Constituting one of the most important elements in the city's population were the "aristocrats of labour", the skilled craftsmen who built ships like the one pictured here, towering over the workers' homes. The West Side (Carleton) and the Portland area just north of the city proper were the shipbuilding centres of the port. Beginning with small and often badly built vessels in the 1790s, the ships of Saint John steadily increased in quality and numbers until, by the mid- nineteenth century, the city was one of the great shipbuilding centres of the empire, often producing more than 100 vessels a year. The commerce of the port kept pace with this growth. While most Saint John ships were sold in the United Kingdom, the city still had the largest merchant marine of any port in the Maritime colonies, and the Maritime ports had one of the largest merchant marines in the world. Many of the ships constructed here, similar to the Alexander Yeats in this photograph, exceeded 1,000 tons.
