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Title: All Afloat
A Chronicle of Craft and Waterways
Author: William Wood
Release Date: March 11, 2008 [eBook #24808]
Language: English
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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}
CHAPTER II
CANOES
What the camel is to desert tribes, what the horse is to the Arab, what
the ship is to the colonizing Briton, what all modern means of
locomotion are to the civilized world to-day, that, and more than that,
the canoe was to the Indian who lived beside the innumerable waterways
of Canada. The Indian went fishing, hunting, campaigning, and
sometimes even whaling, in his bark canoe. Jacques Cartier found
Indians fishing in the Gulf of St Lawrence and sleeping under their
upturned canoes, as many a white and Indian has slept since that
long-past summer of 1534. Every succeeding explorer made use of the
Indian canoe, up to the time of Mackenzie,[1] who paddled north to the
Arctic in 1789, along the mighty river which bears his name; and who,
four years {17} later, closed the age of great discoveries by crossing
the Great Divide to the westward-flowing Fraser and reaching the
Pacific by way of its tributary, the Blackwater, an Indian trail
overland, and the Bella Coola. Mackenzie had found the canoe route;
and when he painted the following record on a fiord rock he was
bringing centuries of arduous endeavour to a befitting close:
'Alexander Mackenzie, from Canada, by land, the 22nd of July, 1793.'
This crowning achievement with paddle and canoe seems very far away
from the reader of the twentieth century. Yet François Beaulieu, one
of Mackenzie's voyageurs, only died in 1872, and was well known to many
old North-Westers who are still alive.
The Indian birch-bark canoe is pre-eminently characteristic of Canada.
But it is not the most primitive type of small craft; and it was often
superseded for various purposes by the more advanced types introduced
by the whites. There are three distinct types of small craft all the
world over. Like everything else, they have followed the invariable
order of evolution, from the simple to the complex. First came the
simple log, which served the earliest man to cross some little stretch
of water by the aid of pole or paddle. Next came {18} the union of
several logs, which formed the clumsy but more stable raft. Then some
prehistoric genius found that the more a log was hollowed out the
better it would float; and so the dug-out was invented. Log, raft, and
dug-out all belong to the first and simplest type, in which there are
no artificial parts to fit together. The second type is exemplified by
the birch-bark canoe, which has three parts in its frame--gunwale,
cross-bars, and ribs--and a fourth part, the skin, to complete it. The
third type is distinguished from the second by its keel, as clearly as
vertebrate animals are distinguished from invertebrates by their
backbone. The common keeled boat, with all its variations, represents
this third and, so far, final type. All three types have played their
parts in Canada, both jointly and separately, and all three play their
parts to-day. But they are best understood if taken one by one.
First, then, the log, the raft, and the dugout canoe. Any one watching
a 'log drive' to-day can see the shantymen afloat in much the same way,
though for a very different purpose, as their remotest human ancestors
hundreds of thousands of years ago. The raft, like the log, is now a
self-carrying cargo, not a passenger craft. But there it is, much as
it {19} always was. Indeed, it is simpler now than it used to be some
years ago, before the days of tugs and railways. Then it was craft and
cargo in one. It was steered by immense oars, as sailing vessels were
before the days of rudders; other gigantic oars were occasionally used
to propel it, like an ancient galley; it carried loose-footed square
sails, like the ships of Tarshish; and its crew lived aboard in shacks
and other simple kinds of shelter, like the earliest Egyptian cabins
ages before the captivity of Israel.
The dug-out has the humblest, though the longest, history of any craft
the hand of man has ever shaped. At one time it rose to the dignity of
being the liner and the man-of-war of the Pacific coast; for the giant
trees there favoured a kind of dug-out that the savage world has never
seen elsewhere, except in certain parts of equatorial Africa. At
another time, only a century or two ago, dug-outs of twenty feet or so
were used in trade between the St Lawrence and the Hudson. They were
of white pine, red or white cedar, or of tulip tree; and their crews
poled standing or paddled kneeling, for they had no thwarts. They
carried good loads, went well, with their canoe-shaped ends, and lasted
ten or twelve {20} years if tarred or painted. They were, indeed,
one-piece canoes, which they had a perfect right to be, as the word
canoe comes from the name the West Indian natives gave their dug-outs
when questioned by Columbus. Nowadays the dug-out is generally used
for the dirtier work of 'longshore fisheries. It has lost its elegance
of form, and may be said to have reverted to a lower type. But this
reversion only serves the better to remind the twentieth century of
what all sorts of craft were like, not twenty, but two hundred,
centuries ago.
Secondly comes the Indian bark canoe, so justly famous in the history,
romance, and poetry of Canada. As in the case of other craft, its
form, size, and material have never been what we call 'standardized.'
Indians living outside the birch belt had to use inferior kinds of
bark. But the finest type was always made, and is still made, with
birch-bark. At least three kinds of tree are necessary for the best
results: the birch for the skin, the fir to caulk it with, and the
cedar for the sewing fibres and the frame. Only a single tool is
needed--a knife; and many a good canoe was built before the whites
brought metal knives from Europe. The Indian looks out for the {21}
biggest, soundest, and smoothest birch tree in his neighbourhood. He
prefers to strip it in the early summer, when the bark is supple with
the sap. Sap is as good for the bark as it is bad for the woodwork of
canoes and every other kind of craft. The soft inside of the bark is
always scraped as clean as a tanner scrapes a hide. If the Indian has
to build with dry or frozen bark he is careful to use hot water in
stripping the trunk, and he warms the bark again for working. Of
course, it is a great advantage to have as few strips as possible,
since every seam must first be sewn together by the squaws and then
gummed over. Occasionally a tree will be found big and suitable enough
to yield a single strip from which a seamless twenty-footer can be
built. But this is very rare.
The next thing is the frame--the gunwale, ribs, and cross-bars. Where
many canoes are building there is generally some sort of model round
which the ribs are bent. But a skilled Indian can dispense with any
model when making the ribs with every requisite degree of curve, from
the open ribs amidships, where the bottom is nearly flat, to the close
ribs at the ends, where the shape becomes halfway between the letter
'U' and {22} the letter 'V.' The gunwale is quite the most important
part of the canoe, as it holds all the other parts together and serves
some of the constructional purposes of a keel. The voyageurs,
recognizing this, call it _le maître_. It is laid on the ends of the
ribs, which are made fast to it. Then the frame is completed by the
three or more cross-bars, which keep the two sides of the gunwale from
spreading apart. After this the birch-bark skin is stretched on the
frame as tightly as possible, turned in over the gunwale, and clamped
on there by the _faux maître_ or super-gunwale. The two ends, both as
sharp as an ordinary bow, are then sewn together by a sort of
criss-cross fibre lacing, and every hole or seam in the bark is well
gummed with melted rosin. The finishing touches are equally important,
each in its own way. Thin boards are laid in lengthwise, either
between the ribs and the skin or over the ribs, so as to protect the
bark bottom from being injured by the cargo. The ends of the canoe are
reinforced inside by the Indian equivalent for a collision bulkhead.
This bulkhead sometimes rises well above the gunwale and is carved like
a figurehead, which accounts for its voyageur name of _le p'ti'
bonhomme_. A third finishing touch, {23} very common in earlier days,
is the decoration of the outsides of both ends, which used to rise with
a sharp sheer, and sometimes actually curved back. The usual
decorations here were totem signs, generally made of porcupine quills,
dyed in many colours, and serving the original purpose of a coat of
arms.
The familiar shape has never been greatly varied, though some canoes
are built on finer lines for speed, and others on fuller lines for
carrying cargo. But there has always been plenty of variety in size
and material. The smallest canoe would hardly hold two persons, and
could be carried in one hand. The big war canoes would hold more than
twenty well-armed paddlers and required four men to carry them. The
very biggest canoe probably did not exceed forty feet in length, six in
breadth, and two in depth amidships. Fifty men or five tons of cargo
could have been carried in it. But perhaps one quite so large was
never built. When white cedar and birch were not to be had, all sorts
of substitutes were used. Any roots with tough fibres would do for the
sewing, and any light and tough wood served its turn as a more or less
efficient substitute for the white cedar framing. But elm and other
alternative barks {24} were all bad. The elm bark was used inside out,
because the outside was too rough and brittle for the bottom of a
canoe. It made dull paddling and never lasted the whole of a hard
season, unlike the birch-bark, which sometimes had a life of six or
seven years. The most modern material is canvas, which is generally
painted red or green. It is light, easily repaired, and has much to
recommend it, though trappers think it gives a taint which scares their
game away. The paddles were and are of all shapes and sizes, long and
short, broad and narrow, spoon-blade and square; and they were and are
made of all kinds of wood, from the lightest spruce to the much heavier
but handsomer bird's-eye maple. Sails were and are only used with
light winds dead aft, and not often in birch-barks even then, because
there is no 'stiffness' without a keel.
There were skin as well as bark canoes among the Indians. But the
typical skin canoe is the Eskimo kayak. This is a shuttle-shaped
craft, about fifteen feet long and just wide enough to let its single
paddler sit flat on the bottom. It differs from the Indian canoe in
being entirely decked over. The skin of the grey seal, when that best
of canoe skins can be found, is carefully sewn, so as to be quite {25}
waterproof, and then stretched as tightly as a drumhead all over the
frame, except for the little 'well' where the Eskimo sits with his
double-bladed paddle. As he tucks himself in so closely that water
cannot enter he does not fear to be capsized, for he can right himself
with a sweep of his paddle. Kayaks are very light and handy, as the
frame is made either of whalebone or spruce. The oomiak is the
Eskimo's family boat and cargo carrier, flat-bottomed, not decked in,
and sometimes big enough for twenty people with their gear. It is made
of much the same materials.
The white man's canoes, so well known--outside of Canada--as 'Canadian
canoes,' are partly true canoes and partly a cross between canoes and
boats. The fact that the skin is not made of bark or hide, but of
canvas, wood, or metal, and the further innovation that machinery is
freely used, make no essential difference, provided always that there
is no semblance of a keel. But once the keel is introduced the whole
constructional idea is changed and the ways of savages are left behind.
A first-rate keeled canoe, built of white cedar, brass shod and copper
fastened, fitted with air tanks and life-line, a lateen sail and
portage handles, is the very perfection {26} of a handy little cruiser
for all sorts of inland waters. One like this, but built of basswood,
proved quite serviceable after more than ten years' work, in the course
of which it covered several thousand miles along the Lower St Lawrence,
where the seas are often rough and the low-tide landings always hard.
But all similar craft, though looking like canoes afloat, are no more
like the true canoes and kayaks in their constructional detail than a
bird is like a butterfly. The keel makes all the difference.
Everything in naval architecture springs from and is related to the
keel. 'Laying the keel' means beginning the ship in the only possible
way, and 'two keels to one' is an expression which every one
understands as meaning a naval preponderance in that proportion. The
keel is to the ribs of a ship exactly what the backbone is to the ribs
of a man, and any craft built up from a keel, no matter how small and
simple it may be, belongs to the third and apparently final type of
craft, which is as far ahead of the canoe type as that is ahead of the
dug-out, raft, and log.
An intermediate type that once did much service, and still does a
little, is the white man's flat-bottomed boat, which could be {27}
paddled, rowed, or sailed, according to build and circumstances. The
common punt is the best known form of it; the dory by far the handiest
all round; the cargo barge the biggest; and the old-fashioned 'bateau'
the most characteristically Canadian. The modern 'bateau' is to be
found only among keeled sailing craft. But the old 'bateau,' which
Wolfe's local transport officers spelt _battoe_, was more of a rowboat.
It was sharp at both ends, wall-sided, and fitted with oars, poles, and
a square sail. The bottom had some sheer--that is, it was curved up at
each end--but less than the top. Four men rowed, the fifth steered,
and three tons of miscellaneous goods or thirty-five barrels of flour
made a fair cargo. Bateaux like this were the craft in which the
United Empire Loyalists went up the St Lawrence to settle Upper Canada.
Afterwards the size and crew were increased till the average cargo
amounted to about four tons and a half. But the Durham boat,
introduced by American traders from the Mohawk valley, soon became a
successful rival, which was not itself supplanted till canals enabled
still larger craft to pass from one open water to another. The Durham
was larger than the bateau; long, light, and shallow. It had a not
quite flat {28} bottom and a moderate sheer in the sides. The best
bateaux and Durhams were made with strong white oak bottoms and light
fir sides.
The bark canoe gave place to the boat, step by step, as civilized
intercourse advanced. It disappeared first from the great national
highway of the St Lawrence and the Lakes, where the French began using
bateaux and sailing craft as early as the seventeenth century. During
the eighteenth the boat gained steadily on the canoe, which was more
and more confined to the Indians. The local craft in chief civilized
use on both sides during the fight for Canada was the bateau; and the
best crews then and afterwards were the French-Canadian voyageurs.
But everywhere beyond the immediate spheres of French and British
influence the canoe was universal. The Great West then began at the
Lakes and the Mississippi, and was a land of wild adventure, rumour,
and extravagant surmise. The map that formed the frontispiece to the
standard authority of the time--Jefferys' _French Dominions in
America_--is full of geographical romance. Once in the Kaministikwia,
the map has no territorial divisions other than those between the {29}
different tribal hunting grounds, each one of which was watered by a
hundred streams and marked by the 'carrying places' where the canoes
had to be 'portaged.' There lived the 'Nation of the Bear' and the
'Nation of the Snake,' whose special totems of course were worked in
coloured quills on every war canoe; and there flowed many a river 'the
course of which is uncertain.' Along the great Assiniboine lay the
'Warrior's track from the River of the West,' and just where the
prairies ran out into the complete unknown there was the vista of a
second Eldorado in the hopeful suggestion that 'Hereabouts are supposed
to be the Mountains of Bright Stones mentioned in the Map of ye Indian
Ochagach.'
After the Conquest the tide of trade and settlement flowed faster and
faster west; and with the white man's trade and settlement came the
white man's boats. At last, in 1823, Sir George Simpson, the resident
governor of the Hudson's Bay Company, finding that canoe transport was
half as dear again as that done with boats, ordered that boats should
supersede canoes all over the main trade routes of the Company's vast
domain. This was the death-blow to the canoe as a real factor in
Canadian life. From that time on it has been receding {30} farther and
farther, from waterway to waterway, at first before the white man's
boat with oars and sails, and now before his steamer. But in distant
or secluded wilds it lingers still--the same craft to-day that it was
when the Celtic coracles were paddled on the Thames before the Romans
ever heard of England--the horse, the ship, the moving home of those
few remaining nomads whose life is dying with its own.
The great historic age of inland small craft--the age of dug-out,
bateau, and canoe; the age of Indian, pioneer, and voyageur--was the
eighteenth century, when fresh-water sailing craft were few, when
steamers were unknown, and when savage and civilized men and methods
were mingled with each other in the fur trade over a larger area than
they used in common either before that time or since. The seventeenth
century saw the slow beginnings of this age after Champlain had founded
Quebec in 1608 and had taken the warpath with the Hurons against the
Iroquois. The nineteenth century saw its almost equally slow decline,
which began in 1815, at the close of the war with the United States,
and may be said to have been practically completed with the two
North-West Rebellions of 1870 and 1885. The latter year, indeed,
closed a real {31} epoch with three significant events: the end of the
last Indian and half-breed war in Canada, the completion of the first
trans-continental Canadian railway, and the return from Egypt of the
first and last Canadians to go on an oversea campaign as professed
voyageurs.
Under the French régime the fur trade reached well past Lake Superior.
Nepigon and the Kaministikwia were the two most important junctions of
routes at the western end of the lake. Under British rule the Montreal
'fur lords' used the 'Grand Portage,' which ends on a bay of Lake
Superior some way south of the modern Fort William. It was a regular
bush road, nearly ten miles long, made to avoid the falls of the
Pigeon. As early as 1783, the year in which King George III first
recognized the United States as an independent power, the fur lords
kept no less than five hundred men in constant work at the height of
the season, during the latter half of August. Horses and oxen were
used later on; but the voyageur himself was the chief beast of burden
here, as everywhere else. There were two kinds of voyageur. One was
the mere merchant carrier, who went from Montreal to the Grand Portage
in big boats of four tons burden having a crew of ten men. These were
the 'pork {32} eaters' or _mangeurs de lard_, who had nothing worse to
face than well-known rapids. The others were a finer breed, the true
and daring coureurs de bois, or pioneers of the bush, who went west in
comparatively light canoes, each carrying not more than a ton and a
half, who hunted their own game, risked a fight with the Indians, and
were to the duller 'pork eaters' what a charger is to a cart-horse or a
frigate to a barge. The regulation portage load was one hundred and
fifty pounds, and many a man was known to carry this weight the whole
ten miles and back within six hours.
There was need to hurry. Supplies were going west to Lake Winnipeg, up
the Saskatchewan, and even on to Athabaska; while furs were coming down
for the autumn trade to Europe. As a rule the traders were Scottish
and the voyageurs French Canadian. Indians and half-breeds were fairly
common; they manned the canoes in the farther wilds, guided the
pioneers, and did the actual trapping. To speak in terms of modern
transportation: the Indians and their bark canoes produced the raw
material and worked the branch lines; while the voyageurs met them at
the junctions and took the goods down to {33} the head of ocean
navigation, where everything was, of course, trans-shipped for Europe.
The same sort of trade was carried on, in a slightly different way, in
the Maritime Provinces. There are survivals of it still in Labrador.
At the end of July, Nascaupees, some of whom take months to reach their
hunting grounds by paddle and portage, may be seen at Seven Islands, on
the north shore of the Gulf of St Lawrence, where huge modern pulp
mills make paper for the New York press, and where the offing is alive
with transatlantic shipping all season through.
These inland voyages are as strange to the average Canadian of to-day
as to contemporary Englishmen and Frenchmen. So it is perhaps worth
while to record the ordinary features of what must soon become
altogether a thing of the past. The incidents would be much the same
with every kind of small craft that has served its turn along the
interlocking network of Canadian waterways, whether an old-fashioned
bateau or a Durham boat, a sharp-end dug-out, or a bark canoe. But the
immemorial birch-bark is the best to choose for example, as it preceded
and outlasted every other kind and is the most typically Canadian of
them all.
{34}
Before starting, every broken seam and hole must be gummed over. Water
is poured into the canoe and every point of exit marked for gumming.
Loading must be done with unusual care, as the slightest crankness of
such frail craft in such wild waters is likely to prove fatal. Crews
always were their own stevedores, and it was a poor crew that could not
load to perfection in a short five minutes, once the cargo had been
settled. The actual paddling is not difficult to learn, that is, the
paddling required from an ordinary member of the crew. But the man in
the bow and, still more, the man in the stern need the highest kind of
skilful daring to take them safely through. Paddling by oneself also
requires a special touch, only to be learnt by long practice. Even in
dead water it takes some time before a novice can send the canoe
straight ahead when paddling on one side only. As the paddle goes aft
the bow naturally tends to turn towards the other side. The trick of
it consists in counteracting this tendency by a twist of the blade
which brings the inner edge round, aftwise beside the canoe, till the
blade becomes a rectifying rudder as well as a thrusting propeller at
the end of every stroke. When a fall or impassable rapid is reached,
{35} the 'bowman' jumps out before the canoe touches bottom and draws
her safely ashore. He and the 'steersman' then carry her over the
portage, while the rest carry the cargo on their backs. A man's own
weight is a fair load; but with a sling across their foreheads, and
clasped hands behind their heads, strong men have carried twice as much
and more. When a rapid has to be ascended the canoe is lightened as
much as need be, the steel-shod poles are got out, and the bow and
stern paddlers stand up to their work, balancing themselves as easily
as other men would on dry land.
But it is when a rapid is to be 'run' that the finest skill is shown.
If there is any doubt the steersman walks down to take a good look
first. Then, if necessary, some or all of the cargo is taken out and
portaged to the next 'steady' in the river. Rapids are so common in
some journeys that canoemen think less of them than foxhunters think of
five-barred gates. In most cases a mistake means death; so every nerve
and muscle is kept tensely ready the whole run through. The current
should be 'humoured'; for it does a surprising amount of the work
itself. If rightly headed with the main throw of it the canoe will
{36} naturally tend to seek the deepest and safest channel just as the
body of the water does. Split channels must be met by instant
decision; and it is when picking out the proper one that steerage way
tells. As the pace of the rapid increases, so does the danger; for the
slightest false thrust of a blade is enough to make a canoe swerve or
upset. But, with the expert bowman on the keenest of look-outs and the
course under the knowing touch of the still more expert steersman, a
rapid may be run in perfect safety through racing waves which only just
fail to leap aboard, on roaring water which drowns the human voice so
completely that the bowman can only make use of signals, past rocks and
snags on which a single graze would mean a wreck, and, often the worst
of all, from one wild 'throw' to another with quite a different set and
a wrench of two fierce currents where they meet.
All the white man's boats used by the voyageurs approximated more or
less to the shape of the canoe: the various kinds of Hudson river
dug-out, the bateau, the 'Durham,' and the 'York,' which last became
the wooden successor of the birch-bark after Governor Simpson's general
inspection of the Hudson's Bay domain. Only the rather {37} barge-like
'Mackinaw' was completely outside this venturesome class. It was a
useful but humdrum cargo boat, laboriously poled along shallow, quiet
waters, or rowed with lumbering sweeps; or sometimes even sailed, when
it shovelled its way through the water with a very safe wind dead aft.
This completes the tale of Canadian inland small craft that depended on
pole and paddle, oar and towline, and only used a simple sail as an
exceptional thing. But the human interest would not be complete
without some reference to the tours of inspection made by the magnates
of the Hudson's Bay Company. The greatest tours of all were those of
Sir George Simpson, the governor who took charge after the Company
absorbed its warring rival in 1821. In modern business language he
would be called the executive head of the great Canadian fur-trade
'merger.' He was a young promoted clerk, a Scotsman born, with little
experience of the Canadian wilds, but with the natural faculty of rule
and a good deal of diplomacy--the gauntlet in the velvet glove.
Simpson soon grasped the salient features of the people he had to deal
with and very sensibly made his tours of inspection as much like a {38}
royal progress as he could. Time and money were never neglected: his
'record runs' across the wilderness and the dividends at headquarters
proved that to the full. He was determined to show every one concerned
that thenceforth there was only one governing company, and that he was
its proper representative. Then, as always, London was the general
headquarters. But the Canadian headquarters were at Montreal; and
Simpson fixed what might be called the field headquarters at Norway
House, near the north end of Lake Winnipeg, a commanding strategic
point in the heart of the great fur territories. Here he was always
busy introducing discipline, enforcing a much-needed reduction in the
ration of rum given to the Indians, and reporting home. As voyageurs,
he thought the French Canadians much better than the men of any other
race. 'Canadians preferable to Orkneymen. Orkneymen less expensive
but slow. Less physical strength and spirits. Obstinate if brought
young into the service. Scotch and Irish, when numerous, quarrelsome,
independent, and mutinous.' He introduced fines as a punishment. But
'this will only do for Europeans. A blow is better for Canadians.' On
July 12, 1828, Simpson left York Factory {39} on Hudson Bay for a state
and business progress across the continent to Fort Vancouver on the
Columbia. One of his staff, Archibald Macdonald, wrote an account of
it, called _Peace River: a Canoe Voyage from the Hudson Bay to the
Pacific_. The best of birch-barks were used to ensure speed; though
the birch-bark had already been superseded as a cargo craft. There was
a doctor in the party, which included nine voyageurs to each of the two
canoes. Simpson's departure was the signal for a salute of seven guns,
which was duly repeated at every subsequent fort. The whole population
lined the waterside as the voyageurs struck up one of their old French
folk-songs to beguile the way. The arrival at Norway House was still
more imposing. The Union Jack, with the magic letters 'H. B. C.' on
its fly, was hoisted, to the admiration of all the whites and Indians
from that most important neighbourhood. Simpson's party had landed out
of sight to put on their best clothes; after which they shot through
the gorge at full speed, to the strains of the bagpipes from Simpson's
canoe and bugles from the other. At Fort St James, the central point
of 'New Caledonia,' the approach was made by land. 'Unfurling the
British Ensign, it was given {40} to the guide, who marched first.
