TO EUROPE BY HUDSON BAY
I
It must have become apparent to the most casual observer that
transportation has been to Canada more than a system of exploitation by
capital. Transportation has been to Canada an integral part of her
very national life--which, perhaps, explains how with the exception of
extravagance incident to a period of great prosperity her railroad
systems have been founded on sound finance from bed-rock up. In spite
of huge land grants--in all fifty-five million acres--and in the case
of one railroad wild stock fluctuations from forty-eight to three
hundred dollars--it is a question if a dollar of public money has ever
been diverted from roadbed to promoters' pockets. Certainly, in the
case of the strongest road financially in Canada, no director of the
road has ever juggled with underground wires to unload worthless
securities on widows and orphans. Railroad stocks have never been made
the football of speculators. Charters in the old days were juggled
through legislatures with land grants of eight and twelve thousand
acres per mile; but at that time these acres were worthless; and the
system of land grants has for the last ten years been discontinued.
Because railroads are a necessary part of Canada's national
development, state aid of late has taken the form of loans, cash grants
and guarantee of bonds by provincial and federal governments. This has
given Canada's Railway Commission a whip handle over rates and
management, which perhaps explains why railroads in Canada have never
been regarded as lawful game by the financial powers that prey.
Including municipal, provincial and federal grants, stocks and bonds,
Canada has spent on her railroads a billion and a half. Including
capital cost and maintenance, Canada has spent on her canals
$138,000,000. On steamship subsidies, Canada's yearly grants have
gradually risen from a few hundred thousands to as high as two millions
in some years. Nor does this cover all the national expenditure on
transportation; for besides the thirty-eight millions spent on dredging
and improving navigation on the St. Lawrence, twelve millions have been
appropriated for improving Halifax Harbor; and only recently federal
guarantee for bonds to the extent of forty-three millions was accorded
one transcontinental. This road was so heavily guaranteed by
provincial governments that if it had failed it would have involved
four western provinces. Its plight arose from two causes--the
extravagant cost of labor and material in an inflated era, and the
depression in the world money markets curtailing all extension.
Workmen on this road were paid three to seventeen dollars a day, who
would have received a dollar and a half to four dollars ten years ago.
In fact, the owners of the road themselves received those wages thirty
years ago. Sections cost one hundred thousand dollars a mile which
would formerly have been built for thirty thousand; and prairie grading
formerly estimated at six to eight thousand dollars a mile jumped to
twenty and thirty thousand dollars. In coming to the aid of the Canada
Northern, the government did no more than Sir John Macdonald's
government did for the Canadian Pacific Railroad in 1885, and the
prosperity of the Canadian Pacific Railroad has amply justified that
aid.
Canada's transportation system has been a national policy from the
first. Her first transcontinental she built to unify and bind
confederation. Her second two transcontinentals she launched to carry
commerce east and west, because the United States had built a tariff
wall which prevented Canada moving her commerce north and south. Her
canal system to cut the distance from the Great Lakes to the seaboard
and to overcome the rapids at "the Soo," at Niagara and on the St.
Lawrence--has simply resolved itself into an effort to move seaboard
inland, on the principle that the farther inland the port the shorter
the land haul and the lower the traffic toll. Owing to the enormous
increase in the cargo capacity of lake freighters in recent years,
grain ships reach Buffalo carrying three hundred thousand bushels of
western wheat, and Canada's Welland Canal has worked at a handicap.
Until the Canal is widened, the big cargo carriers can not pass through
it, and the necessity to break bulk here is one explanation of more
than half Canada's western traffic going to seaboard by way of Buffalo
instead of Montreal.
For years the proposal has been under consideration to connect the
Great Lakes with the St. Lawrence by way of a canal from Georgian Bay
through Ottawa River. This would be a colossal undertaking; for the
region up Mattawa River toward Georgian Bay is of iron rock, and to
build a canal wide enough for the big cargo carriers would out-distance
anything in the way of canal construction in the world. Both parties
in Canada have endorsed what is known as the Georgian Bay Ship Canal;
and estimates place the cost at one hundred and twenty-five millions;
but traffic men of the Lakes declare if the big cargo carriers are to
have cheap insurance on this route, the canal will have to be wide
enough to guarantee safe passage; and the cost would be twice this
estimate.
