Delphi complete works of.., p.777
Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 777
There is no such “freakishness” about the coast of Canada. The wandering curves of its coasts only enhance the facility of communication and guarantee harbours and shelter. At its southern terminus are the Bay of Fundy and the great circle of the Gulf of St. Lawrence from Cape Breton Island to the Straits of Belle Isle. Hudson Strait and Hudson Bay open up a vast inland sea, and on the Pacific side the coast of British Columbia is one continuous stretch of bay and fiord, inlet and sea way. This indented coast is, and has been throughout history, one of the salient advantages of Canada and indeed of North America. The “stern and rock-bound coast” sounds grim in poetry but in reality it means a coast offering at every turn shelter and safety and points of embarkation. To its earliest explorers, to Champlain and those who followed, the Bay of Fundy must have offered a marvellous prospect — with each successive harbour, each wooded inlet, each sheltering island lovelier than the last.
To appreciate the beauty of our Canadian coast in this respect one has but to compare it with the hundreds, the thousands, of miles of the western coast of Africa. Here to the innocent eye of a child, or a painter, nature seems to blend and harmonize land and sea to one consenting contour — low, green shores, the sanded desert stretching to the sanded beach, together with an approach of sea to land, so soft, so slow, wooing the land — this, in reality, in the geological sense, is territory that the unending breaking of the sea has conquered. This is land of which the sea has made what it would fain make of the Channel Coast of England or the stubborn rock of Nova Scotia — this unending shore of Africa, all pounded and broken into sand where the sea meets it day and night, in calm and storm, with a long roll of breaking surf that forbids all access. Our Sable Island, 110 miles off Cape Canso, Nova Scotia, the “graveyard of the Atlantic” with over two hundred recorded wrecks, is, as it were, a little piece of Africa, broken off to warn us what the sea could do.
Our coast is rendered more varied, more majestic and more sheltered still by the great number of islands, some of colossal size, which girdle it from end to end. One thinks at once of Grand Manan in the Bay of Fundy, of Cape Breton Island (3,120 square miles) split off from Nova Scotia by the mile-wide Strait of Canso and riven in twain by the Bras d’Or Lakes; of Prince Edward Island (2,184 square miles), itself a province, with a coast line as broken as that of the parent continent; of the Island of Anticosti, a hundred and thirty miles long, an area of 4,000 square miles (half the area of Wales); and as the greatest of all in size, significance and history, Newfoundland (42,734 square miles), our lost sister, or is it our truant mother?, bound to us in spite of itself by geology and geography.
But the islands most imposing in size are those of the great Arctic Archipelago in what used to be called, until it became unfashionable, the “frozen seas.” Of the economic value of these Arctic islands, in summer at best a fishing coast and a treeless pasture of grass and flowers and flies, in winter a desolation, we may none the less in this age of minerals entertain certain hopes. England’s acquaintance with them began when Martin Frobisher brought home to Queen Elizabeth a ship-load of gold (fool’s gold, iron pyrites) Richard Hakluyt, “Principall Navigations of the English Nation,” 1598-1600 from Baffin Island. But the shipment may yet prove as momentous as when John Hawkins brought to the same Queen “niggers” from Guinea and Raleigh tobacco from America. But in size, as just said, the islands are truly imposing. Baffin Island, the largest, contains 200,000 square miles and is almost ten times the size of Nova Scotia; second to it are Victoria (80,000) and Ellesmere (75,000) and half a dozen others each larger than the Province of Prince Edward Island.
On the Pacific coast Vancouver Island (12,400 square miles) is world famous for its history, its beauty and its outlook on a new world in the making. Above it extends an innumerable chain of Pacific Coast Islands and notably the spacious and fertile group of the Queen Charlotte, temperate in climate, rich in resources, sleeping still, hardly known, scarcely used a century after their discovery (1787).