After him came the band, consisting of buglers and bagpipers. Next
came the governor, mounted, and behind him Hamlyn and Macdonald, also
on horses. Twenty men loaded like beasts of burden formed the line,
and finally M'Gillivray with his wife and family brought up the rear.'
On the nineteenth day out from York Factory Simpson reached Fort
Langley at the mouth of the Fraser.
How far away it all seems now in this new twentieth century! And yet,
as in the case of Alexander Mackenzie, there is a wonderfully intimate
human link connecting that time with our own; for Lord Strathcona was
born before the amalgamation of the rival companies in 1821; he became
the last resident-governor of the Hudson's Bay Company while François
Beaulieu, Mackenzie's centenarian voyageur, was still alive; and he
lived until 1914, the year of the Great World War.
[1] For the canoe voyages of Mackenzie, to the Arctic in 1789 and to
the Pacific in 1793, see _Adventurers of the Far North_ and _Pioneers
of the Pacific Coast_ in this Series.
{41}
CHAPTER III
SAILING CRAFT: THE PIONEERS
When we call Canada a new country in the twentieth century we are apt
to forget that her seafaring annals may possibly go back to the Vikings
of the tenth century, a thousand years ago. Long before William the
Conqueror crossed over from France to England the Vikings had been
scouring the seas, north, south, east, and west. They reached
Constantinople; they colonized Iceland; they discovered Greenland; and
there are grounds for suspecting that the 'White Eskimos' whom the
Canadian Arctic expedition of 1913 noted down for report are some of
their descendants. However this may be, there is at least a
probability that the Vikings discovered North America five centuries
before Columbus. The saga of Eric the Red sings of the deeds of Leif
Ericson, who led the discoverers and named the three new countries
Helluland, Markland, and Vineland. Opinions differ as to which {42} of
the four--Labrador, Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, or New England--are to
be included in the Vikings' three. In any case, the only inevitable
two are Newfoundland and Nova Scotia, with which the subsequent history
of Canada also begins.
But even if the Vikings never came to Canada at all, their ships could
not be refused a place in any history of sailing craft; for it is the
unique distinction of these famous freelances of the sea to have
developed the only type of ancient and mediaeval hull which is the
admiration of the naval world to-day. The kind of vessel they used in
the tenth century is the craft of most peculiar interest to Canadian
history, though it has never been noticed there except by the merest
landsman's reference. The special type to which this vessel belonged
was already the result of long development. The Vikings had a way of
burying a chief in his ship, over which they heaped a funeral mound.
Very fortunately two of these vessels were buried in blue clay, which
is an excellent preserver of timber; so we are able to see them to-day
in an almost perfect state. The one found in 1880 at the mouth of the
Christiania fjord is apparently a typical specimen, though smaller than
many {43} that are described in the sagas. She is about eighty feet
long, sixteen feet in the beam, and seven feet in total depth
amidships, from the top of the gunwale to the bottom of the keel. The
keel runs into the stem and stern-post with very gentle curves. The
whole of the naval architecture is admirably done. The lines are so
fine that there is almost the least possible resistance to the water
when passing through it. The only point worth criticizing is the
slightness of the connection between the topsides and the body of the
boat. But as this was a warship, carrying little besides live ballast,
such a defect would be minimized. Iron rivets, oak treenails (or
pegs), clinker planking (each plank-edge overlapping the next below
it), admirably proportioned frame, as well as arrangements for
stepping, raising, and lowering the single mast, all show that the
builders knew exactly what they were about.
The rudder is hung over on the starboard, or 'steer-board,' side and
worked by a tiller. The ropes are made of bark fibre and the planking
is partly fastened to the floors with ties made of tough tree roots.
Only one sail, and that a simple square one, was used. Nothing could
be done with this unless the {44} wind was more or less aft. The sail,
in fact, was centuries behind the hull, which, with the firm grip of
its keel, would have been quite fit for a beat to windward, if the
proper canvas had been carried. The thirty oars were often used, and
to very good purpose, as the easy run of the lines suited either method
of propulsion. The general look of these Viking craft is not unlike
that of a big keeled war canoe, for both ends rise with a sharp sheer
and run to a point. A classical scholar would be irresistibly reminded
of the Homeric vessels, not as they were in reality, but as they appear
in the eager, sea-born suggestions of the Iliad and the Odyssey--long,
sharp, swift, well-timbered, hollow, with many thwarts, and ends curved
high like horns.
[Illustration: SHIPS OF THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY From Winsor's America]
Three Viking vessels discovered in a Danish peat-bog probably belong to
the fifth century, thus being fifteen hundred years of age. Yet their
counterparts can still be seen along the Norwegian coast. Such
wonderful persistence, even of such an excellently serviceable type, is
quite unparalleled; and it proves, if proof were needed, that the
Norsemen who are said to have discovered Newfoundland and Nova Scotia
were the finest seamen of their own and many a later time. The way
they planned and built {45} their vessels was the glory of their homes.
The way they manned and armed and fought them was the terror of every
foreign shore. War craft and crew together were the very soul and body
of strength and speed and daring skill, as, with defiant figurehead and
glittering, shield-hung sides, they rode to battle joyously on the wild
white horses of the mediaeval sea.
Five centuries more, and the English, another great seafaring people,
first arrived in Canada. Then came increasing swarms of the most
adventurous fishermen of Europe. After these came many competing
explorers and colonizers, all of whose fortunes directly depended on
the sea.
Cabot's English crew of eighteen hands is a century nearer to our own
time than Leif Ericson the Norseman was to Cabot's. Yet Cabot himself
preceded Columbus in setting foot on what may fairly be called the
mainland of America when he discovered Canada's eastern coast in 1497.
He cleared from Bristol in May, reached the new regions on June 24, and
returned safe home at the end of July. It was an age of awakening
surmise. The universal question was, which is the way to the golden
{46} East? America was looked upon as a rather annoying obstruction to
proper navigation, though it was allowed to have some incidental
interest of its own. Vasco da Gama doubled the Cape of Good Hope in
the same year that Cabot raised St George's Cross over what afterwards
became British territory. Twenty-five years later Magellan found the
back way through behind Cape Horn, and his ship, though not himself,
went round the world. Then, twelve years later still, the French
sailed into the Canadian scene on which they were to play the principal
part for the next two centuries and a quarter.
Every text-book tells us that Jacques Cartier was the great French
pioneer and explains his general significance in the history of Canada.
But no books explain his peculiar significance from the nautical point
of view, though he came on the eve of the most remarkable change for
the better that was ever made in the art of handling vessels under
sail. He was both the first and the last mediaeval seaman to appear on
Canadian inland waters. Only four years after his discovery of the St
Lawrence, an Englishman, Fletcher of Rye, astonished the seafaring
world of 1539 by inventing a rig with which a ship could beat to
windward with sails trimmed {47} fore and aft. This invention
introduced the era of modern seamanship. But Cartier has another, and
much more personal, title to nautical fame, for he was the first and
one of the best of Canadian hydrographers, and he wrote a book
containing some descriptions worthy of comparison with those in the
official 'Pilots' of to-day. This book, well called his _Brief Recit
et Succincte Narration_, is quite as easy for an Englishman to read in
French as Shakespeare is for a Frenchman to read in English. It
abounds in acute observations of all kinds, but particularly so in its
sailing directions. Compare, for instance, his remarks on Cumberland
Harbour with those made in the latest edition of the _St Lawrence
Pilot_ after the surveys of four hundred years. Or take his few,
exact, and graphic words about Isle-aux-Coudres and compare them with
the entries made by the sailing masters of the British fleet that used
this island as a naval base during the great campaign for the winning
of Canada in 1759. In neither case will Cartier suffer by comparison.
He was captain, discoverer, pilot, and surveyor, all in one; and he
never failed to make his mark, whichever role he undertook.
Like all the explorers, Jacques Cartier had his {48} troubles with his
crews. The average man of any time cannot be expected to have the
sustained enthusiasm, much less the manifold interest, which inspires
his leader. Nearly every commander of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and
seventeenth centuries had to face mutiny; and, even apart from what
might be called natural causes, men of that time were quite ready to
mutiny for what seem now the most absurd of reasons. Some crews would
not sail past the point of Africa for fear of turning black. Others
were distracted when the wind held for days together while they were
outward bound, lest it might never blow the other way in North America,
and so they would not be able to get back home. The ships, too, often
gave as much trouble as the men. They were far better supplied with
sails and accommodation than the earlier Viking ships had been; but
their hulls were markedly inferior. The Vikings, as we have seen,
anticipated by centuries some of the finest models of the modern world.
The hulls of Cabot, Columbus, and Cartier were broader in the beam,
much bluffer in the bow, besides being full of top-hamper on the deck.
Nothing is known about Cabot's vessel except that she must have been
very small, probably less than fifty tons, because the crew numbered
{49} only eighteen and there was no complaint of being short-handed.
Cartier's _Grande Hermine_ was more than twice as large, and, if the
accepted illustrations and descriptions of her may be relied upon, she
probably was not unlike a smaller and simplified _Santa Maria_, the
ship which bore Columbus on his West Indian voyage of 1492. Such
complete and authentic specifications of the _Santa Maria_ still remain
that a satisfactory reproduction of her was made for the Chicago
World's Fair of 1893. Her tonnage was over two hundred. Her length of
keel was only sixty feet; length of ship proper, ninety-three; and
length over all, one hundred and twenty-eight. This difference between
length of keel and length over all was not caused by anything like the
modern overhang of the hull itself, which the Vikings had anticipated
by hundreds and the Egyptians by thousands of years, but by the
box-like forecastle built over the bows and the enormous half and
quarter decks jutting out aft. These top-hampering structures
over-burdened both ends and produced a regular see-saw, as the Spanish
crew of 1893 found to their cost when pitching horribly through a
buffeting head sea. The _Santa Maria_, like most 'Spaniards,' had a
lateen-rigged mizzen. {50} But the _Grande Hermine_ had no mizzen,
only the square-rigged mainmast, foremast, and bowsprit. The bowsprit
of those days was a mast set at an angle of forty-five; and it
sometimes, as in the _Grande Hermine_, carried a little upright branch
mast of its own.
Many important changes occurred in the nautical world during the two
generations between the days of Jacques Cartier and those of Champlain.
The momentous change in trimming sails, already referred to, came
first, when Fletcher succeeded in doing what no one had ever done
before. There can be no doubt that the lateen sail, which goes back at
least to the early Egyptians, had the germ of a fore-and-after in it.
But the germ was never evolved into a strong type fit for tacking; and
no one before Fletcher ever seems to have thought it possible to lay a
course at all unless the wind was somewhere abaft the beam. So England
can fairly claim this one epoch-making nautical invention, which might
be taken as the most convenient dividing-line between the sailing craft
of ancient and of modern times.
The French had little to do with Canada for the rest of the sixteenth
century. Jacques Carrier's best successor as a hydrographer was {51}
Roberval's pilot, Saint-Onge, whose log of the voyage up the St
Lawrence in 1542 is full of information. He more than half believes in
what the Indians tell him about unicorns and other strange beasts in
the far interior. And he thinks it likely that there is unbroken land
as far as Tartary. But, making due allowance for his means of
observation, the claim with which he ends his log holds good regarding
pilotage: 'All things said above are true.'
The English then, as afterwards, were always encroaching on the French
wherever a seaway gave them an opening. In 1578 they were reported to
be lording it off Newfoundland, though they had only fifty vessels
there, as against thirty Basque, fifty Portuguese, a hundred Spanish,
and a hundred and fifty French. Their numbers and influence increased
year by year, till, in 1600, they had two hundred sail manned by eight
thousand men. They were still more preponderant farther north and
farther south. Frobisher, Davis, Hudson, and other Englishmen left
their mark on what are now Arctic and sub-Arctic Canada. Hudson also
sailed up the river that bears his name, and thus did his share towards
founding the English colonies that soon began their ceaseless {52}
struggle with New France. But even before his time, which was just
after Champlain had founded Quebec, two great maritime events had
encouraged the English to aim at that command of the sea which they
finally maintained against all rivals. In 1579 Sir Francis Drake
sailed completely round the world. He was the first sea captain who
had ever done so, for Magellan had died in mid-career fifty-seven years
before. This notable feat was accompanied by his successful capture of
many Spanish treasure ships. Explorer, warrior, enricher of the realm,
he at once became a national hero. Queen Elizabeth, a patriot ruler
who always loved a hero for his service to the state, knighted Drake on
board his flagship; and a poet sang his praises in these few, fit
words, which well deserve quotation wherever the sea-borne English
tongue is known:
The Stars of Heaven would thee proclaim,
If men here silent were.
The Sun himself could not forget
His fellow traveller.
Nine years later the English Navy fought the unwieldy Spanish Armada
into bewildered flight and chased it to its death round the hostile
coast-line of the British Isles.
{53}
Meanwhile the quickened interest in 'sea affairs' had led to many
improvements in building, rigging, and handling vessels. Surprising as
it may seem, most of these improvements were made by foreigners. Still
more surprising is the fact that British nautical improvements of all
kinds, naval as well as mercantile, generally came from abroad during
the whole time that the British command of the sea was being won or
held. Belated imitation of the more scientific foreigner was by no
means new, even in the Elizabethan age. It had become a national habit
by the time the next two centuries were over. English men, not English
vessels, won the wars. The Portuguese and Spaniards had larger and
better vessels than the English at the beginning of the struggle, just
as the French had till after Trafalgar, and the Americans throughout
the War of 1812. Even Sir Walter Raleigh was belated in speaking of
the 'new' practice of striking topmasts, 'a wonderful ease to great
ships, both at sea and in the harbour.'
{54}
CHAPTER IV
SAILING CRAFT: UNDER THE FLEURS-DE-LIS[1]
Every one knows that when Champlain stood beside Lake Huron, wondering
if it had a western outlet towards Cathay, he was discovering the Great
Lakes, those fresh-water seas whose area far exceeds the area of Great
Britain. Every one knows that he became the 'Father of New France'
when he founded Quebec in 1608; and that he was practically the whole
civil and military government of Canada in its infant days. But few
know that he was also a captain in the Royal Navy of France, an expert
hydrographer, and the first man to advocate a Panama canal. And fewer
still remember that he lived in an age which, like our own, had {55}
its 'record-breaking' events at sea. Baffin's 'Farthest North,'
reached in 1616, was latitude 77° 45'. This remained an unbroken
record for two hundred and thirty-six years. Champlain's own voyage
from Honfleur to Tadoussac in eighteen days broke all previous records,
remained itself unbroken for a century, and would be a credit to a
sailing ship to-day. His vessel was the _Don de Dieu_, of which he
left no exact description, but which was easily reproduced for the
tercentenary of Quebec in 1908 from the corresponding French merchant
vessels of her day. She was about a hundred tons and could be handled
by a crew of twenty. The nearest modern equivalent of her rig is that
of a barque, though she carried a little square sail under her bowsprit
and had no jibs, while her spanker had a most lateenish look. Her
mainsail had a good hoist and spread. She had three masts and six
sails altogether. The masts were 'pole,' that is, all of one piece.
The tallest was seventy-three feet from step to truck, that is, from
where the mast is stepped in over the keel to the disc that caps its
top. She carried stone ballast; her rudder was worked by a tiller,
with the help of a simple rope tackle to take the strain; and the poop
contained three cabins.
[Illustration: CHAMPLAIN'S SHIP, The _DON DE DIEU_. From the mdoel at
the Quebec Tercentenary]
{56}
Not long after the death of Champlain (1635) there was a world-wide
advance in shipbuilding. Perhaps it would not be too much to say that
the modern school of wooden sailing-ship designers began with Phineas
Pett, who was one of a family that served England well for nearly two
hundred years. He designed the _Sovereign of the Seas_, which brought
English workmanship well to the front in the reign of Charles I. She
surpassed all records, with a total depth from keel to lanthorn of
seventy-six feet, which exceeds the centre line, from keel to captain's
bridge, of modern 'fliers' with nearly twenty times her tonnage. The
Cromwellian period also gave birth to a most effective fleet, which in
its turn was succeeded by the British fleets that won the Second
Hundred Years' War with France and decided the destiny of Canada. This
long war, or series of wars, begun against Louis XIV in the seventeenth
century, only ended with the fall of Napoleon at Waterloo. La Hogue in
1692, Quebec in 1759, and Trafalgar in 1805 were three of the great
deciding crises. La Hogue and Trafalgar were purely naval; while
Quebec was the result of a joint expedition in which the naval forces
far exceeded the military. The general effect of this whole Second
Hundred {57} Years' War was to confirm the British command of the sea
for another century.
But the French designs in shipbuilding were generally better than the
English. The French, then and afterwards, were more scientific, the
English more rule-of-thumb. Yet when it came to actual handling under
sail, especially in action, the positions were reversed. The English
seafaring class was far larger in proportion to population and it had
far more practice at sea. Besides, England had more and more at stake
as her oversea trade and empire extended, till at last she had no
choice, as an imperial power, but either to win or die.
The French kingdom rose to its zenith under Louis XIV, whose great
minister, Colbert, did all he could to foster the Navy, the mercantile
marine, and the French colonies in Canada. But the fates were against
him. France was essentially a landsman's country. It had several land
frontiers to attack or defend, and it used its Navy merely as an
adjunct to its Army. Moreover, its people were not naturally so much
inclined to colonize over-sea possessions as the British, and its
despotic colonial system repressed all free development. The result
was that the French dominions in America never reached a population of
one {58} hundred thousand. This was insignificant compared with the
twelve hundred thousand in the British colonies; while the disparity
was greatly increased by the superior British aptness for the sea.
French Canada had all the natural advantages which were afterwards
turned to such good account by the British. It had timber and
population along a magnificently navigable river system that tapped
every available trade route of the land. Had there only been a demand
for ships New France might have also enjoyed the advantage of employing
the scientific French naval architects. But the seafaring habit did
not exist among the people as a whole. A typical illustration is to be
found in the different views the French and British colonists took of
whaling. The British on Nantucket Island first learned from the
Indians, next hired a teacher, in the person of Ichabod Paddock, a
famous whaling master from Cape Cod, and then themselves went after
whale with wonderful success. The French in Canada, like the British
on Nantucket Island, had both whales and whaling experts at their very
doors. The Basques kept a station at Tadoussac, and whales were seen
at Quebec. But, instead of hiring Basques to teach them, {59} the
French in Canada petitioned the king for a subsidy with which to hire
the Basques to do the whaling for them. Of course the difference
between the two forms of government counts for a good deal--and it is
not at all likely that any paternal French ruler, on either side of the
Atlantic, ever wished to encourage a sea-roving spirit in Canada. But
the difference in natural and acquired aptitude counts for more.
The first Canadian shipbuilding was the result of dire necessity.
Pont-Gravé put together a couple of very small vessels in 1606 at Port
Royal so that he might cruise about till he met some French craft
homeward bound. Shipbuilding as an industry arose long after this.
The _Galiote_, a brigantine of sorts, was built by the Sovereign
Council and launched at Quebec in 1663. But it was the intendant Talon
who began the work in proper fashion. In 1665, immediately after his
arrival, he sent men 'timber-cruising' in every likely direction.
Their reports were most encouraging. Suitable timber was plentiful
along the waterways, and the cost was no more than that of cutting and
rafting it down to the dockyards. Talon reported home to Colbert. But
official correspondence was too slow. At his {60} own cost he at once
built a vessel of a hundred and twenty tons. She was on the most
approved lines, and thus served as a model for others. A French
Canadian built an imitation of her the following year. Talon vainly
tried to persuade this enterprising man to form a company and build a
ship of four hundred tons for the trade with the West Indies. Three
smaller vessels, however, successfully made the round trip from Quebec
to the West Indies, on to France, and back again, in 1670. In 1671
Colbert laid aside for Talon a relatively large sum for official
shipbuilding and for the export of Canadian wood to France. The next
year Talon had a five-hundred-tonner on the stocks, while preparations
were being made for an eight-hundred-tonner, which would have been a
'mammoth' merchant vessel in contemporary France. Before he left
Canada he had the satisfaction of reporting that three hundred and
fifty hands, out of a total population of only seven thousand souls,
were engaged in the shipyards.[2] But there were very few at sea.
The first vessel to sail the Great Lakes was built by La Salle seventy
years after their discovery by Champlain. This was _Le Griffon_, {61}
which, from Father Hennepin's description, seems to have been a kind of
brig. She was of fifty or sixty tons and apparently carried a real
jib. She was launched at the mouth of Cayuga Creek in the Niagara
peninsula in 1679. Her career was interesting, but short and
disastrous. She sailed west across Lake Erie, on through Lakes St
Clair and Huron, and reached Green Bay on Lake Michigan, where she took
in a cargo of fur. On her return voyage she was lost with all hands.
In the eighteenth century shipbuilding in Quebec continued to flourish.
The yards at the mouth of the St Charles had been enlarged, and even
then there was so much naval construction in hand that private merchant
vessels could not be built as fast as they were wanted. In 1743 some
French merchants proposed building five or six vessels for the West
India trade, besides twenty-five or thirty more for local trade among
the West Indian islands. A new shipyard and a dry-dock were hurriedly
built; and there was keen competition for ship-carpenters. In 1753
_L'Algonkin_, a frigate of seventy-two guns, was successfully launched.
The shipwrights experimented freely with Canadian woods, of which the
white oak proved the best. But the Canadian-built vessels for {62}
transatlantic trade never seem to have equalled in number those that
came from France.
The restrictions on colonial trade were rigidly enforced; no
manufacture of goods was allowed in the colonies, and no direct trade
except with France and French possessions. Canada imported
manufactured goods and exported furs, timber, fish, and grain. The
deep-water tonnage required for Canada was not over ten or twelve
thousand, distributed among perhaps forty vessels on the European route
and twenty more that only visited the French West Indies. A complete
round trip usually meant a cargo of manufactures from France to Canada,
a cargo of timber, fish, and grain from Canada to the West Indies, and
a third cargo--of sugar, molasses, and rum--from the West Indies home
to France. Quite half the vessels, however, returned direct to France
with a Canadian cargo. Louisbourg was a universal port of call, the
centre of a partly contraband coasting trade with the British
Americans, and a considerable importing point for food-stuffs from
Quebec.
French commerce on the sea had, however, a mighty rival. The
encroaching British were working their way into every open water in
America. The French gallantly disputed their advance in Hudson Bay and
won several {63} actions, of which the best victory was Iberville's in
1697, with his single ship, the _Pélican_, against three opponents. In
Labrador and Newfoundland the British ousted all rivals from
territorial waters, except from the French Shore. The 'Bluenose' Nova
Scotians crept on from port to port. The Yankees were as supreme at
home as the other British were in Hudson Bay, though on occasion both
were daringly challenged. All the French had was the line of the St
Lawrence; and that was increasingly threatened, both at its mouth and
along the Great Lakes.
The British had in their service a powerful trading corporation. The
Hudson's Bay Company was flourishing even in the seventeenth century.
In one sense it was purely maritime, as its posts were all on the Bay
shore, while the French traded chiefly in the hinterlands. The
Company's fleet, usually three or four ships, sailed regularly from
Gravesend or Portsmouth about June 1, rounded the Orkneys and made for
Hudson Bay. The return cargo of furs arrived home in October. This
annual voyage continues to the present day.[3]
{64}
As Hudson Bay was the place for fur, so Newfoundland, and all the
waters round it, was the place for fish. 'Dogs, fogs, bogs, and
codfish,' was the old half-jeering description of its products.
Standing in the gateway of Canada, Newfoundland was always a menace to
New France. Thirty years before Champlain founded Quebec a traveller
notes that, among the fishing fleets off Newfoundland, 'the English
rule all there.' In other quarters, too, there was a menace to France.
The British colonies were always feeling their way along the coast as
well as along the Great Lakes. In spite of ordinances on both sides,
forbidding trade between colonies of different powers, little trading
craft, mostly British, would creep in with some enticing contraband,
generally by way of Lake Champlain.
