Michel Vezina of Beauport, Quebec, has asked us for information on a tanker named either TRONTOLITE or TORONTOLITE and we are glad to oblige with what material we have on this ship.

First of all, her name was correctly spelled TRONTOLITE. She was a unit of what at one time was a large deep sea and coastal fleet operated by Standard Oil and the affiliated Imperial Oil and the company frequently took liberties in the spelling of its ships' names, presumably to make them more pronounceable. Examples of this practice were MONTROLITE, VANCOLITE, VICTOLITE, ALBERTOLITE, CALGAROLITE, and CANADOLITE. The names might best be described as being grossly abbreviated.

TRONTOLITE (U.S.215947) was built in 1918 at Seattle, Washington, by the Skinner and Eddy Corporation. She measured 428.0 x 57.0 x 31.5, Gross 6882, Net 5267, and was powered by a 6-cylinder diesel engine of German manufacture. She was originally owned by the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey but during the 1920s she was acquired by the Imperial Oil Company Ltd. which brought her under the Canadian flag (C.141680) and registered her at Montreal. She operated under the ownership of a number of Imperial subsidiaries, of which one appears to have been Imperial Oil Shipping Company Ltd.

Like most of Imperial's salt water tankers, she operated mainly on the crude oil run from South American ports to Canada. She lasted until 1946 when she was finally broken up at Sydney, Nova Scotia. At the time of her scrapping, her tonnage was shown as 7115 Gross and 3586 Net and her owner's name by that time had been changed to the more modern Imperial Oil Limited.

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