Peterson Cara Smooth Ebony Canadian Fishtail (Shape 264), Irish Estate, 20th–21st Century

This reference example is a Peterson Cara in the Canadian shape, catalogued under shape number 264, finished in a smooth ebony-dark dress and fitted with a fishtail mouthpiece. It entered the archive as an Irish estate pipe, meaning a previously smoked example, and it serves here to document both the Cara line and Peterson's treatment of the Canadian form. The fishtail bit on this example is therefore itself instructive: Peterson has long offered many of its lines with a conventional flattened fishtail mouthpiece as an alternative to the P-Lip, and the Cara belongs to that conventional-bit tradition. The Cara line is a smooth-finished series within Peterson's broader catalogue, presented here in a deep ebony stain that emphasises silhouette over grain display. The Canadian is one of the classic long-shank shapes of the pipe repertoire, defined by an elongated oval shank paired with a proportionally short stem and a forward-canted billiard-type bowl. The extended shank lengthens the smoke channel within the wood itself, a quality traditionally prized for a cooler, drier draw, while the oval cross-section distinguishes the true Canadian from its round-shanked cousins the Lumberman and Lovat. Shape 264 is Peterson's rendering of this pattern. Dating rests on the identification supplied with the pipe rather than on factory codes: Peterson, like most makers, did not stamp explicit date codes on standard production, and precise dating typically depends on nomenclature style, country-of-manufacture wording, and line chronology studied against reference literature. On the evidence available, the example is placed honestly within twentieth-to-twenty-first-century Peterson production, its exact period undetermined.