[Illustration: A FRENCH FRIGATE OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY From Winsor's
America]
The first attempt in the English colonies to trade with Canada by way
of the open sea was made in 1658, when Captain John Perel sailed from
New York for Quebec in the French barque _St Jean_, and was wrecked on
Anticosti, with the total loss of a cargo of sugar and tobacco. The
sloop _Mary_ managed to reach Quebec in 1701 with a miscellaneous
cargo, containing, among many other items, '166 cheses, 20+81+101 Rols
of tobacko, {65} 2 hogheds of botls marckt SR, 70 bunches of arthen
waire pots, 8 barels of beaire, 19 caskes of schotte.' Her return
cargo included '14 barels of brandy, 4 hogsds of Claret, 2 bondles of
syle skins, etc.' She was wrecked before she reached home, but most of
her cargo was saved. Her owner, Samuel Vetch, the son of a 'Godly
Minister and Glorifier of God in the Grass Market' in Edinburgh, was a
great local character in New York. Four years after this voyage he was
sent to Quebec to arrange a truce between New France and New England.
But his return was as unlucky as that of his sloop _Mary_, for he was
arrested and fined £200 on a charge of having traded with his own
country's official enemies.
The fashion in ships changed very slowly. As we have seen, what may be
called the ancient period of sailing ships closed about the time
Jacques Cartier appeared in Canada. When the fore-and-aft-trimmed
sails were invented in 1539, the modern age began. This has three
distinctive eras of its own. The first lasted for about a century
after the time of Jacques Cartier; and its chief work was to free
itself of ancient and mediaeval limitations.
The second, or central, modern era lasted twice {66} as long, from the
middle of the seventeenth century to the middle of the nineteenth. It
thus covered one century under the Fleurs-de-lis in Canada and another
under the Union Jack. It also exactly corresponded with the long era
of the famous British navigation laws, of which more will presently be
heard. During this period sails were improved in size, cut, and
setting. The changes can be described only in technical language.
Jibs became universal, adding greatly to handiness in general and the
power of tacking in particular. Four sails were used on a mast--main,
top, topgallant, and royal. Naval architecture was greatly improved,
especially by the French. But this improvement did not extend to
giving the hull anything like its most suitable shape. The Vikings
were still unbeaten in this respect. Even the best foreign
three-deckers were rather lumbering craft.
The third era began with the introduction of the clippers about 1840,
and will not end till deep-sea sailing craft cease to be a factor in
the world's work altogether. It was in this present era, when steamers
were gaining their now unquestioned victory, and not during previous
eras, when steam was completely unknown, that sailing craft reached
their highest development. Sails {67} increased to eight on the
mainmast of a full-rigged ship, and they were better cut and set than
ever before. Yachts and merchantmen cannot be fairly compared in the
matter of their sails. But it is worth noting that the old
'white-winged days' never had any sort of canvas worth comparing with a
British yachting 'Lapthorn' or a Yankee yachting 'Sawyer' of our own
time. Hulls, too, have improved far beyond those of the old
three-decker age, beyond even the best of the Vikings'.
Such broad divisions into eras of shipbuilding are, of course, only to
be taken as marking world-wide nautical advances in the largest
possible sense. One epoch often overlaps another and begins or ends at
different times in different countries. A strangely interesting
survival of an earlier age is still to be seen along the Labrador, in
the little Welsh and Devonshire brigs, brigantines, and topsail
schooners which freight fish east away to Europe. These vessels make
an annual round: in March to Spain for salt; by June along the
Labrador; in September to the Mediterranean with their fish; and in
December home again for Christmas. They are excellently handled
wherever they go; and no wonder, as every man aboard of them is a
sailor born and bred.
[1] The nautical history of New France is all parts and no whole;
brilliant ideas and thwarted execution; government stimulus and
government repression; deeds of daring by adventurers afloat and deeds
of various kinds by officials ashore: everything unstable and
changeable; nothing continuous and strong. It cannot, therefore, make
a coherent narrative, only a collection of half-told tales.
[2] See in this Series _The Great Intendant_, chapters iv and ix.
[3] For the narrative of the Hudson's Bay Company the reader is
referred to _The Adventurers of England on Hudson Bay_, in this Series.
{68}
CHAPTER V
SAILING CRAFT: UNDER THE UNION JACK
When Canada finally became a British possession in 1763 she was, of
course, subject to the navigation laws, or the Navigation Act, as this
conglomeration of enactments was usually called. The avowed object of
these laws was to gain and keep the British command of the sea. They
aimed at this by trying to have British trade done in British ships,
British ships manned by British crews, and British crews always available
if wanted for British men-of-war. The first law was enacted under the
Commonwealth in 1651. The whole series was repealed under Victoria in
1849. Exceptions were often made, especially in time of war; and there
was some opposition to reckon with at all times. But, generally
speaking, and quite apart from the question of whether they were wise or
not, the British government invariably looked upon these navigation laws
as a cardinal point of policy down to the close {69} of the wars with the
French Empire and the American Republic in 1815.
The first laws only put into words what every sea-power had long been
practising or trying to practise: namely, the confining of all sea
trading to its own ships and subjects. They were first aimed at the
Dutch, who fought for their carrying trade but were crushed. They
operated, however, against all foreigners. They forbade all coastwise
trade in the British Isles except in British vessels, all trade from
abroad except in British ships or in ships belonging to the country
whence the imported merchandise came, all trade between English colonies
by outsiders, and all trade between the colonies and foreign countries,
except in the case of a few enumerated articles. The manning clauses
were of the same kind. Most of the crew and all the officers were to be
British subjects--an important point when British seamen were liable to
be 'pressed' into men-of-war in time of national danger.
The change of rule in 1763 meant that Canada left an empire that could
not enforce its navigation laws and joined an empire that could.
Whatever the value of the laws, Canadian shipping and sea trade continued
to grow under them. In the eighteenth century {70} there was little
internal development anywhere in America; and less in Canada than in what
soon became the United States. People worked beside the waterways and
looked seaward for their profits. Elias Derby, the first American
millionaire, who died in 1799, made all his money, honestly and legally,
out of shipping. Others made fortunes out of smuggling. An enterprising
smuggler at Bradore, just inside the Strait of Belle Isle, paved his
oaken stairs with silver dollars to keep the wood from wearing out; and
he could well afford to do so.
The maritime provinces of Nova Scotia (then including New Brunswick) and
Prince Edward Island had been gradually growing for a quarter of a
century before the United Empire Loyalists began to come. Halifax was a
garrison town and naval station. There was plenty of fish along the
coast; and the many conveniently wooded harbours naturally invited
lumbering and shipbuilding. Fish and furs were the chief exports up to
the War of 1812; after that, timber. The Loyalists came in small numbers
before 1783; in larger numbers during the five years following. From
twenty to thirty thousand altogether are said to have settled in the
Maritime Provinces. {71} They were poor, but capable and energetic, and
by the end of the eighteenth century their 'Bluenose' craft began to
acquire a recognized place at sea. Quebec and Montreal did an increasing
business. Quebec was the great timber-trade and shipbuilding centre;
Montreal the point where furs were collected for export. From Quebec 151
vessels took clearance in 1774. In 1800 there were 21 Quebec-built
vessels on the local register. Ten years later there were 54.
The Great Lakes had no such early development. Moreover, the days of
their small beginnings were full of retarding difficulties. Nor were
they free from what was then a disaster of the first magnitude; for in
1780 a staggering loss happened to the infant colony. The _Ontario_
foundered with one hundred and seventy-two souls on the lake after which
she was named. During the fourteen years between the Conquest and the
Revolution only a few small vessels appeared there. On the outbreak of
the Revolution the British government impressed crews and vessels alike,
and absolutely forbade the building of any craft bigger than an open boat
except for the government service. Subsequently the strained relations
on both sides, lasting till after the War of {72} 1812, and the tendency
of the Americans to encroach on the frontier trade and settlements,
combined to prevent the government from giving up the power it had thus
acquired over shipping. The result was that trade was carried on in
naval vessels, some of which had originally been built as merchantmen and
others as men-of-war. There were frequent complaints of non-delivery
from the business community, both on the spot and in England. But
'defence was more important than opulence,' and the burden was, on the
whole, cheerfully borne by the Loyalists. In 1793 twenty-six vessels
cleared from Kingston. Two years later a record trip was made by the
sloop _Sophia_, which sailed from there to Queenston, well over two
hundred miles, in eighteen hours. Two years later again a traveller
counted sixty wagons carrying goods from Queenston, beyond the other end
of Lake Ontario, to Chippawa, so as to get them past Niagara Falls.
Anywhere west from Montreal the unit of measurement for all freight was a
barrel of rum, the transport charge for which was over three dollars as
far as Kingston, where it was trans-shipped from the bateau to a schooner.
There was very little shipping on Lake Erie {73} till after the War of
1812. The first American vessel launched in these waters had a curious
history. After a season's work in 1797 she was carted past Niagara and
launched on Lake Ontario, where she plied between Queenston and Kingston
under the British flag with the name of _Lady Washington_. The rival
Hudson's Bay and North-West Companies each had a few boats on the western
Lakes at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and the government
maintained there a tiny flotilla of its own. But shipping was a very
small affair west of Niagara for several years to come.
While the War of 1812 killed out the feeble trade on the Lakes, it
greatly stimulated the well-established trade in sea-going craft from
Quebec and the Maritime Provinces. The British command of the sea had
become so absolute by 1814 that the whole American coast was practically
sealed to trade, which was thus forced to seek an 'underground' outlet by
way of Canada, in spite of the state of war. This, in addition to the
transport required by the British forces in Canada, sent freights and
tonnage up by leaps and bounds. The only trouble was to find enough
ships and, harder still, enough men.
Canadian sailing craft in the nineteenth {74} century had a chequered
career. Many disturbing factors affected the course of trade: the
cholera of '32; the Rebellion of '37; the Ship Fever of '47; the great
gold finds in California in '49 and in Australia in '53; Reciprocity with
the United States in '54; Confederation in '67; the triumph of steam and
steel in the seventies; and the era of inland development which began in
the eighties.
The heyday of the Canadian sailing ship was the third quarter of the
nineteenth century. This period, indeed, was one of great activity in
the history of mast and sail all the world over. There was intense
rivalry between steam and sail. The repeal of the Navigation Act in
England had brought the whole of British shipping into direct competition
with foreigners. The Americans were pushing their masterful way into
every sea. The rush to California was drawing eager fleets of Yankee,
Bluenose, and St Lawrence vessels round the Horn. India, China, and
Australia were drawing other fleets round the Cape. The American
clippers threatened to oust the slower 'Britishers' and throw the
comparatively minor Canadians into the shade. For the first and only
time in history American tonnage actually began to threaten British
supremacy. {75} But the challenge was met in the proper way, by building
to beat on even terms. The British had already regained their lead
before the Civil War of the sixties; and the subsequent inland
development of the United States, with the momentous change from wood and
sails to steel and steam, combined to depress the American mercantile
marine in favour of its British rival.
Canada played a great part in this brief but stirring era, when the
wooden sailing vessel was making its last gallant stand against steam,
and the sun of its immemorial day was going down in a blaze of glory
which will never fade from the memories of those who love the sea.
Canada built ships, sailed ships, owned ships, and sold ships. She
became one of the four greatest shipping centres in the world; and this
at a time when she had less than half as many people and less than
one-tenth as much realized wealth as she has now. Quebec had more than
half its population dependent on shipbuilding in the fifties and sixties.
In 1864 it launched sixty vessels, many of them between one and two
thousand tons. About the same time Nova Scotia launched nearly three
hundred vessels and New Brunswick half as many. The Nova Scotians,
however, only averaged two {76} hundred tons, and the New Brunswickers
four hundred. If the Lakes, Prince Edward Island, the rest of Canada,
and Newfoundland are added in, the total tonnage built in the best single
year is found to be close on a quarter of a million. Allowing for the
difference in numbers of the respective populations, this total compares
most favourably with the highest recent totals built in the British
Isles, where the greatest shipbuilding the world has ever seen is now
being carried on.
It was the change from wood to metal that caused the decline of
shipbuilding in Canada. It was also partly the change to steam; but only
partly, for Canada started well in the race for building steamships.
What proves that the disuse of wood was the real cause of the decline is
the fact that Canada never even attempted to compete with other countries
in building metal sailing vessels. If Canada had developed her metal
industries a generation sooner she would have had steel clippers running
against 'Yankees,' 'Britishers,' and German 'Dutchmen'; for there was a
steel-built sailing-ship age that lasted into the twentieth century and
that is not really over yet. Indeed, even wooden and composite sailers
are still at work; and with their steel comrades {77} they still make a
very large fleet. Singular proof of this is sometimes found. Nothing
collects sailing ships like a calm; vessels run into it from all quarters
and naturally remain together till the breeze springs up. But, even so,
most readers will probably be surprised to learn that, only a few years
ago, a great calm off the Azores collected a fleet of nearly three
hundred sail.
Canadian shipbuilders had some drawbacks to contend with. One was of
their own making. Certain builders in the Maritime Provinces, especially
at Pictou and in Prince Edward Island, turned out such hastily and ill
constructed craft as to give 'Bluenoses' a bad name in the market. By
1850, however, the worst offenders were put out of business, and there
was an increasing tendency for the builders to sail their own vessels
instead of selling them.
A second, and this time a general, drawback was the difficulty of getting
Canadian-built vessels rated A1 at Lloyd's. 'Lloyd's,' as every one
knows, is the central controlling body for most of the marine insurance
of the world, and its headquarters are in London. There were very few
foreign 'Lloyd's' then, and no colonial; so it was a serious matter when
the {78} English Lloyd's looked askance at anything not built of oak.
Canada tried her own oak; but it was outclassed by the more slowly
growing and sounder English oak. Canada then fell back on tamarac, or
'hackmatac,' as builders called it. This was much more buoyant than oak,
and consequently freighted to advantage. But it was a soft wood, and
Lloyd's was slow to rate it at its proper worth. Tamarac hulls went
sound for twenty years, and sometimes forty, especially when hardwood
treenails were used--a treenail being a bolt that did the service of a
nail in woodwork or a rivet in steel plating. At first Canadian vessels
were only rated Al for seven years, as compared with twelve for those
built of English oak. A year was added for hardwood treenails, and
another for 'salting on the stocks.' In 1852 Lloyd's sent out its own
surveyor, Menzies, who would guarantee work done under his own eye for
twenty-five cents a ton; while Lloyd's, for its part, would give
preferential rates to any vessels thus 'built under special survey.'
Perhaps Canadian timber is not as lasting as the best European.
Certainly it has no such records of longevity; though there is no reason
why Canadian records should not be better than they are in this respect.
Few {79} people know how long a well-built and well-cared-for ship can
live. Lloyd's register for 1913 contains vessels launched before Queen
Victoria began to reign. Merchantmen have often outlived their century.
Nelson's _Victory_ still flies the flag at Portsmouth, though she was
laid down the year before Wolfe took Quebec. And the _Konstanz_, a
thirty-five-ton sloop, still plies along the Danish coast, although her
launch took place in 1723--a hundred and ninety years ago.
A third drawback for Canadian builders was the lack of capital.
Shipbuilding fluctuates more than most kinds of business, and requires
great initial outlay as well; so failures were naturally frequent. The
firm of Ross at Quebec did much to steady the business by sound finance.
But the smaller yards were always in difficulties, and no shipbuilder
ever made a fortune.
Excellent craft, however, came out of Canadian yards: notable craft
wherever they sailed. One of the best builders at Quebec was a French
Canadian, whose beautiful clipper ship _Brunelle_, named after himself,
logged over fourteen knots an hour and left many a smart sailer, and
steamer too, hull down astern. Mackenzie of Pictou was builder and {80}
skipper both. With the help of a friend he began by cutting down the
trees and doing all the rest of the work of building a forty-five-ton
schooner. By 1850 he had built a fourteen-hundred-tonner, the famous
_Hamilton Campbell Kidston_, which greatly astonished Glasgow, for she
was then the biggest ship the Clyde had ever seen. His last ship was
launched in the 'record' year of 1865. The Salter Brothers did some fine
work at the 'Bend,' as Moncton was then called. Their first vessel, a
barque of eight hundred tons, was sold at once in England. Next year
they built a clipper ship called the _Jemsetgee Cursetgee_ for an East
Indian potentate, who sent out an Oriental figurehead supposed to be a
likeness of himself. A peculiar feat of theirs was rigging as a schooner
and sending across the Atlantic a scow-like coal barge ordered by a firm
in England.
The decline of Canadian sailing craft was swifter than its rise; and with
the sailing craft went the Canadian-built steamers, because wood was the
material used for both, and the use of iron and steel in the yards of the
British Isles soon drove the wooden hulls from the greater highways of
the sea. Once the palmy days of the third quarter of the century were
{81} over the decline went on at an ever-increasing rate. In 1875 Canada
built nearly 500 vessels, and, if small craft are included, the tonnage
must have nearly reached 200,000. In 1900 she built 29 vessels, of 7751
tons--steam, steel, wood, and sail. Shipowning does not show such a
dramatic contrast, but the decline has been very marked. Within
twenty-two years, from 1878 to 1900, the Canadian registered tonnage was
almost exactly halved. The drop was from a grand total, sail and steam
together, of a million and a third, which then made Canada the fourth
shipowning country in the world and put her ahead of many nations with
more than ten times her population.
{82}
CHAPTER VI
SAILING CRAFT: THE BUILDING OF THE SHIP
Shipbuilding was and is a very complex industry. But only the actual
construction can be noticed here, and that only in the briefest general
way. The elaborate methods of European naval yards were not in vogue
anywhere in Canada, not even in Quebec, much less in Nova Scotia. It
was not uncommon for a Bluenose crew to make everything themselves,
especially in the smaller kinds of vessels. They would cut the trees,
draft the plan, build the ship and sail her: being thus lumbermen,
architects, builders, and seamen all in one. The first step in
building is to lay the blocks on which the keel itself is laid. These
blocks are short, thick timbers, arranged in graduated piles, so that
they form an inclined plane of over one in twenty, from which the
completed hull can slide slowly into the water, stern first. Then
comes the laying of the keel, that part which is to the whole vessel
what {83} the backbone is to a man. A false keel is added to the
bottom of this in order to increase its depth and consequent grip.
This prevents the side drift which is called making leeway. The false
keel is only fastened to the keel itself from underneath, because such
a fastening is strong enough to resist water pressure and weak enough
to allow of detachment in case of grounding. The slight projection of
the keel itself then gives too little purchase for a dangerous amount
of leverage on the frame. A long keel is made up of several pieces of
square timber, with their ends shaped into scarfs, an overlapping and
interlocking arrangement of great strength. The foremost keel piece is
scarfed into the stem, which is the fore-end of the vessel's bow. The
aftermost keel piece joins the stern-post, on which the rudder hangs.
Elm makes a good keel, especially with oak for stem and stern-post.
The frame, to pursue our simile, is to the ship what ribs are to our
bodies. In the same way the planking is the skin. The frame, or ribs,
determines the vessel's form. There were, and still are, many
varieties of frame. In a very small vessel there are very few timbers.
The keel is probably all in one piece, and the planks may possibly run
from stem {84} to stern without a break. In this case the unity of
each piece supplies enough longitudinal resistance to strains. But
when a vessel is large, and more especially when she is long, the
strains known as hogging and sagging are apt to rack her timbers apart.
A ship is not built for mere passive resistance, like a house, or even
for resistance only to pressures and vibrations, like a bridge. She is
built to resist every imaginable strain of pitching and rolling, and so
requires architectural skill of a far higher kind than is required (in
the constructional, not the aesthetic, sense) for any structure on the
land. When a ship is on the top of a single wave she tends to hog,
because there is much less support for her ends than for her centre,
and so her ends dip down, racking her upper and compressing her lower
parts amidships. When the seas are shorter she often has her ends much
more waterborne than her centre, and this in spite of the fact that the
extreme ends are not naturally waterborne themselves. Then she sags,
and the strains of racking and compressing are reversed, because her
centre tends to sink and her ends to rise. Now, a series of hogging
and sagging strains alternately compresses and opens every resisting
join in every {85} timber, with the inevitable result of loosening the
whole. To meet these strains longitudinal strength must be supplied.
The keel supplies much of it, so does the planking (or skin) to a
lesser degree; but not enough; and the ribs, by themselves, are for
transverse stiffening only. Four means are therefore employed to hold
the parts together lengthwise--keelsons, shelf-pieces, fillings, and
some form of truss.
The keelson is an inverted keel inside the vessel. The floors, which
are the timbers uniting the two sides of the frame (or ribs), are given
a middle seating on the keel. The keelson is then placed over them,
exactly in line with the keel, when bolts as long as the thickness of
all three are used to unite the whole in one solid backbone, and this
backbone with the ribs. Side or 'sister' keelsons were used in the
Navy on either side of the mainmast for a distance equal to about a
third of the length of the keelson. But they were little used in
merchant vessels, and their longitudinal resistance was only partial
and incidental. Shelf-pieces and waterways were adapted from French
models by Sir Robert Seppings, who became chief constructor to the Navy
some years after Trafalgar. They are thick timbers running
continuously under and {86} over the junctions of the deck beams with
the ship's sides, to both of which they are securely fastened.
The keelson was an old invention and shelf-pieces and waterways were
soon in vogue. But fillings and trusses, both expensive improvements,
were not much favoured in any mercantile marine. The truss is even
older than the keelson, having been used by the ancient Egyptians at
least thirty-five centuries ago, and probably earlier. Four to eight
pillars rose in crutches from the bottom amidships to about six feet
above the gunwale. The Egyptians ran a rope over the crutches and
round the mast, and then used its ends to brace up the stem and stern.
The moderns discarded the rope, took the strains on connecting timbers,
and modified the truss, sometimes out of recognition. But many
Canadian and American river steamers of the twentieth century A.D.
employ the same principle for the same object as the Egyptians of the
seventeenth century B.C. Fillings came from the French, like
shelf-pieces and waterways. Seppings put them between the ribs, in the
form of thick timbers. The whole frame thus became almost solid
against any tendency of the ribs to close together, and quite strong
{87} enough against their other tendency to draw apart.
All means that strengthen a well-built hull longitudinally have also
been made to add their quota to its transverse strength. The ribs
spring from the solid mass of their own floors bolted in between the
keelson and the keel; and the planking, or skin, is let into the
rabbets, or side grooves, of the keel and firmly fastened to the ribs
throughout by hardwood pegs called treenails. The decks are, in
themselves, a source of weakness. The beams supporting them are like
the rafters of a house, which, of course, work the walls apart under
pressure from the floors--and here, as in every other detail, the
stability required for a house is nothing to what is required for a
ship. The way to overcome this difficulty is to make the decks and
beams so many bridges holding the sides together. At the point of
junction of every beam-end with a shelf-piece, waterway, and rib there
is an arrangement of bolts and dowellings (or dovetailings) which makes
the whole as solid as possible. An extra bolt through the waterway,
rib, and outside planking adds to the strength; and a knee, or angular
piece of wood or iron connecting the shelf with the under side of the
beam, almost completes the {88} beam-end connection. The final touches
are the clamps below the shelves and the spirketing above the
waterways, with short-stuff between the clamps of one deck and the
spirketing of the next below.
All this is only the merest suggestion of what is done for the main
part of the vessel's hull. The ends require many modifications,
because the shape there approaches a V, and so the floors cannot cross
the keel as holding bodies. But the breast-hooks forward and crutches
aft, the deck transom, which is the foundation for the deck abaft as
well as the assemblage of timbers uniting the stern to the body of the
vessel, with all the other parts that make up the ends, cannot be more
than mentioned here. Then come the decks, which are quite complex in
themselves, and still more complex by reason of the mast-holes and
hatchways cut out of them all, and the windlass, bitts, and capstan
built into the one that is exposed to the storm. To make sure that
whatever strength is taken out by cutting is restored in some other
way, and that the exposed deck which has to resist the strains put upon
the structures built into it is specially reinforced, the most careful
provision must be made for the mast-holes; for the hatchways {89} with
their coamings fore and aft on carlings that reach from beam to beam;
for the riding bitts, which are posts to hold the cable when the vessel
is at anchor, and which must therefore be immensely strong; for the
windlass, which in the merchant service often did the double duty of
the bitts and capstan; and for a multiplicity of other parts.
A landsman could hardly believe what a marvellous adjustment of
co-operating parts is required for a ship unless he actually watches
its construction. He will then understand why it is by far the most
wonderful structure man has ever built throughout all the ages of his
evolution. It represents his first success in mastering an element not
his own; and, whatever the future may see in the way of aviation, the
priority of seamanship will always remain secure by thousands and
thousands of known and unknown years.
