Delphi complete works of.., p.785
Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 785
We must add to this the peculiar character of the epoch W. Cunningham, “Growth of English Industry and Commerce” of the Great Peace which began in 1815. With it the industrial revolution that had initiated machine production in the eighteenth century found its first real opportunity. England became not only the workshop of the world but also the world’s bank, the world’s policeman and the world’s transportation agency. With this went the comfortable British feeling that this situation was just as it should be and was destined to last forever. This very error had its service in making the British people willing to invest money, that is, to perform physical services, anywhere and everywhere — to build railways in the United States and Argentina, with their own Empire still mostly empty. Who has finally won or finally lost on this is not yet known.
But there is no doubt of the expansion which this era gave to shipping. It was needed not only for the transport of goods but for the transport of the new emigration that for the first time became a large scale feature of the world’s economics. In the days of colonial America about 3,000 immigrants a year, at the most, crossed the Atlantic. The Great Peace of 1815 was immediately followed by large scale W. A. Carrothers, “Emigration from the British Isles,” 1929 emigration from Britain. In the first five years after Waterloo 98,000 British people went overseas as emigrants. Twenty years later (1835-9) the five year total had risen to 287,000 and by 1850-54 the British emigrants in all numbered 1,629,000.
To these were added the people from all western Europe, especially from the German monarchies where tyranny and oppression fomented migration as a form of escape. Hence each new revolution, each new repression in Europe, each new distress of famine and poverty brought people in thousands, presently in millions, to the continent of liberty and plenty. Even if the liberty was a little rough and the plenty a little rude at least it was “bread and work” and they were people humble enough then to ask just that. Hence appeared on the seas the emigrant sailing ship carrying its outgoing poor — crowded, dirty and triumphant. The emigrants fed and bunked on their own, crowded into the “steerage.” At times ship fever and shore cholera wiped them out like flies. But still they came. People forget that for the emigrants of the “hungry forties” and the gold-seeking fifties it was a matter of this one voyage and never again. On those terms men and women, bound for the promised land, could stand a lot. One may read and visualize the mingled hope and misery of the emigrant sailing ship in Charles Dickens’ Martin Chuzzlewit or shudder away from the emigrant cholera as described Mrs. C. P. Traill, “The Backwoods of Canada” by Mrs. Traill’s account of its visitation on Montreal.
After the emigration of poverty came the emigration of the Australian gold rush. The sailing ship looked after that. It was too far for steam. It was largely the shipyards of Quebec and New Brunswick that built the fast wooden ships for the Australian emigration passages. For speed now had begun to count for much even on the long passages. Before this period it had not. The stout and stately Indiaman, heavily sparred and heavily armed with cannon, was out for safety, not speed. The East India Company had a tight monopoly and could get there when they liked as far as trade was concerned. Their only fear need be of shipwreck and of the French. But the clipper ship could laugh at both of these.
Hence the clipper was all of a rush, the Indiaman heavy with form and formality, officers in gold lace, sailors in uniform, and passengers, such as Macaulay on his way to E. K. Chatterton, “The Old East Indiamen,” 1914 India, settling down for a quiet six months’ reading. On the East Indiamen they send down the royal yards at sunset, let the weather be never so fine. They put the ship to bed for the night, all tight shut. Thus they carried on their sweltering stuffy passage, of five, six, or seven months, and eventually got there. It is not fair to over-idealize the sea and the sea voyage of the bye-gone sailing ship. The “palatial liner” at whose softness we love to scoff has something to be said for it. Try this in place of it, this description of a stormy night spent in an East Indiaman’s cabin. “The timbers creak and groan. The cabin grows stuffy and almost unbearable by lack of ventilation, for every hatch is battened down, every skylight closed and covered with tarpaulins. You try lying in your bunk reading by the light of a swaying lamp, with the constant groan of the ship’s timbers, the incessant rolling back and forth, the irregular pitching, the occasional trickle of water from the deck and the lack of ventilation, has made your cabin an oppressive place seemingly unfit for human habitation.”
