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CARPENTER’S
WORLD TRAVELS

Familiar Talks About Countries
and Peoples

WITH THE AUTHOR ON THE SPOT AND
THE READER IN HIS HOME, BASED
ON THREE HUNDRED THOUSAND
MILES OF TRAVEL OVER
THE GLOBE

“READING CARPENTER IS SEEING THE WORLD”

WHERE MAN FEELS CLOSE TO GOD

Canada shares with the United States the glories of the Rockies, which invite the traveller ever westward and, once seen, cast a spell that is never shaken off.

CARPENTER’S WORLD TRAVELS

CANADA
AND
NEWFOUNDLAND

BY
FRANK G. CARPENTER
LITT.D., F.R.G.S.

WITH 116 ILLUSTRATIONS
FROM ORIGINAL PHOTOGRAPHS

GARDEN CITY NEW YORK
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
1924

COPYRIGHT, 1924, BY
FRANK G. CARPENTER
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES
AT
THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS, GARDEN CITY, N. Y.
First Edition

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

In the publication of this volume on my travels in Canada and Newfoundland, I wish to thank the Secretary of State for letters which have given me the assistance of our official representatives in the countries visited. I thank also the Secretary of Agriculture and our Secretary of Labour for appointing me an Honourary Commissioner of their Departments in foreign lands. Their credentials have been of great value, making accessible sources of information seldom opened to the ordinary traveller.

To the officials of the Dominions of Newfoundland and Canada I desire to express my thanks for exceptional courtesies which greatly aided me in my investigations.

I would also thank Mr. Dudley Harmon, my editor, and Miss Ellen McB. Brown and Miss Josephine Lehmann, my associate editors, for their assistance and coöperation in the revision of notes dictated or penned by me on the ground.

While nearly all of the illustrations in Carpenter’s World Travels are from my own negatives, those in the book have been supplemented by photographs from the official collections of the Canadian government, the Canadian National Lines, the Canadian Pacific Railway, the Publishers’ Photo Service, the Holloway Studios of St. John’s, N. F., and Lomen Bros., of Nome, Alaska.

F. G. C.

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

CANADA
AND
NEWFOUNDLAND

CANADA AND NEWFOUNDLAND

CHAPTER I
JUST A WORD BEFORE WE START

The country through which we shall travel in this book is the biggest on the North American continent. The Dominion of Canada is almost as big as all Europe. It is bigger than the United States and all its outlying possessions. It is thirty times as big as Great Britain and Ireland, and it has one third of all the land over which the Union Jack flies.

We shall find the country one of magnificent distances and wide, open spaces. It lies just over our boundary and reaches from there to just below the North Pole. Moreover, it is so thinly settled that it could increase its lands now under cultivation fivefold and not exhaust its available farms.

The Dominion has untold mineral and industrial wealth. It has enough natural resources to support many times its present population of nine or ten millions, and one day it will have, so Canadians tell me, as many white people as the United Kingdom and all the colonies of the British Empire have now.

This book is the result of many journeys through Canada. I have visited the Dominion again and again in the various stages of its development, and have followed the star of the new nation as it moved ever westward. I have stopped with the French in the St. Lawrence Valley, have travelled along the Saskatchewan when the United States farmers rushed into the wheat belt, and have seen the Klondike and the Yukon when they were still pouring streams of gold into the world.

We of the United States are vitally interested in the Canadians. We are largely of the same blood, and the lines of our national lives have run along side by side. Thousands of us have relatives in the Dominion, for more than a million former American citizens are now living on the other side of the border. We have so much faith in Canada that our financial investments there are already in excess of two thousand million dollars, and our trade with it is more important to us than that of almost any other part of the world.

For this reason we shall start out knowing that we shall receive everywhere a most cordial welcome. The men and women whom we shall meet, for the most part, speak our own language, think much the same thoughts, and have the same high ideals of life. Indeed, we shall be surprised again and again at the vivid realization of our great similarity, and the rich inheritance we have received from our common ancestors.

Two empires, by the sea.

Two peoples, great and free,

One anthem raise.

One race of ancient fame,

One tongue, one faith, we claim;

One God, whose glorious name

We love and praise.

“Canada is a land of untold wealth. Its treasures extend from the humming industries of the east to the great forests and fisheries of the West, and from the golden wheatfields of the South to the bricks of the Klondike gold I saw in the Far North.”

What John Cabot saw when he discovered the American continent were stern cliffs of gray rock such as this near St. John’s, which now has a tower erected in his honour, five hundred feet above the water.

CHAPTER II
THE KEY TO THE ST. LAWRENCE

Imagine yourself aboard ship with me. We are steaming along off the coast of Newfoundland, bound north for St. John’s, the capital and chief port of the oldest and smallest British dominion. Just before daybreak this morning I was awakened by a glaring light flashing full in my face. I jumped from my berth and looked out of the porthole. As I did so three blasts from the whistle tore the air and made the ship tremble, and were answered a moment later by the w-h-a-a-n-g of a foghorn from over the water. The dazzling light that had awakened me flashed around again. I knew then that we were saluting Cape Race, the southeast tip of Newfoundland, and chief signal station for the ocean traffic of the North Atlantic.

We were hardly a mile from the shore. If it had been daylight, we would have steamed closer in. The lighthouse towered high in the air, the flash seeming to come from out of the sky. Cape Race light is more than three hundred feet above the water, and, with its foghorn and the wireless station close by, tells thousands of mariners their position at sea. It is usually the first land sighted in coming to Canada across the Atlantic, and marks the point where practically every vessel in these waters changes its course.

Day has dawned since we passed Cape Race, and we can see for miles over the bright blue ocean, silvered and dancing under the sun. The air is so fresh and crisp it is almost intoxicating. Even the dolphins, leaping and diving in graceful curves beside the ship, seem to share our feeling that it is a wonderful morning on which to be alive and at sea.

Now turn to the map in this book, and see just where we are. Like most Americans, I had always thought of Newfoundland as a sub-arctic country far to the north of us. Since leaving New York I have felt like an explorer on his way to the Pole. The fact is, however, that we have been steaming much more to the east than to the north, and are at this moment only about sixteen hundred miles from the west coast of Ireland. We have come hardly three hundred miles north of New York, but so far to the eastward that we are half way to Liverpool. We are still south of England, in the same latitude as Paris, and are not far from the shoals that form the Grand Banks of Newfoundland, famous the world over as cod-fishing grounds. Here the bed of the ocean rises to within less than five hundred feet of the surface, and the cold arctic currents meet the Gulf Stream, causing the fogs so much dreaded in this part of the Atlantic.

As seen on the map, Newfoundland is a triangle of land that nearly fills, like a plug, the gaping mouth of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, but it also commands the sea routes of the North Atlantic, and its possession by an enemy power would menace both Canada and the United States. It has an area of forty-two thousand square miles, being larger than Ireland and of about the same size as Tennessee. At first glance it seems a part of the mainland, but a closer look shows the Strait of Belle Isle separating the island from the Labrador coast. Though in some places only eight or ten miles wide, this strait furnishes a summer-time passage for transatlantic liners to Canada.

For some years there has been talk of building a dam across the Strait of Belle Isle, to stop the icy waters of the Labrador current coming through the Strait into the Gulf of St. Lawrence. This, it is claimed, would force the Gulf Stream closer to Newfoundland, and give that country and eastern Quebec a climate as warm as that of New Jersey. How England would fare in this shifting of ocean waters no one can say; the history of the world would have been vastly different but for the present course of the Gulf Stream in relation to the British Isles. However, no one has yet offered to pay for this project, and shipping men say it would be impossible to make a dam strong enough to withstand the enormous pressure of ice, which comes down from the arctic every year in great floes of from five hundred to one thousand square miles and sometimes piles up on shore to the height of a five-story building.

The Newfoundland coast greatly resembles that of Norway. Looking shoreward, we see great headlands jutting out into the ocean, their precipitous sides rising straight out of the water for three or four hundred feet. Between them are deep bays and inlets, walled with sheer rock. At the heads of the coves and smaller bays we can see the white houses of little villages, clinging to the hillsides above tiny beaches. On top, these great rock ridges are covered with low scrub, now in red and brown autumn dress.

Now we are approaching St. John’s, which has one of the famous natural harbours of the world. Our steamer heads for what seems an unbroken wall of rock, five hundred feet high, and surmounted by a mighty stone tower. This is Cabot Tower, erected to commemorate the discovery of Newfoundland in 1497 by John Cabot, the Venetian mariner commissioned by Henry VII of England to find him new dominions. Except for the Vikings, five centuries earlier, Cabot was really the first to discover the North American continent, as Columbus did not reach the mainland until some years later.

Just south of the Cabot Tower is Cape Spear, the “farthest east” point of all North America. It was on these hills that Marconi received the first wireless message flashed across the Atlantic, and from them that the first transatlantic hydroplane flight was begun. On these shores, also, several of our transatlantic cables are landed.

Like pirate ships of old, icebergs in spring hover about the rock-bound entrance to St. John’s harbour. The channel is so narrow that the French once closed it to the British ships by a chain from shore to shore.