But we are still no farther than a few parts of the hull. There is the
stepping of the masts, with their heels set firm and square above the
keel, and their rake 'right plim' throughout. Then there is the whole
of the rigging--a perfect maze to look at, though an equally perfect
device to use; the sails, which require the most highly expert
workmanship to make; {90} the rudder, and many other essentials.
Finally, there is all that is needed in every well-found vessel which
is 'fit to go foreign.' No vessel would go far unless its under-water
parts were either sheathed, tarred, or tallowed; for sea-worms burrow
alarmingly, and 'whiskers' grow like the obnoxious weeds they are.
These particulars, of course, leave many important gaps in the process.
Then the hull has to be transferred from the inclined plane of block
piles, on which it was built, to a cradle, on which it moves down the
sliding-ways into the water.
When everything is ready, the christening of the ship takes place. A
bottle of wine is broken against her bows and her name is pronounced by
some distinguished person in a formula which varies more or less, but
which is generally some version of the good old English benediction:
'God bless the Dreadnought and all who sail in her.' No matter what
the name may be, the ship herself is always 'she.' Many ingenious and
mistaken explanations have been given of this supposedly female 'she.'
The schoolboy 'howler' on the subject is well known: 'All ships are
"she" except mail boats and men-of-war.' Had this schoolboy known a
very little more he might {91} have added jackass brigs to his list of
male exceptions. The real explanation may possibly be that the English
still spoken at sea is, in some ways, centuries older than the English
spoken on land, and that the nautical 'she' comes down to us from the
ancient days in which all inanimate objects were endowed with life in
everyday speech and neuters were as yet unknown.
Immediately this most stirring ceremony ceases, the stentorian order
comes to 'Down dog-shore!' on which the dog-shore trigger is touched
off, the dog-shores fall, an awakening quiver runs through the
sliding-ways and cradle; and then the whole shapely vessel, still
facing the land from which she gets her being, moves majestically into
the water, where her adventurous life begins.
{92}
CHAPTER VII
SAILING CRAFT: 'FIT TO GO FOREIGN'
We will suppose that the ship is complete in hull, successfully
launched, and properly rigged and masted. The two questions still
remaining are: what is her crew like, and how does she sail?
The typical British North American crew of the nineteenth-century
sailing ship is the Bluenose crew. Newfoundlanders were too busy
fishing in home waters, though some of them did ship to go foreign and
others sailed their catch to market. Quebeckers built ships, but
rarely sailed them; while the Pacific coast had no shipping to speak
of. Thus the Bluenoses had the field pretty well to themselves.
Bluenoses were so called because the fog along the Nova Scotian and New
Brunswick coast was supposed to make men's noses bluer than it did
elsewhere. The name was generally extended by outsiders to all sorts
of British North Americans; and, of course, was also applied {93} to
any vessel, as well as any crew, that hailed from any port in British
North America, because a vessel is commonly called by the name of the
people that sail her. 'There's a Bluenose,' 'that's a Yankee,' 'look
at that Dago,' or 'hail that Dutchman' apply to ships afloat as well as
to men ashore. And here it might be explained that 'Britisher'
includes anything from the British Isles, 'Yankee' anything flying the
Stars and Stripes, 'Frenchie' anything hailing from France, 'Dago'
anything from Italy, Spain, or Portugal, and 'Dutchman' anything manned
by Hollanders, Germans, Norsemen, or Finns, though Norwegians often get
their own name too. A 'chequer-board' crew is one that is half white,
half black, and works in colour watches.
[Illustration: SHIP _BATAVIA_, 2000 TONS. Built by F.-X. Marquis at
Quebec, 1877. Lost on Inaccessible Island, 1879. From a picture
belonging to Messrs Ross and Co., Quebec.]
Hard things have often been said of Bluenose crews. Like other general
sayings, some of them are true and some of them false. But, mostly,
each of them is partly true and partly false: and--'circumstances alter
cases.' The fact is, that life aboard a Bluenose was just what we
might expect from crews that lived a comparatively free-and-easy life
ashore in a sparsely settled colony, and a very strenuous life afloat
in ships which depended, like all ships, on disciplined effort for both
success {94} and safety. When national discipline is not very strong
ashore it has to be enforced by hook or by crook afloat. The general
public never bothered its head much about seamen's rights or wrongs in
a rather 'hard' new country managing its own maritime affairs. So
there certainly were occasional 'hell ships' among the Bluenoses,
though very rarely except when there were Bluenose officers with a
foreign crew.
This was quite in accordance with the practice all along the coast of
North America. Even aboard the famous Black Ball Line of Yankee
transatlantic packets in the forties there was plenty of 'handspike
hash' and 'belaying-pin soup' for shirkers or mutineers. The men
before the mast were mostly foreigners and riff-raff Britishers; very
few were Yankees or Bluenoses. Discipline had to be maintained; and it
was maintained by force. But these were not the real hell ships.
'Hell ships' were commonest among deepwatermen on long voyages round
the Horn, or among the whalers when the best class of foremast hands
were not to be had. Many of them are much more recent than is
generally known; and even now they are not quite extinct. 'Black
Taylor,' 'Devil Summers,' and 'Hell-fire {95} Slocum' are well within
living memory. Black Taylor came to a befitting end. Because the rope
surged at the capstan he kicked the nearest man down, and was jumping
to stamp his ribs in, when the man suddenly whipped out his knife and
ripped Black Taylor up with a New Orleans nigger trick-twist for which
he got six months, though really deserving none.
But such mates and skippers always were exceptions; and, as a general
rule, no better crews and vessels have ever sailed the sea than the
Yankees at their prime. Their splendid clippers successfully
challenged the slower Britishers on every trade route in the world. At
the very time that the _America_ was beating British yachts hull-down,
the old British East Indiamen were still wallowing along with eighty
hands to a thousand tons, while a Yankee thousand-tonner could sail
them out of sight with forty. The British excuse was that East
Indiamen required a fighting crew as well as a trading one, and that
British vessels were built to last, not simply put together to make one
flashy record. But after the Napoleonic wars the British Navy could
police the world of waters; so double numbers were no longer needed;
and if East {96} Indiamen were built to last, how was it they only went
an average of six times out and six times home before being broken up?
Nor was it only in speed that the Yankees were so far ahead. They paid
better wages, they gave immeasurably better food, they were smarter to
look at and smarter to go, their rigging was tauter, their sails better
cut and ever so much flatter on a wind, their cargo more quickly and
scientifically stowed, and, most important point of all, their
discipline quite excellent. Woe betide the cook or steward whose
galley or saloon had a speck of dirt that would make a smudge on the
skipper's cleanest cambric handkerchief! It was the same all through,
from stem to stern and keel to truck, from foremast hand to skipper.
Aboard the best clippers the system was well-nigh perfect. Each man
had found, or had the chance of finding, the position for which he was
most fit. The best human combination of head and heart and hand was
sure to come to the top. The others would also find their own
appropriate levels. But shirkers, growlers, flinchers, and mutineers
were given short shrift. The officers were game to the death and never
hesitated to use handspikes, fists, or firearms whenever the occasion
required it. {97} As for sea-lawyers--the canting equivalent of
ranting demagogues ashore--they could hardly have got a hearing among
any first-rate crew. No admiralissimo ever was a greater hero to a
junior midshipman than the best Yankee skippers were to the men before
the mast. There's no equalitarian nonsense out at sea.
This digression springs from and returns to the main argument; because
the Yankee excellence is so little understood and sometimes so
grudgingly acknowledged by British and foreign landsmen, and because
Bluenose and Yankee circumstances and practice were so much alike.
Britishers were different in nearly all their natural circumstances,
while, to increase the difference, their practice became greatly
modified by a deal of good but sometimes rather lubberly legislation.
And yet all three--Britisher, Bluenose, and Yankee--are so inextricably
connected with each other that it is quite impossible to understand any
one of them without some reference to the other two.
Bluenose discipline was good, very good indeed. When the whole ship's
company was Bluenose discipline was partly instinctive and mostly went
well, as it generally did when Yankees and Bluenoses sailed together.
The whole population of the little home {98} port--men, women, and
children--knew every vessel's crew and all about them. The men were
farmers, fishermen, lumbermen, shipbuilders, and 'deepwatermen,' often
all in one. Among other peoples, only Scandinavians ever had such an
all-round lot as this. Even in the present century, with its
increasing multiformity of occupation, books full of nauticalities can
be read and understood in these countries by everybody, though such
books cannot be read elsewhere except by the seafaring few. Business
meant ships or shipping; so did politics, peace and war, adventure and
ambition.
But there is a different tale to tell when the tonnage outran the
Bluenose ability to man it, and Dutchmen, Dagos, miscellaneous
wharf-rats, and 'low-down' Britishers had to be taken on instead. If
the crew was mixed and the officers Bluenose there was sure to be
trouble of graduated kinds, all the way up from simple knock-downs to
the fiercest gun-play of a real hell ship. The food was inferior to
that aboard the Yankees. But in discipline there was nothing to
choose. An all-Bluenose or all-Yankee sometimes came as near the
perfection of seamanship and discipline as anything human possibly can.
But aboard a mixed Bluenose the rule of bend or break {99} was enforced
without the slightest reference to what was regarded as landlubber's
law. The Britisher's Board of Trade regulations were regarded with
contempt; and not without reason; for, excellent as they were, they
struck the Bluenose seamen as being an interference made solely in the
supposed interests of the men against the officers.
The mistake was that the old injustices were repeated in a new way.
Formerly the law either sided with the officers and owners or left them
alone; now it either sided with the men or left the officers and owners
in the lurch. The true balance was not restored. Here is a thoroughly
typical instance of the difference between a Britisher and a Bluenose
under the new dispensation. The second mate of a Britisher asked for
his discharge at Bombay because he could not manage the men, who had
shirked disgracefully the whole way out. The skipper got a good
Bluenose for his new second mate. The first day the Bluenose came
aboard one of the worst shirkers slung a bucket carelessly, cut the
deck, and then proceeded to curse the ship and all who sailed in her,
as he had been accustomed to do under the Britisher. The Bluenose mate
simply said, 'See here, just shut your head or I'll {100} shut it for
you,' on which the skulker answered by threatening to 'cut his chicken
liver out.' In a flash the Bluenose had him naped, slung, and flying
across the rail. A second man rushed in, only to be landed neatly on
the chin and knocked limp against the scuppers. The rest of the watch,
roused by this unwonted assertion of authority, came on, but stopped
short, snarling, when the Bluenose swung an iron bar from the windlass
in a way that showed he knew how to handle it effectively. The skipper
and mate now appeared, and, seeing a clear case of actual fight, at
once ranged themselves beside the capable Bluenose. The watch, a mixed
lot, then slunk off; and, from that day out, the whole tone of the ship
was changed, very much for the better.
It is pleasanter, however, to take our last look at a Bluenose vessel,
under sail, with Bluenose skipper, mates, and crew, and a Bluenose
cargo, all complete. But a word must first be said about other parts
and other craft, lest the Maritime-Province Bluenose might be thought
the only kind of any consequence. There were, and still are, swarms of
small craft in Canada and Newfoundland which belong mostly or entirely
to the fisheries, and which, therefore, will be noticed in another
{101} chapter. The schooners along the different coasts, up the lower
St Lawrence, and round the Lakes; the modern French-Canadian sailing
bateaux; the transatlantic English brigs that still come out to
Labrador; the many Britishers and Yankees that used to come to Bluenose
harbours and to Quebec; the foreigners that come there still; and the
host of various miscellaneous little vessels everywhere--all these are
by no means forgotten. But only one main thread of the whole historic
yarn can be followed here.
Before starting we might perhaps remember what a sailing vessel cannot
do, as well as what she can, when the proper men are there and
circumstances suit her. She is helpless in a calm. She needs a tow in
crowded modern harbours or canals. She can only work against the wind
in a laborious zigzag, and a very bad gale generally puts her
considerably off her course. But, on the other hand, she could beat
all her best records under perfect modern conditions of canvas,
scientific metal hull, and crew; and the historic records she actually
has made are quite as surprising as they are little known. Few people
realize that 'ocean records' are a very old affair, even in Canada,
where they begin with Champlain's voyage of {102} eighteen days from
Honfleur to Tadoussac and end with King George V's sixty-seven hours
from land to land, when he speeded home in H.M.S. _Indomitable_ from
Champlain's tercentenary at Quebec in 1908, handling his shovel in the
stokehole by the way.
Here are some purely sailing records worth remembering. A Newfoundland
schooner, the _Grace Carter_, has sailed across to Portugal, sold her
fish there, gone to Cadiz for all the salt that she could carry, and
then reported back in Newfoundland within the month. A Canadian
schooner yacht, the _Lasca_, has crossed easterly, the harder way, in
twelve days from the St Lawrence. In 1860 the Yankee _Dreadnought_
made the Atlantic record by going from Sandy Hook to Liverpool in nine
days and seventeen hours, most of the time on the rim of a hurricane.
Six years later the most wonderful sea race in history was run when
five famous clippers started, almost together, from the Pagoda
Anchorage at Fu-chau for the East India Docks in London. This race was
an all-British one, as the civil war, the progress of steam everywhere
except in the China trade, and the stimulus of competition, had now
given Britishers the lead in the East, while putting them on an even
footing with Yankees in the {103} West. The course was sixteen
thousand miles; the prize was the world's championship in
clipper-racing. Three ships dropped considerably astern. But the
_Ariel_ and _Taeping_ raced up the Channel side by side, took in their
pilots at the same time, and arrived within eight minutes of each
other. The _Ariel_ arrived first; but the _Taeping_ won, as she had
left twenty minutes later. The total time was ninety-nine days. A
very different, but still more striking, record is the longest daily
run ever made entirely under sail. This was, in one sense at least, an
Anglo-American record; for the ship, appropriately called the
_Lightning_, was built by that master craftsman, Donald M'Kay of
Boston, and sailed by a British crew. She made no less than 436 sea
miles, or 502 statute miles, within the twenty-four hours.
There are no individual Bluenose rivals of these mighty champions. But
the Bluenoses more than held their own, all round, in any company and
on any sea. So it is well worth our while to end this story of a
thousand years--from the Vikings till to-day--by going aboard a
Bluenose vessel with a Bluenose crew when both were at their prime.
The _Victoria_ is manned by the husbands, fathers, sons, and brothers
of the place where {104} she was built. Her owners are the leaders of
the little neighbourhood, and her cargo is home-grown. She carries no
special carpenter and sailmaker, like a Britisher, because a Bluenose
has an all-round crew, every man of which is smart enough, either with
the tools or with the fid and palm and needle, for ordinary work, while
some are sure to be equal to any special job. She of course carries
two suits of canvas, her new best and older second best. Each sail has
required more skill than tailors need to make a perfect fit in clothes,
because there is a constant strain on sails, exceeding, if possible,
the strains on every other part. But before sail is made her anchor is
hove short, that is, the ship is drawn along by her cable till her bows
are over it. 'Heave and she comes!' 'Heave and she must!' 'Heave and
bust her!' are grunted from the men straining at the longbars of the
capstan, which winds the tightening cable in. 'Click, click, clickety,
click' go the pawls, which drop every few inches into cavities that,
keeping them from slipping back, prevent the capstan from turning the
wrong way when the men pause to take breath. 'Break out the mud-hook!'
and a tremendous combined effort ensues. Presently a sudden welcome
slack {105} shows that the flukes have broken clear. The anchor is
then hove up, catted, and fished.
'All hands make sail!' sings out the mate. The wind is nicely on the
starboard quarter, that is, abaft the beam and forward of the stern,
which gives the best chance to every sail. A wind dead aft, blanketing
more than half the canvas, is called a lubber's wind. A soldier's wind
is one which comes square on the beam, and so makes equally plain
sailing out and back again. What sail a full-rigged ship can carry!
The Yankee _Great Republic_ could spread nearly one whole acre of
canvas to the breeze. Another Yankee, the _R. C. Rickmers_, the
largest sailing vessel in the world to-day, exceeds this. But her
tonnage is much greater, more than eleven thousand gross, and her rig
is entirely different. A full-rigged clipper ship might have
twenty-two square sails, though it was rare to see so many. In
addition she would have studding-sails to wing her square sails farther
out. Then, there were the triangular jibs forward and the triangular
staysails between the masts, with the quadrangular spanker like an
aerial rudder on the lower mizzenmast. All the nine staysails would
have the loose lower corner made fast to a handy place on deck by a
sheet {106} (or rope) and the fore and aft points connected by the
stays to the masts, the fore point low and the aft high. This is not
the nautical way of saying it. But 'points' and 'corners' and other
homely land terms sometimes save many explanations which, in their
turn, lead on to other explanations.
The heads of square sails are made fast to yards, which are at right
angles to the masts on which they pivot. Sails and yards are raised,
lowered, swung at the proper angle to catch the wind, and held in place
by halliards, lifts, braces, and sheets, which can be worked from the
deck. Sheets are ropes running from the lower corners of sails. All
upper sails have their sheets running through sheave-holes in the
yardarms next below, then through quarter-blocks underneath these yards
and beside the masts, and then down to the deck. Braces are the ropes
which swing the yards to the proper angle. Halliards are those which
hoist or lower both the yards and sails. The square sails themselves
are controlled by drawlines called clew-garnets running up from the
lower corners, leechlines running in diagonally from the middle of the
outside edges, buntlines running up from the foot, and spilling lines,
to spill the wind in heavy {107} weather. When the area of a sail has
to be reduced, it is reefed by gathering up the head, if a square sail,
or the foot, if triangular, and tying the gathered-up part securely by
reef points, that is, by crossing and knotting the short lines on
either side of this part. The square sails on the mainmast are called,
when eight are carried, the mainsail, lower and upper maintopsails,
lower and upper maintopgallants, main-royal, main-skysail, and the
moonsail. The standing rigging is the whole assemblage of ropes by
which the masts are supported.
These few words are very far from being a technically full, or even
quite precise, description. But, taken with what was previously said
about the hull, they will give a better general idea than if the reader
was asked to make a realizable whole out of a mazy bewilderment
embracing every single one of all the multitudinous parts.
'All hands make sail!' Up go some to loose the sails aloft, while
others stay on deck to haul the ropes that hoist the sails to the
utmost limit of the canvas. The jibs and spanker generally go up at
once, because they are useful as an aid to steering. The staysails
generally wait. The jibs and staysails are triangular, the spanker a
quadrangular {108} fore-and-after. The square sails made fast to
wide-spreading yards are the ones that take most hauling. But setting
the sails by no means ends the work at them. Trimming is quite as
important. Every time there is the slightest shift in the course or
wind there ought to be a corresponding shift of trim so as to catch
every breath the sail can hold. To effect this with the triangular
sails a sheet must be slacked away or hauled more in; while, in the
case of the square sails on the yards, a brace must be attended to.
Our Bluenose mate now thinks he can get more work from his canvas. His
voice rings out: 'Weather crossjack brace!' which means hauling the
lowest and aftermost square sail more to windward. 'Weather crossjack
brace!' sings out the timekeeper, whose duty it is to rouse the watch
as well as strike the bells that mark the hours and halves. The watch
tramp off and lay on to the weather brace, the A.B.'s (or able-bodied
seamen) leading and the O.S.'s (ordinary seamen) at the tail. Some one
slacks off the lee braces and sings out 'Haul away!' Then the watch
proceed to haul, with weird, wild cries in minor keys that rise and
fall and rise again, like the long-drawn soughing of the wind itself.
{109} _Eh--heigh--o--az_! _Eh--heigh--ee_! _Eh--hugh_! In comes the
brace till the trim suits the mate, when he calls out 'Turn the
crossjack brace!' which means making it fast on a belaying pin. The
other braces follow. By the time the topgallant braces are reached
only two hands are needed, as the higher yards are naturally much
lighter than the lower ones.
Sheets and braces are very dangerous things to handle in a gale of
wind. Every movement of the rope must be closely watched with one
vigilant eye, while the other must be looking out for washing seas.
The slightest inattention to the belaying of a mainsheet while men are
hanging on may mean that it breaks loose just as the men expect it to
be fast, when away it goes, with awful suddenness and force, dragging
them clean overboard before their instinctive grip can be let go. The
slightest inattention to the seas may mean an equally fatal result.
Not once, nor twice, but several times, a whole watch has been washed
away from the fore-braces by some gigantic wave, and every single man
in it been drowned.
Squalls need smart handling. Black squalls are nothing, even when the
ship lays over till the lee rail's under a sluicing rush of broken
water. But a really wicked white squall {110} requires luffing, that
is, bringing her head so close to the wind that it will strike her at
the acutest angle possible without losing its pressure in the right
direction altogether. The officer of the watch keeps one eye to
windward, makes up his mind what sail he'll shorten, and then yells an
order that pierces the wind like a shot, 'Stand by your royal
halliards!' As the squall swoops down and the ship heels over to it he
yells again, 'Let go your royal halliards, clew 'em up and make 'em
fast!' Down come the yards, with hoarse roaring from the thrashing
canvas. But then, if no second squall is coming, the mate will cut the
clewing short with a stentorian 'Masthead the yards again!' on which
the watch lay on to the halliards and haul--_Ahay_! _Aheigh_!
_Aho--oh_! Up she goes!
The labour is lightened, as hand labour always has been lightened, by
singing to the rhythm of the work. The seaman's working songs are
chanties, a kind of homespun poetry which, once heard to its rolling
music and the sound of wind and wave, will always bring back the very
savour of the sea wherever it is heard again. There are thousands of
chanties in scores of languages, which, like the men who sing them,
have met and mingled all round the {111} world. They are the folklore
of a class apart, which differs, as landsmen differ, in ways and speech
and racial ambition, but which is also drawn together, as landsmen
never have been, by that strange blend of strife and communing with man
and nature which is only known at sea. They will not bear quotation in
cold print, where they are as pitiably out of place as an albatross on
deck. No mere reader can feel the stir of that grand old chanty
Hurrah! my boys, we're homeward bound!
unless he has heard it when all hands make sail on leaving port, and
the deck begins pulsating with the first throb of the swell that sets
in landward across the bar. And what can this chorus really mean to
any one who has never heard it roared by strong male voices to the
running accompaniment of seething water overside?
What ho, Piper! watch her how she goes!
Give her sheet and let her rip.
We're the boys to pull her through.
You ought to see her rolling home;
For she's the gal to go
In the passage home in ninety days
From Cal-i-for-ni-o!
But though you can no more wrest a chanty from its surroundings and
then pass it off as a {112} seaman's folk-song than you can take the
blue from the water or the crimson from the sunset, yet, as some
chanties have become so well known ashore, as others so richly deserve
to be known there, and as all are now being threatened with extinction,
perhaps a few may be mentioned in passing. _Away for Rio_! with its
wild, queer wail in the middle of its full-toned chorus, has always
been a great favourite afloat:
For we're bound for Rio Grande,
And away Rio! ay Rio!
Sing fare-ye-well, my bonny young girl,
We're bound for Rio Grande.
The _Wide Missouri_ is a magnificent song for baritones and basses on
the water:
Oh, Shenando'h, I love your daughter,
'Way-ho, the rolling river!
Oh, Shenando'h, I long to hear you,
'Way-ho, we're bound away,
Down the broad Missouri.
A famous capstan chanty is well known on land, whence, indeed, it
originally came:
And it's hame, dearie, hame; oh! it's hame I want to be.
My topsails are hoisted and I must out to sea;
But the oak and the ash and the bonnie birchen tree,
They're all a-growin' green in the North Countree.
--which is quite as appropriate to the _Nova {113} Scotia_ as to the
one beyond the North Atlantic. A favourite sail-setting chanty is
_Solo_. Haul on the bowlin', the fore and maintop bowlin'--
_Chorus_. Haul on the bowlin', the bowlin' haul!
A good pumping-out chanty after a storm is
_Solo_. Old Storm has heard the angel call.
_Chorus_. To my ay! Old Storm along!
_Reuben Ranzo_ is a grand one for a good long haul. The chorus comes
after every line, striking like a squall, with a regular roar on the
first word, Ranzo.
_Solo_. Hurrah for Reuben Ranzo!
_Chorus_. Ranzo, boys, Ranzo!
Ranzo's progress from a lubberly tailor to a good smart sailor is then
related with infinite variations, but always with the same gusto.
_Ranzo_ is only really popular afloat. But _Blow the man down_ is a
universal favourite.
