HMCS Canada

CGS Canada was a Canadian Government Ship that served as a patrol ship in the Fisheries Protection Service of Canada, an enforcement agency that was part of the Department of Marine and Fisheries. She is considered to the nucleus of the Royal Canadian Navy for her role in training Canadian naval officers and asserting Canadian sovereignty. Canada saw service in the First World War and was commissioned into the Royal Canadian Navy as HMCS Canada during that conflict.

Civilian service
CGS Canada was launched at the Vickers, Sons & Maxim shipyard in Barrow-in-Furness, England in 1904. Upon delivery, the Canada became the flagship for the Fisheries Protection Service of Canada and was instrumental in detaining numerous vessels illegally fishing in Canadian territorial waters. She was equipped with what was then the smallest Marconi wireless telegraph in the world.

She saw extensive use as a training vessel for crew who served throughout the Fisheries Protection Service of Canada squadron. She also saw use as the first ship to train fishermen to become members of Canada's Naval Militia, before the existence of a Canadian naval service. Her participation in Royal Navy fleet exercises in 1905 is considered by some to be the beginnings of Canada's naval activity.

Until 1910, Canada did not have a naval service and relied upon the Royal Navy for military force on the high seas. However, British military forces had withdrawn from Canada in 1906, therefore Canadian politicians began to call for the establishment of a domestic naval service.

On 29 March 1909, a resolution was passed in Canada's House of Commons calling for the establishment of a 'Canadian Naval Service'. The resolution was not successful; however, on 12 January 1910, the government of Prime Minister Sir Wilfrid Laurier took the resolution and introduced it as the Naval Service Bill. After third reading, the bill received Royal Assent on 4 May 1910, and became the Naval Service Act, administered by the Minister of Marine and Fisheries at the time. The official title of the navy was the 'Naval Service of Canada' (also informally the 'Canadian Naval Forces'). The first Director of the Naval Service of Canada was Rear-Admiral Charles Kingsmill (Royal Navy, retired), who was previously in charge of the Marine Service of the Department of Marine and Fisheries, which included the Fisheries Protection Service of Canada. Several vessels were acquired from the Royal Navy and the Naval Service of Canada changed its name to 'Royal Canadian Navy' on 30 January 1911, but it was not until 29 August that the use of "Royal" Canadian Navy was permitted by King George V.

Meanwhile, following passage of the Naval Service Bill in the spring of 1910 and the pending acquisition of the two cruisers HMCS Niobe and HMCS Rainbow (1891) from the British Admiralty, the federal government sought to begin training officers and crew for naval service. Without a naval academy, Canada looked to the Fisheries Protection Service of Canada and its method of training officers and crew aboard CGS Canada.

Thus CGS Canada became Canada's first naval training ship and was, as stated by naval historians in Canada, the “Flagship of the embryonic Canadian Navy at the time, symbolic of the evolution of Canada from a dominion within the British Empire to a sovereign nation.”

HMCS Canada
After the First World War broke out in August 1914, the CGS Canada was officially transferred to the Royal Canadian Navy (RCN). She underwent a refit to become a naval patrol ship which saw her forecastle raised and the Maxim guns for fisheries patrol use were replaced with two 12-pounder and two 3-pounder naval guns. She was commissioned as HMCS Canada in 1915 and served on the Atlantic coast.

On 6 December 1917 she was one of the ships anchored at HMC Dockyard in Halifax Harbour during the Halifax Explosion. She suffered minor damage and one crew member was seriously injured. The crew was sent ashore to lend assistance to the shattered city.

HMCS Canada was decommissioned from the RCN in November 1919 and she resumed her former civilian fisheries patrol duties as CGS Canada before being retired from government service in 1920.

Queen of Nassau
In 1920, the CGS Canada was offered for sale at a price of $25,000. When no one purchased her, she was laid-up in Halifax.

After four years of neglect she was sold to an American company and then re-sold to Florida real estate entrepreneur Barron Gift Collier, Sr.. Collier renamed her MV Queen of Nassau and pressed her into service shuttling passengers between Miami, Florida and Nassau, Bahamas. Unfortunately, this was a service for which she was poorly equipped, lacking comfortable overnight accommodations for the island cruise, as well as air conditioning. Passengers rapidly lost interest in the service and once again the ship sat idle and rusting, this time for 18 months in Biscayne Bay.

Collier announced some Mexican investors were interested in purchasing the ship for service in the Gulf of Mexico in June 1926. The ship left Miami on 30 June 1926 for Tampa, Florida to undergo a final inspection before the sale. After stopping twice in the Straits of Florida due to problems with her boilers, she began taking on water on 2 July 1926. At first her three pumps were enough to keep her afloat but when flooding reached her engine room, the boilers cooled and then failed, leaving no power for the pumps. The 18-person crew abandoned ship and shortly after 7:00 pm the vessel slipped below the waves stern-first to a watery grave in 35 fathoms (64 m) of water off Islamorada.

Wreck site
The wreck was located by divers in 2001. In 2003, the site was the focus of an archaeological investigation by a NOAA team consisting of the Monitor National Marine Sanctuary, East Carolina University, and the National Undersea Research Center at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. The wreck is encrusted with oysters, as well as sponges, corals, and other invertebrate growth.

Archeologists are working toward designating the wreck a U.S. National Historic Site because of the significance it holds in the evolution of Canada's military.