But see, there is an opening in the wall of rock straight ahead, and we get a glimpse of the harbour and the city beyond. The passage is only six hundred feet wide, and it seems much less from the deck of our steamer. Here the French, during their brief possession of St. John’s, slung chains across the Narrows to prevent the entrance of enemy ships. Inside the Narrows, the harbour is about a mile long and one half as wide. It is fringed with a forest of masts and the smokestacks of steamers. On the right is St. John’s. The hill on which it is built rises so steeply from the water that we can see the whole sides of buildings, one above the other along the terraced streets. The painted brick or wooden structures give the city a rather drab appearance, which is emphasized by the absence of shade trees. This is partly because the town has been burned three times, the last time in 1892. Across the harbour the red and brown hillside is gashed here and there with the slate gray of stone pits, or splotched with fenced-in patches of green, so steep that it is hard to imagine how they are farmed.

St. John’s, the capital city of Newfoundland, sits high on a hill overlooking the land-locked harbour. It is the centre of the fishing industry, and the commercial metropolis of the island. Its atmosphere is distinctly British.

St. John’s is not quite as large as Portland, Maine, but it is the chief city of Newfoundland and the centre of the fishing trade. The whole country has only about a quarter of a million inhabitants. It is as though the people of Toledo formed the total population of the state of Ohio. The Newfoundlanders are a mixture of English, Irish, and Scotch, with an occasional trace of French. The original Indian inhabitants have practically all disappeared. Most of the people worship at the Church of England, though Catholics also are numerous. Both denominations have cathedrals at St. John’s, the Catholic edifice being especially conspicuous as viewed from the harbour. The Methodist Church is well established, and there is a sprinkling of Congregationalists. Education in Newfoundland is sectarian, each church receiving a grant from the government for the support of its schools. There is much rivalry between the churches, especially in the villages, but I am told that some of the Protestants send their children to Catholic schools, considering them better. The sons and daughters of well-to-do people usually go to England to complete their education.

CHAPTER III
AROUND ABOUT ST. JOHN’S

Come with me for a drive around St. John’s. We can hire a touring car of almost any make, but for novelty we choose a one-horse open coach. The grizzled driver tells us times are dull with him just now, the taxis getting most of the trade, but that he will have the best of it in December, when the cars are laid up until spring on account of the snow. St. John’s has an average of about four feet of snow in a season, but I have seen pictures of the streets snowed in to the roofs of the houses. The thermometer rarely falls below zero, but once the snows begin, the ground is covered until April.

The chief business street of St. John’s is strung out for a mile or more just back of the wharves. It is lined on both sides with three- and four-story wood and brick buildings. Among the most modern is the home for sailormen built by the Doctor Grenfell mission of Labrador fame. Though the store windows look bright and attractive, many of the shops are tiny affairs, and the street seems more English than American.

I notice many branches of Canadian banks, which monopolize the banking business of Newfoundland. Contrary to the belief of many Americans, Newfoundland politically is no more a part of Canada than it is of New Zealand. It is a separate dominion of the British Empire, to which its people are enthusiastically devoted, having more than once refused to be federated with Canada. They will tell you that the name of their country is pronounced with the accent on the last syllable—New-found-land.

The main street of St. John’s has a trolley running practically its entire length. Whenever the conductor collects a fare, he puts a little ticket in a tiny cash register that he carries in his hand. Like all the Newfoundlanders I have met, the car men are most courteous. One of them left his car to ask a policeman on the corner to direct me to the American consulate. Indeed, I like these Newfoundlanders. They are cordial and hospitable and most polite, though sometimes I have difficulty in understanding their Anglicized speech. I was told on the ship that I would see none but natural complexions in St. John’s, and as far as I have observed that is true, all the girls having bright rosy cheeks. Both men and women here are long lived.

Our driver is now asking us to look at the government buildings. They are high up above the harbour and surrounded by beautiful grounds. The party having a majority in the lower house of parliament forms the government and names the premier and his ministers. The upper house, called the Legislative Assembly, consists of twenty-four members appointed by the governor in council. The members of the lower house are elected for terms of four years and meet every year. While the humblest fisherman may be elected to parliament, Newfoundland has not yet granted women the vote. It has no divorce laws.

Our next stop is at the west end of St. John’s, where the Waterford River empties into the harbour. Here is a valley covered with truck gardens, and beyond lies a park given to the city by one of its titled shipping magnates. It is said that spring comes here two weeks earlier than in the eastern end of town. The reason for this is that while the fogs and the winds from the sea sweep over the bluffs at the harbour entrance, they rarely penetrate to the valley.

Driving back to town we pass the station of the Newfoundland Government Railway, a narrow gauge line that covers the most important parts of the island. It runs far to the north, then to the west shore, and down to Port aux Basques at the southwest. Branches jut out here and there, linking the port towns with the main line and the capital. The greater part of the south shore has no railroad, nor is there yet any line into the Barbe Peninsula, which extends northward to Belle Isle Strait. There is talk of bridging the Strait and connecting Newfoundland with Canada by a rail line through northeastern Quebec.

The manager of the railroad tells me that the Newfoundland line is unique in that its passenger revenues exceed its freight earnings. The reason for this is that most of the people live near the sea, and the bulk of freight goes by water. On the cross country route there are many steep grades, for the interior is hilly, although the highest point on the island is only two thousand feet above sea level. The railroad skirts the shores of hundreds of lakes, of which Newfoundland has more than it has found time to count. It is estimated that one third of the land lies under water. I met a man to-day, just returned from a hunting trip forty miles inland, who told me that he had stood on a hilltop and counted one hundred lakes and ponds in plain sight. He has a friend who has fished in no less than forty different ponds within a half mile of his camp. Grand Lake, on the west side, is more than fifty-six miles long, and two others are nearly as large.

American sportsmen have already discovered in Newfoundland hunting and fishing grounds that rival those of Canada, and some of our rich Americans have permanent camps along the rivers and streams on the south and the west coasts, to which they come every summer for salmon. The railroad manager promises that if I will take the train across country I shall see herds of caribou from the car window.

Much of the land along the railway has been burned over, but nevertheless the country has ten thousand square miles of well-timbered land, worth as it stands five hundred million dollars. Some is being cut for lumber, and more for mine props that go to England and Wales. The chief use of the forests at present is to furnish pulp wood for news print. Lord Northcliffe built at Grand Falls a six-million-dollar plant, operated by water-power, to supply his newspapers and magazines, and an even larger project, to cost twenty-five million dollars, is now under way at the mouth of the Humber River, on the west coast. The scenery there is much like that of the fiords of Norway.

The chief agricultural development of Newfoundland is on the west side of the island, where stock is raised successfully and wintered outdoors. This section of the country has produced as much as three million pounds of beef or three times as much as the amount imported. Newfoundland is not primarily, however, an agricultural country. The efforts of the people have always centred largely on fishing and related industries.

Newfoundland has had its gold fevers, especially on the coast of Labrador, which it owns. So far, these have amounted to nothing. But it has one of the world’s largest iron deposits, and at one time this country was an important producer of copper. It suffers commercially from its handicaps in the way of transportation, and also because of its limited supply of capital.

In studying the map of Newfoundland, I have been interested in its many fanciful names, and wish that I might see what inspired them. There are, for example, “Heart’s Content” and “Heart’s Ease,” “Bay of Bulls” and “Leading Tickle,” “Baldhead” and “Redhead Rocks.” “Come by Chance” is a railroad station in eastern Newfoundland, while just to the north is “Random.”

Most of the points on the Newfoundland coast were named by the early mariners who learned from experience rather than charts how to navigate these dangerous shores. To help remember sailing directions, they made up little rhymes such as this one I learned from a schooner captain just in from Labrador:

When Joe Bat’s point you are abreast,

Fogo Harbour bears due west;

It’s then your course that you must steer

Till Brimstone Head do appear.

And when Old Brimstone do appear,

Then Dean’s Rock you need not fear.

CHAPTER IV
THE COD FISHERIES OF NEWFOUNDLAND

Perhaps you have thought, as I did before coming here, that fish are fish, all the world over. But in Newfoundland fish are cod. The existence of the other finny creatures in the sea is recognized, but they are referred to only by their proper names. There is a story that a Newfoundlander was asked if there were any fish in a certain stream.

“No, there are no fish in here,” was the reply, “nothing but trout.”

The history of Newfoundland is largely the story of its cod fisheries and the contests to possess them. Cabot reported to his royal master that the waters off the Newfoundland coast were so thick with fish as to impede navigation. Not long ago cod were so plentiful that dogs caught them alive in the water as they were crowded upon the beach by the pressure of the thousands behind, and to-day the cod fisheries here are the largest of their kind in the world. Nine tenths of the people of Newfoundland still make their living either directly or indirectly from fish, and eighty per cent. of the export trade comes from them. At one time dried cod formed the national currency, and debts were paid in kind. This fall, as for many years, thousands of fishermen are paying for their spring outfits, and for flour and molasses and pork on which they will subsist during the coming winter, with fish.

Within a year after Cabot’s voyage, fishermen from Devonshire, England, were on the Newfoundland coast, and several years later Portuguese and French fishermen were competing with them for the right to share in the phenomenal catches. Though claimed by the British by right of discovery, Newfoundland became a kind of “no man’s land.” Its coast was frequented by hordes of daring men, partly fishermen, partly traders, most of whom were not above a little piracy now and then. In 1578, four hundred fishing vessels were coming here every year. Of these nearly half were French. The English dominated even then, and a quarter of a century later ten thousand men and boys from the west counties of England were spending their summers in the fisheries, as catchers at sea and dryers on shore.