_Solo_. Blow the man down, blow the man down,
_Chorus_. 'Way-ho! Blow the man down.
_Solo_. Blow the man down from Liverpool town;
_Chorus_. Give us some wind to blow the man down.
When every sail is set and every stitch is drawing, there is no finer
sight the sea can show. The towering masts; the canvas gleaming white,
with its lines of curving {114} beauty drawn by the touch of the wind;
the whole ship bounding forward as if just slipped from her leash--all
this makes a scene to stir the beholder then and for ever after. The
breeze pipes up. She's doing ten knots now; eleven, twelve; and later
on, fifteen. This puts the lee rail under; for she lays over on her
side so far that her deck is at a slope of forty-five. Her forefoot
cuts through the water like the slash of a scimitar; while her bows
throw out two seething waves, the windward one of which breaks into
volleying spray a-top and rattles down like hailstones on the fore-deck.
But next day the wind has hauled ahead, and she has to make her way by
tacking. She loses as little as possible on her zigzag course by
sailing close to the wind, that is, by pointing as nearly into it as
she can while still 'keeping a full on' every working sail. Presently
the skipper, having gone as far to one side of his straight course as
he thinks proper, gives the caution; whereupon the braces are taken off
the pins and coiled down on deck, all clear for running, while the
spanker-boom is hauled in amidships so that the spanker may feel the
wind and press the stern a-lee, which helps the bow to windward. Then
the 'old man' (called {115} so whatever his age may be) sings out at
the top of his voice, 'Ready, oh!' The helm is eased down on his
signal, so as not to lose way suddenly. When it is quite down he
shouts again, 'Helm's a-lee!' on which the fore and head sheets
(holding the sails attached to the foremast and bowsprit) are let go
and overhauled. The vessel swings round, the spanker pressing her
stern in one direction and the sails at the bows offering very little
resistance now their sheets are let go. The skipper's eye is on the
mainsail, which is the point of pivoting. Directly the wind is out of
it and it begins to shiver he yells, 'Raise tacks and sheets!' when,
except that the foretack is held a bit to prevent the foresail from
bellying aback, all the remaining ropes that held the ship on her old
tack are loosed. A roar of wind-waves rushes through the sails, and a
tremor runs through the whole ship from stem to stern. The skipper
waits for the first decided breath on her new tack and then shouts,
'Mainsail haul!' when the yards come swinging round so quickly that the
men can hardly take in the slack of the braces fast enough. The scene
of orderly confusion is now at its height. Every one hauling sings out
at the very top of his pipes. The sails are struggling to find their
{116} new set home; while the headsheets forward thrash about like mad
and thump their blocks against the deck with force enough to dash your
brains out.
Mates and boatswain work furiously, for the skipper's eye is searching
everywhere, and the skipper's angry words cut the delinquent like the
lash of a well-aimed whip. The boatswain forward has the worst of it,
for the restive sheets and headsails won't come to trim without a fight
when it's breezing up and seas are running. But presently all the
yards get rightly trimmed, tacks boarded, and bowlines hauled out taut.
She's on a bowline taut enough to please the old man now; that is, the
ropes leading forward from the middle of the forward edge of every
square sail are so straight that she is sailing as near the wind as she
can go and keep a full on. 'Go below, the watch!' and the men off duty
tramp down, the cook and boatswain with their 'oilies' streaming from
their scuffle with the flying spray and slapping dollops at the bows.
When a quartering trade wind is picked up sailing is at its easiest;
for a well-balanced suit of canvas will keep her bowling along night
and day with just the lightest of touches at the wheel. Then is the
time to bend her old sails {117} on; for, unlike a man, a ship puts on
her old suit for fair weather and her new suit for foul. Then, too, is
the time for dog-watch yarning, when pipes are lit without any fear of
their having to be crammed half-smoked into the nearest pocket because
all hands are called. Landsmen generally think that most watches
aboard a wind-jammer are passed in yarns and smoking. But this is far
from being the case. The mates and skipper keep everybody busy with
the hundred-and-one things required to keep a vessel shipshape:
painting, graining, brightening, overhauling the weak spots in the
rigging, working the 'bear' to clean the deck with fine wet sand,
helping whomever is acting as 'Chips' the carpenter, or the equally
busy 'Sails'; or 'doing Peggy' for 'Slush' the cook, who much prefers
wet grub to dry, slumgullion coffee to any kind of tea, ready-made hard
bread to ship-baked soft, and any kind of stodge to the toothsome
delights of dandyfunk and crackerhash. And all this is extra to the
regular routine, with its lamp-lockers, binnacles, timekeeping,
incessant look-out, and trick at the wheel. Besides, every man has to
look after his own kit, which he has to buy with his own money, and his
quarters, for which he alone is responsible. {118} So there is never
much time to spare, with watch and watch about, all through the voyage;
especially when all the ills that badly fed flesh is heir to on board a
deepwaterman incapacitate some hands, while falls from aloft and
various accidents knock out others.
The skipper, boatswain, cook, steward, Chips, and Sails keep no
watches, and hence are called 'the idlers,' a most misleading term, for
they work a good deal harder than their counterparts ashore; though the
mates and seamen often work harder still. There are seven watches in a
day, reckoned from noon to noon: five of four hours each and two of two
hours each. These two, the dog watches, are from four to six and six
to eight each afternoon. The crew are divided into port and starboard
watches, each under a mate. In Bluenose vessels the port watch was
always called by the old name of larboard watch till only the other
day. The starboard and larboard got their names because the starboard
was the side on which the steering oar was hung before the rudder was
invented, and the larboard was the side where the lading or cargo came
in.
Bluenoses have no use for nippers, as Britishers call apprentices. But
if they had, {119} and the reader was a green one, he would just about
begin to know the ropes and find his sea legs by the time that our
_Victoria_ had run her southing down to within another day's sail of
the foul-weather zone in the roaring forties round the Horn, which
seamen call 'Old Stiff.' Sails are shifted again, and the best new
suit is bent; for the coming gales have a clear sweep from the
Antarctic to the stormiest coast of all America, and the enormous,
grey-backed Cape Horners are the biggest seas in the world.
The best helmsmen are on duty now. Not even every Bluenose can steer,
any more than every Englishman can box or every Frenchman fence. There
are a dozen different ways of mishandling a vessel under sail. Let
your attention wander, and she'll run up into the wind and perhaps get
in irons, so that she won't cast either way. Let her fall off when
you're running free, and she'll broach to and get taken aback. Or
simply let her yaw about a bit instead of holding true, and you'll lose
a knot or two an hour. But do none of these careless things, observe
all the rules as well, and even then you will never make a helmsman
unless it's born in you. Steering is blown into you by the wind and
soaked into you by the water. And you must also have {120} that inborn
faculty of touch which tells you instinctively how to meet a vessel's
vagaries--and no two vessels are alike--as well as how to make her fall
in with all the humours of a wayward ocean.
The hungry great Antarctic wind comes swooping down. The _Victoria_
lays over to it, her forefoot slashing, her lee side hissing, the
windward rigging strained and screaming, and every stitch of canvas
drawing full. Still the skipper carries on. He and his vessel have a
name to keep up; and he has carried on till all was blue ere this, and
left more than one steam kettle panting. Every timber, plank, mast,
yard, and tackle wakes to new life and thrills in response to the
sails. She answers her helm quickly, eagerly. She rides the galloping
waters now as you ride her. And as she rises to each fresh wave you
also rise, with the same exultant spring, and take the leap in your
stride.
The wind pipes up: a regular gale is evidently brewing; and most of the
canvas must come off her now or else she'll soon be stripped of it.
'Stand by your royal halliards!' yells the second mate. 'Let go your
royal halliards!' The royals are down for good. The skysails have
been taken in before. Another {121} tremendous blast lays her far
over, and the sea is a lather of foam to windward. The skipper comes
on deck, takes a quick look round, and shouts at the full pitch of his
lungs: 'All hands shorten sail!' Up come the other watch in their
oilskins, which they have carefully lashed round their wrists and above
their knees to keep the water out. Taking in sail is no easy matter
now. Every one tails on, puts his back into it, and joins the chorus
of the hard-breathed chanty. The human voices sound like fitful
screams of seabirds, heard in wild snatches between the volleying
gusts; while overhead the sails are booming like artillery, as the
spilling lines strain to get the grip. 'Now then, starboard watch, up
with your sail and give the larboard watch a dressing down!' _Yo--ho_!
_Yo--hay_! _Yo--ho--oh_! Up she goes! A hiss, a crash, a deafening
thud, and a gigantic wave curls overhead and batters down the toiling
men, who hang on for their lives and struggle for a foothold. 'Up with
you!' yells the mate, directly the tangled coil of yellow-clad humanity
emerges like a half-drowned rat, 'Up with you, boys, and give her
hell!' _Yo--ho_! _To--hay_! _Yo--ho--harrhh_! 'Turn that!' 'All
fast, sir!' 'Aloft and roll her up! Now then, starbowlines, show
{122} your spunk!' Away they go, the mate dashing ahead; while the
furious seas shoot up vindictive tongues at them and nearly wash two
men clean off the rigging on a level with the lower topsails. Out on
the swaying yard, standing on the foot-rope that is strung underneath,
they grasp at the hard, wet, struggling canvas till they can pass the
gaskets round the parts still bellying between the buntlines. 'One
hand for the ship and one for yourself' is the rule aloft. But
exceptions are more plentiful than rules on a day like this. Both
hands must be used, though the sail and foot-ropes rack your body and
try their best to shake you off. If they succeed, a sickening thud on
deck, or a smothered scream and a half-heard _plopp_! overside would be
the end of you.
All hands work like fury, for a full Antarctic hurricane is on them.
This great South Polar storm has swept a thousand leagues, almost
unchecked, before venting its utmost rage against the iron coasts all
round the Horn. The South Shetlands have only served to rouse its
temper. Its seas have grown bigger with every mile from the Pole, and
wilder with every mile towards the Horn. Now they are so enormous that
even the truck of the tall Yankee clipper staggering along to {123}
leeward cannot be seen except when both ships are topping the crest.
Wherever you look there seems to be an endless earthquake of
mountainous waves, with spuming volcanoes of their own, and vast,
abysmal craters yawning from the depths. The _Victoria_ begins to
labour. The wind and water seem to be gaining on her every minute.
She groans in every part of her sorely racked hull; while up aloft the
hurricane roars, rings, and screeches through the rigging.
But suddenly there is a new and far more awful sound, which seems to
still all others, as a stupendous mother wave rears its huge, engulfing
bulk astern. On it comes, faster and higher, its cavernous hollow
roaring and its overtopping crest snarling viciously as it turns
forward, high above the poop. 'Hold on for your lives!' shout the
mates and skipper. They are not a moment too soon. The sails are
blanketed, and the ship seems as if she was actually being drawn, stern
first, into the very jaws of the sea. A shuddering pause . . . and
then, with a stunning crash, the whole devouring mass bursts full on
deck. The stricken _Victoria_ reels under the terrific shock, and then
lies dead another anxious minute, utterly helpless, her {124} deck
awash with a smother of foaming water, and her crew apparently drowned.
But presently her stern emerges through the dark, green-grey
after-shoulder of the wave. She responds to the lift of the mighty
barrel with a gallant effort to shake herself free. She rises,
dripping from stem to stern. Her sails refill and draw her on again.
And when the next wave comes she is just able to take it--but no more.
The skipper has already decided to heave to and wait for the storm to
blow itself out. But there is still too much canvas on her. Even the
main lower topsail has to come in. The courses, or lowest square
sails, have all come in before. The little canvas required for lying
to must neither be too high nor yet too low. If it is too high, it
gives the wind a very dangerous degree of leverage. If it is too low,
it violently strains the whole vessel by being completely blanketed
when in the trough of the sea and then suddenly struck full when on the
crest. The main lower topsail is at just the proper height. But only
the fore and mizzen ones are wanted to balance the pressure aloft. So
in it has to come. And a dangerous bit of work it gives; for it has to
be hauled up from right amidships, where the deck is wetter than a
{125} half-tide rock. The yellow-oilskinned crew tail on and heave.
_Yo--ho_! _Yo--hay_! 'Hitch it! Quick, for your lives, hang on,
all!' A mountainous wall of black water suddenly leaps up and crashes
through the windward rigging. The watch goes down to a man, some
hanging on to the rope as if suspended in the middle of a waterfall,
for the deck is nearly perpendicular, while others wash off altogether
and fetch up with a dazing, underwater thud against the lee side. Inch
by inch the men haul in, waist-deep most of the time and often
completely under. _Yo--ho_! _Yo--hay_! _harrhh_, and they all hold
breath till they can get their heads out again. _Yo--ho_! _Yo--hay_!
'In with her!' _Heigh--o--oh_! 'Turn that!' 'All fast!'
''Way aloft and roll her up quick!' The tossing crests are blown into
spindrift against the weather yardarm, while a pelting hailstorm stings
the wet, cold hands and faces. The men tear at the sail with their
numb fingers till their nails are bleeding. They hit it, pull it,
clutch at it for support. Certain death would follow a fall from
aloft; for the whole deck is hidden under a surging, seething mass of
water. You would swear the water's boiling if it wasn't icy cold. The
skipper's at the wheel, watching his {126} chance. There is no such
thing as a good chance now. But he sees one of some kind, just as the
men get the sail on the yard and are trying to make it fast. Down goes
the helm, and her head comes slowly up to the wind. 'She's doing
it---- No! Hang on, all! Great snakes, here comes a sea!' Struck
full, straight on her beam, by wind and sea together, the _Victoria_
lays over as if she would never stop. Over she heels to it--over,
over, over! A second is a long suspense at such a time as this. The
sea breaks in thunder along her whole length, and pours in a sweeping
cataract across her deck, smashing the boats and dragging all loose
gear to leeward. Over she heels--over, over, over! The yards are
nearly up and down. The men cling desperately, as if to an inverted
mast. And well they may, especially on the leeward arm that dips them
far under a surge of water which seems likely to snap the whole thing
off. But the _Victoria's_ cargo and ballast never shift an inch. Her
stability is excellent. And as the heaving shoulder eases down she
holds her keel in, just before another lurch would send her turning
turtle. A pause . . . a quiver . . . and she begins to right. 'Now
then,' roars the indomitable mate, the moment his dripping {127}
yardarm comes from under, 'turn to, there--d' y' think we 're going to
hang on here the whole damn' day?' Whereupon the men turn to again
with twice the confidence and hearty goodwill that any other form of
reassurance could possibly have given them.
As she comes back towards an even keel the wind catches the sails. The
skipper is still at the wheel, to which he and the two men whose trick
it is are clinging. 'Hard-a-lee!' and round she goes this time, till
she snuggles into a good lie-to, which keeps her alternately coming up
and falling off a little, by the counteraction of the sails and helm.
Here she rides out the storm, dipping her lee rail under, climbing the
wild, gigantic seas, and working off her course on the cyclone-driven
waters; but giving watch and watch about a chance to rest before she
squares away again.
Next morning the skipper hardly puts his head out before he yells the
welcome order to set the main lower topsail--from the lee yardarm of
which a dozen men had nearly gone to Davy Jones's locker only
yesterday. He takes a look round; then orders up reefed foresail and
the three upper topsails, also reefed. Up goes the watch aloft and
lays out on the yard. 'Ready?' comes the shouted {128} query from the
bunt. 'Ay, ay, sir!' 'Haul out to windward!' _Eh--hai, o--ho,
o--ho--oh_! 'Far enough, sir?' 'Haul out to leeward!' _Eh--hai,
o--ho, o--ho--oh_! 'That'll do! Tie her up and don't miss any
points!' 'Right-oh! Lay down from aloft and set the sail!' _Yo--ho,
yo--hai, yo--ho--oh_! Then the chanty rises from the swaying men,
rises and falls, in wavering bursts of sound, as if the gale was
whirling it about:
Blow the man down, blow the man down,
'Way-ho! Blow the man down.
Blow the man down from Liverpool town;
Give us some wind to blow the man down.
And so the gallant ship goes outward-bound; and homeward-bound the
same. At last she's back in Halifax, after a series of adventures that
would set an ordinary landsman up for life. But the only thing the
Nova Scotian papers say of her is this: 'Arrived from sea with general
cargo--ship _Victoria_, John Smith, master, ninety days from
Valparaiso. All well.'
No mention of that terrible Antarctic hurricane? No 'heroes'? No
heroics?
It's all in the day's work there.
{129}
CHAPTER VIII
STEAMERS
Steamers and all other machine-driven craft are of very much greater
importance to Canada now than canoes and sailing craft together. But
their story can be told in a chapter no longer than the one devoted to
canoes alone; and this for several reasons. The tale of the canoe
begins somewhere in the immemorial past and is still being told to-day.
The story of the sailing ship is not so old as this. But it is as old
as the history of Canada. It is inseparably connected with Canada's
fortunes in peace and war. It is Canada's best sea story of the recent
past. And, to a far greater extent than the tale of the canoe, it is
also a story of the present and the immediate future. Moreover,
sailing craft helped to make turning points of Canadian history as only
a single steamer ever has. Sailing craft made Canada known
distinctively among every great seafaring people as steamers never
have. {130} And while the building, ownership, and actual navigation
of sailing craft once made Canada fourth among the shipping countries
of the world, the change to steam and steel, coinciding with the
destruction of the handiest timber and the development of inland forms
of business, put no less than eight successful rivals ahead of her.
Every one knows that James Watt turned the power of steam to practical
use in the eighteenth century. But it was not till the first year of
the nineteenth that a really workable steamer appeared, though the
British, French, and Americans had been experimenting for years, just
as ingenious men had been experimenting with stationary engines long
before Watt. This pioneer steamer was the _Charlotte Dundas_, which
ran on the Forth and Clyde Canal in Scotland in 1801. Six years later
Fulton's _Clermont_, engined by the British firm of Boulton and Watt,
ran on the Hudson from New York to Albany. Two years later again the
_Accommodation_, the first steamer in Canada, was launched at Montreal,
and engined there as well. She was built for John Molson by John
Bruce, a shipbuilder, {131} and John Jackson, an engineer. She was
eighty-five feet over all and sixteen feet in the beam. Her engine was
six horse-power, and her trial speed five knots an hour. She was
launched, broadside on, behind the old Molson brewery. She was fitted
up for twenty passengers, but only ten went on her maiden trip. The
fare was eight dollars down to Quebec and ten dollars back. The
following is interesting as a newspaper account of the first trip made
by the first Canadian steamer. It is taken, word for word, from an
original copy of the _Quebec Gazette_ of November 9, 1809.
The Steam Boat, which was built at Montreal last winter, arrived here
on Saturday last, being her first trip. She was 66 hours on the
passage, of which she was at anchor 30. So that 36 hours is the time
which, in her present state, she takes to come down from Montreal to
Quebec [over 160 statute miles]. On Sunday last she went up against
wind and tide from Brehault's wharf to Lymburner's; but her progress
was very slow. It is obvious that her machinery, at present, has not
sufficient force for this River. But there can be no doubt of the
possibility of {132} perfectioning it so as to answer every purpose for
which she was intended; and it would be a public loss should the
proprietors be discouraged from persevering in their undertaking.
They did not fail to persevere. When Molson found that ox-teams were
required to tow her up St Mary's Current, below Montreal, he ordered a
better engine of thirty horse-power from Boulton and Watt in England,
and put it into the _Swiftsure_ in 1811. This steamer was twice the
size of the _Accommodation_, being 120 by 24 feet; and the _Quebec
Gazette_ waxed eloquent about her:
The Steam Boat arrived here from Montreal on Sunday. She started from
Montreal at 5 o'clock on Saturday morning, and anchored at Three
Rivers, which she left on Sunday morning at 5 o'clock, and arrived at
the King's Wharf, Quebec, at half-past two; being only 24 hours and a
half under way between the two cities, with a strong head wind all the
way. She is most superbly fitted up, and offers accommodation for
passengers in every respect equal to the best hotel in Canada. In
short, for celerity and security, she well {133} deserves the name of
_Swiftsure_. America cannot boast of a more useful and expensive
undertaking by one individual, than this of Mr Molson's. His
Excellency, the Governor-in-chief, set out for Montreal on Tuesday
afternoon, in the Steam Boat.
The following letter from Molson, for the information of Sir George
Prevost, governor-general during the War of 1812, refers to one of the
first tenders ever made, in any part of the world, to supply steamer
transport for either naval or military purposes. It was received at
Quebec by Commissary-General Robinson on February 6, 1813:
I received a letter from the Military Secretary, under date of the 15th
Decr. last, informing me of His Excellency's approval of a Tender I had
made of the Steam Boat for the use of Government; wherein I am likewise
informed that you would receive instructions to cause an arrangement to
be made for her Service during the ensuing Season. For the Transport
of Troops and conveyance of light Stores, it will be necessary to fit
her up in a manner so as to be best adapted for the purpose, which will
be in my opinion something after the mode {134} of a Transport. For a
passage Boat she would have to be fitted up quite in a different
manner. If you wish her to be arranged in any particular manner under
the direction of any Person, I am agreeable. I should be glad to be
informed if His Excellency wishes or expects that I shall sail in her
myself, whether Government or I furnish the Officers and men to
Navigate and Pilot her, the Engineer excepted, the fuel and all other
necessarys that may be required for her use. I imagine the arrangement
must be for the Season, not by the Trip, as Government may wish to
detain her for particular purposes. Ensurance I do not believe can be
effected for less than 30 p. cent for the Season, therefore I must take
the risque upon myself.
Within five years of this tender Molson's St Lawrence Steamboat Company
had six more steamers running. In 1823 a towboat company was formed,
and the _Hercules_ towed the _Margaret_ from Quebec to Montreal. The
well-known word 'tug' was soon brought into use from England, where it
originated from the fact that the first towboat in the world was called
_The Tug_. In 1836, before {135} the first steam railway train ran
from La Prairie to St Johns, the Torrance Line, in opposition to the
Molson Line, was running the _Canada_, which was then the largest and
fastest steamer in the whole New World. Meanwhile steam navigation had
been practised on the Great Lakes for twenty years; for in 1817 the
little _Ontario_ and the big _Frontenac_ made their first trips from
Kingston to York (now Toronto). The _Frontenac_ was built at Finkles
Point, Ernestown, eighteen miles from Kingston, by Henry Teabout, an
American who had been employed in the shipyards of Sackett's Harbour at
the time of the abortive British attack in 1813. She was about seven
hundred tons, schooner rigged, engined by Boulton and Watt, and built
at a total cost of $135,000. A local paper said that 'her proportions
strike the eye very agreeably, and good judges have pronounced this to
be the best piece of naval architecture of the kind yet produced in
America.'
Canals and steamers naturally served each other's turn. There was a
great deal of canal building in the twenties. The Lachine Canal,
opening up direct communication west of Montreal, was dug out by 1825,
the Welland, across the Niagara peninsula, by 1829, and the {136}
Rideau, near Ottawa, by 1832. A few very small canals had preceded
these; others were to follow them; and they were themselves in their
infancy of size and usefulness. But the beginning had been made.
The early Canadian steamers and canals did credit to a poor and thinly
peopled country. But none of them ranked as a pioneering achievement
in the world at large. This kind of achievement was reserved for the
_Royal William_, a vessel of such distinction in the history of
shipping that her career must be followed out in detail.
[Illustration: TRANSPORT _BECKWITH_ AND BATEAUX, LAKE ONTARIO, 1816.
From the John Rose Robertson Collection, Toronto Public Library.]
She was the first of all sea-going steamers, the first that ever
crossed an ocean entirely under steam, and the first that ever fired a
shot in action. But her claims and the spurious counter-claims against
her must both be made quite clear. She was not the first steamer that
ever put out to sea, for the Yankee _Phoenix_ made the little coasting
trip from Hoboken to Philadelphia in 1809. She was not the first
steamer in Canadian salt water, for the _St John_ crossed the Bay of
Fundy in 1826. And she was not the first vessel with a steam engine
that crossed an ocean, for the Yankee _Savannah_ crossed from Savannah
to Liverpool in 1819. The {137} _Phoenix_ and _St John_ call for no
explanation. The _Savannah_ does, especially in view of the claims so
freely made and allowed for her as being the first regular steamer to
cross an ocean. To begin with, she was not a regular sea-going steamer
with auxiliary sails like the _Royal William_, but a so-called
clipper-built, full-rigged ship of three hundred tons with a small
auxiliary engine and paddle-wheels made to be let down her sides when
the wind failed. She did not even steam against head winds, but
tacked. She took a month to make Liverpool, and she used steam for
only eighty hours altogether. She could not, indeed, have done much
more, because she carried only seventy-five tons of coal and
twenty-five cords of wood, and she made port with plenty of fuel left.
