THE ATTRACTION OF THE SAGUENAY
Almost directly one lands in Canada, one feels the desire to move
west. It is not that the east fails to attract and interest, or that
a man might not spend many years in Quebec province alone, and still
have seen little of its vast, wild, northern parts. Again there is
the Evangeline country, little known for all that it is 'storied.'
But the tide is west just at present. Everybody asks everybody
else--Have you been West, or Are you going West? And every one who
has been West or is going feels himself to be in the movement. Some
day no doubt the tide will set back again, or flow both ways equally.
To-day it flows westward.
I should have been sorry, however, if I had not gone eastward at
least as far as the Saguenay, and I am duly grateful to the American
who, so to speak, irritated me into going there. He was a thin, pale
youth, somewhat bald from {38} clutching at his hair, who sat next to
me at dinner my third day at Quebec. He announced to the table at
large that he was travelling for his pleasure, but to judge from his
strained face, travelling for his pleasure was one of the hardest
jobs he had tried. He had been doing Quebec, and he gave all
Canadians present to understand that Quebec had made him very very
tired. Look at the trips around too. Look at the Montmorency Falls.
Had anybody present seen Niagara? Well, if anybody had seen Niagara,
the Montmorency Falls could only make him tired. One or two
Canadians present bent lower to their food. But on the whole
Canadians do not readily enter into argument, and half Niagara Falls
is Canadian too, so that finding no opponents the youth proceeded
triumphantly to give the relative proportions in figures of the two
falls. As he directed them chiefly at me, I felt bound to say that I
had seen falls about a tenth the size of either which had struck me
as worth going to see. He then said that he guessed I was from
England. I said this was so. Thereupon he told me that everybody in
England was asleep. I suggested that sleep was better than insomnia,
and shocked by my soporific levity, he advised me to go and have a
look at {39} New York if I wanted to know how things could hum. I
said I supposed that New York was a fairly busy place. A silly
remark--only he happened to be a New Yorker, and all that tiredness
left him. I learnt so much about the busyness of New York that I
have hardly forgotten it all yet.
Afterwards, but some time afterwards, when the American had left the
table, a Scottish Canadian asked me if I had done the Saguenay trip,
and when I said that I had not done it, he strongly advised me not to
miss it.
'It's the finest trip in Canada. Yes, sir.'
I decided to go. It takes just two days from the start at Quebec to
Chicoutimi and back, and you go in a spacious sort of houseboat which
paddles along at just the right pace, first on one side of the river
then on the other, stopping to load and unload at the little villages
along the St. Lawrence. There to the left--a great sheet of silver
hung from the cliff--were the Montmorency Falls, which had made that
young American tired. A hundred and twenty years ago Queen
Victoria's father occupied the Kent house, hard by the Falls, now a
hotel. Wolfe lay ill for two weeks in a farm close by; probably on
no other sick-bed in the world were plans so big with fate {40}
conceived. Then the Ile d'Orléans floats by--that fertile island
which Cartier named after the Grape God four hundred years ago,
because of the vines that grew there. All this waterway is history,
French-Canadian history mostly. With a fine mist hung over the
river, concealing the few modern spires and roofs, you can see the
country to-day just as Cartier saw it when he came sailing up.
Neither four hundred nor four thousand years will serve to modernise
the banks of the St. Lawrence. Take that thirty-mile stretch where
the Laurentides climb sheer from the water. That is what Cartier
saw--nothing different. No houses, no people; only the grey rock
growing out of the green trees, and the grey sky overhead. Lower
down, with the sun shining as it did for us, Cartier would see, if he
came sailing up to-day, all those picturesque French-Canadian
villages which have sprung up along the shore--Baie St. Paul, St.
Irénée, Murray Bay, Tadousac, with the white farms of the Habitants,
and the summer homes of the Quebeckers and Montrealers, and the
shining spires of the churches, and the wooden piers jutting far out
into the river. Those piers are particularly cheerful places. There
are always gangs of porters waiting to run out freight from the hold,
and {41} a gathering of ladies in gay frocks who want to greet
friends on board, and heaps of little habitants playing about or
smoking their pipes. The habitant appears to start his pipe at the
age of eight or nine years, judging from those who frequent the piers.
I think I was the only Englishman on board that boat. Most of the
passengers were Americans, but cheerful ones--not like that young man
at the hotel--and we were all very keen on seeing everything, so that
it became dusk much too soon for most of us. We got to Tadousac just
about dusk, which I was particularly sorry for, since of all the
places we passed, it held the most memories. In 1600 the whole fur
trade of Canada centred round this benighted little spot, and the men
of St. Malo were the rivals of the Basques for the black foxes
trapped by the Indians of that date. I should like to have seen this
queer little port by daylight, but I suppose for most purposes
Parkman's description holds good, and cannot easily be beaten:--
'A desolation of barren mountain closes round it, betwixt whose ribs
of rugged granite, bristling with savins, birches, and firs, the
Saguenay rolls its gloomy waters from the northern wilderness.
