photographs depict not only the ships but also the crew members as they carry out their duties.

The great majority of the photographs are full-page. To this reviewer, they are endlessly fascinating, and they have been reproduced to a uniformly high standard. Surprisingly, though, there are no illustrations of crew members’ accommodations.

The 10 or so introductory pages are well-written and informative, even if the copy-editing is imperfect. A 12-page appendix contains statistical and historical information about the 50 ships, Canadian and American, that appear in the book. First and last, though, Lake Boats is a marvellous photo album, one that does full justice to the ships and sailors of the five Great Lakes.