Delphi complete works of.., p.786
Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 786
The quality of these Quebec ships was high. The difficult days of experimentation as under the French and the early British régime were over. The builders knew their timber and they knew the requirement of their market, for most Quebec ships were built to sell. A good many were built of hardwood (oak) while Maritime vessels were almost all soft-wood ships, pine, tamarack, spruce.
A certain number of the seagoing ships rigged and fitted out at Quebec were actually built at ports on the Lakes and brought down through the canals. The City of Toronto, 758 tons, was built in Toronto in 1855, built altogether of the fine white oak from the uplands above the city. D. D. Calvin who established at Garden Island (where Lake Ontario narrows to the river) what became the great centre of the assemblage of timber rafts, built there a barque of 870 tons which was put into ocean trade and in the present century with the passing of the sailing ship passed, like so many other vessels, into Norwegian hands. Several ocean vessels, running as high as 1,223 tons were built at Kingston, Ont., in the sixties and the seventies. But all building on the Lakes was restricted to a maximum length of hull of 180 feet, at that time the length of the shortest locks.
The Quebec ships may very especially be called “ships” as opposed to the vessels of the Lakes and the Coast, since they very largely were “ships” and if not ships at any rate were mainly square-rigged (barques, brigs, brigantines). The fore-and-aft rig, as we have seen, especially suited the navigation of the Lakes, as it did also the in-and-out navigation of the Atlantic Coast where it became constantly still more fore and still more aft, running presently to the Maine schooners with six masts. A “ship,” as arm chair navigators may remind one another, means properly a vessel with three masts all having square sails on yards that swing across the mast. Put fore-and-aft sails on the mizzen (rear) mast and the vessel becomes a barque; give it only two masts and it is a brig; put fore-and-aft sails on the rear once again and it is a brigantine.
A “clipper” ship is distinguished not by rigging but by its lines — built for speed — relatively long and narrow and “streamlined” — no superstructures, no “castles” and a press of sail that can spread an acre of canvas on a ship. Its bows were a little pinched in, concave, to cut its path. It could be driven over 400 nautical miles in 24 hours. The experts tell us that the Quebec ships were none of them “clippers” in the full and exacting sense. People are apt to think otherwise since the connection is very close. The two partners of the great Quebec firm of McKay and Warner, which launched 18 ships and barques at Quebec, 1863-1874, were both noted clipper captains. McKay sailed the famous clipper Sovereign of the Seas for his brother Donald McKay the builder. But the clipper ship in its true form was built for speed, had to sacrifice cargo space for design and could only operate with profits in the most lucrative trades, such as China tea. As steam invaded these, the clipper had to become a little bit heavier, a little bit humbler.
Yet the Quebec ships were things of beauty. We can judge it for ourselves, for the photograph and the artist’s brush, as seen in Mr. Wallace’s collection of pictures, have preserved many of them for us: the artist’s brush in so much as it had become the lover-like fashion of the day to have the ship’s picture painted. Here for example is the Cosmo, ranked by Mr. Wallace as the finest ship built at Quebec. She is three masted, square-rigged, with four square sails on each mast and an extra fore-and-aft sail out from the mizzen. The orthodox five sails, as on the mainmast, were mainsail, topsail, topgallant, royal and sky sail. The sky sail yard on a clipper was about 200 feet above the water and hence spoken of as “delicate tracery.” As a matter of fact it was the size of a large telephone pole, about 40 feet long and 9 inches at its thickest. Owing to the huge size to which single sails grew as ships increased and masts heightened, top sails and top gallants were often divided into upper and lower. But the Cosmo carried the more elegant proportion of the orthodox rig. Too much division makes pictured sails look like washing out to dry. The Cosmo has a full flutter of jibs, defying a landsman’s classification, and a spread of tri-lateral stay-sails between the masts. The run of the hull is smooth and unbroken. All along the side runs a white band with painted black ports — imitating the old painted gun-ports of the Trafalgar ships — a device retained by Quebec when other ports had forgotten it.