Centuries of civilisation {42} have not tamed the wildness of the
place; and still, in grim repose, the mountains hold their guard
around the waveless lake that glistens in their shadow, and doubles,
in its sullen mirror, crag, precipice and forest.'
I know that Parkman goes on to say that when Champlain landed here in
April 1608 he found the lodges of an Indian camp, which he marked in
his plan of Tadousac. When we landed, there were also a few shacks
in much the same spot, and in one of the best lighted of them hung a
placard to this effect:--
THE ONLY REAL INDIAN
BUY WORK FROM HIM.
The lodges Champlain saw belonged to an Algonquin horde, 'Denizens of
surrounding wilds, and gatherers of their only harvest--skins of the
moose, cariboo, and bear; fur of the beaver, marten, otter, fox, wild
cat, and lynx.'
Other days, other harvests. From the shack of the Only Real Indian I
saw one stout tourist issue forth (a Chicago pork-packer he must have
been, if persons ever correspond to their professions), laden with
three toy bows and arrows, as many miniature canoes, and what
appeared to be a couple of patchwork bedspreads. That the descendant
of braves should live by making {43} patchwork bedspreads seemed too
much, even though I had given up as illusions the Red Indians of my
boyhood. Far rather would I at that moment have seen the stout
tourist come forth, either scalpless himself, or dangling at his
ample belt the raven locks of the Only Real Indian.
In the night we went on to Chicoutimi, but saw nothing of that, being
asleep. We had sung songs, American songs--'John Brown's Body,'
'Marching through Georgia,' etc., till a late hour of the night; and
in any case the bracing river air would have insured sleep. Only in
the morning as we came down the Saguenay again did I wake to its
beauty and strangeness. Men have learnt to tunnel through rocks at
last, but the Saguenay learnt this art for itself thousands of years
ago. A wide water tunnel through the sheer rock, a roofless tunnel,
open to the sky, that is the Saguenay--most magnificent at the point
where Cap Trinité looms up, a wall of darkness fifteen hundred feet
high.
It is a curious fact that famous landscapes always produce a
remarkable frivolity in the human tourist visiting them. Perhaps it
is man's instinct to assert himself against nature. When the boat
draws opposite Cap Trinité, {44} stewards produce buckets of stones
and passengers are invited to try and hit the Cap with the stones
from impossible distances. I do not know that it greatly added to
the pleasure of the trip, but we all tried to hit the cliff with the
stones and most of us failed, and had to content ourselves with
drawing echoes from it. After that we went on, and some of the white
whales which are characteristic of the Saguenay began to appear, and
experienced travellers explained that they were not really white
whales but a sort of white porpoise. Once again, as we passed it,
Tadousac was invisible, but this time because a white fog had wrapped
it round. So silently we turned out of the Saguenay into the St.
Lawrence. I think the silence of the Saguenay was what had most
impressed me. Not very long before I had steamed down the Hoogly
where by day the kites wheel and shriek overhead, and the air buzzes
with insects' sounds, and all night the jackals scream--a noisy
river, full of treacherous sandbanks, its shores green with the
bright poisonous green of the East. The Saguenay, unique as it is in
many ways, seemed by the contrast of its deepness and silence, and by
the fresh darkness of the rocks and trees that shut it in, to be
peculiarly a river of the West. I do not know if it {45} would have
made the somewhat bald young American tired.
It is only fair to say that his attitude about Quebec is not at all
characteristic of his fellow-countrymen. For most Americans, Quebec
province (and still more perhaps the woods of Ontario) is becoming
almost as popular a playground as Switzerland is for Englishmen.
Camping out has become a great craze among Americans, and if the
camping out can be done amid unspoilt natural surroundings, close to
rivers where one can fish and woods where one can hunt, an ideal
holiday is assured them. I forget who it was who said that much of
the old American versatility and nobility had disappeared since the
American boys left off whittling sticks, but in any case the desire
to whittle sticks is renewed again among them, from Mr. Roosevelt
downwards. And in Canada this whittling of sticks--this return to
nature--can easily be accomplished. For the north is still there,
unexploited. In Quebec province, fishing and hunting clubs of Quebec
and Montreal have secured the rights over vast tracts of country. So
vast are those tracts that one or two clubs, I was told, have not
even set eyes on all the trout streams they preserve. This may be an
exaggeration, though probably {46} not a great one. There
remains--especially in Ontario--much water and wood that any one may
sport in unlicensed, or get access to by permission of the local
hotel proprietor. Some of the Americans on the boat had been fishing
in Quebec streams and told me of excellent sport they had had, so
that I began to wonder why no Englishmen ever came this way. The
voyage to Canada is a little further than that to Norway, but there
are more fish in Canada. And there is certainly only one Saguenay in
the world.
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