CHARLOTTETOWN, PRINCE EDWARD ISLAND, AND HABITANT, CANADA
The Prince of Wales and his cruiser escort left Halifax on the night of
Monday, August 18th, for Prince Edward Island, in the Gulf of St.
Lawrence, arriving at the capital of that province the next morning.
Owing to the difficulty of getting across country, the Press
correspondents were unable to be present at this visit, and went direct
by train to Quebec to await the Prince's arrival.
We were sorry not to visit this tiny, self-contained province of the
Dominion, for we had heard much concerning its charm and individuality
in character. It is a fertile little island, rich in agriculture,
sport and fishing. It is an island of bright red beaches and green
downs set in a clear sea, an Eden for bathers and holiday-makers.
It is also one of the last rallying-points of the silver fox, which is
bred by the islanders for the fur market. This is a pocket industry
unique in Canada. The animals are tended with the care given to prize
fowls, each having its own kennel and wire run. Such domesticity
renders them neither hardy nor prolific, and the breeding is an
exacting pursuit.
At the capital, Charlottetown, His Royal Highness had a real Canadian
welcome, tinged not a little with excitement. While he was on the
racecourse one of the stands took fire, and there was the beginning of
a panic, men and women starting to clamber wildly out of it and
dropping from its sides. The Prince, however, kept his place and
continued to watch the races. His presence on the stand quieted the
nervous and checked what might have been an ugly rush, while the fire
was very quickly got under.
Off Charlottetown the Prince transferred again to the battle-cruiser
_Renown_, and finished the last section of his sea voyage up the great
St. Lawrence on her.
II
Our disappointment at not seeing Prince Edward Island was mitigated by
the glimpses we had from our train of the country of New Brunswick and
the great area of the habitants that surrounds Quebec.
On the morning of August 19th we woke to the broken country of New
Brunswick. The forests of spruce, pine, maple and poplar made walls on
the very fringe of the single-line railway track for miles, giving way
abruptly to broad and placid lakes, or to sharp narrow valleys, in
which shallow streams pressed forward over beds of white stone and
rock. At this time the streams were narrowed down to a slim channel,
but the broad area of white shingle--frequently scored by many
subsidiary thin channels of water--gave an idea of what these streams
were like in flood.
There was a great deal of unfriendly black rock in the land pushing
itself boldly up in hills, or cropping out from the thin covering soil.
Here and there were the clearings of homesteaders, who lived sometimes
in pretty plank houses, sometimes in the low shacks of rough logs that
seemed to be put in the clearings--some of them not yet free of the
high tree stumps--in order to give the land its authentic local colour.
On the streams that flow between the walls of trees there were always
logs. Logs sometimes jamming the whole fairway with an indescribable
jumble, logs collected into river bays with a neatness that made the
surface of the water appear one great raft, and by these "log booms"
there was, usually, the piles of squared timber, and the collection of
rough wooden houses that formed the mill.
The mills have the air of being pit-head workings dealing with a
cleaner material than coal. About them are lengthy conveyors, built up
on high trestle timbers, that carry the logs from the water to the mill
and from the mill to the dumps, that one instantly compares to the
conveyors and winding gear of a coal mine. Beneath the conveyors are
great ragged mounds of short logs cut into sections for the paper pulp
trade, and jumbled heaps of shorter sections that are to serve as the
winter firing for whole districts; these have the contours of coal
dumps, while fed from chutes are hillocks of golden sawdust as big and
as conspicuous as the ash and slag mounds of the mining areas.
In the mill yards are stacks and stacks of house planks that the great
saws have sliced up with an uncanny ease and speed, stacks of square
shingles for roofs and miles of squared beams.
We passed not a few but a multitude of these "booms" and mills, and our
minds began to grasp the vastness of this natural and national
industry. And yet it is not in the main a whole-time industry. For a
large section of its workers it is a side line, an occupation for days
that would otherwise be idle. It is the winter work of farmers, who,
forced to cease their own labours owing to the deep snow and the
frosts, turn to lumbering to keep them busy until the thaw sets in.
That fact helps the mind to realize the potentialities of Canada. Here
is a business as big as coal mining that is largely the fruit of work
in days when there is little else to do.
We saw this industry at a time when the streams were congested and the
mills inactive. It was the summer season, but, more than that, the
lack of transport, owing to the sinking, or the surrender by Canada for
war purposes, of so much ship space, was having its effect on the
lumber trade. The market, even as far as Britain, was in urgent need
of timber, and the timber was ready for the market; but the exigencies,
or, as some Canadians were inclined to argue, the muddle of shipping
conditions, were holding up this, as well as many other of the Dominion
industries.
In this sporting country there are many likely looking streams for
fishermen, as there are likely looking forests for game. At New Castle
we touched the Miramichi, which has the reputation of being the finest
salmon-fishing river in New Brunswick; the Nepisiquit, the mouth of
which we skirted at Bathurst, is also a great centre for fishermen,
and, indeed, the whole of this country about the shores of the great
Baie de Chaleur--that immense thrust made by the Gulf of St. Lawrence
between the provinces of New Brunswick and Quebec--is a paradise for
holiday-makers and sportsmen, who, besides their fishing, get excellent
shooting at brant, geese, duck, and all kinds of game.
