THE MARITIME PROVINCES
I have come into Canada through the Maritime Provinces, which lie
on the Atlantic Coast between our own state of Maine and the mouth
of the St. Lawrence. The Provinces are Nova Scotia, New Brunswick,
and Prince Edward Island. Their area is almost equal to that of our
six New England states, and in climate and scenery they are much
the same. Their population, however, is only about one million, or
little more than one fourth as many as the number of people living in
Massachusetts. These provinces were the first British possessions in
Canada, and like New England they have seen the centre of population
and progress move ever westward.
Nova Scotia is the easternmost province of the Dominion of Canada. Its
capital and chief city is Halifax, situated on the Atlantic on one
of the world’s best natural harbours. This is a deep water inlet ten
miles in length, which is open all the year round. Montreal and Quebec
are closed to navigation during the winter months on account of the
freezing of the St. Lawrence.
Halifax is six hundred miles closer to Europe than is New York, and
nearer Rio de Janeiro than is New Orleans. As the eastern terminus of
the Canadian National Railways, it has direct connections with all
Canada. With these advantages, the city hopes to become one of the
great shipping centres on the North Atlantic.
Halifax has long been noted as the most English city in Canada. It
was once the military, naval, and political centre of British North
America, and gay with the social life of British officers and their
ladies. Now, both the warships and the soldiers are gone, and the city
is devoting itself to commercial activities.
As we steamed past the lighthouses and the hidden guns on the headlands
guarding the entrance, I was reminded of all that this harbour has
meant to America. The city was founded by Lord Cornwallis in 1749 at
the suggestion of Boston merchants who complained that the French were
using these waters as a base for their sea raiders. Less than thirty
years later it provided a haven for Lord Howe when he was driven out of
Boston by our soldiers of the Revolution, and became the headquarters
for the British operations against the struggling colonies. In the
war of 1812, the American warship _Chesapeake_ was brought here after
her defeat by the British frigate _Shannon_. During our Civil War
Halifax served as a base for blockade runners, and the fortunes of
some of its wealthy citizens of to-day were founded on the profits of
this dangerous trade. No one dreamed then that within two generations
England and America would be fighting side by side in a World War, that
thousands of United States soldiers would sail from Halifax for the
battlefields of Europe, or that an American admiral, commanding a fleet
of destroyers, would establish his headquarters here. Yet that is what
happened in 1917–18. All that now remains of the former duels on the
sea is the annual sailing race between the fastest schooners of the
Gloucester and the Nova Scotia fishing fleets.
Halifax is built on a hillside that rises steeply from the water-front
to a height of two hundred and sixty feet above the harbour. The city
extends about halfway up the hill, and reaches around on both sides of
it. The top is a bare, grassy mound, surmounted by an ancient citadel.
Stand with me on the edge of the old moat, and look down upon Halifax
and its harbour. Far to our left is the anchorage where occurred one
of the greatest explosions the world ever knew. Just as the city was
eating breakfast on the morning of December 6, 1917, a French munitions
ship, loaded with benzol and TNT, collided with another vessel leaving
the harbour, and her cargo of explosives blew up in a mighty blast.
Nearly two thousand people were killed, six thousand were injured, and
eleven thousand were made homeless. Hardly a pane of glass was left
in a window, and acres of houses were levelled to the ground. A deck
gun was found three miles from the water, and the anchor of one of the
vessels lies in the woods six miles away, where it was thrown by the
explosion. A street-car conductor was blown through a second-story
window, and a sailor hurled from his ship far up the hillside. Since
then much of the devastated area has been rebuilt along approved
town-planning lines, but the scars of the disaster are still visible.
For a long time after the explosion, the local institution for the
blind was filled to capacity, and one saw on the streets many persons
wearing patches over one eye.