On no section of her national transportation has Canada expended more
thought and effort than improving navigation on the St. Lawrence.
This, in its way, has been as difficult a problem for a people of seven
millions as the construction of Panama for a people of ninety millions.
Consider the geographical position of the St. Lawrence route! It
penetrates the continent from eight hundred to nine hundred sixty
miles. Montreal, the head of navigation on the St. Lawrence, is the
farthest inland harbor of America with the exception of two
ports--Galveston on the Gulf of Mexico and Port Nelson on Hudson Bay.
Galveston is seven hundred miles from the wheat fields of Kansas. Port
Nelson is four hundred miles from the wheat fields of Manitoba.
Montreal is--roughly--a thousand miles from the head of the Lakes, one
thousand five hundred miles from the wheat fields of Manitoba, two
thousand two hundred miles from the wheat fields of Alberta.
Montreal's great advantage is in being situated so far inland. Her
disadvantages are from the nature of the St. Lawrence. First, the port
is closed by ice from November to April. Second, the St. Lawrence is
the drainage bed of inland oceans--the Great Lakes. Third, it passes
into the Atlantic at one of the most difficult sections of the coast.
South of Newfoundland are the fogs of the Grand Banks. North of
Newfoundland the tidal current beats upon an iron coast in storm and
fog. To save detour, St. Lawrence vessels, of course, follow the route
north of Newfoundland through the Straits of Belle Isle.
When Canada began dredging the St. Lawrence in 1850, the channel
averaged a depth of ten feet. By 1888, the channel averaged
twenty-seven and one-half feet at low water. To-day a depth of thirty
to thirty-one feet has been attained. At its narrowest points the St.
Lawrence has a steamship channel four hundred and fifty feet wide and
thirty feet deep from side to side. In the days when high insurance
rates were established against the St. Lawrence route, there was
practically not a lighthouse nor channel buoy from Tadousac to the
Straits of Belle Isle. To-day between Montreal and Quebec are
ninety-nine lighted buoys, one hundred and ninety-five can buoys;
between Quebec and the Straits, three light ships, eighty gas buoys,
one whistling buoy, seventy-five can buoys, four submarine bell ships,
and a line of lighthouses. Telegraph lines extend to the outer side of
Belle Isle, and hydrographic survey has charted every foot of the
river. In spite of these improvements, insurance rates are four to six
per cent. for lines to Canada, where they are one and one-half to two
and one-half to American ports.
II
What with three transcontinentals, a complete canal system from
seaboard to the Great Lakes and an outlet for western traffic through
Panama, one would think that Canada had made ample provision for
transportation; but she has only begun. If she is to be the shortest
route to the Orient, she must keep traffic in Canadian channels and not
divide it with Panama and Suez. If she is to feed the British Empire,
she must establish the shortest route from her wheat fields to the
United Kingdom; and if she is to overcome the disadvantage of harbors
open only half the year, she must secure to herself some other
advantage--such as access to the harbor having the shortest land haul
and therefore the lowest freight rates in America. There is another
consideration. If when Canada is raising less than three hundred
million bushels of wheat her transcontinentals are glutted with traffic
and her harbors gorged, what will happen when her wheat fields raise
eight hundred million bushels of wheat? So Canada has cast about for a
shorter route to Europe by Hudson Bay, and both parties in Dominion
politics have backed the project.
At a time when the food supply of Great Britain must be drawn almost
solely from her colonial possessions and the United States and
Argentina, when her very national existence depends on the sea lanes to
that food supply being kept open--a route which shortens the distance
to that food supply by from one thousand five hundred to three thousand
miles becomes doubly interesting.
Take a mental look at the contour of North America! All the big export
harbors of the Atlantic Coast are situated at the broadest bulge of the
continent--Halifax, St. John, Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore
are all where the distance across the continent from the grain fields
is widest. That means a long land haul.
Take another look at the map--this time at a revolving globe! Any
schoolboy knows that a circle round a top is shorter at the ends than
around its middle. The same of the earth. East and west distances are
shorter the nearer you are to the Pole, the farther you are from the
Equator.