A notable feature of the old ship building days at Quebec was the building of ships, as especially by the outstanding shipbuilder of the port, James Ross, for immediate sale on the British market. The ships were specially designed for the needs of the hour and if the markets were overstocked Ross chartered and sent out the ships at his own venture. Here first came before the public eye the notable figure of Captain Joseph Eleazar Bernier, the famous Arctic voyager who has been affectionately called Canada’s “Grand Old Man of the Sea.” Born in 1852 Bernier went (was taken) to sea at three years old, took time off presently for six years’ education ashore and found himself at the age of twenty-one a ship’s captain sailing James Ross’s new ships to the British market. In this trade he made forty-six Atlantic crossings with an average of 22 days each and records as low as 17 days. He developed a marvellous knowledge not only of the technique of ships, their fittings, their marketing but of winds, tides and currents, that helped to make his splendid success in his years of Arctic navigation for the Dominion.
The Quebec sailing ships, whether sold abroad or registered and sailing from home, literally sailed the world over. Many, of course, were employed in the general trade with Great Britain of which the timber trade to Liverpool and Glasgow was the largest single feature. But others were in the cotton trade in and out of the Gulf ports, others made guano voyages to Peru. Others, the best of them, were in the Australian emigrant service or replaced the old Indiamen on the British India routes. Somewhat unique is the voyage of the Quebec barque Signet, 574 tons, in 1880 from Quebec to Victoria, B.C. around the Horn, a distance of 16,000 miles. It is odd to think that this was entered as a coastal voyage in the “home trade.” A striking feature of the Quebec trade even later down in the epoch is seen in the timber ships. These vessels carried over to Great Britain the wood from the Canadian forests hewn square into long sticks of “timber.” We now send it as “lumber” cut into deals, planks, boards — thick, thin or any other way. For a long time the British builders wouldn’t take it so. Being British, they wanted to see what they were getting, and of course the British navy needed masts “in the piece.” Hence the bye-gone wasteful but D. D. Calvin, “A Quiet Corner,” 1941 colourful square-timber export. Wasteful it was, since squaring a log meant leaving on the ground, or burning, about one-quarter of it, which the Canadians couldn’t use and which the British could have used; colourful, since the timber gathered from a thousand streams came down the St. Lawrence and the Ottawa in great rafts, broken up and rejoined at each formidable rapid, or on the Ottawa going down prepared “chutes” beside the rapids. The last St. Lawrence raft went down Lachine in 1911: last Ottawa chutes 1908. From Montreal the raft floated lazily to Quebec, less lazily in later years when a tug hauled it. At Quebec the timber was loaded into timber ships, sailing across the Atlantic. The timber ships thus formed a large part of the trade. The great “P.G.” firm (Pollock, Gilmour) in their 1,503 voyages made between 1846 and 1873 included 1,151 with timber. The timber ships used to lie in serried lines in Sillery Cove with acres of square timber floating round them, waiting to be stowed into them through specially constructed ports. Originally many of them were fine ships but as time went on and steam inexorably forced out sail, all sorts of vessels were turned into timber ships. Anything that could float would do. Timber itself wouldn’t sink, but sometimes seasons of terrific gales, such as that of 1872, would break the ships, or scatter the heavy “deck cargo” that the unhappy old vessel carried as its last straw. Any old ship could be pressed into the service. Some had chains bound round their ancient bellies to hold them up, like a paunchy old beau with a corset. Others were bye-gone Indiamen, sold up and worn out, once all gold lace and mahogany now battered out of all semblance, with square timber rammed into them lengthwise. Thus lay Ontario pine where once mused Macaulay, outgoing to India. The trade is all gone now. Timber has turned to lumber and Canada sells, and is glad to buy, littered edgings Price Current, Orillia, 1943 for ten dollars a cord.
