E-text prepared by Al Haines
Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this
file which includes the original illustrations.
See 24808-h.htm or 24808-h.zip:
(https://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/2/4/8/0/24808/24808-h/24808-h.htm)
or
(https://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/2/4/8/0/24808/24808-h.zip)
Transcriber's note:
Page numbers in this book are indicated by numbers enclosed
in curly braces, e.g. {99}. They have been located where page
breaks occurred in the original book. For its Index, a page
number has been placed only at the start of that section.
Chronicles of Canada
Edited by George M. Wrong and H. H. Langton
In Thirty-two volumes
31
ALL AFLOAT
by
WILLIAM WOOD
Part IX
National Highways
[Frontispiece: THE VOYAGEURS ON A MISTY MORNING. From a painting by
Verner]
ALL AFLOAT
A Chronicle of Craft and Waterways
by
WILLIAM WOOD
Toronto
Glasgow, Brook & Company
1915
Copyright in all Countries subscribing
to the Berne Convention
TO
THE PETRYS
EACH AND ALL
IN TOKEN OF
A FAMILY FRIENDSHIP
FOUR GENERATIONS STRONG {ix}
CONTENTS
Page
I. A LAND OF WATERWAYS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
II. CANOES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
III. SAILING CRAFT; THE PIONEERS . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
IV. SAILING CRAFT: UNDER THE FLEURS-DE-LIS . . . . . . 54
V. SAILING CRAFT: UNDER THE UNION JACK . . . . . . . . 68
VI. SAILING CRAFT: THE BUILDING OF THE SHIP . . . . . . 82
VII. SAILING CRAFT: 'FIT TO GO FOREIGN' . . . . . . . . 92
VIII. STEAMERS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129
IX. FISHERIES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155
X. ADMINISTRATION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 171
XI. NAVIES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 179
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 189
INDEX . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 193
{xi}
[Transcriber's note: The page numbers below are those in the original
book. However, in this e-book, to avoid the splitting of paragraphs,
the illustrations may have been moved to preceding or following pages.]
ILLUSTRATIONS
THE VOYAGEURS ON A MISTY MORNING . . . . . . . . . . _Frontispiece_
From a painting by Verner.
THE SPIRIT OF THE LAKES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . _Facing page_ 12
By Lorado Taft, in the Chicago Art Institute.
SHIPS OF THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY . . . . . . . . . . . " 44
From Winsor's 'America.'
CHAMPLAIN'S SHIP, THE 'DON DE DIEU' . . . . . . . . " 54
From the model at the Quebec Tercentenary.
A FRENCH FRIGATE OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY . . . . . " 64
From Winsor's 'America.'
SHIP 'BATAVIA,' 2000 TONS . . . . . . . . . . . . . " 92
Built by F.-X. Marquis at Quebec, 1877. Lost
on Inaccessible Island, 1879. From a picture
belonging to Messrs Ross and Co., Quebec.
TRANSPORT 'BECKWITH' AND BATEAUX, LAKE ONTARIO, 1816 " 136
From the John Ross Robertson Collection,
Toronto Public Library.
THE 'ROYAL WILLIAM' . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . " 140
From the original painting in possession of the
Literary and Historical Society of Quebec.
{1}
CHAPTER I
A LAND OF WATERWAYS
Canada is the child of the sea. Her infancy was cradled by her
waterways; and the life-blood of her youth was drawn from oceans, lakes,
and rivers. No other land of equal area has ever been so intimately
bound up with the changing fortunes of all its different waters, coast
and inland, salt and fresh.
The St Lawrence basin by itself is a thing to marvel at, for its mere
stupendous size alone. Its mouth and estuary are both so vast that their
salt waters far exceed those of all other river systems put together.
Its tide runs farther in from the Atlantic than any other tide from this
or any other ocean. And its 'Great Lakes' are appropriately known by
their proud name because they contain more fresh water than all the world
beside. Size for size, this one river system is so pre-eminently first
in the sum of these three attributes that there is no competing second to
be found elsewhere. {2} It forms a class of its own. And well it may,
even for its minor attributes, when the island of Newfoundland at its
mouth exceeds the area of Ireland; when the rest of its mouth could
contain Great Britain; when an arm of the true deep sea runs from Cabot
Strait five hundred miles inland to where the Saguenay river soundings go
down beyond an average of a hundred fathoms; and when, three hundred
miles farther inland still, on an island in an archipelago at the mouth
of the Ottawa, another tributary stream, there stands the city of
Montreal, one of the greatest seaports in the world.