But the word “innumerable” quite rightly designates the islands, as also the lakes, of our fortunate country. Thus — to quote examples only from territory now accurately “Year Book of Canada,” 1941 surveyed — in an area of 6,094 square miles south and east of Lake Winnipeg there are 3,000 lakes; in an area of 5,294 square miles, accurately mapped, southwest of Reindeer Lake in Saskatchewan there are 7,500 lakes; in the area of the Georgian Bay there are, as commonly and currently estimated, some thirty thousand islands; and much of the Mistassini country in northern Quebec appears indistinguishable as to whether made of lakes surrounded by land, or islands surrounded by water.
The vast inland reservoirs of fresh water represented by the chain of lakes of the Mackenzie River system (Athabasca, Great Slave, Great Bear) and by the Great Lakes of the St. Lawrence basin, stand in a peculiar connection with the sea. They bring it as it were inland to the very heart of our country. We commonly think of rivers as running to the sea, as they undoubtedly do. But seafaring people think of the sea as running into the land, as, from their off shore viewpoint, it does. If we reverse the gear of our common thought to the opposite direction, and think of the St. Lawrence and the Mackenzie as running inland we find a sea way that penetrates into Canada from the Strait of Belle Isle and Cabot Strait inland 1,168 miles past Montreal to Fort William; and one that passes from Aklavik, the Arctic harbour of the North West Territories, for an unimpeded voyage to Fort Smith on the Slave River, beside the Alberta boundary, 1,292 miles away. Already ports far inland, such as Fort William and Port Arthur, are sea ports in so much that ships, actually from the distant seas, lie at their docks. The completion of the St. Lawrence Seaway, now an international certainty, will carry seafaring to the heart of the continent. Our Canadian transport began with the canoe and the portage. The cycle of innovation has turned a full circle. The ocean steamer and the canal have brought it back to where it started.
THE GRANDE HERMINE OF JACQUES CARTIER — FIRST VESSEL TO ASCEND THE ST. LAWRENCE
The Grande Hermine was the largest of the three vessels with which Jacques Cartier in his second voyage (1535) successfully passed the tides and currents of Anticosti, ascended the St. Lawrence and discovered Canada. She was of the type called a carvel, the principal ocean ship of the days of Mediterranean, Spanish and Portuguese commerce. Clumsy under sail these carvels carried more people and heavier armament than the type of long open vessels which they displaced.
CHAPTER TWO THE TWILIGHT OF OUR EARLY SEA HISTORY
The Coming of Man to America — Land Chain of the Alaskan Seas — Vast Lapse of Time Obliterates all Record — Pytheas the Greek in the Northern Seas — Coming and Going of the Vikings
THE ORIGINAL “CANADIAN” — indeed the original American — arrived by sea. His “people” came from Asia after a migration that had covered so many thousand miles of distance and so many thousand years of time that he did not know that he had migrated or even that he was on the move. Presumably he was of the Mongolian type represented still so directly by the Eskimos, by the vanishing Aleuts of the Aleutian Islands, by the Thlingit Indians of Alaska and indirectly by all the Indians of America from Point Barrow to Tierra del Fuego. Anthropologists do not doubt that the animal man, originated as one stock, a first cousin but not a direct descendant, of the baboon and the larger apes. It is out of the question that different forms of men originated separately in different parts of the earth and then intermingled, and still further out of the question that one and the same kind of man (the one we know) originated in the same form in separate places. All archaeological evidence — buried bones and skulls, remains of implements and immemorial refuse heaps buried for uncounted centuries — point to Asia as the first home of mankind, and within this capacious birthplace the original cradle may well have been somewhere in the uplands of Persia and the Bible Lands of Mesopotamia. From this central point man migrated in all directions, responsive to the roving instinct that seeks food and avoids danger. Some portion of the human race thus moved gradually across Central Asia and beyond it to the inhospitable regions of the far north east of what is now Siberia, the coldest, bleakest place in all the world where Verkhoyansk holds the world’s record for cold, marking down to 94 below zero. Thus wandered primitive men from one bleak region to another, and finally to the sea where he made his fortunate transit across the Bering Strait, or along the Aleutian Islands and thus reached America. From this first Alaskan lodgement mankind wandered, or rather filtered, on down the continent, moving towards sunshine and warmth, all the way till their furthest advance reached the cold again over nine thousand miles below in Patagonia. But certain groups migrated from their first Alaskan landings along the Polar Seas. These were the Eskimos — acquiring as they went, in the course of centuries a culture of their own, following the coast to Hudson Bay and down and round it to Ungava and finally to Greenland.