Standing on the hill across the harbour one sees the town of Dartmouth,
where much of the industrial activity of the Halifax district is
centred. There are the largest oil works, chocolate factories, and
sugar refineries of Canada. Vessels from Mexico, South America, and
the British West Indies land their cargoes of tropical products at the
doors of the works. Fringing the water-front are the masts of sailing
vessels and the smokestacks of steamers. Among the latter is a cable
repair ship, just in from mending a break in one of the many submarine
telegraph lines that land on this coast. Next to her is a giant new
liner, making her first stop here to add to her cargo some twenty-five
thousand barrels of apples from the Annapolis Valley. This valley, on
the western side of Nova Scotia, is known also as “Evangeline Land.”
It was made famous by Longfellow’s poem based on the expulsion of the
French Acadians by the English because they insisted on being neutral
in the French-British wars. It is one of the finest apple-growing
districts in the world, and sends annually to Europe nearly two million
barrels. Many descendants of the former French inhabitants have now
returned to the land of their ancestors.
Looking toward the mouth of the harbour, we see the new terminal, a
twenty-five million dollar project that has for some years stood half
completed. Here are miles and miles of railroad tracks, and giant piers
equipped with modern machinery, a part of the investment the Dominion
and its government-owned railway system have made to establish Halifax
as a first-class port. Beyond the port works another inlet, Northwest
Arm, makes its way in between the hills. I have motored out to its
wooded shores, which in summer time are crowded with the young people
of Halifax, bathing and boating. It is the city’s chief playground and
a beautiful spot.
But now take a look at the city itself, stretching along the
water-front below where we stand. The big red brick building just under
our feet is the municipal market. There, on Saturdays, one may see an
occasional Indian, survivor of the ancient Micmacs, and Negroes who
are descendants of slaves captured by the British in Maryland when
they sailed up the Potomac and burned our Capitol. Farther down the
hillside are the business buildings of the city, none of them more
than five stories high, and all somewhat weatherbeaten. I have seen
no new construction under way in downtown Halifax; the city seems to
have missed the building booms of recent years. Most of the older
houses are of stone or brick. Outside the business district the people
live in wooden frame houses, each with its bit of yard around it. One
would know Halifax for an English town by its chimney pots. Some of
the houses have batteries of six or eight of these tiles set on end
sticking out of their chimneys.
The streets are built on terraces cut in the hillside, or plunging
down toward the water. Some of them are so narrow that they have room
for only a single trolley track, on which are operated little one-man
cars. I stepped for a moment into St. Paul’s Church, the first English
house of worship in Canada. Its front pew, to the left of the centre
aisle, is reserved for the use of royal visitors. Passing one of the
local newspaper offices, I noticed a big crowd that filled the street,
watching an electric score board that registered, play by play, a World
Series baseball game going on in New York. The papers are full of
baseball talk, and the people of this Canadian province seem to follow
the game as enthusiastically as our fans at home.
My nose will long remember Halifax. In lower Hollis Street, just back
from the water-front, and not far from the low gray stone buildings
that once quartered British officers, I smelled a most delicious aroma.
It was from a group of importing houses, where cinnamon, cloves, and
all the products of the East Indies are ground up and packed for the
market. If I were His Worship, the Mayor of Halifax, I should propose
that Hollis street be renamed and called the Street of the Spices. Just
below this sweet-scented district, I came to a tiny brick building,
with a sign in faded letters reading “S. Cunard & Co., Coal Merchants.”
This firm is the corporate lineal descendant of Samuel Cunard, who,
with his partners, established the first transatlantic steamship
service nearly a century ago, and whose name is now carried all over
the world by some of the greatest liners afloat.
Another odour of the water-front is not so sweet as the spices. It is
the smell of salt fish, which here are dried on frames built on the
roofs near the docks. Nova Scotia is second only to Newfoundland in her
exports of dried cod, and all her fisheries combined earn more than
twelve million dollars a year. They include cod, haddock, mackerel,
herring, halibut, pollock, and salmon. Lunenburg, down the coast toward
Boston, is one of the centres of the deep-sea fishing industry, and
its schooners compete on the Grand Banks with those from Newfoundland,
Gloucester, and Portugal.
