Delphi complete works of.., p.762
Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 762
Indeed a new town arose as an addition to the old one. What had been the flatlands and meadows and broken, straggling woods, along the valley of the Little River, the ground which had offered the natural terrain for the Lachine Canal, now with each succeeding decade reared its clumsy factories and shabby plants, its lifting cranes and iron runways, obliterating and disfiguring nature but offering a new beauty to the eye of the shareholder. Nor were they presently without a beauty, or at least an imposing majesty of their own, such as Brangwyn has loved to convey — red-litten windows all aglow at night, long streamers of lurid smoke and flame pouring into the darkness, or even in the daylight, the beating of the hammer, the whistles of the boats in the canal, and the peculiar attraction that goes with things in a straight line, the rectilinear canal, the power wires straight as perspective itself, the long rows of casks piled high and all of a piece, acres of boxes neat as a garden — the new symmetry of arrangement which necessity imposes on engineering, converting man’s latest efforts back to nature’s oldest forms. Such is the new Montreal that sprang up in these later decades of the nineteenth century between the city and Lachine, duplicated presently by the downstream manufacturers below the original port.
Thus strangely has changed the character of Montreal — a mission, a fort of the fur trade in the wilderness, a French colonial military town, a British port of trade, a Canadian metropolis of shipping and manufacture with arts and letters on the hill behind it.
Most notable and visible, of course, was the development, the progress, of the harbor and Port of Montreal. It is true that the port and its facilities and equipment as now existing are the product of the present century. But under the first generations of operations by the Dominion after 1867 it moved a long way forward from the “granite quays” of Charles Dickens’ visit, and even from the day when the Prince of Wales opened the Victoria Bridge.
The port and with it the care of the ship channel and the navigation guides of the river below and above it now passed under the care and enjoyed the aid of the government of the Dominion of Canada. It remained under the administration of a body of Harbour Commissioners appointed by the government, an arrangement which lasted until 1935, when the control of the Montreal Harbour, along with those of other Canadian seaports, was given over to a centralized body at Ottawa. To the Commissioners was added, some years later, a Harbour Corporation (1894) in which were vested the port area, docks, and properties.
At the time of Confederation the ship channel down the river had been dredged from its original eleven feet in the shallow stretches to a depth of twenty feet; constant dredging guaranteed a deeper and deeper channel, rendered necessary by the increasing draft of the steamships of the period. By 1882 the depth was twenty-five feet; by 1887 it was twenty-seven and one half. The docks themselves were as constantly improved as the channel. The wharfage of Montreal in 1870 already covered three miles (it is now ten). Most of these were low-level wharves that have disappeared today in favor of the high-level piers of the present harbor, a change that began just at the end of the century. The Victoria Pier stands in the harbor plan of 1877 the same as today.
The greatest evidence of the progress of the port is the increase of its tonnage from the 205,000 tons of 1866 to the 1,000,000 tons of 1892 and its reach beyond 1,500,000 at the close of the century. (It stood in 1938 at 9,000,000 tons.) Progressive changes came over the character of the shipping with the change from sail to steam, from smaller ships to large. The tonnage of 205,000 in 1866 represented 516 overseas ships, an average of about 400 tons. The 735 ships that totaled 1,036,000 in 1892 show an average of 1400 tons, and the 868 overseas ships totaling 1,584,000 in 1898 give an average of over 1800 tons.
For years after Confederation sail predominated over steam along the water front in the ocean shipping at Montreal, as distinguished from the steamers of the trade of the upper river and the Great Lakes. Thomas S. Brown, the retired “rebel” general of 1837, mentioned earlier, speaks in his old-age memoirs of the crowd of sail in the harbor of 1872. There were “20 ships, 22 barques, 3 brigs, 4 brigantines and schooners,” in all forty-nine vessels under sail. Sailors will recognize the types as corresponding to the old pictures of the harbor; the brig two-masted and square-rigged; the brigantine with a fore-and-aft sail on the mainmast; the barque, a three-master with a fore-and-aft on the mizzen. But what the pictures, seemingly authentic, show as “old-time schooners” at anchor in the lower harbor do not correspond to the true fore-and-aft schooner of the New England coast, having three masts with only the mizzenmast rigged fore and aft. But the point is one of interest only to sailors, mostly dead. The ocean ships under sail, however, greatly exceeded in the Port of Montreal of the seventies the ships under steam. The sailing vessels named above are set against twenty-one ocean steamers.