It is estimated that the annual catch of the English vessels was worth one hundred thousand pounds, a huge sum in those days. The “Merchant Adventurers” of England, who gained most of the profit, tried to set up a monopoly. They did their utmost to drive the French from the fishing grounds and shore stations, and discouraged all attempts to colonize Newfoundland, spreading false reports that the country was desolate and uninhabitable. At one time there were laws forbidding a fishing vessel from taking any settlers to Newfoundland and requiring it to bring back to England every man it carried away. The “Fishing Admirals,” as the ancient profiteers of that industry were called, even secured an order to burn the homes of the fishermen on shore. Indeed, it was not until 1711 that England changed her cruel policy toward Newfoundland and organized the colony under a naval government.

Most of the people of Newfoundland get their living directly or indirectly from the codfish industry. The bulk of the catch is shipped abroad from St. John’s, chiefly to the warm countries of the Mediterranean and the West Indies.

The fisherman’s work has only begun when he has caught the cod. After cleaning them, he and his family must spread the fish out to dry every day, and stack them up every evening until they are “made.”

In the meantime, bitter struggles with the French had been going on. The French recognized in Newfoundland a key to their possessions in Canada along the Gulf and River of St. Lawrence. They succeeded in gaining a foothold on the south shore of Newfoundland, and from there frequently attacked the English settlements to the north, until the Treaty of Utrecht compelled them to give up their holdings. All that remains of French possessions in this part of the world are the islands of Miquelon and St. Pierre just south of Newfoundland. With the prohibition wave that swept over North America, the port of St. Pierre has had a great boom as headquarters of the bootlegging fleets of the North Atlantic. It has grown rich by taxing the liquor traffic, so much so, in fact, that St. John’s is casting envious eyes at its island neighbour, and making plans to get into this profitable trade.

I had my first glimpse of the native cod as I entered St. John’s harbour. Just as our steamer passed a motor dory lying off shore, one of the men in her caught a big fish. He pulled it out of the water, and after holding it up to our view, clubbed it on the head and threw it into the boat. To-day I visited one of the fishing villages, where I saw the day’s catches landed and talked with the fishermen.

I took a motor in St. John’s and drove out to Waterford Valley, up over the gray rocky hills into the back country. On the heights I found a blue pond, just below it another, and then another, like so many steps leading from the heights down to the sea. The last pond ended in a great wooden flume running down the rocky gorge to a little power station that supplies electricity to the city of St. John’s.

Here I stopped to take in the view. Before me was a little bay, perhaps a half mile long and a quarter of a mile wide, where the stream from the hill ponds empties into the ocean. This was Petty Harbour, a typical Newfoundland “outport.” On both sides of the harbour rocky walls rose almost straight up to a height of three or four hundred feet. The only outlets were the waters of the tiny bay and the gorge through which I came. There was literally no level land, only a few narrow shelves and terraces along the sides of the hills. There were no streets, only a winding roadway down the slope. The lower portion was too narrow for our motor, so that I had to go part of the way down on foot. The houses were placed every which way on the steep hillsides. Most of them had tiny dooryards, with a patch of grass and sometimes a few flowers in front. Behind them, or at the sides, were other patches of green, on some of which small black and white goats, wearing pokes about their necks, were feeding. Small as were the houses, each was neatness itself and shiny with paint. Every one of the hundred or so houses was built by its occupant or his father before him. Indeed, I am prepared to believe, after what I have seen, that the Newfoundland fisherman is the world’s greatest “handy man.” He builds not only his house, but also his boats, landing stages, and fish-drying platforms; he makes his own nets, raises his own vegetables, and often has a sheep or two to furnish wool, which his wife will spin and weave into a suit of clothes or a jersey.

Walk along with me the rest of the way down to the waterside. You must step carefully on the path that leads over and between the ridges of out-cropping rock. Behind us a troop of youngsters are proving themselves true citizens of the kingdom of boyhood by tooting the horn of our motor. I notice many children playing about, and I ask where they go to school. In reply two little frame buildings are pointed out on the hillsides, one the Church of England school, and the other maintained by the Catholics. The children we see look happy and well fed, and the little girls especially are neatly dressed and attractive.

But here is a fisherman, drying cod, who offers to show us about. With him we clamber down to the nearest stage, built out over the rocks, its far end resting in water that is deep enough for the boats. The stages are built of spruce poles and look like cliff-dwellers’ homes. At the end nearest the water is a little landing platform, with steps leading down to the motor dory moored alongside.

A boat has come in with a load of fish. They are speared one by one and tossed up to the landing stage, while one of the men starts cleaning them to show us how it is done. He first cuts the throat to the backbone, breaks off the head against the edge of the bench, and then rips open the belly. He tosses the liver to the table and the other organs to the floor, cuts out the greater part of the backbone, and throws the split, flattened-out cod into a tub at his feet. It is all done in a few seconds.

Outside there is now a great heap of cod. This fish has a gray-greenish back, a white belly, and a great gaping mouth lined with a broad band of teeth so fine that to the touch they feel like a file. One big fellow a yard long weighs, we are told, perhaps twenty-five pounds, but most of them will average but ten or twelve pounds.

These fish were caught in a net, or trap. When set in the water the cod trap measures about sixty feet square. It is moored in the sea near the shore. The fish swim into the enclosure, are caught within its walls, and cannot make their way out. The size of the meshes is limited by law, so that the young fish may escape. Three fourths of the Newfoundland cod are taken in this manner. Fish traps may cost from six hundred to one thousand dollars each, and making them is the chief winter job of the fishermen.

Sometimes the cod are caught with trawls, or lines, perhaps three or four thousand feet long, with short lines tied on at every six feet. The short lines carry hooks, which are baited one by one, and the whole is then set in the ocean with mooring buoys at each end. The trawls are hauled up every day to remove the fish that have been caught, and to bait up again.

I had thought a fisherman’s work done when he brought in his catch, but that is really only the beginning. The Newfoundland fisherman has nothing he can turn into money until his fish are salted and dried. The drying process may take a month or longer if the weather is bad. It is called “making” the fish. The flat split fish are spread out upon platforms called “flakes.” The sun works the salt down into the flesh, at the same time removing the moisture. Every evening each fish must be picked up and put in a pile under cover, and then re-spread on the flakes in the morning. The children are a great help in this part of the work.

Wherever there is a slight indentation on the high rock-faced coast you will find a fishing village with its landing stages and drying “flakes,” built of spruce poles and boughs, clinging to the steep shore.

It is in the perfection of the drying, rather than by size, that fish are graded for the market. At one of the fish packing wharves in St. John’s, I saw tons of dried cod stacked up like so much cord wood. They all looked alike to me, but the manager said:

“Now, the fish in this pile are for Naples, those in that for Spain, and those on the other side of the room will be sent to Brazil. It would never do to mix them, as our customers in each country have their own taste. Some like their fish hard, and some soft, and there are other differences we have to keep in mind as we sort the fish and grade them for export. The poorest fish, those you see in the corner, are for the West Indies. The people there nearly live on our fish, which will keep in their hot climate, but they can’t afford to buy the best quality.”

Arrived at the ice fields, the seal hunters armed with spiked poles scatter over the pack. They kill for their hides and fat the baby seals which every spring are born on the ice of the far north Atlantic.

Caribou are plentiful in Newfoundland. They are often seen from the train on the railroad journey across the country. The interior has thousands of lakes, one third of the island lying under water.

Newfoundland exports more than one hundred and twenty million pounds of dried cod every year. Brazil, Italy, Spain, and Portugal take about ninety million pounds, while the West Indies, Canada, Greece, and the United States absorb the balance. The fish are exported in casks each containing about two and a half quintals, or two hundred and eighty pounds.

While the shore fisheries account for most of the annual Newfoundland catch, there are two other ways of taking cod. The first is the “bank fishery,” in which schooners go off to the Grand Banks where they put out men in small boats to fish with hook and line until a shipload is caught. The fish are cleaned and salted on board, but are dried on shore. The crews of the schooners usually share in the catch, as in our own Gloucester fishing fleets. The third kind is the Labrador fishery. Sometimes as many as nine hundred schooners will spend the summer on the Labrador coast, fishing off shore, and drying the catches on the beach. Whole families take part in this annual migration. Labrador fish do not, however, bring as good a price as Banks or offshore fish.

The prosperity of the Newfoundlanders depends every year on the price of cod. This may range from three dollars a quintal to the record prices of fourteen and fifteen dollars during the World War. Just now the price is depressed, and Newfoundland is feeling competition from the Norwegians, who are underselling them in the western European and Mediterranean markets. Consequently, many Newfoundlanders, especially the young people, are emigrating to the United States. Some of the men go to New England and engage in the Massachusetts fisheries. Others ship on merchant vessels, while the girls are attracted by high wages paid in our stores, offices, and factories.

I have made some inquiries about the earnings of the Newfoundland fisherman, and find his net cash income amounts to but three or four hundred dollars a year. While he builds his own boat, he has to buy his engine, gasoline, and oil. He must buy twine and pitch for his nets, cord and hooks for his baited lines, and salt for pickling. A fisherman usually figures on making enough from the cod livers and their oil to pay his salt bill. The bones and entrails and also the livers after the oil has been removed are used as fertilizer.

The fisherman usually has no other source of income than his catch, and during the winter he does little except prepare for the next season. He goes in debt to the merchant who furnishes his outfit and the supplies for his family. His catch for the year may or may not bring as much as the amount he owes, but he must deliver it, at the current price, to the firm that gave him credit. This system accounts for the big stores in St. John’s, some of which have made a great deal of money. The merchants render a real service in financing the fishermen, whom they carry through the lean years, but there are those who believe the credit system has outlived its usefulness.

