Delphi complete works of.., p.713
Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 713
I speak of such recollections not in a personal way but as a heritage common to so many of us in Canada. Carry them back through a generation or two of memory and hearsay, and you can reach to the days of the American Revolution and the founding of the Maritime Provinces. With our French-Canadian fellows such memories and recollections carry back even further, till they are lost in the golden mist of the royal history of France. In our Western Canada the annals of settlement are still for the most part those of a single life, and memory and history are one. It is to this softened light of a history that blends so largely with living memory that this narrative looks for its colouring.
But this relative shortness of the past serves to lengthen and enlarge our future. Canadians instinctively think more of what is still to come in their country than of what has happened in the past. People of older lands typically and commonly look back. They think of their thousands of years of history, they see all about them the monuments and the majesty of the past. The face of the earth beneath their feet has been changed and refashioned at the hands of man. Of nature as it was there is but the unchanging sea and the sky, fickle with the changes of the hours but in centuries the same. Thus people in England or Scotland turn their aspirations towards living up to their past, keeping their country as great as it has been. “There’ll always be an England” sings the Englishman, and the Scot doesn’t even have to sing. But Canadians would never sing that there will always be a Canada — like this one. This is just a beginning. We have hardly started. Wait a hundred years and see.
Hence any proper story of Canada, even in narrating the past, must open the windows of every outlook to the sunshine of the future.
I would like to add one further word. It may well be that in the writing of this book the execution has fallen short of the aim. But there is no doubt of the value to our country of such a record of the history and the life of its people as this book was designed to be by those who collaborated in planning it. Canada has always been fortunate in the generous help given in the past to education, art and science by those eminent in commercial life. The House of Seagram in their public-spirited design in the production of this volume, worthily take their place in this honoured company.
CHAPTER I. THE EMPTY CONTINENT
THE NEW DISCOVERY of America — Formation of the Continent — Man’s Transit to America — The Norsemen in America — The Aborigines and the Empty Continent — European Expansion and the New World — The Search for the East — Voyages and Explorations of the Fifteen Hundreds — Misdirection of Effort — The Empty Continent still waits.
The poet Jemmy Thomson, in writing Rule Britannia in 1740, tells us that Britain originally “arose from out the azure main.” This is exactly what it did, except that the main was not azure. It rose, very properly accompanied by the rest of the British Empire and in fact preceded by Canada. The “main” was not azure because there was no sunlight to make it so. Around our unformed globe was still wrapped the dense volume of steamy cloud that shrouded it in the half-darkness that still holds the planet Venus. Under this moved and stirred the heaving and silent water later to be the windswept, sunlit ocean. Within the first crust that thus emerged and remained above the water, was the rim of desolate rock that surrounds the Hudson Bay, the central ring of inner Canada. This is perhaps the oldest country in the world. Till yesterday it seemed destined to eternal solitude. The discovery of America has begun again. Much of it, and especially of Canada, such as the El Dorado in the northern wilderness or the Aladdin’s cave of radium beside the Great Bear Lake, moves from useless desolation to the foreground of human interest. In the world’s production of wealth and search for welfare the emphasis of human effort has shifted from tropic plants to northern minerals, from the jungle to the rock, from the forced labour of the Egyptian slave to the leaping power of the northern waterfall. This alters entirely the outlook of the world towards Canada. Less than a century ago the famous British historian, Sir Archibald Alison, “History of Europe,” Cha could state that “probably seven-eighths of this immense surface, British North America, are doomed to eternal sterility from the excessive severity of the climate, which yields only a scanty herbage to the reindeer, the elk and the musk-ox.” But it is now as if the globe had shifted on its axis and tilted Canada towards the sun. Thus does history reveal that continued migration “Northward Course of Empire,” V. Stefansson, 1922 of civilization so finely called the “northward course of empire.” The palaces of Nineveh are buried under the Mesopotamian sand, and the Assyrian, who once came down like a wolf on the fold and whose banners were gleaming in purple and gold, now sells rugs in a palatial hotel in what was once the “desert of the Saskatchewan.” This sense of the illimitable resource of our future — not boastful but earnest — should be the inspiring idea of a proper study of Canada.