But indeed, in a sense, all the ocean vessels in and out of Montreal, with steam or without, were still sailing vessels and remained so till the end of the century. For those were the days of the old-time passenger liners, such as those of the famous Allan Line, driven principally by steam, but carrying also in a fair breeze a great press of sail on three tall masts that retained all the old-time glory of the sea. Such good old ships, the Sarmatian, the Sardinian, the Polynesian (otherwise the Rolling Polly and later the unrolling Laurentian), and the last and latest queen of the river under sail, the Parisian, back and forward on the Liverpool voyage, carry a wealth of memory as a chronicle of the times. Their outcoming voyages filled with the new settlers from Britain, the “quality” dining in the saloon, the quantity feeding in the steerage, are a part of our British history. Some people think that all the fast duchesses and windless empresses ever built cannot remake the romance of the St. Lawrence voyage as it was.
The Sarmatian, Which Carried the Writer of This Book in 1876 as a Child of Six on His Way to Canada. The Picture from the Allan Line Records Is Supplied by the Courtesy of the Canadian Pacific Railway Company.
For in those old days of the Allan Line the Atlantic voyage, Liverpool to Montreal, in the seventies and the eighties had a far different, far deeper meaning than what the voyage had come to signify fifty years later. The Atlantic service, even in the years just before the Great War, had become an Atlantic ferry — fast, efficient, luxurious for those who could pay for luxuries, comfortable for all. Most of the people traveling had crossed the ocean before, many of them several times. All expected to cross the ocean again. There was nothing left of the farewells to England of the departing emigrant, no falling tears as the green shores of Ireland, soft with rain and dotted with the sunlight on the yellow gorse, faded out of sight.
In the days of which we speak it was far otherwise. Most of the outcoming people on the Allan liner had never crossed before, hardly expected to cross again, were saying “good-by” in a sense lost in our present world of radio and aerial flight. The writer of this book can recall such a voyage, of 1876, coming out as a child of six, in the Allan liner Sarmatian (built in 1871), a grand ship with a tower of canvas on its square yards — a ship, the real thing, its masts reaching upward in a network of ropes and rigging, men calling from aloft, a great brass notice on the mizzenmast: “Do not speak to the Man at the Wheel” — and the speechless and unspeakable helmsman there in sight, his hands on the wheel, his eye on the compass and the clouds. The Liverpool-Montreal boats of those days lay at anchor in the Mersey. There was no floating dock. The people came on board in a tender, and when all was ready the word was given and the anchor hauled up from a capstan by the crew, with the passengers and even the children tailed on to the capstan ropes. All sang — it was the custom of the line,
“Cheer, boys, cheer, no more of idle sorrow, Courage, true hearts, will bear us on our way” —
a song that ended with the assertion that the “Star of the Empire glitters in the West.” As beside such a ship, clearing the Irish Channel in a steady breeze under a cloud of sail, the sun on the canvas, the wind in the rigging, a great liner of today is just a floating apartment house to play cards in.
Thus went out the British people, singing, into exile, with hope ahead and behind them a memory of home that time could not obliterate, nor adversity tarnish, nor even fortune lull into forgetfulness. It is strange that we do not learn that the greatest British asset is the British people, the chief import of the Dominion, more and ever more of them; empty-handed, it doesn’t matter; empty hands made Canada.
To be exact, the Sarmatian was a vessel of four thousand tons, with a single screw and large single funnel and three masts. Her lines resembled the beauty of a clipper ship, with the clean run of a single deck, the boats swung on davits at the side, with nothing of those superstructures which later on rose on the decks of the liners when masts and sails disappeared. She was square-rigged but carried also as the lowest course of sail on each mast a large fore-and-aft sail, the “cro’ jack” of nautical parlance, used either in place of the mainsail or in addition to it. The mizzenmast carried no square yards. She had no bowsprit but carried headsails before the foremast and thus could present, if need be, a great press of canvas to a favoring wind. Under steam she easily made fourteen knots. “The Sarmatian,” said the London Graphic of 1878, “is one of the finest passenger vessels in the world.” She had served as a troopship in the Ashanti War of 1873-74, carrying the Black Watch to West Africa. In 1878 she had the honor of carrying the Marquis of Lorne (the Governor General) and the Princess Louise to Canada. She was in and out of the Port of Montreal till the opening of the present century.