But mere size is not the first consideration. The Laurentian waters are
much more important for their significance in every stage of national
development. They were the highway to the heart of America long before
the white man came. They remained the same great highway from Cartier to
Confederation--a period of more than three hundred years. It is only
half a century since any serious competition by road and rail began.
Even now, in spite of this competition, they are one of the greatest of
all highways. Nor does their significance stop here. Nature laid out
the St Lawrence basin so that it not only {3} led into the heart of the
continent, but connected with every other system from the Atlantic to the
Pacific and from the Tropics to the Polar sea. Little by little the
pioneers found out that they could paddle and portage the same canoe, by
inland routes, many thousands of miles to all four points of the compass:
eastward to the Atlantic between the Bay of Fundy and New York; westward
till, by extraordinary efforts, they passed up the giant Saskatchewan and
through the mighty ranges that look on the Pacific; southward to the
Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico; northward to Hudson Bay, or down the
Mackenzie to the Arctic ocean.
As settlement went on and Canada developed westwards along this
unrivalled waterway man tried to complete for his civilized wants what
nature had so well provided for his savage needs. There is a rise of six
hundred feet between Lake St Peter and Lake Superior. So canals were
begun early in the nineteenth century and gradually built farther and
farther west, at a total cost of $125,000,000, till, by the end of the
century, with the opening of the Canadian 'Soo,' the last artificial link
was finished and direct navigation was established between the western
end of Lake {4} Superior at Duluth and the eastern end of the St Lawrence
system at Belle Isle, a distance of no less than 2340 miles.
But even the mighty St Lawrence, with the far-reaching network of its
connecting systems, is not the whole of Canada's waters. The eastern
coast of Nova Scotia is washed by the Atlantic, and the whole length of
British Columbia by the Pacific. Then, there are harbours, fiords,
lakes, and navigable rivers not directly connected with either of these
coasts or with the wonderfully ramified St Lawrence. So, taking every
factor of size and significance into consideration, it seems almost
impossible to exaggerate the magnitude of the influence which waterways
have always exerted, and are still exerting, on the destinies of Canada.
Canada touches only one country by land. She is separated from every
other foreign country and joined to every other part of the British
Empire by the sea alone. Her land frontier is long and has given cause
for much dispute in times of crisis. But her water frontiers--her river,
lake, and ocean frontiers--have exercised diplomacy and threatened
complications with almost constant persistence from the first. There
were conflicting rights, claims, and jurisdictions about the waters long
{5} before the Dominion was ever thought of. Discovery, exploration,
pioneering, trade, and fisheries, all originated questions which,
involving mercantile sea-power, ultimately turned on naval sea-power and
were settled by the sword. Each rival was forced to hold his own at sea
or give up the contest. Even in time of peace there was incessant
friction along the many troublous frontiers of the sea. From the Treaty
of Utrecht in 1713 down to the final award at The Hague, nearly two
centuries later, the diplomatic war went steadily on. It is true that
the fishing grounds of Newfoundland were the chief object of contention.
But Canada and Newfoundland are so closely connected by geographical,
imperial, and maritime bonds that no just account of craft and waterways
can be given if any attempt is made to separate such complementary parts
of British North America. They will therefore be treated as one
throughout the present book.
But, even apart from Newfoundland, the Canadian interests concerned
rather with the water than the land make a most remarkable total. They
include questions of international waterways and water-power, salt and
fresh water fishing, sealing, whaling, inland {6} navigation, naval
armaments on the Great Lakes, canals, drainage, and many more. The
British ambassador who left Washington in 1913 declared officially that
most of his attention had been devoted to Canadian affairs; and most of
these Canadian affairs were connected with the water. Nor was there
anything new in this, or in its implication that Canadian waters brought
Canada into touch with international questions, whether she wished it or
not. The French shore of Newfoundland; the _Alabama_ claims; the San
Juan boundary; the whole purport of the Treaty of Washington in 1871; the
_Trent_ affair of ten years earlier; the Panama Canal tolls of to-day;
the War of 1812; the war which others called the Seven Years' War, but
which contemporary England called the 'Maritime War'; all the invasions
of Canada, all the trade with the Indians, all Spanish, French, Dutch,
British, and American complications--everything, in fact, which helped to
shape Canadian destinies--were inevitably connected with the sea; and,
more often than not, were considered and settled mainly as a part of what
those prescient pioneers of oversea dominion, the great Elizabethan
statesmen, always used to call 'the sea affair.'
{7}
Canada, like other countries, may be looked at from many points of view;
but there is none that does not somehow include her oceans, lakes, or
rivers. Her waterways, of course, are only one factor in her history.