To England from Eastern Asia by Suez is fourteen to eighteen thousand
miles. To England from Asia by San Francisco is eleven thousand miles,
by Seattle ten thousand miles, by Prince Rupert and Hudson Bay seven to
eight thousand miles--representing a saving by the northern route of
almost half round the world.
Another point--take a compass! Stick the needle on Hudson Bay and
swing the leg down round New York and up through the wheat plains of
the Northwest. Draw lines to the center of your circle--to your
amazement, you find the lines from the wheat plains to New York are
twice and thrice as long as the lines from the wheat plains to Hudson
Bay. In other words, Mr. Hill's wheat empire is one thousand miles
nearer tidewater to Hudson Bay than to New York. The three prairie
provinces of Northwestern Canada are from four hundred (for Manitoba)
to eight hundred miles (for Alberta) distant from ocean front on Hudson
Bay. They are from one thousand two hundred to two thousand four
hundred miles distant from tidewater at Montreal and New York and
Philadelphia.
That is--if land rates were the same as water rates--the Hudson Bay
route to Europe would cut rates to England from the Orient by half, and
from the wheat plains by the difference between one thousand two
hundred miles and four hundred, and two thousand four hundred miles and
eight hundred. But land rates are not water rates. From Alberta to
the Great Lakes is roughly one thousand two hundred miles. From the
Great Lakes to tidewater is roughly another one thousand two hundred
miles--either by way of Chicago-Buffalo, or Lake Superior-Montreal.
For the one thousand two hundred miles from Alberta to the Great Lakes,
grain shippers at time of writing pay a rate of twenty-two to
twenty-five cents a bushel. For the one thousand two hundred miles
from the head of the Lakes to Buffalo, the rate is three cents, from
the head of the Lakes to Montreal five to six cents. In other words,
the rate by land is just five to eight times higher than the rate by
water.
To the argument--shorter distances by half by the northern route--is
added the argument cheaper rates as eight to one.
That is why for twenty years Canada has gone sheer mad over a Hudson
Bay route to Europe. For obvious reasons the ports in Eastern Canada
have fought the idea and ridiculed the whole project as "an iron tonic
from rusting rails" for the cows. That has not stopped the West.
Grading is under way for the railroad to Hudson Bay from the grain
plains. The Canadian government is the backer and the builder.
Construction engines, dredges, steamers now whistle over the silences
of the northern inland sea; and Port Nelson, which for three centuries
has been the great fur entrepôt of the wintry wastes, now echoes to
pick and hammer and blowing locomotive intent on the construction of
what is known as the Hudson Bay Railroad. Should the war last for
years as wars of old, and Port Nelson become a great grain port as for
three centuries it has been the greatest fur port of the world, the
navies of Europe may yet thunder at one another along Hudson Bay's
shallow shores, as French and English fought there all through the
seventeenth century.
III
The Hudson Bay railroad hung in mid-air for almost a quarter century.
It was regarded by the East as one of the West's mad impossible "boom"
projects. Hadn't Canada, a country of seven million population, a
railroad system of 29,000 miles? Hadn't the Dominion spent
$138,000,000 on canals heading traffic to the St. Lawrence? Why divert
half that traffic north to Hudson Bay? Surely three great
transcontinental systems for a country with a population not larger
than New York State were enough. So argued the East, and a great many
conservative people in the West. Better make haste slowly, especially
as it was becoming more and more evident that Canada would have to come
to the aid of two of the transcontinentals or see them go bankrupt.
Then something happened. In fact, two or three things happened.
The population, which had remained almost stationary for half a
century, jumped two million in less than ten years. Immigrants began
pouring in at the rate of four hundred thousand a year--they were
coming literally faster than the railroads could carry them.