Her original log (the official record every vessel keeps) disproves the
whole case mistakenly made out for her by some far too zealous
advocates.
The claims of the _Royal William_ are proved by ample contemporary
evidence, as well as by the subsequent statements of her master, John
M'Dougall, her builder, James Goudie, and John Henry, the Quebec
founder who made some castings for her engines the year after they had
been put into her at Montreal. {138} M'Dougall was a seaman of
indomitable perseverance, as his famous voyage to England shows.
Goudie, though only twenty-one, was a most capable naval architect,
born in Canada and taught his profession in Scotland. His father was a
naval architect before him and had built several British vessels on the
Great Lakes for service against the Americans during the War of 1812.
Both Goudie and Henry lived to retell their tale in 1891, when the
Canadian government put up a tablet to commemorate what pioneering work
the _Royal William_ had done, both for the inter-colonial and
inter-imperial connection.
The first stimulus to move the promoters of the _Royal William_ was the
subsidy of $12,000 offered by the government of Lower Canada in 1830 to
the owners of any steamer over five hundred tons that would ply between
Quebec and Halifax. Half this amount had been offered in 1825, but the
inducement was not then sufficient. The Quebec and Halifax Navigation
Company was formed by the leading merchants of Quebec joined with a few
in Halifax. The latter included the three Cunard brothers, whose
family name has been a household word in transatlantic shipping circles
from that day to this. On September 2, {139} 1830, Goudie laid the
keel of the _Royal William_ in the yard belonging to George Black, a
shipbuilder, and his partner, John Saxton Campbell, formerly an officer
in the 99th Foot, and at this time a merchant and shipowner in Quebec.
The shipyard was situated at Cape Cove beside the St Lawrence, a mile
above the citadel, and directly in line with the spot on which Wolfe
breathed his last after the Battle of the Plains.
The launch took place on Friday afternoon, April 29, 1831. Even if all
the people present had then foreknown the _Royal William's_ career they
could not have done more to mark the occasion as one of truly national
significance. The leaders among them certainly looked forward to some
great results at home. Quebec was the capital of Lower Canada; and
every Canadian statesman hoped that the new steamer would become a bond
of union between the three different parts of the country--the old
French province by the St Lawrence, the old British provinces down by
the sea, and the new British province up by the Lakes.
The mayor of Quebec proclaimed a public holiday, which brought out such
a concourse of shipwrights and other shipping experts as hardly any
other city in the world could show. {140} Lord Aylmer was there as
governor-general to represent King William IV, after whom the vessel
was to be named the _Royal William_ by Lady Aylmer. This was most
appropriate, as the sailor king had been the first member of any royal
house to set foot on Canadian soil, which he did at Quebec in 1787, as
an officer in H.M.S. _Pegasus_. The guard and band from the 32nd Foot
were drawn up near the slip. The gunners of the Royal Artillery were
waiting to fire the salute from the new citadel, which, with the walls,
was nearing completion, after the Imperial government had spent
thirty-five million dollars in carrying out the plans approved by
Wellington. Lady Aylmer took the bottle of wine, which was wreathed in
a garland of flowers, and, throwing it against the bows, pronounced the
historic formula: 'God bless the _Royal William_ and all who sail in
her.' Then, amid the crash of arms and music, the roaring of
artillery, and the enthusiastic cheers of all the people, the stately
vessel took the water, to begin a career the like of which no other
Canadian vessel ever equalled before that time or since.
Her engines, which developed more than two hundred horse-power, were
made by Bennett and Henderson in Montreal and sent to meet {141} her a
few miles below the city, as the vessel towing her up could not stem St
Mary's Current. Her hull was that of a regular sea-going steamer,
thoroughly fit to go foreign, and not the hull of an ordinary sailing
ship, like the _Savannah_, with paddles hung over the sides in a calm.
Goudie's master, Simmons of Greenock, had built four steamers to cross
the Irish Sea; and Goudie probably followed his master's practice when
he gave the _Royal William_ two deep 'scoops' to receive the
paddle-boxes nearer the bows than the stern. The tonnage by builder's
measurement was 1370, though by net capacity of burden only 363. The
length over all was 176 feet, on the keel 146. Including the
paddle-boxes the breadth was 44 feet; and, as each box was 8 feet
broad, there were 28 feet clear between them. The depth of hold was 17
feet 9 inches, the draught 14 feet. The rig was that of a three-masted
topsail schooner. There were fifty passenger berths and a good saloon.
[Illustration: THE _ROYAL WILLIAM_ From the original painting in
possession of the Literary and Historical Society of Quebec]
The three trips between Quebec and Halifax in 1831 were most
successful. But 1832 was the year of the great cholera, especially in
Quebec, and the _Royal William_ was so harassed by quarantine that she
had to be laid up there. The losses of that disastrous season {142}
decided her owners to sell out next spring for less than a third of her
original cost. She was then degraded for a time into a local tug or
sometimes an excursion boat. But presently she was sent down to
Boston, where the band at Fort Independence played her in to the tune
of 'God Save the King,' because she was the first of all steamers to
enter a seaport of the United States under the Union Jack.
Ill luck pursued her new owners, who, on her return to Quebec, decided
to send her to England for sale. She left Quebec on August 5, 1833,
coaled at Pictou, which lies on the Gulf side of Nova Scotia, and took
her departure from there on the 18th, for her epoch-making voyage, with
the following most prosaic clearance: '_Royal William_, 363 tons. 36
men. John M'Dougall, master. Bound to London. British. Cargo: 254
chaldrons of coals [nearly 300 tons], a box of stuffed birds, and six
spars, produce of this province. One box and one trunk, household
furniture and a harp, all British, and seven passengers.' The fare was
fixed at £20, 'not including wines.'
The voyage soon became eventful. Nearly three hundred tons of coal was
a heavy concentrated cargo for the tremendous storm she encountered on
the Grand Banks of Newfoundland. {143} She strained; her starboard
engine was disabled; she began to leak; and the engineer came up to
tell M'Dougall she was sinking. But M'Dougall held his course, started
the pumps, and kept her under way for a week with only the port engine
going. The whole passage from Pictou, counting the time she was
detained at Cowes repairing boilers, took twenty-five days. M'Dougall,
a sturdy Scotsman, native of Oban, must have been sorely tempted to
'put the kettle off the boil' and run her under sail. But either the
port or starboard engine, or both, worked her the whole way over, and
thus for ever established her claim to priority in transatlantic
navigation under steam alone.
In London she was sold for £10,000, just twice what she had fetched at
sheriff's sale in Quebec some months before. She was at once
chartered, crew and all, by the Portuguese government, who declined to
buy her for conversion into a man-of-war. In 1834, however, she did
become a man-of-war, this time under the Spanish flag, though flying
the broad Pennant of Commodore Henry, who was then commanding the
British Auxiliary Steam Squadron against the Carlists in the north of
Spain. Two years later, on May 5, 1836, under {144} her Spanish name
of _Isabella Segunda_, she made another record. When the British
Legion, under Sir de Lacy Evans, was attacking the Carlists in the bay
of St Sebastian, she stood in towards the Carlist flank and thereupon
fired the first shot that any steam man-of-war had ever fired in action.
Strangely enough, she cannot be said to have come to any definite end
as an individual ship. She continued in the Spanish service till 1840,
when she was sent to Bordeaux for repairs. The Spaniards, who are
notorious slovens at keeping things shipshape, had allowed her to run
down to bare rot after her Britisher-Canadian crew had left her. So
the French bought her for a hulk and left her where she was. But the
Spaniards took her engines out and put them into a new _Isabella
Segunda_, which was wrecked in a storm on the Algerian coast in 1860.
Her career of record-making is well worth a general summary: the _Royal
William_ was the first steamer built to foster inter-colonial trade in
Canada; the first Canadian steamer specially designed for work at sea;
the first sea-going steamer to enter a port in the United States under
the British flag; the first steam transport in Portugal; the first
steam man-of-war in {145} Spain; the first naval steamer that ever
fired a shot in action; and the first vessel in the world that ever
crossed an ocean under steam alone.
The next step in the history of Canadian steamers is not concerned with
a ship but with a man. Sir Hugh Allan, who, though the greatest, was
not the first of the pioneers. The Cunard brothers preceded the Allan
brothers in establishing a transatlantic line. Samuel Cunard had been
one of the shareholders in the _Royal William_. He had wonderful
powers of organization. He knew the shipping trade as very few have
ever known it; and his name has long since become historical in this
connection. The first 'Cunarder' to arrive in Canada was the
_Britannia_, 1154 tons, built on the Clyde, and engined there by
Napier. From that time on till Confederation, that is, from 1840 to
1867, Cunarders ran from Liverpool to Halifax. But Halifax was always
treated as a port of call. The American ports were the real
destination. And after 1867 the Cunarders became practically an
Anglo-American, not an Anglo-Canadian, line. During their connection
with Canada, partially renewed in the present century, the Cunards
never did {146} anything really original. They were not among the
first to make the change from wood to iron or from paddle-wheels to
screws. But they did business honestly and well and always took care
of their passengers' safety.
The Cunards were Canadians. Sir Hugh Allan was a Scotsman. But he and
the line he founded are unchallengeably first in their services to
Canada. Hugh Allan was born in 1810, the son of a Scottish master
mariner who about that time was mate of a transport carrying supplies
to the British Army in the Peninsular War. He arrived in Canada when
he was only fifteen, entered the employ of a Montreal shipping firm
when he came of age, and at forty-eight obtained complete control of it
with his brother Andrew. From that day to this the Allan family have
been the acknowledged leaders of Canadian transatlantic shipping.
Hugh Allan was a man of boundless energy, iron will, and consummate
business ability. The political troubles of the Pacific Scandal in
1873 prevented him from anticipating the present Canadian Pacific
Railway in making a single united service of trains and steamers to
connect England with China and both with Canada. But what he did
succeed in carrying {147} through, against long odds, was quite enough
for one distinguished business lifetime. He began by running a line of
sailing craft between Montreal and the mother country in conjunction
with his father's firm in Glasgow. Then, in 1853, he and his brother
headed a company which ordered two iron screw steamers to be built in
Scotland for the St Lawrence. The first of these, the _Canadian_, came
out to Quebec on her maiden voyage in 1854; but both she and her sister
ship were soon diverted to the Crimea, where high rates were being paid
for transports during the war.
In 1858 the Allans contracted with the government for a weekly mail
service and bought out all their partners, as they alone considered
that the time had come for such a venture. The subsidy was doubled the
next year to prevent the collapse of the service after a widespread
financial panic. But heavy forfeits were imposed for lateness in
delivering mails, an adverse factor in the greatest fight against
misfortune ever known to Canadian shipping history. Within eight years
the Allans lost as many vessels. In every case there was disastrous
loss of property; in some, a total loss of everything--vessel, cargo,
crew, and passengers.
{148}
No other firm has ever had to face such a storm of persistent
adversity. But the indomitable Allans emerged triumphant; and by the
time of Confederation, in 1867, the worst was over. Thenceforth they
were first in all respects till very recently. In the introduction of
shipbuilding improvements they are without a rival still. Their
_Bavarian_ was the first Atlantic liner entirely built of steel; their
_Parisian_ the first to be fitted with bilge keels; their _Virginian_
and _Victorian_ the first to use the turbine.
There are only two other salient features of Canadian steamer history
that can be mentioned beside the _Royal William_ and the Allans: the
Richelieu and Ontario Navigation Company and the Canadian Pacific
Railway's merchant fleet. True, neither of these comes into quite the
same class. The _Royal William_ occupies an absolutely unique position
in the world at large. The Allans are more intimately connected with
the history of Canadian shipping than any other family or firm. Both
the _Royal William_ and the Allans are landmarks. But the Richelieu
and Ontario Navigation Company and the Canadian Pacific Railway Company
have also shown abundant energy; turned to effective national account.
The Richelieu Steamboat Company was {149} formed in 1845, and took its
other title thirty years later, when it made its first great 'merger.'
It began in a very humble way, by running two little market boats
between Sorel and Montreal. From the first it had to fight for its
commercial life. The train was beginning to be a formidable
competitor. But the fight to a finish was the fight of boat against
boat. Fares were cut and cut again. At last the passengers were
offered bed, board, and transportation for the price of a single meal.
Every day there was a desperate race on the water. The rival steamers
shook and panted in their self-destroying zeal to be the first to get
the gangway down. Clouds of fire-streaked smoke poured from their
funnels. More than once a cargo that would burn well was thrown into
the furnaces to keep the steam up. The public became quite as keen as
any of the crews or companies, and worked excitement up to fever pitch
by crowding the wharves to gamble madly on this daily river Derby. The
stress was too much for the weaker companies. One by one they either
fell out or 'merged in.' After the merger with the Ontario Company in
1875 things went on, with many ups and downs, more in the usual way of
competition. Finally, in 1913, a {150} general 'pooling merger' was
effected by which practically all Canadian lines came under one
control, from the lower Great Lakes, down the St Lawrence, through the
Gulf, and south away to the West Indies. The title of this new merger
is the Canada Steamship Lines Limited. The Canadian Pacific Railway
Company has half a dozen different fleets at work: one on the Atlantic,
another as a trans-Pacific line, a third on the Pacific coast, a fourth
on the lakes of British Columbia, a fifth on the upper Great Lakes, and
a sixth as ferries for its trains. Thus, by taking the upper Great
Lakes and the West, it divides the trans-Canadian waters with the
Canada Steamship Lines, which latter take the lower Great Lakes and the
East. A company whose annual receipts and expenditure are balanced at
not far short of two hundred millions of dollars might well seem to be
all-important in every way, especially when its shipping tonnage
exceeds that of the Allans by over thirty thousand. But this Chronicle
is a history of at least four hundred years; while the famous 'C.P.R.'
has not as yet been either forty years a railway line or twenty years a
shipping firm. There is only one great C.P.R. disaster to record. But
that is of appalling magnitude. Over a thousand lives were lost {151}
when the Norwegian collier _Storstad_ sank the _Empress of Ireland_ off
Rimouski in 1914.
The five principal features of Canadian steamship history have now been
pointed out: John Molson's pioneer boats, the _Royal William_, the
Allan line, the 'R. and O.' (now the Canada Steamship Lines), and the
'C.P.R.' No other individual feature has any noteworthy Canadian
peculiarities. Nor does the general evolution of steam navigation in
or around Canada differ notably, in other respects, from the same
evolution elsewhere. Steamers have adapted themselves to circumstances
in Canada very much as they have in other countries, pushing their
persistent way step by step into all the navigable waters, fresh or
salt. The Canadian waters, especially the fresh waters, certainly have
some marked characteristics of their own, but the steamers have
acquired no special character in consequence.
Both Canadian and visiting steamers have always had their duplicates on
many other oceans, lakes, and rivers. There is the ubiquitous tug;
stubby, noisy, self-assertive, small; but, in its several varieties,
the handiest {152} all-round little craft afloat. It is worth noting
that in the special class of sea tugs the Dutch, and not the British,
are easily first: a curious exception to the general rule of British
supremacy at sea. Then, with many variations and several intermediate
types, there are the two main distinctive kinds of inland vessels: the
long, low, grimy, cargo-carrying whale-back, tankship, barge, or other
useful form of ugliness, simply meant to nose her way through quite
safe waters with the utmost bulk her huge stuffed maw will hold; and,
at the opposite end of the scale, the high, white, gaily decorated
'palace' steamer, with tier upon tier of decks, and a strong suggestion
of the theatre all through. Sea-going craft show the same variations
within a given type and the same intermediate types between the two
ends of the scale. But the general distinction is quite as well
marked, though the necessity for seaworthy hulls brings about a closer
resemblance along the water-line. There is the cargo boat, long,
comparatively low, and rather dingy; with derricks and vast holds,
which remind one of the tentacles and stomach of an octopus. The
opposite extreme is the great passenger liner, much larger and more
shapely in the hull; but best distinguished, at any {153} distance, by
her towering, white, superstructural decks, with their clean-run
symmetry fore and aft.
The 'Britisher' is the predominant type in Canadian waters. This is
natural enough, considering that the British Isles build nearly all
'Britishers,' most 'Canadians,' and many foreigners, and that the
tonnage actually under construction there in 1913 exceeded the total
tonnage owned by any other country except Germany and the United
States, while it greatly exceeded the total tonnage under construction
in all other countries of the world put together, including Germany and
the United States. The British practice is naturally the prevailing
one both in shipbuilding and marine engineering. But there is a
general conformity to certain leading ideas everywhere. The engine is
passing out of the stage in which the fuel-made steam worked machinery,
which, in its turn, worked propellers; and passing into the stage in
which the latent forces of the fuel itself are brought to bear more
directly on propellers, that is to say, into the stage of internal
combustion engines and the turbine-driven screw. The hull has changed
more and more in its proportions between length and breadth since the
supplanting of wood by steel. {154} Instead of a length equal at most
to five beams there are lengths of more than ten beams now. This means
a radical change in framing. The old wooden vessel, as we have seen,
had a frame looking like the skeleton of a man's body, with the keel
for a backbone and multitudinous ribs at right angles to it. But the
new steel vessel, especially if built on the excellent Isherwood
principle, looks entirely different. The transverse ribs are there, of
course, but in a modified form. They do not catch the eye, which now,
instead of being drawn from side to side, is led along from end to end
by what looks like, and really is, a complete ribbing of internal
keels. The whole system has, in fact, been changed from the transverse
to the longitudinal.
The subject is well worth pursuing for its own sake. But the modern
developments of naval architecture and waterborne trade which Canada
shares with the rest of the world do not concern us any further here.
{155}
CHAPTER IX
FISHERIES
The fisheries of Canada are the most important in the world. True as
this statement is, it needs some explanation. In the first place,
Newfoundland is included, in accordance with its inclusion under all
other headings in this book. Then, all the wholly or partly
unexploited waters are taken into consideration, including Hudson Bay
and the Arctic ocean. And, thirdly, the catch made by foreigners in
all waters neighbouring the Canadian coasts is not left out. Thus the
Canadian fisheries are held to mean all the fisheries, fresh and salt,
in or nearest to the whole of British North America. This is a
perfectly fair basis to start from. It is, indeed, the fairest basis
that can be found, as it affords a fixed territorial standard of
comparison with other countries; and standards of comparison are
particularly hard to fix in regard to fishing. French and Americans
fish round Newfoundland, in waters {156} closely neighbouring British
territory and far removed from their own; and the fishing fleets of the
British Isles work grounds as far asunder as the White Sea is from
Africa. Yet all their catches figure in official reports as being
French, American, or British. And so they legally are, if the men who
make them observe the three-mile open-water distance-limit fixed by
international agreement as the proper territorial boundary of
government control. Beyond three miles from shore all 'nationals' are
on an equal footing.
Now, taking the word Canadian in the sense just defined, it is safe to
say that Canadian waters contain a greater quantity of the principal
food fishes than those of any other country. The truth of this
statement depends on three facts. The first is that practically all
fish landed in Canada are caught in Canadian waters. This is a marked
contrast to what happens in the other great fishing countries, like the
United States, the British islands, Germany, Norway, and France, all of
which send some of their fleets very far afield. The second fact is
the statistics of totals caught. Canada at present catches fifty
million dollars' worth of fish from her own waters in a single year.
The 'Britisher' and 'Yankee' totals {157} each exceed this, though not
by much. But the Yankee total includes a good deal, and the Britisher
total a very great deal, caught far outside their own waters. No other
country is even worthy of comparison with these. The third fact is
that the Canadian total, already advancing more rapidly than any other
total, must continue to advance more rapidly still, because Canada has
the greatest area of unexploited fish-bearing waters in the world.
If the amount caught per head of the total population is made the
standard of comparison, then the Canadian catch is more than five times
greater than the Britishers', and more than ten times greater than the
Yankees'. And if, still keeping to this standard, the comparison is
made between totals caught in strictly territorial waters, Canada
surpasses both Britishers and Yankees, put together, ten times over.
There are nearly 120,000 fishermen in Canada and Newfoundland. The
proportion in Newfoundland is, of course, by far the higher of the two.
About 60,000 people are engaged in handling fish ashore, and many
thousands more are concerned in trading with fish products. One way
and another, the livelihood of at least one Canadian in every fifteen,
and one Newfoundlander in every two, is entirely dependent {158} on
fishing. Statistics are apt to become bewildering unless carefully
marshalled in tabular form. But one or two items might be added.
There is a fishing craft of some kind, however small most of them are,
to every single family in Newfoundland, a proportion immeasurably
higher than in any other country in the world. But even more
astonishing is the statistical fact that the fishermen of all nations
in Newfoundland waters catch each year nearly 1000 cod-fish for every
single individual person there is in the whole population of the
island. After this, numbers seem rather to weaken than strengthen the
argument. But it is worth mentioning that there are nearly 80,000
local fishing boats of all sorts actually counted by the governments of
Canada and Newfoundland, from little rowboats up to full-powered
steamers of considerable tonnage; that nearly a quarter of the whole
number in 1913 already had gasoline or other motors; that the total
length of all the Canadian and Newfoundland coastlines is nearly equal
to that of the equator; that, excluding all parts of the Great Lakes
within the American sphere of influence, the fresh-water fishing area
of Canada exceeds the total area of the British Isles by more than
100,000 square miles; and, finally, that the {159} mere increase of
value in the fisheries of the single province of British Columbia,
within a single year, has exceeded the value of the total catch
marketed in several of the smaller states of Europe and America.
The two principal salt-water craft that have a history behind them and
a sphere of active usefulness to-day are the schooner and its tender,
the little dory. A schooner is a fore-and-aft-rigged vessel with at
least two masts and four sails--mainsail, foresail, jib, and the
staysail generally called a wind-bag. The schooner rig makes the
handiest all-round vessel known. It can be managed by fewer hands in
proportion to its tonnage than any other, and its sails do the greatest
amount of work under the most varied conditions. Other rigs may beat
it on special points; but the general sum of all the sailing virtues is
decidedly its own. It takes you more nearly into a head wind than most
others, and scuds before a lubber's wind dead aft with a maximum of
canvas spread out 'wing-and-wing'--one big sail to port and the other
out to starboard.
The dory is a two-man rowboat which possesses as many of the different,
and sometimes contradictory, good points of the canoe, skiff, punt, and
lifeboat as it is possible to {160} combine in a single craft. It can
be rowed, sculled, sailed, or driven by a motor. It is the first
aquatic plaything for the boys, and often the last salvation for the
men. The way it will ride out a storm that makes a liner labour and
sinks any ill-found vessel like a stone is little short of marvellous.
It has a flattish bottom, sheering up at both ends, which are high in
the gunwale. The flat stern, which looks like a narrow wedge with the
point cut off, is a good deal more waterborne than the bow and rises
more readily to the seas without presenting too much resisting surface
to either wind or wave. Each schooner has several dories, which fish
all round it, thus suggesting what is often called the hen-and-chickens
style. At dark, or when the catch has filled the dory, the men come
back on board, 'nesting' half a dozen dories, one inside the other.
But sometimes a sudden storm, especially if it follows fog, will set
the chickens straying; and then the men must ride it out moored to some
sort of drogue or floating anchor. The usual drogue is a trawl tub,
quite perfect if filled with oil-soaked cotton waste to make a 'slick'
which keeps the crests from breaking. The tub is hove into the water,
over the stern, to which it is made fast by a bit of line long {161}
enough to give the proper scope. And there, with the live ballast of
two expert men, whose home has always been the water, the dory will
thread its perilous way unharmed through spume and spindrift, across
the engulfing valleys and over the riven hill-tops of the sea.
These schooners and their attendant dories have a long and stirring
history of their own. But they are not the only craft, nor yet the
oldest; and though their history would easily fill a volume twice the
size of this, it would only tell us a very little about Canadian
fisheries as a whole, from first to last. Even if we went back by
hasty steps, of quite a century each, we should never get into the wild
days of the early 'fishing admirals' before our space gave out. All we
can do here is simply to mention the steps themselves, and then pass
on. First, the red men, few in number, and fishing from canoes. Then
the early whites, dispossessing the red men and steadily increasing.