But they are a constant factor, everywhere at work, though sometimes
little recognized, and making their influence felt throughout the length
and breadth of the land. If any one would see what the water really
means to Canada, let him compare her history with Russia's. Russia and
Canada are both northern countries and both continental, with many
similarities in natural resources. But their extremely different forms
of government are not so unlike each other as are their differing
relations with the sea. The unlikeness of the two peoples accounts for a
good deal; but this only emphasizes the maritime character of Canada.
Russia is essentially an empire of the land. Canada is the greatest link
between the oceans which unite the Empire of the Sea.
Take any aspect of sea-power, naval or mercantile, and British interest
in it is at once apparent. Take the mere statistics of tonnage--tonnage
built, tonnage afloat, tonnage armed. The British Navy has over a third
of the world's effective naval tonnage; the British Empire {8} has nearly
half of the whole world's mercantile marine; and the United Kingdom alone
builds more than three-fifths of the world's new tonnage every year.
When all the other elements of sea-power are taken into
consideration--the people who are directly dependent on the sea, the
values constantly afloat, the credits involved, the enormous advantages
enjoyed, and the clinching fact that British naval defeat means disaster
and disaster means ruin--when all this is brought into the reckoning, it
is safe to say that the combined maritime interests of the British Empire
practically equal those of all the rest of the world put together. When
it is also remembered that Canada, itself a land of waterways, contains a
third of the total area of the Empire, and lies between the Atlantic and
Pacific oceans, the significance of these facts is placed beyond a doubt.
Take a very different illustration--the speech of Canada to-day--and the
significance is still the same. We have so many sea terms in our
ordinary English speech that we almost forget that they are sea terms at
all till we compare them with corresponding idioms in other languages.
Then we realize that only the Dutch, the Finns, and the Scandinavians can
{9} approach the English-speaking peoples in the common use of sea terms.
Other foreigners employ different phrasing altogether. Their landsmen
never 'clear the decks for action,' are never 'brought up with a round
turn,' or even 'taken aback,' as if by the wind on the wrong side. They
never have 'three sheets in the wind,' even when they do get 'half seas
over.' They don't 'throw a man overboard,' even when the man is one of
those unfortunates who is apt to get 'on his beam ends.' The facetious
'don't speak to the man at the wheel' and the cautious 'you'd better not
sail so close to the wind' have no exact equivalents for the Slav or
Latin man in the street.
These, and many more, are common expressions which Anglo-Canadians share
with the stay-at-home type of Englishman. But the special point is that,
like the American, the Canadian is still more nautical than the
Englishman in his everyday use of sea terms. 'So long!' in the sense of
good-bye is a seaport valediction commoner in Canada than in England.
Canadians go 'timber-cruising' when they are looking for merchantable
trees; they used to understand what 'prairie schooners' were out West;
and even now they always 'board' a train wherever it may {10} be. But
even more remarkable are the sea terms universally current among the
French Canadians, who come from the seafaring branch of a race of
landsmen. Under the French régime the army officers used to say they
felt as if they were on board a man-of-war as long as they stayed in
Canada. The modern Parisian may think the same to-day when he is told
how to steer his way about the country roads by the points of the
compass. The word _lanterne_ is unknown, for the nautical _fanal_
invariably takes its place. The winter roads are marked out by 'buoys'
(_balises_), and if you miss the 'channel' between them you may 'founder'
(_caler_) and then become a 'derelict' (completely _dégradé_). You must
_embarquer_ into a carriage and _débarquer_ out of it. A cart is
_radou'ée_, as if repaired in a dockyard. Even a well-dressed woman is
said to be _bi'n gré-yée_, that is, she is 'fit to go foreign.' Horses
are not tied but moored (_amarrés_); enemies are reconciled by being
re-moored (_ramarrés_); and the Quebec winter is supposed to begin with a
'broadside' of snow on November 25 (_la bordée de la Sainte-Catherine_).
No wonder Canadian French and English speech is full of sea terms. Even
when the {11} Canadians themselves forget, as they are very apt to do,
the indispensable naval side of sea-power, they can account for most
kinds of nauticality by their economic history, which all depended,
directly or indirectly, down to the smallest detail, on the mercantile
marine--especially if we give the name of mercantile marine its
justifiable extension so as to cover all the craft that ply on inland
waterways as well as those that cross the sea. It is calculated at the
present day that it is as easy to move a hundred tons by water as ten
tons by rail or one ton by road; and this rule, in spite of many local
exceptions, is fairly correct in practice, especially as distances
increase. Now, Canada is a country of great distances; and by land she
once was in nearly every part, and she still is in a few parts, a country
of obstructive wilds. What, then, must have been the advantage of water
carriage over land carriage when there was neither road nor rail? As
even pack-horses were not available in the early days, and good roads
were few and only established by very slow degrees, it is well within the
mark to say that the sum-total of advantage in favour of water over land
carriage, up to a time which old men can remember, must have been at
least a thousand to one.