It sometimes takes an outsider's view of us to make us realize
ourselves. Do you realize--they asked--that your three grain provinces
alone are three times the area of the German Empire? Here is a grain
field as long as from Petrograd to Paris and of unknown width north and
south. You have 480,000,000 acres of wheat lands. (The United States
plants only 50,000,000 acres a year to wheat.) You are cultivating
only 16,000,000 acres. If there is a grain blockade now, what will
there be when you cultivate 100,000,000 acres? Yes--we know--you may
send Alberta grain west by Panama to Liverpool; but even with half
going by Panama, can the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence route take care of
the rest? We hear about a constant shortage of cars; of elevators
bulging with grain every September; of miles of lake cargo carriers
waiting to get in and out of their berths every October before
navigation closes. Do you know--they asked--that you have five times
more traffic--seventy-two million tons--going through your canals than
is expected for Panama? Do you know your rail traffic has jumped from
36,000,000 tons in 1900 to 90,000,000 tons in 1912? If you sent
200,000,000 bushels of wheat abroad in 1912 and 158,000,000 bushels in
1914--a poor year--what will you send in 1920 with twice as much land
under wheat?
Two other comparatively unpondered facts were the hammers that drove
the argument for a Hudson Bay route home and forced the Canadian
government, irrespective of party, to back the project. The two facts
were these--of Canada's agricultural exports eighty per cent. went to
Great Britain. In spite of Canada spending a billion on her
transportation system, look at the fact well--it is a poser--only from
thirty-two to forty per cent. of her export trade went out by Canadian
routing. Why was that? The Department of Railroads and Canals in its
annual report explains elaborately that sixty per cent. of Western
Canadian grain went out by the Duluth-Buffalo route instead of Ft.
William-Montreal because the lake rate of the former was cheaper as
three to six cents a bushel; but there is nothing in this argument
because Montreal is tidewater. Buffalo is not. To the cheaper Buffalo
rate you must add five cents to New York, proving the American routing
really two cents a bushel higher. Yet sixty per cent. of Western
Canadian wheat went out by the costlier routing. Why? For the same
reason that if you jam a bag too full it bursts. Because the Canadian
trans-continentals simply could not take care of the traffic blockading
tracks and ports and elevators.
So in spite of the funny man's jokes about a Hudson Bay route being
"iron tonic for the cows," Canada launched on another all-red,
to-the-sea railroad project.
IV
What of the road itself?
I camped in the region a few years ago when the venture was still in
air. The wheat plains terminate just west of Lake Winnipeg in an
interminable swamp region that has been the home of small furs from the
beginning of time. Saskatchewan River here literally widens to seventy
miles of swamp, where you can barely find foot room dry soled except in
winter, when the marsh turns to iron ice twelve feet thick. Through
this swamp country runs a ridge of rock northeasterly to Hudson Bay.
Down this ridge run Nelson and Hayes and Churchill Rivers in a
succession of rapids and lakes, wild rough barren country, where you
can paddle in summer or course by dog-train in winter for four hundred
miles without sight of arable land or human dwelling. Along this ridge
the railroad runs from the wheat plains. It is a route destined for
the present to be barren of local traffic, but that also is true of the
stretches along Lake Superior, or across the desert of the Southwest.
Back from the ridge coal deposits have been found, and traces of
copper, the mines of which have not yet been located. I myself saw
chunks of pure copper from the Churchill River region the size of one's
hand, but the veins from which the Indians brought it have not yet been
located. In time these great deposits may be worked as oil and coal
and gold and silver have been taken from the American Desert, but for
the near future the Hudson Bay Railroad will carry little traffic but
that received at its terminals.
The western terminal connecting with the wheat railroads is the Pas, an
old, very old fur post of the French wood-runner days, on the
Saskatchewan west of Lake Winnipeg. Here the railroad touches the
Canada Northern and will doubtless later connect with the Canadian
Pacific Railroad and Grand Trunk. To any one who knows the region well
it seems almost a pity that the western terminus could not have been
Grand Rapids just northwest of Lake Winnipeg. Here is a fine wooded
high park country with the unlimited water power of nine miles of a
continental river walled into a canyon half a mile wide. But the
country west of Lake Winnipeg is as yet untouched by a railroad, though
one can hardly conceive of a city not some day springing up at this the
head of Manitoba navigation. Eastward from the Pas to Hudson Bay it is
four hundred miles plus. Construction presents no great difficulties
except bridging, and that can hardly be compared to the difficulties of
canyons in the Rockies and drouth in the desert.
