LYKES BROS. STEAMSHIP CO. INC.

Southern States Line’s white swallowtail has a smaller blue diamond without a letter. Some sources assign it directly to Lykes; Ships & The Sea 1938 notes addition of L to form L213. Merchant Ships’ discussion of lettering while showing the unlettered version is internally unclear.

Dixie Mediterranean and Dixie U.K. shared a white tapered swallowtail, blue-bordered except at the hoist, with red DIXIE. Their precise corporate relationship to the Lykes concerns remains uncertain.

The lettered diamond appears under both Lykes Bros. Steamship and Lykes Bros.-Ripley. Photographs of Almeria Lykes and Aimee Lykes support a horizontally elongated funnel diamond and an L shaped like the flag’s letter rather than a plain form. Merchant Ships also suggests replacement by the unlettered Southern States funnel, adding to the chronology’s uncertainty.

The flag later becomes an ordinary rectangle. Brown 1995 calls this recent, yet Talbot-Booth 1949 and Stewart 1957 already show it; Stewart 1963 returns to the swallowtail. Stewart 1957 puts the diamond towards the hoist. Brown gives L13 as an alternative funnel, and Bakker’s L13 flag follows that source.

Small website photographs and Lykes Hero on 10 August 2005 suggest a later funnel change to L303. The top may be light sky blue like the logo or the teal blue apparent in the photograph.