Alexander McDougall of Islay
The Islay-born man whose inventions are still celebrated in the US
‘The Captain’ they called him. He built eight shipyards, four dry docks and 200 ships. He designed oceangoing canal boats, an ore washing device and a hydraulic transporting system, designed and operated Mississippi river barges, created a torpedo-proof military vessel and held 49 patents for his inventions. And he came from Port Ellen, a small village on the isle of Islay in the inner Hebrides.
‘The Captain’ was Captain Alexander McDougall and he was born in Port Ellen on 16 March 1845. His working life stretched from the American Civil War to World War I but he never forgot the village of his birth and the shop (now the old Post Office building) where his father operated a village store.
Alexander McDougall was a remarkable man whose achievements on the American Great Lakes are still spoken of with awe – even if he is unknown in his native land. As an inventor, a designer, a pioneer, a major employer and in many ways a visionary in shipping, he was a polymath of substance and lasting success. Alexander’s father, Dugald, shopkeeper in Port Ellen and then a Glasgow policeman, left for Canada like so many of his then countryman when Alexander was aged seven. They landed up in Nottawa, a village near Collingwood, Ontario, from where at the age of sixteen the young Alexander ran away to sail on the mighty Great Lakes. By the age of 26 he was captaining a major cargo ship. An amazing career was about to take off.
His first ship in command was the SS Japan of the Anchor Line. It was a cargo ship that carried 1,200 tons of cargo with 150 passengers. He then built a home in Duluth (pronounced Dulooth) near Minnesota and got involved in the trade arising from the proposed Mississippi-Lake Superior railway line. Burgeoning iron ore mining and the transportation of grain were driving economic activity.
In 1875 he was sent to Russia at the request of Grand Duke Alexis to examine the feasibility of building a canal linking the Volga and Don rivers. He was told to examine possibilities for trade and to get a franchise for a grain elevator. En route he visited his native Islay, then Paris and Berlin (celebrating the defeat of the French). In St Petersburg he saw Tsar Alexander riding in the streets unremarked in a horse and sleigh. He left Russia with hidden maps stitched specially in the linings of his coat.
In 1886, Alexander tried his hand at fishing in Lake Superior, catching quantities of herring and trout. These he and his compatriots froze fish in blocks of ice and sold them with the slogan ‘Frozen with a wiggle in their tails’. Abandoning that project, he then returned to