Instinctively everyone’s thoughts turn to Nova Scotia, as the Maritime province par excellence, the one whose life was most associated with the bye-gone days of sail. This is indeed true. In spite of the superiority of Quebec as a port, the sea commerce of Quebec was only one aspect, and a lesser one, of the life of its people and province. Agriculture and the forest and the rising manufacture of its cities far exceeded its maritime occupations. In New Brunswick also the lumbering industry of its extensive forests and the agriculture of its beautiful river valleys rivalled its interest in the fisheries and the sea. But for Nova Scotia the sea was more nearly its all in all; its fisheries, its carrying trade and its building of ships. The connection of farmer, sailor and fisherman was most intimate; since indeed one man was often all three of them. Here shipbuilding, on its smaller scale, became a sort of domestic industry in the Nova Scotia of the early nineteenth century. The frames and timbers were cut in the adjoining bush: the keel laid down on the shore and the ship built and launched as farmers of the same date in Upper Canada laid down, and jointly raised up a barn.
Ship building in Nova Scotia began with the building of a vessel at the historic Highland settlement of Pictou in 1798. Ship building went on all over Nova Scotia, not only in the large sea port towns but in the little places otherwise unknown to the world. The W. D. Lawrence, of 1874, the largest square-rigged vessel ever built in Canada, was built at Maitland in Hants county, a little village on the Shubenacadie River, that runs into Cobequid Bay, that passes into Minas Basin that narrows into Minas Channel that widens into the Bay of Fundy. On the north corner of the Basin of Minas is Spencer’s Island — too minute for the common map. Here were built ships, small vessels and some over 1,000 tons, among them the famous Mary Celeste — the ocean’s mystery No. 1 — found peaceably under sail in 1872 with no one on board.
But the great port of Nova Scotia, great in ship building, ship sailing and in making sailors was Yarmouth. Yarmouth mostly built its vessels from the spruce forests of its Yarmouth county. They were almost entirely built for registration and operation out of the port itself. At the height of the old days of sail Yarmouth had a fleet of 297 vessels with a total tonnage of 153,515. Taken in all from 1761 to 1884 Yarmouth owned not far from half a million tons, distributed among 1,916 vessels. Of these 1,105 were schooners. But here too the building of wooden ships was exchanged for the purchase and registration of iron and steel ships that began in the middle eighties. Yarmouth still remains an important fishing port and the Nova Scotia schooner still has its place on the fishing banks and in the estimation of the world. But the great days are gone.
The Maritime provinces have voiced many regrets over their union with the Canadas which lost them the American market and free trade with Great Britain and found them the Canadian tariff. Of all this the final result is not yet added up. But the passing of the great ship building days was nobody’s fault. It rested on factors which few foresaw, which none could prevent and nothing could rectify. The substitution of steam for sail, of steel for wood, were world changes beyond our policy or control. Wooden ships needed the forest; steel ships the forge and the factory and the mass production which only a crowded industrial setting can furnish.
As for the sheer joy of the sea, as applied to the passenger traffic, or the mystery or beauty of the ships, most people would trade it easily. We can not have it both ways. The “palatial liner” enables us to cross the ocean without having anything to do with the sea. Yet so discontented is man by nature that many of us, in imagination, still sit up on the royal yard of a clipper ship, musing on the deep.
OCEAN LINER OFF QUEBEC
The Saint Lawrence route, reaching into the very heart of the North American continent, has become one of the great sea-ways of the world. Its shipping has passed through all the historic stages that lead from the carvels of Jacques Cartier to the beautiful passenger liners of today. Below the city of Quebec the river widens to a broad flood of water that offers, with its alternating prospect of open horizon, wooded shores and distant coast half-seen, a voyage of singular attraction in touch still with the snug shelter of land yet already facing the boisterous welcome of the open sea.
CHAPTER ELEVEN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
Isolation Impossible in the World of Today — Rapid Development of Canada in the Twentieth Century — The Royal Canadian Navy — Its Share in the Great War of 1914 — The Period Between Wars — The St. Lawrence and the Port of Montreal — Vancouver and the Pacific — The Arctic Coast — Our Outlook Beyond the Wars
OUR OVERSEAS CONNECTIONS, our relation to the world across the seas have become different in the twentieth century from anything they were before. This is because of the great upheaval, the world disturbance, that has marked the opening forty years of the new century. The advance of science has dislocated human life upon the globe. We live for the first time in a world that has become a globe, in reality a unit, known and self-contained, without escape. Our use, for the first time in English, of the word “global” is evidence of the fact.
