“A Revolution in Travelling”: The Steamboat Letters of the Torrance family, 1831-1848
Bibliographic record
Abstract
La correspondance de la famille Torrance dans la collection des papiers de Robert M. Powell et de sa famille à Bibliothèque et Archives Canada doit être reconnue pour sa discussion sur les bateaux à vapeur du fleuve Saint-Laurent et des Grands Lacs dans les années 1830 et 1840.Cette cachette de lettres récemment découverte jette une nouvelle lumière sur les débuts de la navigation sous vapeur sur le Saint-Laurent, indiquant le grand intérêt et la participation de cette famille dans les aspects technologiques et commerciaux de ce développement révolutionnaire.L'auteur a transcrit les parties les plus significatives de la correspondance et a placé ces extraits en contexte en se rapportant à un éventail de sources déjà publiées.The Torrance family correspondence in the Robert M. Powell and family papers at Library and Archives Canada ranges widely over many subjects of 19 th century historical interest, but perhaps is most notable for its discussion of steamboats on the St. Lawrence River and Great Lakes.The recently discovered cache of letters sheds new light on the early days of steam on the St. Lawrence River, revealing the family's keen interest and involvement in this revolutionary development.1 John Torrance (1786-1870) emigrated from Scotland to Montreal, Canada, where he established a retail and wholesale business in 1814.John Torrance & Company traded in groceries, spirits, and other goods, importing tea direct from India and China.He expanded into shipping to complement this import business, forming the Montreal Tow Boat Company in the 1820s (later known as the Montreal and Quebec Steamboat Company) with the steam tug Hercules as one of its first vessels.2 After competing with the Molson family's St. Lawrence Steamboat Company for a brief period, the two firms 1 Library and Archives Canada (LAC), Robert M. Powell and family fonds, R12455, volume 2, Torrance family correspondence, files 12 to 15.The archival fonds holds three files of family correspondence covering 1831 to 1854 (files 12 to 14), and a fourth file for a later period (file 15), dating from 1868 to 1884.The author would like to thank Walter Lewis and Larry McNally, and the anonymous reviewers, whose careful reading and thoughtful comments have corrected many errors and done much to improve this article.Any errors that remain are, of course, the responsibility of the author.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.019 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".