The East Indiaman with all its glory and its sins was driven off the sea. It was not fast enough. The full rigged ship of the clipper type— “streamlined” is the present word — carrying a press of an acre of canvas that at times drove it over 400 nautical miles (460 road miles) in twenty-four hours, put the Indiaman out of work. The company ultimately sold their whole fleet sometime after their monopoly expired and went out of shipping.
Especially the new China trade, set free from the Company’s monopoly (1833), and the new demand for tea, called for speed at any price. The first tea of the season fetched high prices and all delay on such valuable freight cost high interest. Hence the fast China clippers and such historic episodes as the race of the six tea clippers in 1866 from China to London with the Ariel and the Taeping docking side by Hawthorne Daniel, “The Clipper Ship” 1928 side after a voyage of 99 days from Foochow to London.
Hence the insatiable demand of this period for ships, more ships. The yards couldn’t turn them out fast enough. Thus came the wonderful opportunity of our Maritime shipyards with the forest at the door. English oak indeed they lacked. Canadian oak proved inferior. But Canadian softwoods, though less durable served well enough, pine and spruce and, odd as it seems, hecmatac (tamarack), a wood of little use in ordinary building that mostly lies sleeping as a railway tie. Quebec more fortunate still, had all the forests of the Lakes to draw from and all the St. Lawrence water-ways to bring them.
Hence it was that for a period of half a century the building of wooden ships, and the export of timber became the great industry of the Maritime ports of British North America — in especial Quebec, Saint John, N.B., and Yarmouth, Nova Scotia.
Quebec sailed many of its ships but also sold them: Saint John built them chiefly for sale, and for long voyages; Nova Scotia built its own ships and mostly sailed them, building many of them for home use and on a small scale, adjuncts of the farm and the fishing. Hence the predominance of Nova Scotia in the number of ships owned. Sir Edmund Head, who was Governor of New Brunswick (afterwards of Canada), writing home on the shipping situation in 1852, said, “Nova Scotia is destined to be one of the largest ship-owning countries in the world. She now owns nearly one third as much tonnage as France.” A count of ships made a few years before that date showed Nova Scotia with 2,583 vessels as against 604 for Canada.
The economic life of the Maritime provinces only began in earnest after the influx of the Loyalists of the American Revolution and the British migration after the Napoleonic wars. Then for a long time it outstripped that of British Upper Canada. Among the earliest efforts at Maritime expansion was the attempt to establish the whale fishery, already successful out of New England ports. Governor Parr in 1784 brought up twenty Quaker families from Nantucket, pious people used to the deep sea. He settled them at Dartmouth, across the harbour from Halifax. Although the British government would give no aid some voyages were made into the North Atlantic apparently with no great success. Samuel Cunard of Halifax (1787-1865) F. W. Wallace, “Wooden Ships and Iron Men” of later steamship fame was an early promoter. From Saint John, N.B., whaling voyages were also made to the North Atlantic and West Indies grounds. Little came of it until the great boom of American whaling in the South Pacific that began after 1830. From then on until about 1850 New Brunswick ships, of from 250 to 400 tons, some of them built at Saint John, others bought elsewhere and fitted there went whaling in the South Seas. The voyages were of two to three years’ duration, or even more, involving many strange happenings and adventures. One ship, the Pacific, turned up in Valparaiso, four years and nine months out from Saint John. She was there sold, too far gone for the long voyage home.
But the home base proved too distant. The whaling came to an end, as did the whaling out of Quebec which the British government, with queer inconsistency, tried to foster with Nantucket sailors after refusing to help them at Halifax. But Maritime ships from both provinces and from Quebec, sailing ships of a thousand tons and more, came back to the South Seas with the new trade in “guano,” a word that covers Alexander Humboldt, 1802 a multitude of seabirds’ sins. This guano had lain unheeded for uncounted centuries, of less than no value. Now came modern chemistry, divorced from alchemy to be the new bride of agriculture, and discovered in guano an elixir of new life to the worn out fields of Europe. So the guano was gathered from the century old deposits on the sunbaked rock islands of the Peruvian dry belt (Chincha Island, etc.) where no wind blows. This trade went strong, was in good odor, from 1850 to 1870 — mostly gone now. It came as a product of advancing science and a better science went past it.