We cannot doubt, all scientists accept, this origin of man and his sea-transit to America. Given plenty of time and it is easy enough. There may have been still easier island bridges above water in those days. But even without them the islands in Bering Strait are within sight of one another, and people with any kind of primitive boats might make the longer but warmer Aleutian transit.
Man in America is therefore a new comer, unable to rival the aristocratic descent of the baboon men of the Old World — the ape-man of Java (of whom it is hard to say which he is), or the Piltdown man of Sussex (intelligence just dawning) or the Neanderthal man of Germany — more jaw than brain.
But this accepted theory of the expansion of mankind into America is not needed to account for the spread of other forms of life plant and even animal. It is now widely believed that the American continent was originally broken away entire from Europe and Africa — into which its facial outline still fits marvellously — and was slowly rafted westward, or its loose foundations, across the Atlantic. It is still rocking on gently in the same direction a few yards every year. The original separation may well have carried out to sea a vast collection of animate life, as passengers on the raft. But man could not have been among them. He is not old enough.
But his use of the sea ended with the original transit. There was no coming and going, nor the faintest survival of transmitted memory of what had been left behind. The 1,000 languages of America, North, Central and South, connect throughout among themselves, but bear no trace of Asiatic kinship. Only for the tribal Indians of the Pacific coast and for the Eskimos did the sea remain a part of their life. The dug-out, after all only a floating tree, must be older than Noah’s Ark: the Eskimos worked out the contrivance of the Kayak — their unsinkable boat of skin, the mainstay of their life — along with their snow house, the igloo, their mainstay against death from the cold. They thus were able to occupy all the northern sea shores of Canada including that of Manitoba and Ontario, later indeed abandoned, but occupied by them till almost within touch of history. In the “Lahontan’s Narrative,” 1703 narrative of the young French Baron Lahontan recounting his marvellous journey (1687) into the present Minnesota, too marvellous for general belief, we read that he was told that beyond the sources of the rivers he ascended, other streams ran down to a great salt sea, and that on this sea lived men who paddled in boats of skin. But the Eskimos’ use of the sea was merely that of fishermen along shore. There was practically no “sea faring” in the true sense.
Still less was there for the generality of the “red” Indians who slowly spread inland from the Pacific coast across the continent. Their life was turned away from the sea. They evolved a navigation for streams and sheltered waters, calm lakes and portages. Having evolved the bark canoe and the tobacco pipe they rested, like travellers after a long day’s paddle, and were resting still when found. Nor did the Indians take to the sea even when they reached the Atlantic Ocean. Among the most miserable, in means of support, of all the half-starved Indians of the North were the Beothuks, the “Red Indians” (red grease, not skin) of Newfoundland who gave their name later to all the others. Miserable also appear the shivering Micmacs of the Gulf of St. Lawrence whose wretched condition evoked the pity of Jacques Cartier.
The real sea story for Canada begins with the arrival of the ships of the Vikings, driving over the waves from Greenland with the wind on the quarter, all life and colour, a great swelling sail of gold and blue, and a glitter of painted shields along the gunwale, and the foam smashing under the dragon-beak of the bow. These, if one may dare drop into the vernacular, were “the real boys.”
But before paying the proper tribute to these great seamen of the north, never in their own range surpassed, one may turn a moment to the twilight memory of a great southern navigator, a Greek of more than a thousand years before them, who almost discovered America, and who if he had done so, would have made a better use of it than did the Norsemen who despised it.