I talked in Halifax with the manager of a million-dollar corporation
that deals in fresh fish. He was a Gloucester man who, as he put it,
“has had fish scales on his boots” ever since he could remember.
“We operate from Canso, the easternmost tip of Nova Scotia,” he said.
“Our steamers make weekly trips to the fishing grounds, where they take
the fish with nets. They are equipped with wireless, and we direct
their operations from shore in accordance with market conditions. While
the price of salt fish is fairly steady, fresh fish fluctuates from day
to day, depending on the quantities caught and the public taste. Such
fish as we cannot sell immediately, we cure in our smoking and drying
plants.
“All our crews share in the proceeds of their catch, and the captains
get no fixed wages at all. We could neither catch the fish nor sell
them at a profit without the fullest coöperation on the part of our
men, most of whom come from across the Atlantic, from Denmark, Norway,
and Sweden, and also from Iceland. Next to the captain, the most
important man on our ships is the cook. Few fish are caught unless
the fishermen are well fed. The ‘cook’s locker’ is always full of
pies, cakes, and cookies, to which the men help themselves, and the
coffee-pot must be kept hot for all hands to ‘mug up.’”
From Halifax I crossed Nova Scotia by rail into the adjoining province
of New Brunswick. Nova Scotia is a peninsula that seems to have
been tacked on to the east coast of Canada. It is three hundred and
seventy-four miles long, and so narrow that no point in it is more
than thirty miles from the sea. The coast does not run due north and
south, but more east and west, so that its southernmost tip points
toward Boston. The Bay of Fundy separates it from the coasts of Maine
and New Brunswick, and leaves only an isthmus, in places not more than
twenty miles wide, connecting Nova Scotia with the mainland. The lower
or westernmost half of the province is encircled with railroads, which
carry every year increasing thousands of tourists and hunters from
the United States. The summer vacationists and the artists go chiefly
to the picturesque shore towns, while those who come up for hunting
and fishing strike inland to the lakes and woods. Deer and moose are
still so plentiful in Nova Scotia that their meat is served at Halifax
hotels during the season.
The scenery is much like that of Maine. Rolling hills alternate with
ledges of gray rock, while at every few miles there are lakes and
ponds. Much of the country is covered with spruce, and many of the
farms have hedges and tall windbreaks of those trees. The farmhouses
are large and well built; they are usually situated on high ground and
surrounded by sloping fields and pastures considerably larger than the
farm lots of New England. In some places the broad hills are shaped
like the sand dunes of Cape Cod. At nearly every station freshly cut
lumber was piled up, awaiting shipment, while one of the little rivers
our train crossed was filled with birch logs floating down to a spool
factory.
Some two hours from Halifax we came to Truro at the head of Cobequid
Bay, the easternmost arm of the Bay of Fundy. Scientists who have
studied the forty-foot Fundy tides attribute them to its pocket-like
shape. The tides are highest in the numerous deep inlets at the head of
the Bay. In the Petitcodiac River, which forms the northernmost arm,
as the tide comes in a wall of water two or three feet high rushes
upstream. These tides are felt far back from the coast. The rivers and
streams have deep-cut banks on account of the daily inrush and outflow
of waters and are bordered with marshes through which run irrigation
ditches dug by the farmers.
[Illustration: With his poem of _Evangeline_, Longfellow made famous
the old well at Grand Pré, the scene of the expulsion of the Acadians
because they wanted to remain neutral in the French-British wars.]
[Illustration: When the tide goes out at Digby, vessels tied to the
docks are left high and dry. At some points on the Bay of Fundy the
rise and fall of the water exceeds forty feet.]
Truro is a turning-off point for the rail journey down the Bay side
of Nova Scotia through “Evangeline Land” and the Annapolis Valley,
and also for the trip north and east up to Cape Breton Island. This
island is part of the province of Nova Scotia. It is separated from
the mainland only by the mile-wide Strait of Canso, across which
railroad trains are carried on ferries. In the southern part of the
Island is the Bras d’Or Lake, an inland sea covering two hundred and
forty square miles.