They came from all seafaring peoples, and had no other form of justice
than what could be enforced by 'fishing admirals,' who won their rank
by the order of their arrival on the Banks--admiral first, vice-admiral
second, rear-admiral third. Then government by men-of-war began, and
Newfoundland itself became, {162} officially, a man-of-war, under its
own captain from the Royal Navy. Finally, civil self-government
followed in the usual way.
All through there was a constantly growing and apparently inextricable
entanglement of international complications, which were only settled by
The Hague agreement in the present century. And only within almost as
recent times has what may be called the natural history of Canadian
fisheries begun to follow the inevitable trend of evolution which
gradually changes the civilized fisherman from a hunter into a farmer.
As man increases in number, and his means of hunting down game increase
still faster, a time inevitably comes when he disturbs the balance of
nature to such an extent that he must either exterminate his prey or
begin to 'farm' it, that is, begin to breed and protect as well as kill
it. Fisheries are no exception to this rule; and what with close
seasons, prohibitions, hatcheries, and other means of keeping up the
supply of fish, the fishing population is beginning, though only to a
very small extent as yet, to make the change. Some day we shall talk
of our pedigree cod, but the men of this generation will not live to
see it.
The change is beneficial for the mere mouths {163} there are to fill.
But it means less and less demand for those glorious and most inspiring
qualities of courage, strength, and bodily skill which are required by
all who pit themselves against Nature in her wildest and most dangerous
moods. The fisherman and sealer have only the elements to fight;
though this too often means a fight for life. A hundred men were
frozen to death on the ice, and two hundred more were drowned in the
Gulf, during the great spring seal hunt blizzard of 1914. Whalemen
still occasionally fight for their lives against their prey as well.
And all three kinds of deep-sea fishery have bred so many simple-minded
heroes that only cowards attract particular attention.
No modern reader needs reminding that whales are not fish but mammals,
belonging to the same order of the animal kingdom as monkeys, dogs, and
men. They include the most gigantic of all creatures, living or
extinct. The enormous 'right' whales of the story-books have been
driven far north in greatly diminished numbers. The equally famous
sperm whales have always been very rare, as they prefer southern
waters. But the 'finners,' which are still fairly common, include the
'sulphurs,' among which there have been {164} specimens far exceeding
any authentic sperms or 'rights.' Even the humpbacks and common
finbacks, both well known in Canadian waters, occasionally surpass the
average size of sperms and 'rights.' But the sulphur is probably the
only kind of whale which sometimes grows to a hundred feet and more.
Whaling is done in three different ways: from canoes, from boats sent
off by sailing ships, and from steamers direct. The Indians whaled
from canoes before the white man came, and a few Indians, Eskimos, and
French Canadians are whaling from canoes to-day. Eskimos sometimes
attack a large whale in a single canoe, but oftener with a regular
flotilla of kayaks, and worry it to death; as the Indians once did with
bark canoes in the Gulf and lower St Lawrence. Modern canoe whaling is
done from a North-Shore wooden canoe of considerable size and weight
with a crew of two men. It is now chiefly carried on by a few French
Canadians living along the north shore of the lower St Lawrence. It is
not called whaling but porpoise-hunting, from the mistaken idea that
the little white whale is a porpoise, instead of the smallest kind of
whale, running up to over twenty feet in length. It is dangerous work
at best, and a good many men {165} are drowned. As a rule they are
very skilful, and they nearly always jab carefully while sitting down.
Sometimes, however, the rare occasion serves the rare harpooner, when
the whale and canoe appear as if about to meet each other straight
head-on. Then, in a flash, the man in the bow is up on his feet, with
the harpoon so poised that the rocking water, the mettlesome canoe, and
his watchful comrade in the stern, all form part of the concentrated
energy with which he brings his every faculty to a single point of
instantaneous action. There, for one fateful moment, he stands erect,
his whole tense body like the full-drawn bow before it speeds the arrow
home. He throws: and then, for some desperate minutes, it is often a
fight to a finish between the whale's life and his own.
The old wooden whaling vessel under mast and sail is almost extinct.
But it had a long and splendid career. The Basques, who were then the
models for the world, began in the Gulf before Jacques Cartier came;
and worked the St Lawrence with wonderful success as high as the basin
of Quebec. The French never whaled in Canada; but the 'Bluenose' Nova
Scotians did, and held their own against all comers. 'A dead whale or
a stove boat' {166} was the motto for every man who joined the chase.
Discipline was stern; and rightly so. A green hand was allowed one
show of funk; but that was all. However, there was very little funking
so long as Britishers, Bluenoses, and Yankees could pick their crews
from among the most adventurous of their own populations.
Hardly had the long-drawn clarion of the look-out's _B--l--o--w!_
sounded aloft than the boats were lowered from the davits and began
pulling away towards the likeliest spot for a rise. Two barbed
harpoons, always known as 'irons,' were carried on the same line,
always called the 'warp.' It both could be used, so much the better,
especially as they were some distance apart on the warp, the bight of
which formed a considerable drag in the water. Other drags, usually
called 'drugs,' were bits of wood made fast thwart-wise on the warp, so
as to increase the pull on a sounding whale. The coiling and
management of the warp was of the utmost importance. Many a man has
gone to Davy Jones with a strangling loop of rope around him.
Everything, of course, had to be made shipshape in advance, as there
was no time for finishing touches once the cry of _B--l--o--w!_ was
{167} raised. And if there was haste at all times, what was there not
when fleets of whalers under different flags were together in the same
waters?
The approach, often made by changing the oars for silent paddles; the
strike; the flying whale; the snaking, streaking, zipping line; the
furious tow, with the boat almost leaping from crest to crest; the long
haul in on the gradually slackening warp; the lancing and the dying
flurry, were all exciting enough by themselves. And when a whale
showed fight, charged home, and smashed a boat to splinters, it took a
smart crew to escape and get rescued in time. A Greenland whale once
took fifteen harpoons, drew out six miles of line, and carried down a
boat with all hands drowned before it was killed. Old sperms that had
once escaped without being badly hurt were always ready to fight again.
One fighting whale took down the bow oarsman in its mouth, drowned the
next two, and sent the rest flying with a single snap of its jaws.
Another fought nine hours, took five harpoons and seven bombs, smashed
up three boats, and sank dead--a total loss. A third, after smashing a
boat, charged the ship and stove her side so badly that she sank within
five minutes.
{168}
Yet accidents like these only spurred the whalemen on to greater
efforts, not of mere bravado, but of daring skill. Perhaps the most
wonderful regular feat of all was 'spading,' which meant slewing the
boat close in, as the whale was about to sound, and cutting the tendons
of its tremendous death-dealing tail by a slicing blow from the
two-handed razor-edged 'spade.' Perhaps the most wonderful of all
exceptional escapes was that of a boat which was towed by one whale
right over the back of another. And perhaps the most exciting finish
to any international race was the one in which the Yankee, who came up
second, got 'first iron' by 'pitchpoling' clear over the intervening
British boat, whose crew were nearly drowned by this 'slick' Yankee's
flying warp.
No wonder old whalemen despise the easier and safer methods of steam
whaling practised by the Norwegians in Canadian and other waters at the
present day. And yet steam whaling is not without some thrilling
risks. The steamers are speedy, handy, small, about one hundred tons
or so, with the latest pattern of the explosive harpoon gun originally
invented by Sven Foyn in 1880. The range is very short, rarely over
fifty yards. The harpoon may be compared to the stick of an {169}
umbrella, with four ribs that open when the bomb in the handle explodes
inside the whale, which it thus anchors to the steamer. The whole
steamer then plays the whale as an angler plays a fish, letting out
line--sometimes two miles of it--towing with stopped engines at first,
and then winding in while giving quarter, half, and three-quarter speed
astern, as the steamer gains on the whale. Even a steamer, however,
has been charged, stove, and sunk. And a fighting humpback in the Gulf
of St Lawrence is no easy game to tackle with a hand-lance in a pram.
Norwegians are thrifty folk, and bomb harpooning is expensive. So when
the whale and steamer meet, at the end of the chase, a tiny pram is
launched with two men rowing and a third standing up in the stern to
wield the fifteen-foot lance. As the humpback's flippers are also
fifteen feet long, and as they thrash about with blows that have sunk
several prams and killed more than one crew, it still requires the
fittest nerves and muscles to give the final stroke.
But whaling, in this and every other form, is bound to come to an
untimely end very soon unless the whales are protected by international
game laws rigidly enforced. At present the only protection is the
exhaustion of a whaling {170} ground below a paying yield; when whaling
stops till the whales breed back. But soon they won't breed back at
all. Modern steam whaling spares no kind of whale in any kind of sea.
It has one good point. It is more humane, as a rule. But the odds
against the whale are simply annihilating. And the extermination of
whales, those magnificent leviathans of the mighty deep, would be a
loss from every point of view. Their own commercial value counts for a
good deal. Their value to the fisherman by driving bait inshore counts
for a good deal more. And their admirable place in nature counts for
most of all. Like elephants, lions, and deer, like birds of paradise
and eagles, the whales are among those noblest forms of life, without
whose glorious strength and beauty this world would be a poorer, tamer,
meaner place for proper men to live in.
{171}
CHAPTER X
ADMINISTRATION
Administration is used here for want of a better general term to cover
every form of management that is done ashore, as well as every form of
what might be called, by analogy with fleets and armies, non-combatant
work afloat. It falls into two natural divisions: the first includes
all private management, the second all that concerns the government.
Here, even more than in the other chapters, we are face to face with
such complex and enormous interests that we can only take the merest
glance at what those interests principally are.
The privately managed interests have both their business and their
philanthropic sides. Let us take the philanthropic first. Seamen's
Institutes have grown from very small beginnings, and are now to be
found in every port where English-speaking seamen congregate. They
began when, as the saying was, the sailor {172} earnt his money like a
horse and spent it like an ass. They flourish when the sailor is much
better able to look after himself. But their help is needed still; and
what they have done in the past has not been the least among the
influences which have made the common lot of the seaman so very much
better than it was. Another excellent influence is that of the Royal
National Mission to Deep Sea Fishermen. This mission sends its
missioners afloat in its own steamers to tend the sick and bring some
of the amenities of shore life within the reach of those afloat.
Religion is among its influences, but only in an unsectarian way. Its
work in Canadian waters is directed by two able and self-sacrificing
men: Dr Grenfell, whose base is at St Anthony's in North-East
Newfoundland, and whose beat goes straight down north along the
Newfoundland Labrador, which faces the Atlantic; and Dr Hare, whose
base is Harrington, in the centre of the Canadian Labrador, which runs
in from the Strait of Belle Isle to Natashquan, more than two hundred
miles along the north shore of the Gulf, among a perfect labyrinth of
islands.
Next, the business side. As only a single instance can be given, and
as ordinary business management in shipping circles more or less {173}
resembles what is practised in other commercial affairs, the special
factor of marine insurance will alone be taken, as being the most
typically maritime and by far the most interesting historically.
Ordinary insurance on land is a mere thing of yesterday compared with
marine insurance, which, according to some, began in the ancient world,
and which was certainly known in the Middle Ages. It is credibly
reported to have been in vogue among the Lombards in the twelfth
century, and on much the same principles as are followed by Canadians
in the twentieth. It was certainly in vogue among the English before
Jacques Cartier discovered the St Lawrence. And in 1613, the year
Champlain discovered the site of Ottawa, a policy was taken out, in the
ordinary course of business, on that famous old London merchantman, the
_Tiger_, to which Shakespeare twice alludes, once in _Macbeth_ and
again in _Twelfth Night_.
Modern practice is based on the Imperial Marine Insurance Act of 1906,
which is a development of the Act of 1795, which, in its turn, was a
codification of the rules adopted at Lloyd's in 1779. Nothing shows
more unmistakably how supreme the British are in every affair of the
sea than these striking {174} facts: that 'A1 at Lloyd's' is an
expression accepted all the world over as a guarantee of prime
efficiency, that nearly every shipping country in the world has its own
imitation of Lloyd's, nearly always including the name of Lloyd, and
that the original Lloyd's at the Royal Exchange in London is still
unassailably first. Most people know that Lloyd's originated from the
marine underwriters who used to meet for both business and
entertainment at Lloyd's coffee-house in the seventeenth century. But
comparatively few seem to know that Lloyd's, like most of its
imitators, is not a gigantic insurance company, but an association of
carefully selected members, who agree to carry on their completely
independent business affairs in daily touch with each other. Lloyd's'
method differs from that of ordinary insurance in being conducted by
'underwriters,' each one of whom can write his name under any given
risk for any reasonable part of the whole. Thus, instead of insuring a
million with a company or a single man, the owner lays his case before
Lloyd's, whereupon any members who choose to do so can sign for
whatever proportion they intend to assume. In this way individual
losses are spread among a considerable number of underwriters. Long
{175} experience has proved that the individual and associated methods
of doing business have nowhere been more happily combined than they are
at Lloyd's to-day, and that this special form of combination suits both
parties in a shipping risk better than any other known.
Canadian shipping has often resented Lloyd's high rates against the St
Lawrence route, and threatened to establish a Lloyd's of its own. Yet,
on the whole, the original Lloyd's is the fairest, the soundest, and
incomparably the most expert association of its kind the world has ever
seen.
Business administration in marine affairs is complex enough. Lloyd's
alone is not the subject of one text-book, nor of several, but of a
regular and constantly increasing library. What, then, can usefully be
said in a very few words about the still more complex affairs of
government administration? The bare enumeration of the duties
performed by a single branch of the department of Marine and Fisheries
in Canada will give some faint idea of what the whole department does.
There are Naval, Fisheries, and Marine branches, each with sub-branches
of its own. Among the duties of the Marine branch are the following:
the construction of lighthouses and fog-alarms, {176} the maintenance
of lights and buoys, the building and maintenance of Dominion steamers,
the consideration of all aids to navigation, the maintenance of the St
Lawrence ship channel, the weather reports and forecasts,
investigations into wrecks, steamboat inspection, cattle-ship
inspection, marine hospitals, submarine signals, the carrying out of
the Merchant Shipping Act and other laws, humane service, subsidies to
wrecking plant, winter navigation, removal of obstructions,
examinations for masters' and mates' certificates, control of pilots,
government of ports and harbours, navigation of Hudson Bay and northern
waters generally, port wardens, wreck receivers, and harbour
commissioners.
Besides all this there are, in the work of the department, items like
the Dominion registry of more than eight thousand vessels, the
administration of the enormous fisheries, and the hydrographic survey.
Then, quite distinct from all these Canadian government activities, is
the British consular service, maintained by the Imperial government
alone, but available for every British subject. And round everything,
afloat and ashore, supporting, protecting, guaranteeing all, stands the
oldest, most glorious, and still the best of all the navies in {177}
the world--the Royal Navy of the motherland.
This is only a glance at the conditions of the present; while each
Imperial and Canadian service, department, branch, and sub-division has
a long, romantic, and most important history of its own. The
lighthouse service alone could supply hero-tales enough to fill a book.
The weather service is full of absorbing interest. And, what with
wireless telegraphy, submarine bells, direction indicators,
microthermometers as detectors of ice, and many other new appliances,
the whole practice of navigation is becoming an equally interesting
subject for a book filled with the 'fairy tales of science.' Even
hydrography--that is, the surveying and mapping (or 'charting') of the
water--has an appealing interest, to say nothing of its long and varied
history. Jacques Cartier, though he made no charts, may be truly
called the first Canadian hydrographer; for his sailing directions are
admirably clear and correct. In the next century we find Champlain
noting the peculiarities of the Laurentian waters to good effect; while
in the next again, the eighteenth, we come upon the famous Captain
Cook, one of the greatest hydrographers of all time. Cook was {178} at
Quebec with Wolfe, and afterwards spent several years in making a
wonderfully accurate survey of the St Lawrence and Gulf. His pupil,
Vancouver, after whom both a city and an island have been named, did
his work on the Pacific coast equally well. The principal hydrographer
of the nineteenth century was Admiral Bayfield, who extended the survey
over the Great Lakes, besides re-surveying all the older navigational
waters with such perfect skill that wherever nature has not made any
change his work stands to-day, reliable as ever. And it should be
noted that all the successful official surveys, up to the present
century, were made by naval officers--another little known and less
remembered service done for Canada by the British guardians of the sea.
{179}
CHAPTER XI
NAVIES
This is not the place to discuss the naval side of craft and waterways in
Canada. That requires a book of its own. But no study of Canada's
maritime interests, however short, can close without a passing reference
to her naval history.
When the Kirkes, with their tiny flotilla, took Quebec from Champlain's
tiny garrison in 1629 the great guiding principles of sea-power were as
much at work as when Phips led his American colonists to defeat against
Frontenac in 1690, or as when Saunders and Wolfe led the admirably united
forces of their enormous fleet and little army to victory in 1759. In
the same way the decisive influence of sea-power was triumphantly exerted
by Iberville, the French naval hero of Canada, when, with his single
ship, the _Pélican_, he defeated his three British opponents in a gallant
fight; and so, for the time being, won the {180} absolute command of
Hudson Bay in 1697. Again, it was naval rather than political and
military forces that made American independence an accomplished fact.
The opposition to the war in England counted for a good deal; and the
French and American armies for still more. But the really decisive
anti-British force consisted of practically all the foreign navies in the
world, some--like the French, Spanish, Dutch, and the Americans'
own--taking an active part in the war, while the others were kept ready
in reserve by the hostile armed neutrality of Russia, Sweden, Denmark,
Prussia, and the smaller sea-coast states of Germany. Once again, in the
War of 1812, it was the two annihilating American naval victories on
Lakes Erie and Champlain that turned the scale far enough back to offset
the preponderant British military victories along the Canadian frontier
and prevent the advance of that frontier beyond Detroit and into the
state of Maine.
There were very few people in 1910 who remembered that the Canadian navy
then begun was the third local force of its kind in Canada, though the
first to be wholly paid and managed locally. From the launch of La
Salle's _Griffon_ in 1679 down to the Cession in 1763 there was {181}
always some sort of French naval force built, manned, and managed in New
France, though ultimately paid and directed from royal headquarters in
Paris through the minister of Marine and Colonies. It is significant
that 'marine' and 'colonies' were made a single government department
throughout the French régime. The change of rule did not entail the
abolition of local forces; and from 1755, when a British flotilla of six
little vessels was launched on Lake Ontario, down to and beyond the peace
with the United States sixty years later, there was what soon became a
'Provincial Marine,' which did good service against the Americans in
1776, when it was largely manned from the Royal Navy, and less good
service in 1812, when it was a great deal more local in every way. Two
vestiges of those days linger on to the present time, the first in the
Canadian Militia Act, which provides for a naval as well as a military
militia, permanent forces included, and the second in one of the
governor-general's official titles--'Vice-Admiral' of Canada.
The Canadian privateers are even less known than the Provincial Marine.
Yet they did a good deal of preying on the enemy at different times, and
they amounted altogether to a total {182} which will probably surprise
most students of Canadian history. At Halifax alone eighteen Nova
Scotian privateers took out letters of marque against the French between
1756 and 1760, twelve more against the French between 1800 and 1805, and
no less than forty-four against the Americans during the War of 1812.
The century of peace which followed this war gradually came to be taken
so much as a matter of course that Canadians forgot the lessons of the
past and ignored the portents of the future. The very supremacy of a
navy which protected them for nothing made them forget that without its
guardian ships they could not have reached their Canadian nationality at
all. Occasionally a threatened crisis would bring home to them some more
intimate appreciation of British sea-power. But, for the rest, they took
the Navy like the rising and the setting of the sun.
The twentieth century opened on a rapidly changing naval world. British
supremacy was no longer to go unchallenged, at least so far as
preparation went. The German Emperor followed up his pronouncement, 'Our
future is on the sea,' by vigorous action. For the first time in history
a German navy became a powerful force, fit to lead, rather than to {183}
follow, its Austrian and Italian allies. Also for the first time in
history the New World developed a sea-power of first-class importance in
the navy of the United States. And, again for the first time in history,
the immemorial East produced a navy which annihilated the fleet of a
European world-power when Japan beat Russia at Tsu-shima in the
centennial year of Nelson at Trafalgar.
These portentous changes finally roused the oversea dominions of the
British Empire to some sense of the value of that navy which had been
protecting them so efficiently and so long at the mother country's sole
expense. But the dawn of naval truth broke slowly and, following the
sun, went round from east to west. First it reached New Zealand, then
Australia, then South Africa, and then, a long way last, Canada; though
Canada was the oldest, the largest, the most highly favoured in
population and resources, the richest, and the most expensively protected
of them all.
There was a searching of hearts and a gradual comprehension of first
principles. Colonies which had been living the sheltered life for
generations began to see that their immunity from attack was not due to
any warlike virtue of their own, much less to any of their {184}
'victories of peace,' but simply to the fact that the British Navy
represented the survival of the fittest in a previous struggle for
existence. More than two centuries of repeated struggle, from the Armada
in 1588 to Trafalgar in 1805, had given the British Empire a century of
armed peace all round the Seven Seas, and its colonies a century's start
ahead of every rival. But in 1905 the possible rivals were beginning to
draw up once more, thanks to the age-long naval peace; and the launch of
her first modern Dreadnought showed that the mother country felt the need
of putting forth her strength again to meet a world of new competitors.
The critical question now was whether or not the oversea dominions would
do their proper share. They had grown, under free naval protection, into
strong commercial nations, with combined populations equal to nearly a
third of that in the mother country, and combined revenues exceeding a
third of hers. They had a free choice. Canada, for instance, might have
declared herself independent, though she could not have made herself more
free, and would certainly not have been able to maintain a position of
complete independence in any serious crisis. Or she could have destroyed
her individual Canadian {185} characteristics by joining the United
States; though in this case she would have been obliged to pay her share
towards keeping up a navy which was far smaller than the British and much
more costly in proportion. As another alternative she could have said
that her postal and customs preferences in favour of the mother country,
taken in conjunction with what she paid for her militia, were enough.
This would have put her far behind New Zealand and Australia, both of
whom were doing much more, in proportion to their wealth and population.
There was a very natural curiosity to see what Canada would do, because
she was much the senior of the other dominions, while in size, wealth,
and population she practically equalled all three of them together. But
whatever the expectations were, they were doomed to disappointment, for,
while she was last in starting, she did not reach any decisive result at
all. Australia, New Zealand--and even South Africa, so lately the scene
of a devastating war--each gave money, while Canada gave none. New
Zealand, with only one-seventh of Canada's population, gave a
Dreadnought, while Canada gave none. Australia had a battle-worthy
squadron of her own--but Canada had nothing but a mere flotilla.
{186}
The explanation of this strange discrepancy is to be found, partly, in
geographical position. The geographical position of Canada differs
widely from that of any other dominion. She lives beside the United
States, a country with a population ten times greater than her own, a
country, moreover, which holds the Monroe Doctrine as an article of faith
in foreign policy. This famous doctrine simply means that the United
States is determined to be the predominant power in the whole New World
and to prevent any outside power from gaining a foothold there.
Consequently the United States must defend, if necessary, any weaker
nation in America whenever it is attacked by any stronger nation from
outside. Of course the United States would exert its power only on its
own terms, to which any weaker friend would be obliged to submit. But so
long as there was no immediate danger that the public could actually
feel, the Monroe Doctrine provided a very handy argument for all those
who preferred to do nothing. Another peculiarity of Canada's position is
that she is far enough away from the great powers of Europe and from the
black and yellow races of Africa and Asia to prevent her from realizing
so quickly as the mother country the danger from the {187} first, or so
quickly as her sister dominions the danger from the second.