Some years ago a farmer-fisherman-mechanic named William Coaker organized the Fishermen’s Protective Union, with local councils in the outports. The union organized coöperative companies that now buy and sell fish, build ships, and handle supplies of all kinds. It even built a water-power plant to furnish electricity at cost to light the men’s homes. A new town, called Port Union, was developed on the northeast coast. This has become the centre of the Union activities, and there its organizer, now Sir William Coaker, spends his time. The Union publishes a daily paper in St. John’s. Its editor tells me that in the last ten years the dividend rate paid by the F. P. U. companies was ten per cent. for eight years, eight per cent. for one year, and none at all for only one year. The Union went into politics, and for three elections has had eleven members in the lower house. By combination with other groups this bloc has held the balance of power. While the Union has a strong voice in the government, the conservative business houses seem to be the dominant influence here in St. John’s, where, quite naturally, the fishermen’s organization finds little favour.

St. John’s is the centre for the Newfoundland sealing industry. This is not the seal that yields my lady’s fine furs, but the hair seal, which is killed chiefly for its fat, although the skin is used to make bags, pocketbooks, and other articles of leather. The oil made from the fat is used as an illuminant, a lubricant, and also for some grades of margarine.

The annual seal hunt starts from St. John’s on March 13th. The sealing steamers carry from two hundred to three hundred and fifty men each, packed aboard like sardines in a can. The vessels make for the great ice floes off the northeast coast, and it is on the ice that the seals are taken. The animals spend the winter in waters farther south, but assemble in enormous herds each January and start north toward the ice. Within forty-eight hours after reaching the ice-field, some three hundred thousand mother seals give birth to as many babies. The baby seals gain weight at the rate of four pounds a day, and rapidly take on a coating of fat about two and a half inches thick. When they are six weeks old, they leave their parents and start swimming north. It is a matter of record that the parents reach the ice and the young are born in almost the same spot in the ocean, and on almost the same day, year after year.

I visited one of the sealers. It happened to be the Terra Nova, the ship in which Captain Scott explored the Antarctic. It was a black craft, designed to work in the ice-fields and carry the maximum number of men and seals. I held in my hands one of the six-foot poles, called “bats,” with which the seals are clubbed to death on the ice. Once the ship reaches the ice-pack, the hunting parties scramble overboard and make a strike for the seals. The ice is usually rough and broken, and a man must make sure that he can get back to his ship. Each hunter kills as many seals as he can, strips off the skin and layer of fat, and leaves the carcass on the ice. The skins and fat are brought back to the ship. The baby seals are the ones that are preferred, for since they feed only on their mothers’ milk, the oil from their fat is the best. Seal hunting is exciting and dangerous work while it lasts, though from a sporting standpoint baby seals can hardly be considered big game.

During the winter season the red iron ore from the Wabana mines is stored in huge piles. In the summer it is shipped by steamer to the company’s steel mills in Nova Scotia.

The annual race between schooners of the rival fleets from Nova Scotia and Gloucester, Massachusetts, is a unique sporting event. Every other year the contenders meet on a course off Halifax harbour.

The start of the annual seal hunt is a great occasion for St. John’s. Two thirds of the proceeds of each catch are divided among the crew, the steamer owner taking the balance. It is an old saying in Newfoundland that “a man will go hunting seals when gold will not draw him.” The ships usually return by the middle of April. In a good year each man may get about one hundred and fifty dollars as his share.

From one hundred and fifty to three hundred thousand seals are brought into St. John’s every year. At the factories gangs of skinners strip off the fat from the hides as fast as they are landed. Sometimes one man will strip as many as six hundred and forty skins in a day. The fat is chopped up and steam cooked, and the oil drawn off into casks. The skins are salt dressed.

One might think the seals would be wiped out by such methods, but the herd does not decrease and remains at about one million from year to year. The seals live largely on codfish, each one eating an average of four every day. The estimated consumption of cod by the seals is fourteen times greater than the number caught by the fishermen.

CHAPTER V
IRON MINES UNDER THE SEA

I have just returned from a trip through caves richer than those of Aladdin. They lie far under the ocean, and their treasures surpass the wildest dreams of the Arabian Nights. The treasures are in iron ore, from forty nine to fifty two per cent. pure, and so abundant that they will be feeding steel mills for many generations to come.

I am speaking of the Wabana iron mines, located on, or rather under, Conception Bay on the southeast coast of Newfoundland. They are on an island seven miles long, three miles in width, and three hundred feet high. Along about a generation ago deposits of rich hematite ores were discovered in veins that ran down under the water with a slope of about fifteen degrees. They were gradually developed and within the last thirty years millions of tons of ore have been taken out. The under-sea workshops have been extended more than two miles out from the shore and it is believed that the great ore body crosses the bay. The capacity yield at this time averages about five thousand tons for every working day of the year, and the location is such that the ore can be put on the steamers for export almost at the mouth of the mines. The property is owned by the British Empire Steel Company, made up of British, American, and Canadian capital.

But let me tell you of my trip. I left my hotel in St. John’s in the early morning. The rocky promontories that form the narrow entrance to the harbour were canopied in light fog, under which fishing schooners could be seen tacking back and forth, beating their way out to the open sea beyond. As we drove out over the hills the moisture gathered on the windshield of the motor-car so that we had to raise it and take the fog-soaked air full in our faces. We went through King’s Road, where many of the aristocracy of St. John’s reside in big frame houses with many bay windows and much gingerbread decoration. They were set well back from the street, and, in contrast with most of the houses of the town, were surrounded by trees.

As we reached the open country, rolling hills stretched away in the mist. They were gray with rock or red-brown with scrub. Here and there were patches of bright green, marking vegetable gardens or tiny pastures for a cow or goat. The growing season in Newfoundland is short, and the number of vegetables that can be successfully raised is limited. I saw patches of cabbages, turnips, and beets, and several fields of an acre or more that had yielded crops of potatoes. Most of the fields were small, and some no bigger than dooryards. All were fenced in with spruce sticks. The houses were painted white, and had stones or turf banked up around their foundations. A few farms had fairly large barns, but most had no outbuildings except a vegetable cellar built into a hillside or half-sunk in the ground.

Newfoundlanders follow the English fashion of driving on the left-hand side of the road. It made me a bit nervous, at first, whenever we approached another vehicle. It seemed certain that we would run into it unless we swung to the right, but of course it always moved to the left, giving us room on what an American thinks of as the “wrong side of the road.”

We met an occasional motor-car, and many buggies, but every few minutes we passed the universal vehicle of Newfoundland, the two-wheeled “long cart,” as it is called. Strictly speaking, it is not a cart at all, in our sense of the word, as it has no floor or sides. It consists of a flat, rectangular frame of rough-hewn poles, balanced like a see-saw across an axle joining two large wooden wheels. The long cart is the common carrier of all Newfoundland. It is used on the farms, in the towns, and in the fishing villages. One of these carts was carrying barrels of cod liver oil to the refinery at St. John’s, while on another, a farmer and his wife sat sidewise, balancing themselves on the tilting frame.

After a drive of ten miles we reached Portugal Cove, where I waited on the wharf for the little steamer that was to take me to Bell Island, three miles out in the Bay. The men of the village were pulling ashore the boat of one of their number who had left the day before to try his luck in the States. The boat was heavy, and seemed beyond their strength. Some one called out: “Come on, Mr. Chantey Man, give us Johnny Poker,” whereupon one of the men led in a song. On the last word, they gave a mighty shout and a mighty pull. The boat moved, and in a moment was high and dry on the beach.

This was the chantey they sang:

Oh, me Johnny Poker,

And we’ll work to roll her over,

And it’s Oh me Johnny Poker all.

The big pull comes with a shout on the final word “all.”

After a few minutes on the little mine steamer, I saw Bell Island loom up out of the fog. Its precipitous shore rose up as high and steep as the side of a skyscraper, but black and forbidding through the gray mist. I was wondering how I could ever reach the top of the island when I saw a tiny box car resting on tracks laid against the cliff side, steeper than the most thrilling roller coaster. The car is hauled up the incline by a cable operated by an electric hoist at the top of the hill. I stepped inside, and by holding on to a rail overhead was able to keep my feet all the way up. Nearly everybody and everything coming to Bell Island is carried up and down in this cable car.

From the top of the cliff, I drove across the island toward the mines, and had all the way a fine view of the property. The mine workings are spread out over an area about five miles long and two miles in width. The houses of the miners are little box-like affairs, with tiny yards. Those owned by the company are alike, but those built by the miners themselves are in varying patterns.

The miners are nearly all native Newfoundlanders. They are paid a minimum wage, with a bonus for production over a given amount, so that the average earnings at present are about three dollars and fifty cents a day. When the mines are working at capacity, about eighteen hundred men are employed.

The offices of the company occupy a large frame structure. In one side of the manager’s room is a great window that commands a view of the works. Looking out, my eye was caught first by a storage pile of red ore higher than a six- or seven-story building. No ore is shipped during the winter because of the ice in the Bay, and the heavy snows that block the narrow gauge cable railway from the mines to the pier. Also, since the ore is wet as it comes out of the mine, it freezes during the three-mile trip across the island. This makes it hard to dump and load. Another difficulty about winter operations above ground comes from the high winds that sweep over the island, sometimes with a velocity of eighty miles an hour.

