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The Amai Contractor

by John MacFarlane 2022

Side view. (Photo from the Nauticapedia collection.)

I was recently gifted a box of photographs from Bob Fiorello that came from the John Manly Ltd. shipyard in New Westminster BC. They had been commissioned as part of the vessel construction process and were created by photographic contractors – the Stride Studios (Charles E. Stride). I scanned all the images because they are of small working vessels that seldom attract any attention in the threads of social media. I have gifted the originals to a permanent home at the Vancouver Maritime Museum but I will share some of the series that give good coverage to those vessels.

This image of a small vessel, the Amai Contractor, presents a bit of a mystery. It was apparently never registered (although it shows New Westminster as her port of register) so may have been built for an American customer.

Stern view (Photo from the Nauticapedia collection.)

To quote from this article please cite:

MacFarlane, John (2022) The Amai Contractor. Nauticapedia.ca 2022. http://nauticapedia.ca/Gallery/Amai_Contractor.php

Site News: January 14, 2025

The vessel database has been updated and is now holding 94,957 vessel histories (with 16,337 images and 13,935 records of ship wrecks and marine disasters).

The mariner and naval biography database has also been updated and now contains 58,599 entries (with 3998 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 beginning his 4th year of fact checking all of the entries in the vessel database.

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