For five successive years, from 1909 to 1913, the naval policy of Canada
was the subject of debate in parliament, press, and public meetings. In
1909 the building programme for the German navy brought on a debate in
the Imperial parliament which found an echo throughout the Empire. The
Canadian parliament then passed a loyal resolution with the consent of
both parties. In 1910 these parties began to differ. The Liberals, who
were then in power, started a distinctively Canadian navy on a very small
scale. In 1911 naval policy was, for the first time, one of the vexed
questions in a general election. In 1912 the new Conservative government
passed through the House of Commons an act authorizing an appropriation
of thirty-five million dollars for three first-class Dreadnought
battleships. This happened to be the exact sum paid by the Imperial
government for the fortification of Quebec in 1832, and considerably less
than one-thirtieth part of what the Imperial government had paid for the
naval and military protection of Canada during the British régime. The
Senate reversed the decision of the Commons in 1913, with the result that
Canada's total naval contribution {188} up to date consisted of five
years' discussion and a little three-year-old navy which had far less
than half the fighting power of New Zealand's single Dreadnought.
The two great parliamentary parties agreed on the general proposition
that Canada ought to do something for her own defence at sea, and that,
within the British Empire, she enjoyed naval advantages which were
unobtainable elsewhere. But they differed radically on the vexed
question of ways and means. The Conservatives said there was a naval
emergency and proposed to give three Dreadnoughts to the Imperial
government on certain conditions. The principal condition was that
Canada could take them back at any time if she wished to use them for a
navy of her own. The Liberals objected that there was no naval
emergency, and that it was wrong to let any force of any kind pass out of
the control of the Canadian government. Nothing, of course, could be
done without the consent of parliament; and the consent of parliament
means the consent of both Houses, the Senate and the Commons of Canada.
There was a Conservative majority in the Commons and a Liberal majority
in the Senate. The voting went by parties, and a complete deadlock
ensued.
{189}
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
ALL AFLOAT seems to be the only book of its kind. Not only this, but
no other book seems to have been written on the special subject of any
one of its eleven chapters. There are many books in which canoes
figure largely, but none which gives the history of the canoe in
Canada. Books on sailing craft, on steamers, on fisheries, on every
aspect of maritime administration, and, most of all, on navies, are
very abundant. But, so far, none of them seems to have been devoted
exclusively to the Canadian part of these various themes, with the
single exception of a purely naval work, _The Logs of the Conquest of
Canada_, by the present author, who has consequently been obliged to
write a good deal from his own experience with paddle, sail, and steam.
Of course there are many excellent articles, some of considerable
length, in the Transactions of several learned societies, like the
Royal Society of Canada, the Literary and Historical Society of Quebec,
the Nova Scotia Historical Society, the Ontario Historical Society, and
so on. There are also a certain number of pamphlets and official
bluebooks--like those of the department of {190} Marine and Fisheries;
and there is an immense mass of original evidence stored away in the
Dominion Archives and elsewhere. But books for the public do not seem
to exist; and the suggestion might be hazarded that this whole subject
offers one of the best unworked or little-worked fields remaining open
to the pioneer in Canadian historical research.
Under these circumstances all that can be done here is to name a few of
the many books which either cover some part of the subject incidentally
or deal with what is most closely allied to it.
CANOES are mentioned in every book of travel along the inland
waterways, kayaks in every book about the Eskimos. La Hontan's
_Travels_, though imaginative, give interesting details, as do the much
more sober _Travels_ of Peter Kalm, the Swedish naturalist. Kohl's
_Kitchi-Gami_ is a good book. But the list might be extended
indefinitely.
SAILING CRAFT and STEAMERS require some sort of nautical dictionary,
though even a dictionary sometimes adds to the puzzles of the landsman.
Admiral Smyth's _Sailor's Word Book_, and Dana's _Seaman's Friend_ (as
it is called in the United States), or _Seaman's Manual_ (as it is
called in England), are excellent. Peake's _Rudimentary Treatise on
Shipbuilding_ covers the period so well described in Clark's _Clipper
Ship Era_ and Dana's _Two Years before the Mast_. Sir George Holmes's
{191} _Ancient and Modern Ships_ and Paasch's magnificent polyglot
marine dictionary, _From Keel to Truck_, deal with steam as well as
sail. Lubbock's _Round the Horn before the Mast_ gives a good account
of a modern steel wind-jammer. Patton's article on shipping and canals
in _Canada and Its Provinces_ is a very good non-nautical account of
its subject, and is quite as long and thorough as the ordinary book.
Fry's _History of North Atlantic Steam Navigation_ includes a great
deal on Canada. _The Times Shipping Number_ gives an up-to-date
account of British and foreign shipping in 1912. Barnaby's _Naval
Development in the Nineteenth Century_ is well worth reading. So is
Bullen's _Men of the Merchant Service_; and so, it might be added, are
a hundred other books.
FISHERIES are the subject of a vast literature. An excellent general
account, but more European than Canadian, is Hérubel's _Sea Fisheries_.
Grenfell's _Labrador_ and Browne's _Where the Fishers Go_ give a good
idea of the Atlantic coast; so, indeed, does Kipling's _Captains
Courageous_. The butchering of seals in the Gulf and round
Newfoundland does not seem to have found any special historian, though
much has been written on the fur seal question in Alaska. Whaling is
recorded in many books. Bullen's _Cruise of the Cachalot_ is good
reading; but annals that incidentally apply more closely to Bluenose
whalers are set forth in Spears's _Story of the New England Whalers_.
{192}
Books on the many subjects grouped together under the general title of
ADMINISTRATION cannot even be mentioned. Such headings as Marine
Insurance, Seamen's Institutes, Lighthouses, Navigation, etc., must be
looked up in reference catalogues.
When we come to NAVIES the number of books is so great that they too
must be looked up separately. Corbett's _England in the Seven Years'
War_ and all the works of Admiral Mahan should certainly be consulted.
Snider's collection of well-spun yarns, _In the Wake of the
Eighteen-Twelvers_, seems to be the only book that has ever been
devoted to the old Canadian Provincial Marine.
{193}
INDEX
'Accommodation,' first steamer built in Canada, 130-2.
Allan, Andrew, with his brother Hugh founds the Allan Line, 145, 146.
Allan, Sir Hugh, founds the first Canadian transatlantic line of
steamers, 145, 146-8.
America, looked upon as an obstruction to navigation, 46. See United
States.
American Independence, antagonism of foreign navies to Britain a
decisive factor in accomplishing, 180.
Arctic exploration, 14, 41.
'Ariel,' in famous clipper race, 103.
Australia and the British Navy, 183, 185.
Aylmer, Lord, at the launching of the 'Royal William,' 140
Bacon, Lord, on the Canadian fisheries, 15.
Baffin, William, his record 'Farthest North,' 55.
Barge, the, 27.
Basque fishermen, in the St Lawrence, 165.
Bateau, the, 27-8.
'Bavarian,' first Atlantic liner entirely built of steel, 148.
Bayfield, Admiral, makes surveys in Canadian waters, 178.
Beaulieu, François, a voyageur with Mackenzie, 17.
Bennett and Henderson, a firm of engineers, 140.
Black Ball Line, conditions under the, 94.
Black, George, a shipbuilder at Quebec, 139.
Black Taylor, befitting end of, 94-5.
Bluenose craft, 63, 71; get a bad name, 77; building of, 82; crews of,
92-3; discipline on, 97-100; under sail, 100, 101, 103-4, 113-28.
Boat, the, 26-7, 28-30.
Boston, reception of the 'Royal William' at, 142.
Bougainville, Comte de, French navigator, 13.
Boulton and Watt, firm of engineers, 130, 132, 135.
'Britannia,' the first Cunarder to arrive in Canada, 145.
British Columbia, fisheries of, 159.
British mercantile marine, 7-8, 12. See Great Britain.
British peoples, sea terms in speech of, 8-9.
British crews, a comparison with Yankees, 95, 97.
Bruce, John, builds first Canadian steamer, 130-1.
'Brunelle,' her speed, 79.
Bryce, James, British ambassador at Washington, 6.
Cabot, John, his voyage to America, 45, 46; his ship, 48-9.
California, rush of vessels to, 74.
Campbell, John Saxton, shipowner in Quebec, 139.
Canada, waters of, 1-4, 7; troubles over water frontiers of, 4-6; her
importance in international questions, 5-6; a comparison with Russia,
7; her position in the British Empire, 7-8; her dependence on the
mercantile marine, 11; ignorance in concerning naval history, 13-14;
her fisheries, 14, 155-9, 161-4; evolution of sailing craft in, 15; her
trade relations with West Indies and France, 60, 62; her prosperity
under Navigation Laws, 68, 69; some disturbing factors in her shipping
trade, 73-4; becomes a great shipping centre, 75-6, 129-30; decline of
shipbuilding in, 76, 80-1; her position at Lloyd's, 77-9, 175; some
notable craft, 79-80; five principal features of Canadian steamship
history, 151; her naval policy, 180-1, 182, 183-8.
'Canada,' the largest and fastest steamer of her time, 135.
Canada Steamship Lines Limited, 150.
'Canadian,' the first Allan Line steamer, 147.
Canadian Militia Act, the, 181.
Canadian Pacific Railway, its fleets of steamers, 148, 150-151.
Canadians, some sea terms in speech of, 8-9.
Canoe: Indian, 15, 16; birch-bark, 17, 18, 20-4; Canadian, 25; keeled,
25-6; gives place to the boat, 28-30; a voyage in, 33-6.
Cape Horn, a voyage round, 119-28.
Cartier, Jacques, in the Gulf, 16, 46; compared with modern
hydrographers, 47, 177; his ship, 48-9.
Champlain, Samuel de, 30; first to advocate the Panama Canal, 54; his
record voyage, 55, 101-2, 177.
Chanties, the seaman's working songs, 110-13, 128.
'Charlotte Dundas,' pioneer steamer, 130.
'Clermont,' an early steamer, 130.
Clippers, a race with, from China to London, 102-3.
Colbert, Jean Baptiste, the great French minister, 57, 59, 60.
Conquest, importance of the Navy in the, 13.
Cook, Captain, British navigator, 14; makes a survey of the St Lawrence
and Gulf, 177-8.
Coureurs de bois, the, 32.
Cunard brothers, merchants in Halifax, 138, 145, 146.
Cunard, Samuel, founds the Cunard Line, 145-6.
Derby, Elias, the first American millionaire, 70.
Devonshire ships, annual round of, 67.
'Don de Dieu,' Champlain's ship, 55.
Dory, the, 27; the schooner's tender, 159-61.
Drake, Sir Francis, sails round the world, 52.
'Dreadnought,' her record run, 102.
Dug-out, the, 18, 19-20.
Durham boat, the, 27-8.
East India Docks in London, famous clipper race to, 102-3.
Egyptians, as shipbuilders, 49, 50, 86.
'Empress of Ireland,' loss of, with over a thousand lives, off
Rimouski, 151.
English-speaking people, sea terms in speech of, 8-9.
Eskimos, and whaling, 164.
Fletcher of Rye, his nautical invention, 46-7, 50.
Fort Langley, Simpson reaches, 40.
Fort St James, Simpson's royal progress at, 39-40.
French Canadians, sea terms in speech of, 10; and whaling, 58-9, 164.
'Frontenac,' the, on the Great Lakes, 135.
Fur trade under the French and the British, 31-3; voyages in connection
with, 33, 37-40.
'Galiote,' the, built by the Sovereign Council, 59.
George V, his voyage across the Atlantic, 102.
Germany, her navy, 182-3, 187.
Goudie, James, builder of the 'Royal William,' 137-8, 139, 141.
'Grace Carter,' her record trip, 102.
'Grande Hermine,' Cartier's ship, 49, 50.
Grand Portage, the, 31.
Great Britain, preponderance of her ships, 7-8, 51; her command of the
sea, 15, 53, 56-7, 73, 76, 102, 177; weakness of her Board of Trade
regulations, 99; her tonnage under construction in 1913, 153; her
consular service for Canada, 176; colonial contributions to the Royal
Navy, 183-8.
Great Lakes, why called, 1; the first vessel on, 60; trade on, 71-3.
'Great Republic,' her canvas, 105.
Grenfell, Dr, in Mission to Deep Sea Fishermen, 172.
Halifax, lumbering and shipbuilding at, 70; privateers of, 182.
'Hamilton Campbell Kidston,' a famous ship, 80.
Hare, Dr, in Mission to Deep Sea Fishermen, 172.
Hell ships, 94-5, 98.
Hennepin, Father, his description of 'Le Griffon,' 61.
Henry, John, a Quebec founder, 137-8.
Henry, Commodore, and the 'Royal William,' 143.
'Hercules,' a tug, 134.
Hudson Bay, conflicts between French and British in, 62-3; place for
fur, 64.
Hudson's Bay Company, its maritime trade, 63.
Hundred Years' War, the second, 56.
Hurricane, a ship in a, 120-7.
Iberville, the French naval hero of Canada, 63, 179.
Indians, and whaling, 164.
Jackson, John, engines the first Canadian steamer, 131.
Japan, her naval victory at Tsu-shima, 183.
Jefferys' map of the French dominions in America, 28-9.
'Jemsetgee Cursetgee,' built at Moncton, 80.
Kayaks of the Eskimos, the, 15, 24-5
Kingston, shipping at, 72.
'Konstanz,' longevity of the, 79.
Labrador, British supremacy at, 63, 67.
Lachine Canal, 135.
'Lady Washington,' curious history of the, 73.
Lake Erie, shipping on, 72-73.
Larboard, origin of word, 118.
La Salle, builds the 'Le Griffon,' 60.
'Lasca,' her record trip, 102.
'Le Griffon,' her short career, 60-1, 180.
Leif Ericson, a Norse explorer, 41, 45.
'Lightning,' her record run, 103.
Lloyd's, and Canadian shipping, 77-8; composition and method of, 174-5.
Log, the simplest type of craft, 17-18.
Louisbourg, a universal port of call, 62.
Macdonald, Archibald, his account of Simpson's canoe voyage, 39, 40.
M'Dougall, John, master of the 'Royal William,' 137-8, 142-3.
M'Gillivray, with Simpson at Fort St James, 40.
M'Kay, Donald, a shipbuilder of Boston, 103.
Mackenzie, Alexander, his achievement with a canoe, 16-17.
Mackenzie, a shipbuilder at Pictou, 79-80.
Mackinaw boat, the, 37.
Marine and Fisheries Department in Canada, 175-7.
Marine insurance, 173-5.
'Mary,' her cargo to and from Quebec, 64-5.
Mercantile marine, importance of, 12.
Molson, John, owner of the first Canadian steamer, 130-1, 132-3; his
first tender to supply steamer transport for military purposes, 133-4.
Monroe Doctrine, the, 186.
Montreal, position of, 2; furs collected at, 71.
Nantucket Island, British whaling at, 58.
Nascaupees, and the fur trade, 33.
Naval architecture, improvement of, 66.
Naval history, ignorance concerning, 13-14.
Navigation laws, the, 68-9; repealed, 74.
New Brunswick, shipbuilding in, 75-6.
Newfoundland, 2; in relation to Canada, 5; and knowledge of the sea,
12; boats of various countries at, 51; British supremacy at, 63, 64;
fisheries of, 155, 157-8.
New France, nautical history of, 54 note; nautical advantages of, 58.
New Zealand, and the British Navy, 183, 185.
Norsemen. See Norwegians.
Norway House, field headquarters of the Hudson's Bay Company, 38, 39.
Norwegians, seamanship of, 12, 44-5; and whaling, 168-9.
Nova Scotia, shipbuilding in, 75; whalers of, 165. See Bluenose craft.
'Ontario,' founders in Lake Ontario, 71, 135.
Oomiak, the Eskimo cargo boat, 25.
Paddling, the art of, 34.
Paddock, Ichabod, a whaling master at Cape Cod, 58.
'Parisian,' the first steamer to be fitted with bilge keels, 148.
'Pélican,' d'Iberville's ship, 63.
Perel, Captain John, his ship wrecked in attempt to establish trade
with New France, 64.
Pett, Phineas, ship designer, 56.
'Phoenix,' her record, 136.
Pont-Gravé, builds two vessels in Canada, 59.
Pork-eaters, 31-2.
Portuguese, ships of, 53.
Provincial marine, the, 181.
Punt, the, 27.
Quebec, shipbuilding at, 71, 75; and the launching of the 'Royal
William,' 139-40.
Quebec and Halifax Navigation Company, builds the 'Royal William,' 138.
Queenston, trade at, 72.
Raft, the, 18-19.
Raleigh, Sir Walter, on striking topmasts, 53.
Rapids, running of, 35-6.
'R. C. Rickmers,' the largest sailing ship in the world, 105.
Richelieu and Ontario Navigation Company, 148-50.
Rideau Canal, 136.
Ross, firm of shipbuilders at Quebec, 79.
Royal National Mission to Deep Sea Fishermen, its good work, 172.
Royal Navy. See under Great Britain.
'Royal William,' first steamer to cross the Atlantic entirely under
steam, 136-43; first steamer to fire a shot in action, 143-4; her
records, 144-5.
Sailing craft, three types of, 17-37, 129-30. See under names of craft.
Sails: the simple square of the Vikings, 43-4; invention of the
fore-and-aft-trimmed sails, 46-7, 50, 65-7; sails of a ship, 105-7;
setting and trimming, 107-9, 127; in a squall, 109-10; in an Antarctic
hurricane, 120-5.
St Charles river, shipbuilding yards at, 61.
'St Jean,' wrecked on Anticosti, 64.
'St John,' first steamer in Canadian salt water, 136.
St Lawrence river system, 1-3; and France, 63.
St Lawrence Steamboat Company, 134-5.
Saint-Onge, Roberval's pilot, 51.
Salter Brothers, shipbuilders at Moncton, 80.
'Santa Maria,' Columbus's ship, 49-50.
'Savannah,' her claims disproved, 136-7, 141.
Schooner, handiness of the, 159, 161.
Seamen's Institutes, benefit of, 171-2.
Seppings, Sir Robert, chief constructor of the Navy, 85, 86.
Shipbuilding: in Canada, 14, 59-60, 61; comparison between English and
French, 57; construction and launching of a ship, 82-91, 153-4.
Shipping, in the eighteenth century, 69-70; in the nineteenth, 74-5.
Ships, short terms designating the nationality of, 93.
Simpson, Sir George, governor of the Hudson's Bay Company, 29, 36; his
tour of inspection, 37-40.
'Sophia,' her record trip, 72.
South Africa and the British Navy, 183, 185.
Sovereign of the Seas,' surpasses all records, 56.
Sovereign Council of New France, builds the 'Galiote,' 59.
Spain, her Armada, 52; superiority of her ships, 53.
Squall, how to manage a ship in a, 109-10.
Starboard, origin of word, 118.
Steam craft, types of, 151-2.
Steam-engine, development of, 153.
Steering a ship, 119-20.
'Swiftsure,' an early steamer in Canada, 132-3.
'Taeping,' wins famous clipper race, 103.
Talon, Jean, encourages shipbuilding in Canada, 59-60.
Teabout, Henry, an American shipbuilder in Canada, 135.
Torrance Line, the, 135.
'Tug, The,' first towboat in the world, 134.
Tug, the handiest all-round craft, 151-2.
United Empire Loyalists, settle in Maritime Provinces, 70-71.
United States, her tonnage threatens British supremacy, 53, 74; navy
of, 183.
Vancouver, George, navigates the Pacific coast, 178.
Vetch, Samuel, son of an Edinburgh minister, his misfortune, 65.
'Victoria,' a cruise on the, 103-104, 113-28.
'Victorian,' a turbine steamer, 148.
'Victory,' the, Nelson's ship, 79.
Vikings, voyages of the, 41-42; their ships, 42-5, 48, 66, 67.
'Virginian,' a turbine steamer, 148.
Voyageurs, the, 28, 31-2; in conjunction with the Indians, 32-3; Sir
George Simpson on, 38, 39.
War of 1812, effect of on Canadian shipping trade, 71-72, 73; effect of
American naval victories in the, 180; and Halifax privateers, 182.
Watt, James, improver of the steam-engine, 130.
Welland Canal, 135.
Welsh ships, annual round of, 67.
Whaling, development and dangers of, 163-70.
Winds, different, 105.
Yankee clippers, superiority of, 95-6; crews of, 96-7.
Yankees, and whaling, 168.
York boat, the, 36.
York Factory, Sir George Simpson's tour from, 38-9.
{201}
THE CHRONICLES OF CANADA
Edited by George M. Wrong and H. H. Langton of the University of Toronto
A series of thirty-two freshly-written narratives for popular reading,
designed to set forth, in historic continuity, the principal events and
movements in Canada, from the Norse Voyages to the Railway Builders.
PART I. THE FIRST EUROPEAN VISITORS
1. The Dawn of Canadian History
A Chronicle of Aboriginal Canada
BY STEPHEN LEACOCK
2. The Mariner of St Malo
A Chronicle of the Voyages of Jacques Cartier
BY STEPHEN LEACOCK
PART II. THE RISE OF NEW FRANCE
3. The Founder of New France
A Chronicle of Champlain
BY CHARLES W. COLBY
4. The Jesuit Missions
A Chronicle of the Cross in the Wilderness
BY THOMAS GUTHRIE MARQUIS
5. The Seigneurs of Old Canada
A Chronicle of New-World Feudalism
BY WILLIAM BENNETT MUNRO
6. The Great Intendant
A Chronicle of Jean Talon
BY THOMAS CHAPAIS
7. The Fighting Governor
A Chronicle of Frontenac
BY CHARLES W. COLBY
PART III. THE ENGLISH INVASION
8. The Great Fortress
A Chronicle of Louisbourg
BY WILLIAM WOOD
9. The Acadian Exiles
A Chronicle of the Land of Evangeline
BY ARTHUR G. DOUGHTY
10. The Passing of New France
A Chronicle of Montcalm
BY WILLIAM WOOD
11. The Winning of Canada
A Chronicle of Wolfe
BY WILLIAM WOOD
PART IV. THE BEGINNINGS OF BRITISH CANADA
12. The Father of British Canada
A Chronicle of Carleton
BY WILLIAM WOOD
13. The United Empire Loyalists
A Chronicle of the Great Migration
BY W. STEWART WALLACE
14. The War with the United States
A Chronicle of 1812
BY WILLIAM WOOD
PART V. THE RED MAN IN CANADA
15. The War Chief of the Ottawas
A Chronicle of the Pontiac War
BY THOMAS GUTHRIE MARQUIS
16. The War Chief of the Six Nations
A Chronicle of Joseph Brant
BY LOUIS AUBREY WOOD
17. Tecumseh
A Chronicle of the last Great Leader of his People
BY ETHEL T. RAYMOND
PART VI. PIONEERS OF THE NORTH AND WEST
18. The 'Adventurers of England' on Hudson Bay
A Chronicle of the Fur Trade in the North
BY AGNES C. LAUT
19. Pathfinders of the Great Plains
A Chronicle of La Vérendrye and his Sons
BY LAWRENCE J. BURPEE
20. Adventurers of the Far North
A Chronicle of the Arctic Seas
BY STEPHEN LEACOCK
21. The Red River Colony
A Chronicle of the Beginnings of Manitoba
BY LOUIS AUBREY WOOD
22. Pioneers of the Pacific Coast
A Chronicle of Sea Rovers and Fur Hunters
BY AGNES C. LAUT
23. The Cariboo Trail
A Chronicle of the Gold-fields of British Columbia
BY AGNES C. LAUT
PART VII. THE STRUGGLE FOR POLITICAL FREEDOM
24. The Family Compact
A Chronicle of the Rebellion in Upper Canada
BY W. STEWART WALLACE
25. The Patriotes of '37
A Chronicle of the Rebellion in Lower Canada
BY ALFRED D. DECELLES
26. The Tribune of Nova Scotia
A Chronicle of Joseph Howe
BY WILLIAM LAWSON GRANT
27. The Winning of Popular Government
A Chronicle of the Union of 1841
BY ARCHIBALD MACMECHAN
PART VIII. THE GROWTH OF NATIONALITY
28. The Fathers of Confederation
A Chronicle of the Birth of the Dominion
BY A. H. U. COLQUHOUN
29. The Day of Sir John Macdonald
A Chronicle of the Early Years of the Dominion
BY SIR JOSEPH POPE
30. The Day of Sir Wilfrid Laurier
A Chronicle of Our Own Times
BY OSCAR D. SKELTON
PART IX. NATIONAL HIGHWAYS
31. All Afloat
A Chronicle of Craft and Waterways
BY WILLIAM WOOD
32. The Railway Builders
A Chronicle of Overland Highways
BY OSCAR D. SKELTON
***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ALL AFLOAT***
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