But meantime the real ship industry of the British North American provinces, the building of wooden ships, was launched in its full career. Going strong by 1840 it reached its peak in Nova Scotia, where conditions favoured it, in 1870. By that time iron was displacing wood. The wooden sailing ship by the middle eighties was everywhere being replaced by the iron, then the steel, sailing ship. Then sail itself went. Steam ruled the ocean and sail could only claim the odd voyages, the inlets, the forgotten seas of dhows and proas and sampans, and, as a consolation of honour, the grandeur of the yacht club and the sport of the yacht race.
Saint John, New Brunswick, sea port from its birth, found its principal business in shipbuilding as the expansion of commerce gathered way. We have an admirable description of it as seen by the intelligent eyes and delineated by the James Silk Buckingham, “Canada, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick,” 1843 smooth pen of Mr. Silk Buckingham in the opening year of the forties of the last century. Buckingham, who ran round the Orient, the Near East, the States and Canada as one of the first of the “globe-trotters,” and as one of the first of the “temperance” lecturers, had been a sailor when he was a boy and so when he speaks of a ship he knows what he is talking of. He is all praise for Saint John, a city of 30,000 people, “fifty years ago a wilderness” (as we like to say of Vancouver today); admires its elevated rocky site; its phenomenal tides; its all-year harbour, its rapid rise like a phoenix from its city fires, the last one only last year (1839); its “civility and attention”; its royal barracks; its Grammar School; its Temperance Society offset by its St. George’s Society. It had no negroes, no French Acadians, very many Irish as judged by the signboards on the whisky shops, “less elegance than at Toronto,” and an “American air of equality and eager bustle.” A true vignette of the colonies of the young Queen’s opening reign.
For the shipping Silk is warm in admiration. More ships are entering the harbour of Saint John (statistics of the end of the thirties) than of Quebec, 2,549 vessels (1836) as against 1,147: Quebec tonnage is greater 373,000 against 289,000. Saint John builds mostly ships of 300 to 500 tons but runs to a thousand tons. There are 410 vessels with crews of 2,879 men registered in the port. In the year 1836 there were 81 ships built, a total of 25,000 tons, one-fifth as many as in all the United States ports put together. Apart from building ships the port exports timber, fish, whale oil from the South Sea fisheries and imports manufactured goods and general cargoes. Buckingham gives a quaint, old world quotation, an advertisement in a Saint John newspaper of the hour.
BEAT THIS WHO CAN! The following vessels all owned by the Hon. Alexander Campbell, have been launched at Tatamagouche during the last three weeks: Barque “Acadia” built by Mr. James Chambers, burthen about 360 tons; Ship “Frances Lawson,” built by Mr. John Hewet, burthen about 500 tons; Barque “Columbia,” built by Mr. John Wallace, burthen about 360 tons; Brig “Caledonia,” built by Mr. John Pride, burthen about 250 tons.
But New Brunswick in the sequel was to go far beyond what seemed later the modest beginnings of Mr. Buckingham’s day. It ran strong from this time until the opening of the eighties when iron ships began to appear in the port and, soon after, steel ones. Most firms had dropped out of the business of building wooden sailing ships by 1890. The industry and technical knowledge of Frederick William F. W. Wallace, “In the Wake of the Windships” Wallace have done a great service to the maritime history of Canada in the production of his two well known works on the old wooden sailing ships. In particular the rich collection of first hand illustrations adorning his books enables us as it were to see the old days for ourselves.
Thus we may in fancy recall some of the typical or notable vessels of New Brunswick.
Here is The Kate, a 60 ton schooner, 1840, first venture of the famous Troop family whose name and achievements cover the whole period.