Sailors’ tales, even when quite true, often prove too wonderful for the belief of their friends ashore. When a ship load of Greeks came back from a three years’ voyage and said they had been all round Africa and up the other side, they might have got away with the story except for their adding to it that when they went round the bottom of Africa the sun was in the north part of the sky, instead of the south. Sir Clements Markham, “Pytheas Geog. Journal,” 1893 That proved them liars. So it was when Pytheas came home from a long voyage and said that he had been away across the Ocean, clean past an island Ultima Thule, the last land, till he came to a place where the sea and sky came together, with a great crashing and hissing sound, and that there he had turned back. And it was probably all true. He was apparently right close to the coast of Greenland, could have seen it if the sky had cleared but the mist was rising, as it often does, so thick from the grinding and crushing of the ice pack — breaking into fragments, lumps and splinters, that land and sea all seemed one. As for the sound he heard, you may hear it any spring when the breaking ice of the St. Lawrence is carried past Lachine. The sight of the sea and sky meeting in mist may be seen, we are told, by anyone off Greenland at the season, and close by the coast.
Pytheas was not afraid of the open sea. The Romans were. The timid poet Horace writing verses in his vineyard, tells us that the man who first put out on to the dark sea must have had a heart of oak and been wrapped three times round in brass. No oak and brass for Horace! A book of verses underneath a vine was better. But the snug crowd under the forepeak of a viking ship, reading the verses of Horace — for some of them could read Latin — may well have chuckled over the notion of danger on the open sea.
Pytheas was a Greek of the Phoenician settlement of Marseilles. He lived three hundred years before the Christian era. He was a scientist equipped with all the Greek knowledge of astronomy and of the form and motion of the globe which the mediaeval world was to lose. He made a celebrated voyage out into the Atlantic and along the coast of Europe. He “discovered” the British Isles, “travelled all over Britain on foot” (the words are those of the historian Polybius), estimated its latitude and circumference. He brought home news of the “tin islands” on the coast of Cornwall. He sailed eastward along the shores of the North Sea, then westward six days from the ‘last land’ (Iceland). It was beyond this island and further west that he came to the meeting of sea and sky in the mist. Had the sky cleared he would have seen Greenland: from there the transit was easy to the mainland of North America. Had Pytheas ever seen, as the Norsemen did, the woods of Nova Scotia and the wild vines of New England he would never have let go of it as they did. Canada and Great Britain would have been discovered in the same voyage. Yet it made no difference. No one would have believed him. Even as it was, no one did. It was two hundred years before Mediterranean sailors came back to British shores: and thirteen hundred years before the Norsemen made their westward way past Ultima Thule to Greenland. Pytheas wrote an elaborate book, A Journey about the Earth, or All about the Ocean — it has different titles, sounding singularly up-to-date. But it was lost. It survives now only in quotations of other earlier quotations from it.
With the Norsemen began a real knowledge of the northern seas. As everybody knows they colonized Iceland, establishing F. Nansen, “In Northern Mists,” 1911 settlements, schools, a centre of civilization. From Iceland certain Norsemen (first Eric the Red) sailed on, or were blown, to Greenland. There they made a settlement, well equipped, with stone houses and barns, cattle and comfort, and trade with the home country. Inevitably the Norsemen of Greenland were blown on to the mainland. We have in their sagas and in their records accounts of the Voyage of Leif Ericson to a land of rock and slate (Labrador), a “markland” of trees and woods (Nova Scotia) and a “softer country with grapevines and longer days” — Vineland — which is, or isn’t, New England. No one knows. They even attempted permanent settlement there: but their contact with the savages of the woods, with ambush and sudden death, gave them a horror of the place — as sailors are said to have of life ashore — and they left, never to return, except for random voyages in search of timber.
America was no lost paradise to the Norsemen. They just didn’t want it. Had they been in earnest about settlement their ships would have run back and forward as easily as a ferry. We are in some doubt of what Pytheas’s ship was like. Greek galleys of that date are known only from pictures in vases and are probably only about as truthful to a real galley as a willow-pattern plate to a willow tree. They look hopelessly clumsy and shallow, with a mast dead-centre and a sail as square as Euclid.