With the manager I walked through the village, passing several ore piles, to one of the shaft houses. Trains of cars are hauled by cable from the depths of the mine to the top of the shaft house, where their contents are dumped into the crusher. From the crusher the broken rock is loaded by gravity into other cars and run off to the storage piles or down to the pier. The cable railways and crushers are operated by electricity, generated with coal from the company’s mines at Sydney, Nova Scotia. The same power is used to operate the fans that drive streams of fresh air into the mines and to work the pumps that lift the water out of the tunnels.

At the shaft house I put on a miner’s working outfit, consisting of a suit of blue overalls, rubber boots, and a cap with its socket above the visor for holding a lamp. These miners’ lamps are like the old bicycle lanterns, only smaller. The lower part is filled with broken carbide, on which water drips from a reservoir above and forms acetylene gas.

I was amazed at the ore trains that came shooting up out of the mine at from thirty to forty miles an hour, and trembled at the thought of sliding down into the earth at such speed, but my guide gave the “slow” signal and we began our descent at a more moderate rate.

I sat on the red, muddy bottom of an empty ore car. My feet reached almost to the front and I could just comfortably grasp the tops of the sides with my hands. It was like sitting upright in a bathtub. As we plunged into the darkness, the car wheels roared and rattled like those of a train in a subway. My guide shouted in my ear that the shaft was fifteen feet wide, and about eight feet from ceiling to floor. I noticed that some of the timber props were covered with a sort of fungus that looked like frost or white cotton, while here and there water trickling out of the rock glistened in the light of our lamps.

As we descended the air grew colder. It had a damp chill that bit to the bone, and though our speed kept increasing there seemed to be no end to the journey. Suddenly, out of the darkness I saw three dancing lights. Were they signals to us of some danger ahead? Another moment, and the lights proved to be lamps in the caps of three miners, drillers who had finished their work for the day and were toiling their way up the steep grade to the world of fresh air and warm sunshine.

Another light appeared ahead. Our train slowed up and stopped on a narrow shelf deep down in the earth and far under the ocean. Just ahead, the track plunged steeply down again into the darkness. We were at the station where the underground trains are controlled by electric signals. On each side curved rails and switches led off into branching tunnels.

For an hour or more we walked about in the under-sea workings. At times we were in rock-walled rooms where not a sound could be heard but the crunch of the slippery red ore under our rubber-booted feet, or the sound of water rushing down the steep inclines. At other times the rock chambers reverberated with the chugging and pounding of the compressed air drills boring their way into the rock.

We went to the head of a new chamber where a gang was loading ore into the cars. There was a great scraping and grinding of shovels against the flinty rock as the men bent their backs to their work. The miners’ faces were streaked with sweat and grimy with smears of the red ore. I picked up a piece. It was not as big as a dinner plate, but was almost as heavy as lead.

We rode out of the mine at top speed. Upon reaching the surface, the air of the chilly foggy day felt positively hot, while the sunlight seemed almost unreal after the dampness below.

Halifax has a fine natural harbour well protected by islands and with sufficient deep water anchorage for great fleets. The port is handicapped, however, by the long rail haul from such centres of population as Montreal and Toronto.

Cape Breton Island has a French name, but it is really the land of the Scotch, where village pastors often preach in Gaelic, and the names in their flocks sound like a gathering of the clans.

CHAPTER VI
THE MARITIME PROVINCES

I have come into Canada through the Maritime Provinces, which lie on the Atlantic Coast between our own state of Maine and the mouth of the St. Lawrence. The Provinces are Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island. Their area is almost equal to that of our six New England states, and in climate and scenery they are much the same. Their population, however, is only about one million, or little more than one fourth as many as the number of people living in Massachusetts. These provinces were the first British possessions in Canada, and like New England they have seen the centre of population and progress move ever westward.

Nova Scotia is the easternmost province of the Dominion of Canada. Its capital and chief city is Halifax, situated on the Atlantic on one of the world’s best natural harbours. This is a deep water inlet ten miles in length, which is open all the year round. Montreal and Quebec are closed to navigation during the winter months on account of the freezing of the St. Lawrence.

Halifax is six hundred miles closer to Europe than is New York, and nearer Rio de Janeiro than is New Orleans. As the eastern terminus of the Canadian National Railways, it has direct connections with all Canada. With these advantages, the city hopes to become one of the great shipping centres on the North Atlantic.

Halifax has long been noted as the most English city in Canada. It was once the military, naval, and political centre of British North America, and gay with the social life of British officers and their ladies. Now, both the warships and the soldiers are gone, and the city is devoting itself to commercial activities.

As we steamed past the lighthouses and the hidden guns on the headlands guarding the entrance, I was reminded of all that this harbour has meant to America. The city was founded by Lord Cornwallis in 1749 at the suggestion of Boston merchants who complained that the French were using these waters as a base for their sea raiders. Less than thirty years later it provided a haven for Lord Howe when he was driven out of Boston by our soldiers of the Revolution, and became the headquarters for the British operations against the struggling colonies. In the war of 1812, the American warship Chesapeake was brought here after her defeat by the British frigate Shannon. During our Civil War Halifax served as a base for blockade runners, and the fortunes of some of its wealthy citizens of to-day were founded on the profits of this dangerous trade. No one dreamed then that within two generations England and America would be fighting side by side in a World War, that thousands of United States soldiers would sail from Halifax for the battlefields of Europe, or that an American admiral, commanding a fleet of destroyers, would establish his headquarters here. Yet that is what happened in 1917–18. All that now remains of the former duels on the sea is the annual sailing race between the fastest schooners of the Gloucester and the Nova Scotia fishing fleets.

Halifax is built on a hillside that rises steeply from the water-front to a height of two hundred and sixty feet above the harbour. The city extends about halfway up the hill, and reaches around on both sides of it. The top is a bare, grassy mound, surmounted by an ancient citadel.

Stand with me on the edge of the old moat, and look down upon Halifax and its harbour. Far to our left is the anchorage where occurred one of the greatest explosions the world ever knew. Just as the city was eating breakfast on the morning of December 6, 1917, a French munitions ship, loaded with benzol and TNT, collided with another vessel leaving the harbour, and her cargo of explosives blew up in a mighty blast. Nearly two thousand people were killed, six thousand were injured, and eleven thousand were made homeless. Hardly a pane of glass was left in a window, and acres of houses were levelled to the ground. A deck gun was found three miles from the water, and the anchor of one of the vessels lies in the woods six miles away, where it was thrown by the explosion. A street-car conductor was blown through a second-story window, and a sailor hurled from his ship far up the hillside. Since then much of the devastated area has been rebuilt along approved town-planning lines, but the scars of the disaster are still visible. For a long time after the explosion, the local institution for the blind was filled to capacity, and one saw on the streets many persons wearing patches over one eye.

Standing on the hill across the harbour one sees the town of Dartmouth, where much of the industrial activity of the Halifax district is centred. There are the largest oil works, chocolate factories, and sugar refineries of Canada. Vessels from Mexico, South America, and the British West Indies land their cargoes of tropical products at the doors of the works. Fringing the water-front are the masts of sailing vessels and the smokestacks of steamers. Among the latter is a cable repair ship, just in from mending a break in one of the many submarine telegraph lines that land on this coast. Next to her is a giant new liner, making her first stop here to add to her cargo some twenty-five thousand barrels of apples from the Annapolis Valley. This valley, on the western side of Nova Scotia, is known also as “Evangeline Land.” It was made famous by Longfellow’s poem based on the expulsion of the French Acadians by the English because they insisted on being neutral in the French-British wars. It is one of the finest apple-growing districts in the world, and sends annually to Europe nearly two million barrels. Many descendants of the former French inhabitants have now returned to the land of their ancestors.

Looking toward the mouth of the harbour, we see the new terminal, a twenty-five million dollar project that has for some years stood half completed. Here are miles and miles of railroad tracks, and giant piers equipped with modern machinery, a part of the investment the Dominion and its government-owned railway system have made to establish Halifax as a first-class port. Beyond the port works another inlet, Northwest Arm, makes its way in between the hills. I have motored out to its wooded shores, which in summer time are crowded with the young people of Halifax, bathing and boating. It is the city’s chief playground and a beautiful spot.

But now take a look at the city itself, stretching along the water-front below where we stand. The big red brick building just under our feet is the municipal market. There, on Saturdays, one may see an occasional Indian, survivor of the ancient Micmacs, and Negroes who are descendants of slaves captured by the British in Maryland when they sailed up the Potomac and burned our Capitol. Farther down the hillside are the business buildings of the city, none of them more than five stories high, and all somewhat weatherbeaten. I have seen no new construction under way in downtown Halifax; the city seems to have missed the building booms of recent years. Most of the older houses are of stone or brick. Outside the business district the people live in wooden frame houses, each with its bit of yard around it. One would know Halifax for an English town by its chimney pots. Some of the houses have batteries of six or eight of these tiles set on end sticking out of their chimneys.

The streets are built on terraces cut in the hillside, or plunging down toward the water. Some of them are so narrow that they have room for only a single trolley track, on which are operated little one-man cars. I stepped for a moment into St. Paul’s Church, the first English house of worship in Canada. Its front pew, to the left of the centre aisle, is reserved for the use of royal visitors. Passing one of the local newspaper offices, I noticed a big crowd that filled the street, watching an electric score board that registered, play by play, a World Series baseball game going on in New York. The papers are full of baseball talk, and the people of this Canadian province seem to follow the game as enthusiastically as our fans at home.

