The Alphabet Fleet was a fleet of vessels owned and operated by the Reid Newfoundland Company as part of the provisioning of the 1898 Railway contract between the Dominion of Newfoundland and the Reid Newfoundland Company. The vessels were named after places in Scotland, the native homeland of Sir Robert Gillespie Reid, founder of the Reid Newfoundland Company.[1]
The ships were employed as coastal vessels to service the remote communities of the Newfoundland and the coast of Labrador to operate a mail and passenger service to those communities. These vessels became the lifeline to these communities and were depicted in many paintings and folk songs of the country, even long after it became a province of Canada.