A few years ago, my Canadian-born wife, Karen, and I got acquainted with a television program called Murdoch Mysteries. Then we got hooked. Since we both like history, an appealing feature is that the program is set in Toronto in the 1890s and early 1900s.
Equally compelling is the cleverness of the plots, which involve new forensic techniques of the period, such as “finger marks” and blood typing, to solve murders. Many of the stories take current issues and project back to how they would have been viewed more than 100 years ago. There is inside-joke humor that the viewers are in on and fictionalized stories about celebrities of the era such as Thomas Edison, Harry Houdini, and Alexander Graham Bell.
The protagonists are Toronto detective William Murdoch and pathologists Julia Ogden and Emily Grace. Murdoch knows seemingly everything—or can find out—and is able to invent crude forerunners of such things as sonar, surveillance cameras, and night-vision devices. Constable George Crabtree adds comic touches with his observations and his “predictions” of things to come in the 20th century. The program airs on CBC in Canada and is available through Netflix and the Ovation channel in the United States.
Last year, as a Christmas present to Karen (and myself) I took her to Ontario to see the sites where various episodes were filmed. By far my favorite was the vintage Great Lakes passenger ship Keewatin. (The last two syllables of the ship’s name rhyme with “gotten.”) In part my interest stemmed from my dad’s work on board Great Lakes cruise ships in the years leading up to World War II. He told me stories of his service for the old Georgian Bay Line. The Keewatin is now berthed at Port McNicoll, Ontario, on the Georgian Bay, which is an inlet from Lake Huron.
Her building yard was the Fairfield Shipbuilding and Engineering Company in Govan, Scotland. The yard launched her in July 1907, and in September of that year she made her one and only voyage across the Atlantic to Canada. The builders foresaw and planned for the obstacles the ship would face around the Great Lakes. Back then, long before the St. Lawrence Seaway opened in 1959, only relatively small ships could negotiate the Welland locks for the transit around Niagara Falls from Lake Ontario to Lake Erie. As a result, the ship was constructed so she could be taken apart for the trip and towed. A shipyard in Buffalo then reconnected the bow and stern sections by installing rivets that had served as ballast during the ocean crossing.
In her early years of operation from Port McNicoll, before rail service was well developed, the Keewatin carried passengers and cargo to and from Port Arthur/Fort William on Lake Superior. She thus served as one link in the transcontinental service of the Canadian Pacific Railway. Later, she had a role in recreational cruising on the lakes—a pleasant summer getaway in a time before the Caribbean became a popular destination. As air travel became convenient and affordable, she concluded her operational service in 1965.
That the 336-foot, 3,856-ton ship survives to this day is a blessing. A key event came in 1967 when businessman Roland Peterson purchased her for $37,000, slightly more than she would have brought if sold for scrapping. She was a museum ship in Douglas, Michigan, for decades before returning to her original home port of Port McNicoll in 2012.
The man who now runs the ship is Eric Conroy, known as “Captain Rick.” In his four-stripe merchant marine uniform and neat white beard, Conroy resembles Captain Edward J. Smith, the first and last master of the Titanic. This is a return home for Conroy. As a teenager in the 1960s he worked as a waiter on board the Keewatin and her sister ship Assiniboia.
The Murdoch episode involved a plot to sink the Keewatin during her maiden voyage. That also brings to mind the Titanic; the Keewatin is a much smaller version but has similar amenities, including a grand staircase that resembles the one in the ill-fated ship. Our tour guide was one of a coterie of knowledgeable volunteers who show people around and who have done yeoman work in refurbishing her—more than 10,000 hours of donated time last year. The Murdoch filming brought an infusion of cash—enough to buy four more replica lifeboats.
Unlike the Titanic that sank in 1912, the smaller ship boasted “all first-class service.” But, as the docent pointed out, some cabins “were more first class than others” in that they had private washrooms. Seating in the grand dining room brought touches of elegance. Indeed, there is dark, polished wood throughout the superstructure—vestiges of yesteryear. Near the overhead of the main lounge are hand-painted color windows made in Italy.
The only cabin with a double bed was the honeymoon suite, though the above-door transom and thin bulkheads probably afforded little privacy. Some cabins in the superstructure are decorated as they were during various decades of service and include clothes and artifacts from those periods.
We saw the galley, in which the cooks, all Chinese in origin, prepared meals by using heat from the ship’s steam system. There was a useful metal contraption comprised of a series of perpendicular wires. In the era before automated equipment produced individual pats of butter, the little machine on board the Keewatin dissected one-pound slabs of butter into individual servings.
For me the greater appeal than the passenger havens was in the spaces belowdecks. We saw the cargo holds in which the fictional Murdoch nearly perished as well as the former coal bunkers in a ship that was never converted to burn oil. Nearby were the Scotch boilers that made the steam. The highlight was undoubtedly the engine room. There, in all its glory, was a quadruple-expansion reciprocating engine that could drive the ship at speeds up to 16 knots. We saw the cylinders and connecting rods, imagining how they would have looked when moving steadily up and down to turn the crankshaft and thus the propeller shaft.
Then came the golden moment. The docent invited me to push a button. It started the small electric motor that powered the jacking gear used to activate the engine at slow speed for maintenance. For that moment, as the engine components moved, I was transported more than 100 years back in time.