My nose will long remember Halifax. In lower Hollis Street, just back from the water-front, and not far from the low gray stone buildings that once quartered British officers, I smelled a most delicious aroma. It was from a group of importing houses, where cinnamon, cloves, and all the products of the East Indies are ground up and packed for the market. If I were His Worship, the Mayor of Halifax, I should propose that Hollis street be renamed and called the Street of the Spices. Just below this sweet-scented district, I came to a tiny brick building, with a sign in faded letters reading “S. Cunard & Co., Coal Merchants.” This firm is the corporate lineal descendant of Samuel Cunard, who, with his partners, established the first transatlantic steamship service nearly a century ago, and whose name is now carried all over the world by some of the greatest liners afloat.

Another odour of the water-front is not so sweet as the spices. It is the smell of salt fish, which here are dried on frames built on the roofs near the docks. Nova Scotia is second only to Newfoundland in her exports of dried cod, and all her fisheries combined earn more than twelve million dollars a year. They include cod, haddock, mackerel, herring, halibut, pollock, and salmon. Lunenburg, down the coast toward Boston, is one of the centres of the deep-sea fishing industry, and its schooners compete on the Grand Banks with those from Newfoundland, Gloucester, and Portugal.

I talked in Halifax with the manager of a million-dollar corporation that deals in fresh fish. He was a Gloucester man who, as he put it, “has had fish scales on his boots” ever since he could remember.

“We operate from Canso, the easternmost tip of Nova Scotia,” he said. “Our steamers make weekly trips to the fishing grounds, where they take the fish with nets. They are equipped with wireless, and we direct their operations from shore in accordance with market conditions. While the price of salt fish is fairly steady, fresh fish fluctuates from day to day, depending on the quantities caught and the public taste. Such fish as we cannot sell immediately, we cure in our smoking and drying plants.

“All our crews share in the proceeds of their catch, and the captains get no fixed wages at all. We could neither catch the fish nor sell them at a profit without the fullest coöperation on the part of our men, most of whom come from across the Atlantic, from Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, and also from Iceland. Next to the captain, the most important man on our ships is the cook. Few fish are caught unless the fishermen are well fed. The ‘cook’s locker’ is always full of pies, cakes, and cookies, to which the men help themselves, and the coffee-pot must be kept hot for all hands to ‘mug up.’”

From Halifax I crossed Nova Scotia by rail into the adjoining province of New Brunswick. Nova Scotia is a peninsula that seems to have been tacked on to the east coast of Canada. It is three hundred and seventy-four miles long, and so narrow that no point in it is more than thirty miles from the sea. The coast does not run due north and south, but more east and west, so that its southernmost tip points toward Boston. The Bay of Fundy separates it from the coasts of Maine and New Brunswick, and leaves only an isthmus, in places not more than twenty miles wide, connecting Nova Scotia with the mainland. The lower or westernmost half of the province is encircled with railroads, which carry every year increasing thousands of tourists and hunters from the United States. The summer vacationists and the artists go chiefly to the picturesque shore towns, while those who come up for hunting and fishing strike inland to the lakes and woods. Deer and moose are still so plentiful in Nova Scotia that their meat is served at Halifax hotels during the season.

The scenery is much like that of Maine. Rolling hills alternate with ledges of gray rock, while at every few miles there are lakes and ponds. Much of the country is covered with spruce, and many of the farms have hedges and tall windbreaks of those trees. The farmhouses are large and well built; they are usually situated on high ground and surrounded by sloping fields and pastures considerably larger than the farm lots of New England. In some places the broad hills are shaped like the sand dunes of Cape Cod. At nearly every station freshly cut lumber was piled up, awaiting shipment, while one of the little rivers our train crossed was filled with birch logs floating down to a spool factory.

Some two hours from Halifax we came to Truro at the head of Cobequid Bay, the easternmost arm of the Bay of Fundy. Scientists who have studied the forty-foot Fundy tides attribute them to its pocket-like shape. The tides are highest in the numerous deep inlets at the head of the Bay. In the Petitcodiac River, which forms the northernmost arm, as the tide comes in a wall of water two or three feet high rushes upstream. These tides are felt far back from the coast. The rivers and streams have deep-cut banks on account of the daily inrush and outflow of waters and are bordered with marshes through which run irrigation ditches dug by the farmers.

With his poem of Evangeline, Longfellow made famous the old well at Grand Pré, the scene of the expulsion of the Acadians because they wanted to remain neutral in the French-British wars.

When the tide goes out at Digby, vessels tied to the docks are left high and dry. At some points on the Bay of Fundy the rise and fall of the water exceeds forty feet.

Truro is a turning-off point for the rail journey down the Bay side of Nova Scotia through “Evangeline Land” and the Annapolis Valley, and also for the trip north and east up to Cape Breton Island. This island is part of the province of Nova Scotia. It is separated from the mainland only by the mile-wide Strait of Canso, across which railroad trains are carried on ferries. In the southern part of the Island is the Bras d’Or Lake, an inland sea covering two hundred and forty square miles.

Because of the deep snows in winter the Quebec farmhouse usually has high porches and often a bridge from the rear leading to the upper floor of the barn. The older houses are built of stone.

Spinning wheels and hand looms are still in use among the French Canadian farm women. Besides supplying clothes for their families, they make also homespuns and rugs for sale.

Though Cabot landed on the coast of Cape Breton Island after his discovery of the Newfoundland shore, it later fell into the hands of the French. They found its fisheries worth more than all the gold of Peru or Mexico. To protect the sea route to their St. Lawrence territories, they built at Louisburg a great fortress that cost a sum equal to twenty-five million dollars in our money. To-day, hardly one stone remains upon another, as the works were destroyed by the British in 1758. Not far from Louisburg is Glace Bay, where Marconi continued the wireless experiments begun in Newfoundland, and it was on this coast, also, that the first transatlantic cable was landed.

Cape Breton Island was settled mostly by Scotch, and even to-day sermons in the churches are often delivered in Gaelic. As a result of intermarriage sometimes half the people of a village bear the same family name. For generations these people lived mostly by fishing, but the opening of coal mines in the Sydney district brought many of them into that industry. The Sydney mines, which normally employ about ten thousand men, are the only coal deposits on the continent of North America lying directly on the Atlantic Coast. They are an asset of immense value to Canada, yielding more than one third of her total coal production. One of the mines at North Sydney has the largest coal shaft in the world. Because of these enormous deposits of bituminous coal, and the presence near by of dolomite, or limestone, steel industries have been developed in the Sydney district. Ownership of most of the coal and steel properties has been merged in the British Empire Steel Corporation, one of the largest single industrial enterprises in all Canada. It is this corporation, you will remember, that owns the Wabana iron mines in Newfoundland.

In the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and north of the isthmus connecting Nova Scotia with the mainland, is Prince Edward Island, the smallest, but proportionately the richest province in the Dominion of Canada. It is not quite twice the size of Rhode Island, and has less than one hundred thousand people, but every acre of its land is tillable and most of it is cultivated. The island is sometimes called the “Garden of the Gulf.”

Prince Edward Island is a favourite resort of Americans on vacation. It leaped into fame as the scene of the first successful experiments in raising foxes for their furs, and now has more than half of the fox farms in Canada. The business of selling fox skins and breeding stock is worth nearly two million dollars a year to the Prince Edward Islanders. The greatest profits are from the sales of fine breeding animals.

Most of the west shore of the Bay of Fundy and many of its northern reaches are in the third and westernmost of the three Maritime Provinces. This is the province of New Brunswick. It is Maine’s next-door neighbour, and almost as large, but it has less than half as many people. The wealth of New Brunswick, like that of Maine, comes chiefly from the farms, the fisheries, and the great forests that are fast being converted into lumber and paper. Its game and fresh-water fishing attract a great many sportsmen from both the United States and Canada.

St. John, the chief city of New Brunswick at the mouth of the St. John River, used to be a centre of anti-American sentiment in Canada. This was because the city was founded by the Tories, who left the United States after we won our independence. St. John to-day is a busy commercial centre competing with Halifax for first place as Canada’s all-year Atlantic port. It is the eastern terminal of the Canadian Pacific Railroad, whose transatlantic liners use the port during the winter. It enjoys the advantage over Halifax of being some two hundred miles nearer Montreal, but, like Halifax, suffers on account of the long railway haul and high freight rates to central Canada. As a matter of fact, New England, and not Canada, is the natural market for the Maritime Provinces, and every few years the proposal that this part of Canada form a separate Dominion comes up for discussion. Such talk is not taken seriously by the well informed, but it provides a good safety valve for local irritation.

CHAPTER VII
IN FRENCH CANADA

Come with me for a ride about Quebec, the oldest city in Canada, the ancient capital of France in America, and a stronghold of the Catholic Church. We go from the water-front through the Lower Town, up the heights, and out to where the modern city eats into the countryside. The Lower Town is largely French. The main part of the Upper Town used to be enclosed by walls and stone gates, parts of which are still standing. The dull gray buildings are of stone, with only shelf-like sidewalks between them and the street. Most of the streets are narrow. The heights are ascended by stairs, by a winding street, and in one place by an elevator. The old French caleche, a two-wheeled vehicle between a jinrikisha and a dog-cart, has been largely displaced by motor-cars, which can climb the steep grades in a jiffy. Even the ancient buildings are giving way to modern necessities, and every year some are torn down.

