The SS Catala, Union Steamship A PERSONAL EXPERIENCE
I was five years old at the time of my first Union Steamship voyage on the SS Catala, but I remember it well. When I mentioned this to my eighty-seven-year-old aunt, Edith Nelson, she surprised me.
“Oh,” she said, “I sailed on both the SS Catala AND the SS Cardena.” I quickly asked for details.
My aunt explained that in 1952, she boarded the SS Cardena from Hardwicke Island, where she was teaching at the time.1 There she’d met her fiancé, construction worker Jim Edwards, and the two lovebirds headed for Vancouver by ship to meet her parents at Easter. My aunt later travelled on the SS Catala after she and Jim Edwards married and were setting off on their honeymoon.
For seventy years, the Union Steamship Company formed a vital part of British Columbia’s coastal marine history. Starting in 1889, they helped pioneer British Columbia’s passenger and cargo industry, along with the steamship arm of the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR), which began hauling tea from the Eastern world to Port Moody and points east in 1886.2 By 1910, CPR vessels joined Union ships in sailing “the Triangle Run” (Vancouver-Seattle-Victoria). A third competitor, the Grand Trunk Pacific Company, began in 1910 out of Prince Rupert, at the terminus of its own railway there.3
The SS along with other Union ships, offered peak coastal service from the early 1920s right up to 1959. Her sister ships included the SS the SS the SS the SS and the SS These vessels became lifelines to countless fishing outposts, isolated canneries and logging communities dotting the bays and inlets up and down BC’s rugged coast in the days when airplane or car access did not exist.