As tonnage increased, it was found that mast, sails, and rigging were just dead weight, nor likely to be of any use once the Gulf of St. Lawrence was passed. As steam power increased with the larger-sized boats it was plain that sails were not worth-while. Each new queen of the river surpassed the last in size and luxury but with less and less sail. The Parisian of 1881, reconstructed in 1897, the last word of the day as a “floating palace,” practically abandoned her sails. The later boats, of the opening years of this century, such as the Tunisian and the much larger Victorian and the Virginian, carried no sail at all. The masts shrunk to derricks or returned, as ghosts, to carry wireless.
If we shed tears over the departed glory of the sailing steamer, we may spare a few also for its contemporary, vanished also, the St. Lawrence timber raft. This, too, arriving in sections down the Lachine Rapids and remade at leisure above or below the harbor, was a familiar feature of the Port of Montreal for two generations and more.
Nor was there ever a more unique feature of Montreal Harbour and the St. Lawrence above it than the bygone timber rafts that played so picturesque a part in our Canadian commerce of last century. They are all gone now. The last of the rafts came down the river and over the Lachine Rapids to Montreal in 1911. The movement of lumber and pulpwood is still a vast trade; but sawn lumber and pulp sticks travel much like other freight or cargo. Anyone who ever saw a raft of square timber a quarter of a mile long floating down the St. Lawrence was looking at one of the strangest sights in the history of navigation.
The basis of the industry was the vast forests of red and white pine found all over the St. Lawrence watershed. Pine not only floats but floats so buoyantly that it can help to support the hardwoods, elm, oak, etc., which float either not at all or with difficulty. The ultimate market was in England, where square timber was the raw material of all the carpentry and building trade. With this went to the same market the beautiful straight sticks of pine of special length and a quality that were used for the masts of sailing ships and specially culled and selected for the Royal Navy. The seaport of the trade was Quebec, where a fleet of timber ships gathered every year. These were an odd assemblage. Any old ship would do to carry square timber; leak as it would, it couldn’t sink. Hence we are told that the harbor of Quebec, when sail was on the decline the world over, “was filled with the queerest collection of shipping, old barques and brigantines, ships ‘swifted’ with chains passed round their hulls to hold them together, full-rigged ships that perhaps had once been East Indiamen, even the occasional old man-of-war, much degraded and disguised, turned into a sort of cart-horse of the sea.”
Montreal had only the lesser share in this glory. It was only a midway point of the trade where the rafts, after coming down the Lachine Rapids in sections, were reassembled for their final journey to Quebec. Indeed Montreal helped in the end to kill the trade when the lumber ship, after about 1880, filled with sawn lumber that came to Montreal by rail, replaced the timber ship of Quebec. Nor did Montreal have any share in the square-timber trade that came from the Ottawa and passed down behind Montreal Island by the Rivière des Prairies and the Mille Isles. The Ottawa system was different. Small “cribs” of lumber passed the rapids in specially constructed chutes, the last in 1908.
For both the Ottawa and the St. Lawrence the trade came to an end when British lumber merchants were at last persuaded to buy their lumber already cut. Squaring timber in the bush wasted one third of it. The British buyer would take no stick unless sound to the heart. Hence many trees were felled and left unused. Vast quantities of what are now slabs, edgings, battens, strips, and moldings, went up in flames in the Canadian forests. So the timber raft ultimately went the way of such picturesque, non-economic things as the stagecoach, and the sedan chair.
But the timber raft while it lasted was curious and unique. And it lasted a long time. It had its infant origins in the old French Regime, was boosted by the Napoleonic Wars, reached its height between 1850 and 1880, declined and died in 1911 a painless death in the arms of newer industries.