As a city, Quebec is unique on this continent. It fairly drips with “atmosphere,” and is concentrated romance and history. You know the story, of course, of how Champlain founded it in 1608, on a narrow shelf of land under the rocky bluff that rises nearly three hundred and fifty feet above the St. Lawrence. Here brave French noblemen and priests started what they hoped would be a new empire for France. Between explorations, fights with the Indians, and frequent British attacks, they lived an exciting life. Finally, General Wolfe in 1759 succeeded in capturing for the British this Gibraltar of the New World. Landing his men by night, at dawn he was in position on the Plains of Abraham behind the fort. In the fight that followed Wolfe was killed, Montcalm, the French commander, was mortally wounded, and the city passed into the hands of the English. If General Montgomery and Benedict Arnold had succeeded in their attack on Quebec on New Year’s Eve, sixteen years later, the history of all Canada would have been different, and the United States flag might be flying over the city to-day.

The British built in the rock on top of the bluff a great fort and citadel covering about forty acres. It still bristles with cannon, but most of them are harmless compared with modern big guns. The works serve chiefly as a show place for visitors, and a summer residence for dukes and lords sent out to be governors-general of Canada. The fortification is like a mediæval castle, with subterranean chambers and passages, and cannon balls heaped around the battlements. Below the old gun embrasures is a broad terrace, a quarter of a mile long. This furnishes the people of Quebec a beautiful promenade that overlooks the harbour and commands a fine view of Levis and the numerous villages on the other shore.

The Parliament building stands a little beyond the entrance to the citadel. As we go on the architecture reflects the transition from French to British domination. The houses begin to move back from the sidewalk, and to take on front porches. I saw workmen putting in double windows, in preparation for winter, and noticed that the sides of many of the brick houses are clapboarded to keep the frost out of the mortar. Still farther out apartments appear, while a little beyond are all the marks of a suburban real estate boom. Most of the “for sale” signs are in both French and English.

Now come with me and look at another Quebec, of which you probably have never heard. The city is built, as you know, where the St. Charles River flows into the St. Lawrence. The valley of the St. Charles has become a great hive of industry, and contains the homes of thousands of French workers. Looking down upon it from the ancient Martello Tower on the heights of the Upper Town, we see a wilderness of factory walls, church spires, and the roofs of homes. Beyond them great fields slope upward, finally losing themselves in the wooded foothills of the Laurentian Mountains. Cotton goods, boots and shoes, tobacco, and clothing are manufactured here. It was from this valley that workers for the textile and shoe industries of New England were recruited by thousands. A few miles upstream is the village of Indian Lorette, where descendants of a Huron tribe, Christianized by the French centuries ago, make leather moccasins for lumberjacks and slippers for American souvenir buyers. A big fur company also has a fox farm near Indian Lorette.

Quebec was once the chief port of Canada, but when the river was dredged up to Montreal it fell far behind. All but the largest transatlantic liners can now sail for Europe from Montreal, though they make Quebec a port of call. Quebec is five hundred miles nearer Liverpool than is New York, and passengers using this route have two days less in the open sea. The navigation season is about eight months. The port has rail connections with all Canada and the United States. Above the city is the world’s longest cantilever bridge, on which trains cross the river. After two failures the great central span, six hundred and forty feet long, was raised from floating barges and put into place one hundred and fifty feet above the water.

In the English atmosphere of the Maritime Provinces I felt quite at home, but here I seem to be in a foreign land, and time has been pushed back a century or so. We think of Canada as British, and assume that English is the national language. But in Quebec, its largest province, containing about one fifth of the total area, nearly nine tenths of the people are French and speak the French language. They number almost one fourth of the population of the Dominion.

Quebec is larger than Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California combined; it is nearly as big as all our states east of the Mississippi River put together. Covering an area of seven hundred thousand square miles, it reaches from the northern borders of New York and New England to the Arctic Ocean; from the Gulf of St. Lawrence and Labrador westward to Hudson Bay and the Ottawa River. Most Americans see that part of Quebec along the St. Lawrence between the capital and Montreal, but only one fourteenth of the total area of the province lies south of the river. The St. Lawrence is more than nineteen hundred miles long, and Quebec extends along its north bank for almost the entire distance.

Jacques Cartier sailed up the St. Lawrence in 1535 and claimed possession of the new land in the name of “Christ and France.” Later, French soldiers and priests pushed their way up the river, explored the Great Lakes, and went down the Mississippi. It was French fur traders, fishermen, and farmers who opened up and populated eastern Canada. With no immigration from France since British rule began, the population of the province of Quebec has had a natural increase from about sixty thousand to more than two millions. The average family numbers from six to eight persons, while families of twelve and fourteen children are common. Quebec maintains the highest birth rate of any province in Canada. It has also the highest death rate, but there is a large net gain every year.

Quebec is one of the chief reservoirs of Canada’s natural wealth. It leads all other provinces in its production of pulpwood, and contributes more than one half the Dominion’s output of pulp and paper. It is second only to British Columbia and Ontario in lumber production, while its northern reaches contain the last storehouse of natural furs left on our continent.

Canada is one of the world’s great sources of water-power. Nearly half of that already developed is in the province of Quebec, and her falling waters are now yielding more than a million horse-power. Tens of thousands of additional units are being put to work every year, while some five million horse-power are in reserve. It would take eight million tons of coal a year to supply as much power as Quebec now gets from water.

The ancient citadel on the heights of Quebec is now dwarfed by a giant castle-like hotel that helps make the American Gibraltar a tourist resort. Its windows command a magnificent view of the St. Lawrence.

The St. Louis gate commemorates the days when Quebec was a walled city and always well garrisoned with troops. Just beyond is the building of the provincial parliament, where most of the speeches are in French.

At Three Rivers, about halfway between Montreal and Quebec, the St. Maurice River empties into the St. Lawrence. Twenty miles upstream are the Shawinigan Falls, the chief source of power of the Shawinigan Company, which, with its subsidiaries, is now producing in this district more than five hundred thousand horse-power. This is nearly half the total power development in the province. Around the power plant there have grown up electro-chemical industries that support a town of twelve thousand people, while at Three Rivers more paper is made than anywhere else in the world. Shawinigan power runs the lighting plants and factories of Montreal and Quebec, and also serves most of the towns south of the St. Lawrence. The current is carried over the river in a thick cable, nearly a mile long, suspended on high towers.

In the Thetford district of southern Quebec, power from Shawinigan operates the machinery of the asbestos mines. Fifty years ago, when these deposits were discovered, there was almost no market for asbestos at ten dollars a ton. Nowadays, with its use in theatre curtains, automobile brake linings, and coatings for furnaces and steam pipes, the best grades bring two thousand dollars a ton, and two hundred thousand tons are produced in a year. Quebec now furnishes eighty-eight per cent. of the world’s annual supply of this mineral.

The Quebec government controls all power sites, and leases them to private interests for ninety-nine year terms. The province has spent large sums in conserving its water-power resources. At the headquarters of the St. Maurice River, it built the Gouin reservoir, which floods an area of more than three hundred square miles, and stores more water than the great Aswan Dam on the Nile.

Quebec is the third province in value of agricultural production. What I have seen of its farms convinces me that the French Canadian on the land is a conspicuous success. For a half day I rode along the south shore of the St. Lawrence River through a country like one great farm. Nearly every foot of it is occupied by French farmers. Most of the time we were on high ground, overlooking the river, which, where we first saw it, was forty miles wide. It grew constantly narrower, until, where we crossed it on a ferry to Quebec, its width was less than a mile. All the way we had splendid views of the Laurentian Mountains, looming up on the north shore of the river. Geologists say the Laurentians are the oldest rock formation on our continent. They are not high, the peaks averaging about sixteen hundred feet elevation, but they are one of the great fish and game preserves of the world and are sprinkled with hunting and fishing clubs.

In accordance with French law the Quebec farms have been divided and sub-divided among so many succeeding generations that the land is cut into narrow ribbons. Contrary to the custom in France, however, every field is fenced in with rails. I am sure that the fences I saw, if joined together, would easily reach from Quebec to Washington and back. They did not zig-zag across the fields like ours, thereby wasting both rails and land, but extended in a straight line, up hill and down, sometimes for as much as a mile or more.

The standard French farm along the St. Lawrence used to be “three acres wide and thirty acres long,” with a wood lot at the farther end, and the house in the middle. As the river was the chief highway of the country, it was essential that every farmer have water frontage. With each division one or more new houses would be built, and always in the middle of the strip. The result is that every farmer has a near neighbour on each side of him, and the farmhouses form an almost continuous settlement along the highway, much like the homes on a suburban street. Each wood lot usually includes several hundred maple trees, and the annual production of maple sugar and syrup in Quebec is worth several hundred thousand dollars. The maple leaf is the national emblem of Canada.

The houses are large and well built. They have narrow porches, high above the ground, reached by steps from below. This construction enables the occupants to gain access to their living rooms in winter without so much snow shovelling as would otherwise be necessary. For the same reason, most of the barns are entered by inclines leading up to the second floor and some are connected with the houses by bridges. The older houses are of stone, coated with whitewashed cement. With their dormer windows and big, square chimneys they look comfortable.

I saw the signs of thrift everywhere. Firewood was piled up for the winter, and in many cases a few cords of pulpwood besides, sometimes in such a manner as to form fences for the vegetable gardens. This winter the pulpwood in these fences will be sold. The chief crops raised are hay, oats, beans, and peas. The latter, in the form of soup, is served almost daily in the Quebec farmer’s home.