These great changes have had much to do with the change and development of our globe itself. Where nature built and fashioned broadcast, man has groped and burrowed. Every last thing was thrown down lavishly for us millions of years ago. Only knowledge lingered. So we can perhaps best understand the structure and resources of our country or our continent by turning back to the earliest hour of earth’s time and seeing it in its formation. Our globe, once a ball of fire torn from the J.W. Gregory, “The Making of the Earth,” 1912 sun, cooled, shrank and solidified. As it cooled, so the geologists tell us, it underwent the same pressure of stress and strain as attend the collapse of a balloon losing gas, or a football losing air. Like these it tried to draw itself into a solid figure of four sides, each side a triangle, like the little four-sided glass pyramids seen as table ornaments. Its own rotary motion counteracted this, trying to re-make it to a smaller sphere. But the enlightened eye can still see in the structure of our continents and oceans, the huge outline of these four triangular faces, washed by the seven seas. One great triangle outline, the easiest to detect, is that of America — all America with the Atlantic — from its wide base along the arctic rim to its “toe” in the antarctic. The great gash where the Gulf of Mexico is torn out of the continental outline is said by scientists to mark the place where it was detached in its formation from the side of Africa that once joined it. Slide our American continent east again along its parallels and it would refit with Africa. But as a matter of fact — of science — it is still slowly sliding the other way, west. Canada is estimated to be moving away from Europe at the rate of a few yards a year. This is excellent, except that it brings us nearer Japan. But this picture at least emphasizes, if only as in a parable, the unity of all America.
Per contra, what we call the Old World, Asia with its appended Europe, along with Africa and the Indian Ocean tapering south, forms another face. The Pacific Ocean gives the natural and simple outline of another triangle, sunk beneath the sea. The broad cap of the arctic regions, unfamiliar as a unit in our maps, marks the fourth face — the top, or lid, as it were, as we generally picture the upright globe. As the outline formed, as the ridges rose and the seas retreated, there may well have been alternate rises and falls, lost land, land bridges and bygone islands, such as human fancy, ever since Plato, has loved to restore. All this for the most part long before man; but not of necessity before emerging life.
The globe cooled; the clouds lifted; the sun came; the waters sparkled and there was life. How it came in we do not know. What it is, we cannot tell. We mark its self-adapting change, its will to be. Its mystery we cannot read. Even before the sunlight, great plants, giant ferns, rose in the half-darkness to sink and submerge as future coal fields. Animate life no doubt appeared under the water and then crawled hideous to the land. It grew in size before it grew in adaptability. Huge animals dragged their flabby length, pulpy, non-resistant and premature. But nature always toned the process to strength, endurance and beauty. There came a time when the prairie blossomed with flowers and the birds sang in the woods, and the earth waited for man; waited and waited for such uncounted thousands of years that science cannot count them now. Indeed our scientists seem to lengthen their conjectures with every passing decade. Sir Arthur Keith, “The Antiquity of Man,” 1925 Lord Kelvin estimated the age of the earth at 100,000,000 years. Our later knowledge of radio-active elemental change alters the estimate to perhaps 4,000,000,000 years. Life may have existed hundreds of millions of years ago. But the space between the first appearance of life, and the first appearance of man, perhaps 500,000 years ago, seems inconceivably vast.
But at last man came. He was by descent a sort of super-baboon, or a first-cousin ape. The scientific name is an “aberrant primate.” Like most of us he cannot trace his direct family — just his “people” at large. Such as they were, he parted company with them. Man came down from the trees, stopped climbing, stood to attention and began using his hands. His particular trick was that of “opposing” his thumb to his fingers. They say that that made him.
