All Afloat: a Chronicle of Craft and Waterways

Part IX. National Highways

National Highways

ALL AFLOAT

A Chronicle of Craft and Waterways

WILLIAM WOOD

Toronto Glasgow, Brook & Company 1915

Copyright in all Countries subscribing to the Berne Convention

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}

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.

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CHAPTER I. A Land of Waterways

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.'

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