Here are the little brig Arabia, the barque James and the brig Ellis all out of Saint John in the same year, 1850, and sailing to California round the Horn with passengers and general cargo. A long way — but at the end of it in San Francisco — flour is selling at seventy-five dollars a barrel, sugar at five dollars a pound, cloth at ten dollars a yard and shoes at fifty dollars a pair. Speed on, little ships to this promised land.
The Rock Terrace was the largest of wooden ships of the Troop firm and family of Saint John who built, bought, owned and sailed ships locally and all over the world for over seventy years after their first enterprise on the Schooner Kate of 1840. The Rock Terrace was built at Saint John by David Lynch in 1875. She was a wooden full-rigged ship, 1,769 tons, 216 foot keel, 41 foot 3 inches beam and 25 feet deep. Her mainmast was 193 feet high. Among her ports and cargoes were Liverpool with deals, Peru for guano, New Orleans for cotton, lime her last cargo (1887) from Philadelphia to Japan. Leaking heavily she was abandoned, after twenty-five days of pumping, off Guam. She stopped leaking, blew away on her own, sailed 840 miles and wrecked herself — knocked her bottom out — on the Pacific Island Tarama.
The Cyprus, built in Nova Scotia (Annapolis) but sailing out of Saint John, held probably the speed record. She was built mostly of spruce, the keel (175 feet) of black birch; keelson pitch pine, stronger parts white oak. She was 195 feet overall. She crossed the Atlantic (Saint John-Liverpool) in 17 days, crossed three times, no doubt with good luck, while a slow sailor, no doubt with bad luck, was crossing it once. She made a voyage from New York to the head of the Baltic (Reval) in 18 days.
Here is the Wildwood one of the finest ships of the great Saint John firm of William Thompson and Company: built in Saint John 1883, trading all round the world from 1883 to 1902; Iloilo to Delaware with 2,340 tons of sugar in 113 days; Cardiff to Rio with 2,475 tons of coal in 35 days. Sold to the Norwegians, the last people to keep to sail, in 1902. But mark the beginning of the inevitable end. Here is the full-rigged ship The Troop 1,526 tons built of iron in Scotland in 1884 for the Saint John trade.
Quebec was of course in many senses the premier British North American sea port of the old sailing ship and the ship building days. Steam had robbed it of its original St. Lawrence pre-eminence in favor of Montreal. But the port of Montreal, developing at this time a marvellous advance in the combination type of sail-and-steam together which dominated the middle nineteenth century, was out of the running as far as sail was concerned. The river navigation forbade it.
Hence the port of Quebec naturally led British North America in this era of the sailing ship. Mr. Silk Buckingham in his visit of 1840 comments on the evident change from “a military fortress, the principal citadel of our North American possessions” to the newer aspect of the city as W. Wood, “All Afloat, Chronicles of Canada,” 1913 “a port of entry of the commerce of Europe.” Ships arriving in the year last reported (1839) numbered 1,147, with a tonnage of 373,669 and with 17,985 seamen. The vessels clearing (1,189) are overwhelmingly for Great Britain, 868, for Ireland 200 (emigrant ships) and 107 for the Maritimes. The excess of departures means that 37 ships were built in the port that year. But from this date on shipbuilding of Quebec moves forward continually till it reaches its highest point in 1864 and then with amazing and saddening rapidity it declines and vanishes. By the middle eighties the building of wooden ships at Quebec was all gone.
Yet the record was striking while it lasted. It has been computed that not less than 2,500 ships were built at Quebec between the beginning of British rule and the close of the nineteenth century. We have seen that 37 vessels were built in 1839, the year of Buckingham’s visit. In 1854 there were forty ships and nine barges and in 1864 there were forty-three ships and twenty-two barges. These last vessels were mostly of from 1,000 to 2,000 tons and notably larger — as the Quebec ships consistently were — than the Maritime vessels. Nova Scotia that year launched nearly three hundred vessels but they only averaged 200 tons; New Brunswick about 150 vessels running at 400 tons.