In this global world science has made easy the sustenance of life and matched it with the mechanism of death. In the Middle Ages science was man’s familiar demon, banned by the church; in earlier modern times, from Galileo to Isaac Newton, man’s curiosity; in the nineteenth century man’s help-mate towards universal happiness, man’s triumph over nature. With the twentieth century science turned traitor. It has passed for the present beyond all human control. Its spectacular conquest of the air has brought death from the sky. This ends all isolation. The independent bravery that made possible the brave independence of a small state, is gone. There can now be no new rise of a Dutch republic, no new Thermopylae, except one of despair. The world must live in apprehension. We have at present in this world of potential abundance no form of social organization that can bid it abound. Nor can we make a social organization by writing it down on paper, any more than we can make for ourselves a fine character by giving ourselves a reference.
The grim joke is that this abundant world would be a wonderful place for brothers to live in if we only had the brothers to put into it. At present the best we can do is to tell them either to be brothers or to be bombed. Such is the new gospel, or one might say, the new epistle — the Epistle to the Ethiopians who heard it first from the Italians. This is not to say that it is a world of despair. For those young enough it is a world of hope in which the dark clouds of the passing thunderstorm must presently give way to the sunshine. The greater the apprehension the higher the courage. In the end brotherhood must come.
The practical bearing of this is that national isolation is no longer possible. There is no place in the world sufficiently isolated for isolation. Least of all is it possible for Canada, which faces the overseas world on three fronts. Whether we like it or not, naval power, aerial world-transport and what will soon be called “participation in global control” are now manifest destiny.
The maritime development of Canada from 1900 to 1939 may be thought of as one continuous period both in respect to the growth of naval defense and the expansion of sea-borne trade. The Great War of 1914-1918 was in each case an interruption, a break that closed over and was left behind. At least we thought it so, and acted as if it were so. Only later could we realize to what a great extent the war had meant a dislocation, a break in the machine not remedied but growing worse. This was especially so in the matter of immigration and transportation. The period before the war of 1914 opened the great immigration into our North West. On the strength of it we built up a vast scheme of transport and settlement, with expanded manufacture and an expanded apparatus of colleges, culture, amusement and advertisement to match it. The war of 1914 kept it going by feeding it on destruction. After the war, immigration slackened, and presently our mistaken policy stopped it dead. We gave up the game without playing it out. Development ended. The frame became too big for the picture — miles of railway track and miles of idle railway cars, unused premises, unused power, unused people, unused resources; people working to support people living on the dole without working. Now the new war has again set the whole apparatus into movement.
As with overseas and migration so with the naval defence of Canada. Its history from 1900 until 1939 is more or less continuous with the sudden and unexpected break of the War of 1914 passing like a storm at sea.
When the present century opened, the naval defence Lieut. John Farrow, “The Royal Canadian Navy,” 1908-1940, Can. Geog. Journal, Nov. 1942 of Canada was falling asleep. What there was of it was little more than formal and the Canadian people decided, for independence sake, not to have even that. There was still in 1901 the British Fleet of the North American and West India Stations based upon Halifax. When the British Imperial Garrisons left Canada in 1871 there was still retained the naval garrison at Halifax set at 2,000 men. There were in 1901 thirteen ships of war coming and going on the North Atlantic and West India Stations and seven others on the Pacific station based on Esquimalt. All of this, to most people in Canada, had no particular connection with daily life or national necessity. Only a few, indeed not very many in Great Britain itself, could see the dark clouds around the sunrise of the new century, as the sun rose out of the North Sea. Those who favoured retaining British ships in Canadian waters did so as part of the old allegiance and those who opposed it did so as part of the new independence, both, as usual, being right.