The timber industry was evidently well established at the time of Charles Dickens’ visit to Canada in 1842 for he writes of seeing a huge timber raft on his steamer trip from Toronto to Montreal. “Going on deck after breakfast,” he writes, “I was amazed to see floating down with the stream, a most gigantic raft, with some thirty or forty wooden houses upon it, and at least as many flag-masts, so that it looked like a nautical street. I saw many of these rafts afterwards, but never one so large. All the timber, or ‘lumber,’ as it is called in America, which is brought down the St. Lawrence, is floated down in this manner.”
Indeed the origins of the industry go a long way back before Dickens’ time. French settlers cut and floated pine logs, for masts or lumber, to any near-by market. It was a help-to-live industry like the pulpwood of the back-north settler of today. After the conquest the British turned this into a regular trade and then, about 1800, into a sea-borne trade (masts and square timber). Napoleon, when his decrees shut the Baltic, made himself the godfather of the Canadian timber trade. The steam tug arrived in time to be its wet nurse. The preferential duties till 1843 acted as its guardian. After that the raft was grown up and floated on its own, a quarter of a mile long, did we say? — let us make it half — down Lake St. Louis in the mists of the morning.
The lumber — chiefly pine with elm and oak — was first cut round the shores of Lake Ontario and gathered behind booms in river mouths and bays. As the pine was cleared the cutting moved further back; the lumber shanty crawled north away from civilization like the movement of the American frontier toward the West. At first Lake Ontario had the whole trade; the logs were unable to negotiate Niagara. The Welland Canal opened Lake Erie, and then on and on — that is, backward and backward — moved the timber trade. The logs gathered in Lake Ontario were at first floated as rafts; the lake proved too big, too rough. Hence as the trade was organized they were sent in timber schooners to the foot of the lake among the islands near Kingston. Here special timber firms who had no necessary connection with cutting the lumber or shipping it beyond Quebec made it up into rafts and ran it down.
A St. Lawrence raft was built in six or eight sections called “drams.” To make a dram they built first a frame of hewn timbers (6” × 7” square), a parallelogram, an oblong floating in the water, the logs just over forty feet long end to end and pinned together. The oblong was about 60 feet wide and was connected crosswise with “traverses” (crossties about four inches in diameter). When the frame was set floating logs were pushed under it (by men standing on them), the logs all being set side by side to fill the frame. They were bound to the traverse not with chains or ropes but with “withes,” sapling trees pounded, as it were, into shredded cable and with a wonderful power of yielding to strain without breaking. The logs thus pushed under were the first tier. They had to be pine to make the upper tiers float. Above them, laid crosswise, was a second tier and, if the raft was all pine, a third tier lengthwise; if there was oak in it the third tier was perhaps not filled up, or only in part.
A completed pine dram averaged 600 pieces, or 25,000 cubic feet, or 300,000 board feet of lumber. A raft of eight drams would mean 2,400,000 board feet.
When the raft was complete a cabin was built on the leading dram, the foreman’s cabin with two bunks, a table, a stove, to serve the office for supplies, etc.; on the dram behind this was a bigger cabin with bunks for the men (about eight bunks). The whole regular crew was eight or ten with extra men taken on for each big rapid and dropped off at the foot of it.
Poles were set up to act as masts for big square sails. A mass of “kit” also was carried along and brought back upriver from Quebec again — anchors, windlass, cables, pike poles, cant hooks, oars, crowbars, lanterns — an endless list. A raft carried a big boat (fifteen men) and a smaller one.
When all the drams were pinned together the raft was ready to start. Mr. D. D. Calvin, whose family were connected with the trade for generations, has given us a picture of a raft “leaving port” that has much of the charm of an old-time sea story. “Given a fine summer day — in retrospect a raft inevitably left on a fine afternoon — it will be understood that the last hours of preparation were a delight to youngsters. The ordered confusion of getting all the gear aboard, the half-guessed secrets of the boxes and bags of grub, the characteristic scents of clean pine timber in the sun, of the raw wood of the cabins, of the fresh straw of the mattresses, combine to make a delightful memory, in which the sounds are the shouts in French, the signal gong in the towing steamer’s engine room and the wash from her paddle wheels as she backed to stop along side the raft.”