At any rate man set to work to make something of himself, and presently succeeded, and there he was! Body and mind, man beat his cousin apes on every lap; turned growls and chuckles into speech; made sticks into tools; and so parted company with all the rest of the world.
This was in Asia. Man undoubtedly was evolved in one area and from it spread out over the globe. But our New World of America knew nothing of man for a long time. We have never found, as in Europe and Asia, those ancient skulls buried deep under rocks that prove their age by the calendar of geology. Here is the famous “Piltdown” skull of some man who once lived in Sussex; the Pithecanthropus of Java; or the recently found Mongolian man, the last addition to the “old gang.” Now and then a false alarm, as started by the Los Angeles find of 1924, awakens vain hopes of ancestry. But so far all our discoveries of skulls in rock betray a later burial, and not the solemn, primeval rest of the Sussex man.
Man, then, came to America from the Old World. There was no difficulty about it, as we see it in the light of modern knowledge. Indeed there were so many ways of coming, and man probably came by so many different ways, that the only surprising thing is that there was no regular coming and going to the mainland of America till the time of Christopher Columbus. That was the trouble — the coming and going. Primitive people might come, and did come, but they couldn’t go back; or they came by so slow a journey, spread over generations, that they forgot where they came from and presently thought they came from the sky.
Ellsworth Huntington, “The Red Man’s Continent”
Here are some of the ways in which mankind came to America. A glance at the globe shows that Asia and America are almost connected territory. We seldom realize that the long peninsula of Alaska, which is part of the United States, reaches out so far west that the most westerly of the Aleutian Islands, which form its continuation, are due north of New Zealand. In other words this long peninsula and its island stepping-stones reach to within 200 miles of the Peninsula of Kamchatka, in Siberia. Early men, even with only primitive means of water transport, could have drifted or been blown across this gap. It could never have been in prehistoric times a known and travelled passage. It was at best a disappearance into the black night of the ocean, like the passage beyond Gibraltar to the early Mediterranean people. But the Bering Strait itself, though about 800 miles farther north, is only fifty-six miles wide, with two small islands that reduce its longest water gap to thirty-five miles. In some winters the whole strait freezes to a solid stretch of ice. Nothing but the climate of this desolate Asiatic region prevented mankind from moving eastward out of Asia as easily as westward into Mediterranean Europe. But between the truly habitable parts of Eastern Asia — as the valley of the Amoor River — and the Bering Strait, there lies a stretch of two to three thousand miles of the coldest and most forbidding territory on the globe. Life shudders in the cold, its flame almost extinct. The winter temperature at Verkhoyansk, the “cold pole” of north-east Siberia, shows a January average of 59 degrees below zero, while the minimum recorded (so far) is 94 below. In such a region Ellsworth Huntington, “The Red Man’s Continent” the means of life are scant and precarious, the winter an unending darkness, the summer a glare of meaningless sunshine. Scholars do not doubt that prehistoric man crossed this territory, but never as a single and remembered transit. It was a slow migration, generation after generation long, farther and farther into the mist and cold, till it filtered down the Alaskan coast of America into the sunshine — its origins forgotten. But where man’s memory fails, the stamp that nature sets on him persists. Our Eskimos of Canada and our Indians reproduce beyond all doubt the Mongolian type of man. The native custom and mode of life of our Pacific Indians, as first discovered, still connects with Asiatic culture.
It is true, the bridge of language between Asia and America is broken beyond recall, the connection, if any, a mere matter of guess-work. Language in America is multiplied and divided even more than in the Old World. It is estimated that there are at least 1,000 original distinct languages on the American continent, that is to say, languages, mutually unintelligible and not, as dialects, mutually comprehensible. These all interconnect from the Eskimos to the Patagonians. But nowhere do they connect with the speech of other continents. This is the more striking since elsewhere surviving similarities of language stretch over a connection of thousands of miles of distance and forgotten centuries of history. You may trace the Uro-Altaic family of languages, H. de Windt, “Paris to New York by Land,” 1903 from Finland and Turkey across the whole stretch of Asia. The numerals from one to ten, as existing in Turkish, are virtually the same as those used at Yakutsk. This marks the track of the great Asiatic migration westward and north-eastward from its first starting point. Similarities of language, as said, run through and across all America. But as from continent to continent there is no bridge. Yet this only bespeaks the vast antiquity of the migration and its slow transit.