[Illustration: Because of the deep snows in winter the Quebec farmhouse
usually has high porches and often a bridge from the rear leading to
the upper floor of the barn. The older houses are built of stone.]
[Illustration: Spinning wheels and hand looms are still in use among
the French Canadian farm women. Besides supplying clothes for their
families, they make also homespuns and rugs for sale.]
Though Cabot landed on the coast of Cape Breton Island after his
discovery of the Newfoundland shore, it later fell into the hands of
the French. They found its fisheries worth more than all the gold
of Peru or Mexico. To protect the sea route to their St. Lawrence
territories, they built at Louisburg a great fortress that cost a sum
equal to twenty-five million dollars in our money. To-day, hardly one
stone remains upon another, as the works were destroyed by the British
in 1758. Not far from Louisburg is Glace Bay, where Marconi continued
the wireless experiments begun in Newfoundland, and it was on this
coast, also, that the first transatlantic cable was landed.
Cape Breton Island was settled mostly by Scotch, and even to-day
sermons in the churches are often delivered in Gaelic. As a result of
intermarriage sometimes half the people of a village bear the same
family name. For generations these people lived mostly by fishing, but
the opening of coal mines in the Sydney district brought many of them
into that industry. The Sydney mines, which normally employ about ten
thousand men, are the only coal deposits on the continent of North
America lying directly on the Atlantic Coast. They are an asset of
immense value to Canada, yielding more than one third of her total coal
production. One of the mines at North Sydney has the largest coal shaft
in the world. Because of these enormous deposits of bituminous coal,
and the presence near by of dolomite, or limestone, steel industries
have been developed in the Sydney district. Ownership of most of the
coal and steel properties has been merged in the British Empire Steel
Corporation, one of the largest single industrial enterprises in all
Canada. It is this corporation, you will remember, that owns the Wabana
iron mines in Newfoundland.
In the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and north of the isthmus connecting Nova
Scotia with the mainland, is Prince Edward Island, the smallest, but
proportionately the richest province in the Dominion of Canada. It is
not quite twice the size of Rhode Island, and has less than one hundred
thousand people, but every acre of its land is tillable and most of it
is cultivated. The island is sometimes called the “Garden of the Gulf.”
Prince Edward Island is a favourite resort of Americans on vacation.
It leaped into fame as the scene of the first successful experiments
in raising foxes for their furs, and now has more than half of the
fox farms in Canada. The business of selling fox skins and breeding
stock is worth nearly two million dollars a year to the Prince Edward
Islanders. The greatest profits are from the sales of fine breeding
animals.
Most of the west shore of the Bay of Fundy and many of its northern
reaches are in the third and westernmost of the three Maritime
Provinces. This is the province of New Brunswick. It is Maine’s
next-door neighbour, and almost as large, but it has less than half as
many people. The wealth of New Brunswick, like that of Maine, comes
chiefly from the farms, the fisheries, and the great forests that are
fast being converted into lumber and paper. Its game and fresh-water
fishing attract a great many sportsmen from both the United States and
Canada.
St. John, the chief city of New Brunswick at the mouth of the St.
John River, used to be a centre of anti-American sentiment in Canada.
This was because the city was founded by the Tories, who left the
United States after we won our independence. St. John to-day is a busy
commercial centre competing with Halifax for first place as Canada’s
all-year Atlantic port. It is the eastern terminal of the Canadian
Pacific Railroad, whose transatlantic liners use the port during the
winter. It enjoys the advantage over Halifax of being some two hundred
miles nearer Montreal, but, like Halifax, suffers on account of the
long railway haul and high freight rates to central Canada. As a matter
of fact, New England, and not Canada, is the natural market for the
Maritime Provinces, and every few years the proposal that this part of
Canada form a separate Dominion comes up for discussion. Such talk is
not taken seriously by the well informed, but it provides a good safety
valve for local irritation.