{12}
It would be natural to suppose that some knowledge of the sea was widely
diffused among the British peoples in general and Canadians in
particular. But this is far from being the case. Though there is three
times as much sea as land in the world, it is safe to say that there is
three hundred times as much knowledge of the land as there is of the sea.
The ways of the sea are strange to most people in every country,
excepting Norway and Newfoundland. Seamen have always been somewhat of a
class apart, though they are less so now. Ignorance of everything to do
with the water is exceedingly common, even in England and Canada. The
British mercantile marine is one of the biggest commercial enterprises of
all time. It is of very great importance to Canada. It is absolutely
vital to England. Yet it is less understood among the general public
than any other kind of business that is of national concern. Some people
even think that the mercantile marine differs from every other kind of
business in being under the special care of the government. They are
probably misled by the term 'Merchant Service,' which, when spelt with
capital letters, has a very official look and reminds them of the two
great fighting 'services,' the Army and the Navy. In reality {13} the
merchant service is no more a government service than any other kind of
trade is.
[Illustration: THE SPIRIT OF THE LAKES By Lorado Taft, in the Chicago Art
Institute]
Ignorance about the Navy is commoner still. Canadian history is full of
sea-power, but Canadian histories are not. It was only in 1909, a
hundred and fifty years after the Battle of the Plains, that the first
attempt was made to introduce the actual naval evidence into the story of
the Conquest by publishing a selection from the more than thirty thousand
daily entries made in the logs of the men-of-war engaged in the three
campaigns of Louisbourg, Quebec, and Montreal. Yet there were twice as
many sailors under Saunders as there were soldiers under Wolfe, and the
fleet that carried them was the greatest single fleet which, up to that
time, had ever appeared in any waters. How many people, even among
Canadians born and bred, know that there have already been two local
Canadian navies of different kinds and two Canadian branches of Imperial
navies oversea; that in 1697 a naval battle was fought in the waters of
Hudson Bay, opposite Port Nelson; that seigneurial grants during the
French régime made reservations of man-of-war oak for the service of the
crown; that while Bougainville, the famous French circumnavigator, was
trying to keep Wolfe {14} out of Quebec, Captain Cook, the famous British
circumnavigator, was trying to help him in; that there was steamer
transport in the War of 1812; that the first steam man-of-war to fire a
shot in action was launched on the St Lawrence four years before the
first railway in Canada was working; that just before Confederation more
than half the citizens of the ancient capital were directly dependent on
ship-building and nearly all the rest on shipping; and that the Canadian
fisheries of the present day are the most important in the world? As a
matter of fact, there are very few Canadians or other students of
Canadian history who fully realize what Canada owes to the sea. How many
know that her 'sea affairs' may have begun a thousand years ago, if the
Norsemen came by way of Greenland; that she has a long and varied naval
history, with plenty of local privateering by the way; that the biggest
sailing vessel to make a Scottish port in the heyday of the clippers was
Canadian-built all through; that Canada built another famous vessel for a
ruling prince in India; that most Arctic exploration has been done in
what are properly her waters; that she was the pioneer in ocean
navigation entirely under steam; and that she is now beginning to revive,
with steam and steel, the {15} shipbuilding industry with which she did
so much in the days of mast and sail and wooden hulls?
No exhaustive Canadian 'water history' can possibly be attempted here.
That would require a series of its own. But at least a first attempt
will now be made to give some general idea of what such a history would
contain in fuller detail: of the kayaks and canoes the Eskimos and
Indians used before the white man came, and use to-day, in the
ever-receding wilds; of the various small craft moved by oar and sail
that slowly displaced the craft moved only by the paddle; of the sailing
vessels proper, and how they plied along Canadian waterways, and out
beyond, on all the Seven Seas; of the steamers, which, in their earlier
pioneering days, shed so much forgotten lustre on Canadian enterprise; of
those 'Cod-lands of North America' and other teeming fisheries which the
far-seeing Lord Bacon rightly thought 'richer treasures than the mines of
Mexico and of Peru'; of the Dominion's trade and government relations
with the whole class of men who 'have their business in great waters';
and, finally, of that guardian Navy, without whose freely given care the
'water history' of Canada could never have been made at all.
{16}