But this undoubted movement of man into America was no doubt supplemented in some small degree with arrivals by other routes. We need consider but little the possibility of land bridges joining America to the Old World. Such there undoubtedly were. The American continent, as has been said, may once have adhered to Europe and to Africa, from which we may imagine it, as in the fancy of love songs, reluctantly drifting apart. But few scientists would allow us to imagine man as part of its reluctant flight. His time was yet to come. Similarly the North Atlantic may have had its Atlantis, now sunk beneath the waves, and the “banks” of Newfoundland, the “continental shelf” of Greenland, may once have joined to Iceland and the British Isles. But there is a lack of any evidence that this was in man’s brief yesterday.
But in one direction from America there is such evidence. The Polynesian Islands of the Pacific which are the still projecting heights of the earth-face that collapsed, reach all the way from the Australian waters to where they end at a distance of some 2,000 miles from South America. Across the whole island world of the Pacific, there is, and always has been, transit and intercourse reflected in the bond of language and culture. The phrase “the cannibal isles,” once covered them all. Now Easter G. Routledge, “The Mystery of Easter Island” Island, the farthest outpost towards South America, is distant from it 2,000 miles. To the nearest inhabited island on the west, Pitcairn, the distance is 1,100 miles. But on Easter Island are huge stone monuments, fashioned, beyond all doubt, by man and not by nature. Some of them represent human figures, as high as 37 feet and 50 tons in weight, evidently cut from the still traceable quarries in the island lava. Who put them there? Not the puny population of an island of 55 square miles. It was, at first discovery (1722), estimated at perhaps 2,000; never more; at present 250. This original population knew nothing of either stone work or mechanics. The monuments were certainly not transported from Asia or America. The only conclusion is that Easter Island was once part of a much bigger place with a great population and with arts unknown now, and that most of it subsided under the ocean. The tidal wave of its subsidence may well have washed its people away, or perhaps they left in terror. New-comers, thousands of years later perhaps, took the island and the stones as they found them. If this were true, a lot of queer resemblances between South America and Polynesian culture would find an easy explanation. Constructive imagination, once started, could make the mystery of Easter Island rival the life of William Shakespeare.
On the other side of America is another “dead certainty” of primitive migration. There is no doubt that long ago men from the old world made their way — or had their way made for them — to Central America. Physically this is all too easy since the direction of the winds, blowing over temperate seas, makes such a transit a simple accident of storm and weather. Here then in Yucatan, and in adjoining regions of Central America, overgrown in the jungle, lost from memory for centuries, are the stone walls and sunken corridors that mark what was once the seat of Mayan civilization. Painstaking scholarship has deciphered its calendars, its star pictures and its records, only one degree from alphabet writing. Now primitive people, tending their flocks, know and watch the night sky — a thing unseen and forgotten in our cities. They note imaginary resemblances in a group of stars — highly fanciful mostly — to a dipper or a wagon or a chair. By these resemblances they name the stars, by word or picture. And the Mayan symbols for the stars around the Zodiac — the ram, the bull, the heavenly twins, etc. — are the same as ours, the ones the Old World made up thousands of years ago. The likeness between the constellation and the thing from which it is named could never account for this. There is too little likeness. Mathematically the chance of twelve “same” names in a line, beats out infinity. The only conclusion is that the “Mayans” blew in from “home.” Unfortunately that seems all of it. After the first glow of our comradeship, the realization that they too are of European descent, there is nothing left.