For years there was sharp contest whether the terminus on the Bay
should be Nelson or Churchill. Churchill is one of the best harbors in
the world, land locked, rock protected and fathomless; and Nelson is
probably one of the worst--shallow, with sand bars caused by the
confluence of the two great rivers emptying here, exposed to open sea.
But the balance of favor on the Bay is how long can navigation be kept
open. Navigation is open a month earlier and a month later at Nelson
than at Churchill; so the Dominion dredges have gone to work to make
Nelson a fit harbor.
How long is navigation open on the Bay? The Dominion government has
sent three expeditions to ascertain this, though data might have been
obtained from the Archives of the Hudson's Bay Fur Company covering the
record of over two hundred years. Both the Archives and the official
expeditions record the same--navigation opens between the middle of May
and the first of June, and closes about the end of October. Seasons
have been known when navigation remained open till New Year's, but this
was unusual. So as far as the opening and closing of navigation is
considered, the Hudson Bay route is not far different from the Great
Lakes.
Hudson Bay itself is in area about the size of the Mediterranean.
Because it is so far north the impression prevails that it is afloat
with ice. This is a false impression. Hudson Bay lies in the same
latitude as the North Sea and the Baltic, which are freighted with
Russian and German commerce, but the climate, of course, is colder.
The ice, which has given the great inland sea its ill repute, comes
from the Pole and goes out through the Straits, seldom coming down the
Bay in the season of navigation.
The Straits are the real crux of the Hudson Bay route to Europe, and
there is no narrow neck of land to cut a way of escape through to open
sea as at Kiel and Cape Cod. The Straits have been navigated by
fur-traders since 1670, but the fur-traders could take a week or a
month to the four hundred and fifty miles of Straits. They could
afford the time to float back and forward with the ice packs for six
weeks, and as many as seven vessels have been wrecked in ten years. To
this tale of wreckage in the Straits, friends of the Hudson Bay route
answer as follows:
First, the fur-traders' vessels were little discarded admiralty vessels
of small tonnage and rickety construction. Give us ice jammers such as
the Russians use on the Baltic, built narrow and high of oak, not
steel, to ride and crush down through the ice; and we can take care of
high insurance rates. Second, the Straits are still an utterly
uncharted sea four hundred and fifty miles long and from seventy to one
hundred and fifty wide. This is not so long as the passage up the St.
Lawrence. In such an inland sea as these Straits there must exist safe
as well as unsafe channels, shelters, smooth reaches. Let us get the
Straits charted and marked with buoys, with telegraph and cable points,
and we shall navigate these four hundred and fifty miles. The
questions of lighthouses need not bother the Straits, for the season of
navigation is also the season of long daylight.
V
Three advantages must be put on the credit side of the Hudson Bay route:
Distances to tidewater cut by half.
Distances to Europe cut by a third.
Rates reduced on grain as eight to one.
Against these advantages must be placed three handicaps:
The danger of an uncharted sea in the Straits.
High insurance.
Necessity for enormous elevator and storage room.
Mr. Hill's wheat country may begin wheat cutting in July. The Canadian
Northwest is lucky if it cuts before the eighth of August. Consider
the area of the big wheat farms! The whole of August is taken up with
cutting and threshing. It is September or October, before the wheat is
hauled to market, and it is November before it reaches seaboard. In
November navigation on the Bay closes, and one hundred, perhaps two
hundred million bushels of wheat must be held by the farmers, or the
elevators, till May. This means interest on money out of the farmer's
pocket for six months, or storage charges. On the other hand, there
will be no danger of stored wheat "heating" on the Bay. The cold there
is of too sharp a type, but this is a danger in many of the
all-the-year-round open harbors.
For twenty years the Hudson Bay railroad has been a project up in air.
It is now a project on graded roadbed. Before these words are in print
Hudson Bay Railroad will be on wheels and tracks. Then the real
difficulty of the Straits will be faced, and probably--as Russia has
overcome the difficulties of the Baltic--so will the Canadian Northwest
overcome the difficulties of this hyperborean sea.