The Canadian of the cities has his country cottage in this splendidly
beautiful area, which he comes to for his recreation, and at other
times leaves in charge of a local farmer, who fills his wood shed with
fire logs from the forest in the summer, and his ice house with ice
from the rivers in winter.
III
In this district, and long before we reached the Quebec border, we came
to the country of the habitant farmer. As we stopped at sections to
water or change engines, we saw that this was a land where man must be
master of two tongues if he is to make himself understood. It is a
land where we read on a shop window the legend: "J. Art Levesque.
Barbier. Agent du Lowdnes Co. Habits sur commande." Here the
habitant does business at La Banque Nationale, and takes his pleasure
at the Exposition Provinciale, where his skill can win him Prix
Populaires.
On the stations we talked with men in British khaki trousers who told
us in a language in which Canadian French and camp English was
strangely mingled of the service they had seen on the British front.
It is the district where the clever and painstaking French
agriculturist gets every grain out of the soil, a district where we
could see the spire of a parish church every six miles, the land of a
people, sturdy, devout, tenacious and law-abiding, the "true 'Canayen'
themselves,"
"And in their veins the same red stream;
The conquering blood of Normandie
Flowed strong, and gave America
Coureurs de bois and voyageurs
Whose trail extends from sea to sea!"
as William Henry Drummond, a true poet who drew from them inspiration
for his delightful dialect verse, describes them.
The railway passes for hundreds of miles between habitant farms. The
land is beautifully cared for, every fragment of rock, from a boulder
to a pebble, having been collected from the soil through generations,
and piled in long, thin caches in the centres of the fields. The
effect of passing for hundreds of miles between these precisely aligned
cairns is strange; one cannot get away from the feeling that the rocky
mounds are there for some barbaric tribal reason, and that presently
one will see a war dance or a sacrifice taking place about one of them.
The farms themselves have a strange appearance. They have an
abnormally narrow frontage. They are railed in strips of not much
greater breadth than a London back garden, though they extend away from
the railway to a depth of a mile and more. At first this grouping of
the land appears accidental, but the endlessness of the strange design
soon convinces that there is a purpose underlying it.
Two explanations are offered. One is that the land has been parcelled
out in this way, and not on a broad square acreage, because in the old
pioneer days it afforded the best means of grouping the homesteads
together for defence against the Red Man. The other is that it is the
result of the French-Canadian law which enforces the division of an
estate among children in exact proportion, and thus the original big
farms have been split up into equal strips among the descendants of the
original owner. Either of these explanations, or the combination of
them, can be accepted.
At Campbellton, a pretty, toy-like town, close up to La Baie de
Chaleur, there is gathered a remnant of the Micmac Indians, whom the
first settlers feared. They have a settlement of their own on a peak
of the Baie, and one of their chiefs had travelled to Halifax to be
among those who welcomed the son of the Great White Chief.
Campbellton let us into the lovely valley of the Matapedia, an
enchanted spot where the river lolls on a broad bed through a grand
country of grim hills and forests. Now and then, indeed, its channel
is pinched into gorges where its water shines pallidly and angrily amid
the crowded shadows of rock and tree; usually it is the nursemaid of
rich, flat valleys and the friend of the little frame-house hamlets
that are linked across its waters by a spidery bridge of wooden
trestles. At times beneath the hills it is swift and combed by a
thousand stony fingers, and at other times it is an idler in Arcadie, a
dilettante stream that wanders in half a dozen feckless channels over a
desert of white stones, with here and there the green humpback of an
island inviting the camper.
Beyond Matapedia we got the thrill of the run, an abrupt glimpse of the
St. Lawrence, steel-blue and apparently infinite, its thirty miles of
breadth yielding not a glimpse of the farther side. A short distance
on, beyond Mont Joli, a place that might have come out of a sample box
of French villages, the railway keeps the immense river company for the
rest of the journey.
The valley broadened out into an immense flat plain with but few traces
of the wilder hills of New Brunswick. About the line is a belt of
prosperity forty miles deep, all of it worked by the habitant owners of
the narrow farms, all of it so rich that in the whole area from the
border to the city of Quebec there is not a poor farmer.
Before reaching Riviere du Loup we saw the high peaks of the Laurentine
Mountains on the far side of the St. Lawrence, and on our side of the
stream passed a grim little islet called L'Islet au Massacre, where a
party of Micmac Indians, fleeing from the Iroquois in the old days,
were caught as they hid in a deep cave, and killed by a great fire that
their enemies built at the mouth.
We saw a few seals on the rocks of the river, but not a hint of the
numbers that gave Riviere du Loup its name. It is a cameo of a town
with falls sliding down-hill over a chute of jumbled rocks into a
logging pool beneath.
Riviere du Loup is in the last lap of the journey to Quebec. There are
a score or so of little hamlets, the names of which--St. Alexandre, St.
Andre, St. Pascal, St. Pacome, St. Valier and so on--sound like a
reading from the Litany of the Saints. And, passing the last of them,
we saw across the narrowed St. Lawrence a trail of lace against the
darkness of the Laurentine hills, a mass of filigree that moved and
writhed, so that we understood when some one said:
"The Montmorency Falls."
A moment later we saw across the stream the city of Quebec, a hanging
town of fairyland, with pinnacle and spire, bastion and citadel
delicate against the quick sky. A city of romance and charm, to which
we hurried by the very humdrum route of the steam ferry that crosses to
it from the Levis side.