In the villages all the signs are in French, and in one where I stopped for a time, I had difficulty in making myself understood. The British Canadian resents the fact that the French do not try to learn English. On the other hand the French rather resent the English neglect of French, which they consider the proper language of the country. Proceedings in the provincial parliament are in both tongues. French business men and the professional and office-holding classes can speak English, but the mass of the people know but the one language and are not encouraged to learn any other.

When the British conceded to Quebec the right to retain the French language, the French law, and the Catholic Church, they made it possible for the French to remain almost a separate people. The French Canadians ask only that they be permitted to control their own affairs in their own way, and to preserve their institutions of family, church, and school. They cultivate the land and perform most of the labour; they own all the small shops, while most of the big business is in the hands of British Canadians. Any slight, real or fancied, to the French language or institutions, is quickly resented. The other day a French society and the Mayor of Quebec made a formal protest to a hotel manager because he displayed a sign printed only in English. American moving picture distributors must supply their films with titles in French. Menu cards, traffic directions, and, in fact, almost all notices of a public character, are always given in both languages. Only two of the five daily newspapers are printed in English; the others are French.

In the old Lower Town are all sorts of narrow streets that may end in the rock cliff, a flight of stairs, or an elevator. Many of them are paved with planks.

Miles of rail fences divide the French farms into ribbon-like strips of land that extend from the St. Lawrence far back to the wooded hills. This is the result of repeated partition of the original holdings.

Quebec is now capitalizing her assets in the way of scenery and historic association, and is calculating how much money a motor tourist from the States is worth each day of his visit. The city of Quebec hopes to become the St. Moritz of America and the centre for winter sports. The Canadian Pacific Railroad has here the first of its chain of hotels that extends across Canada. It is built in the design of a French castle, and is so big that it dwarfs the Citadel. The hotel provides every facility for winter sports, including skating and curling rinks, toboggan slides, and ski jumps. It has expert ski jumpers from Norway to initiate visitors into this sport, and dog teams from Alaska to pull them on sleds. Quebec has snow on the ground throughout the winter season, and the thermometer sometimes drops to twenty-five degrees below zero, but the people say the air is so dry that they do not feel this severe cold. Which reminds me of Kipling’s verse:

There was a small boy of Quebec

Who was buried in snow to his neck.

When they asked: “Are you friz?”

He replied: “Yes I is——

But we don’t call this cold in Quebec.”

CHAPTER VIII
STE. ANNE DE BEAUPRÉ AND ITS MIRACULOUS CURES

I have just returned from a visit to the Shrine of the Good Sainte Anne, where three hundred thousand pilgrims worshipped this year. I have looked upon the holy relics and the crutches left behind by the cured and my knees are sore from climbing up the sacred stairway.

The Shrine of Ste. Anne de Beaupré, some twenty miles down the river from Quebec, is the most famous place of the kind on our continent. Quebec is the capital of French Catholicism, and Beaupré is its Mount Vernon, where good Catholics pay homage to the grandmother of their church. The other day a family of five arrived at Ste. Anne; they came from Mexico and had walked, they said, all the way. Last summer two priests came here on foot from Boston, and I talked this morning with a man who organizes weekly pilgrimages from New England. Thousands come from the United States and Canada, Alaska and Newfoundland. I saw to-day a couple just arrived in a Pennsylvania motor truck.

On Ste. Anne’s day, July 26th, the number of pilgrims is often twenty thousand and more. Special electric trains and motor busses carry the worshippers from Quebec to Ste. Anne. For the accommodation of overnight visitors, the one street of the village is lined with little hotels and lodging houses that remind me of our summer resorts. For a week before Ste. Anne’s day, every house is packed, and sometimes the church is filled with pilgrims sitting up all night. Frequently parties of several hundred persons leave Quebec on foot at midnight, and walk to Ste. Anne, where they attend mass before eating breakfast.

The story of Ste. Anne de Beaupré goes back nearly two thousand years. The saint was the mother of the Virgin Mary, and therefore the grandmother of Christ. We are told that her body was brought from Bethlehem to Jerusalem, and then to Apt, in France, which thereupon became a great shrine. In a time of persecution her bones disappeared, but they were later recovered in a miraculous manner. According to tradition they were revealed to Charlemagne by a youth born deaf, dumb, and blind. He indicated by signs an altar beneath which a secret crypt was found. In the crypt a lamp was burning and behind it was a wooden chest containing the remains of the saint. The young man straightway was able to see, hear, and speak, and the re-discovered shrine became a great source of healing. This was exactly seven hundred years before Columbus discovered America.

The first church of Ste. Anne was erected at Beaupré in 1658. Tradition says it was built by sailors threatened with shipwreck, who promised Ste. Anne a new church at whatever spot she would bring them safely to land. Soon after the shrine was established bishops and priests reported wonderful cures, and since then, as the fame of the miracles spread, the shrine has become a great place of worship. Churches, chapels, and monasteries have been built and rebuilt, and countless gifts have been showered upon them. The first relic of Ste. Anne brought here was a fragment of one of her finger bones. In 1892, Pope Leo XIII gave the “Great Relic,” consisting of a piece of bone from the saint’s wrist. This is now the chief object of veneration by pilgrims.

On March 29, 1922, the shrine suffered a loss by fire. The great church, or basilica, was completely destroyed, but the sacred relics and most of the other articles of value were saved. The gilded wooden statue of Ste. Anne, high up on the roof over the door, was only slightly scorched by the blaze. It now stands in the gardens awaiting the completion of the new church. The new building has been planned on such a large scale that five years have been allowed for its construction. Meanwhile, the pilgrims worship in a temporary wooden structure.

The numerous buildings that now form part of the shrine of Ste. Anne are on both sides of the village street, which is also the chief highway along the north bank of the St. Lawrence. On one side the fenced fields of the narrow French farms slope down to the river. On the other, hills rise up so steeply that they seem almost cliffs. The church and the monastery and the school of the Redemptorist Fathers, the order now in charge of the shrine, are on the river side. Across the roadway are the Memorial Chapel, the stations marking “The Way of the Cross,” the sacred stairway, and, farther up the hillside, the convent of the Franciscan Sisters.

In the province of Quebec nine tenths of the people are French-speaking Catholics. Every village supports a large church, every house contains a picture of the Virgin Mary, and every road has its wayside shrine.

In the heart of the business and financial districts of Montreal is the Place d’Armes, once the site of a stockade and the scene of Indian fights. There stands the church of Notre Dame, one of the largest in all America.

One of the Redemptorists, the Director of Pilgrimages, told me much that was interesting about Ste. Anne and her shrine. He gave me also a copy of the Order’s advice on “how to make a good pilgrimage.” This booklet urges the pilgrim to hear Holy Mass as soon as possible. It says that “the greatest number of miraculous cures or favours are obtained at the Shrine after a fervent Communion.”

“After Holy Communion,” the Order’s advices continue, “the act most agreeable to Sainte Anne and the one most calculated to gain her favours, is the veneration of her relic.”

The act of veneration is performed by pilgrims kneeling before the shrine containing the piece of Ste. Anne’s wrist bone. It is then that most of the cures are proclaimed. The people kneel in prayer as close to the shrine as the number of worshippers will permit. Those who experience a cure spring up in great joy and cast at the feet of the saint’s statue their crutches or other evidence of their former affliction. In the church I saw perhaps fifty crutches, canes, and sticks left there this summer by grateful pilgrims. At the back of the church I saw cases filled with spectacles, leg braces, and body harnesses, and even a couple of wheel chairs, all abandoned by pilgrims. One rack was filled with tobacco pipes, evidence of promises to give up smoking in return for the saint’s favours.

The miraculous statue of Ste. Anne, before which the pilgrims kneel, represents the saint holding in her arms the infant Christ. On her head is a diadem of gold and precious stones, the gifts of the devout. Below the statue is a slot marked “petitions.” Pilgrims having special favours to ask of Ste. Anne write them on slips of paper and drop them into the box. After three or four months, they are taken out and burned. On the day of my visit the holy relic was not in its usual place in the church, but in the chapel of the monastery, a fireproof building, where it had been moved for safekeeping. It was there that I gazed upon the bit of bone. The relic is encased in a box of solid gold and is encircled by a broad gold band, about the size of a napkin ring, set with twenty-eight diamonds. The box is studded with gems and inlaid with richly coloured enamels. All the precious stones came from jewellery given by pilgrims.

I visited also the “Grotto of the Passion.” This contains three groups of figures, representing events in the life of Christ. In front of the central group is a large, shallow pan, partly filled with water and dotted with the stumps of candles lighted and set there by pilgrims to burn until extinguished by the water. The Grotto is in the lower part of a wooden structure that looks like a church, built on the side of the hill. Above is the “Scala Sancta,” or sacred stairway. Large signs warn visitors that these stairs, which represent those in Pilate’s house, are to be ascended only on the knees. There are twenty-eight steps, and those who go up are supposed to pause on each one and repeat a prayer. As I reverently mounted the steps, one by one, I was reminded of the Scala Sancta in Rome, which I climbed in the same way some years ago. It is a flight of twenty-eight marble steps from the palace of Pilate at Jerusalem, up which our Saviour is said to have climbed. It was brought to Rome toward the end of the period of the crusades, and may be ascended only on the knees.

The stairway at Beaupré is often the scene of miraculous cures, but none occurred while I was there. At the top the pilgrims kneel again and make their devotions, ending with the words, “Good Sainte Anne, pray for us.”

Near the church are stores that sell souvenirs, bead crosses, and the like, the proceeds from which go toward the upkeep of the shrine. At certain hours each day articles thus purchased, or those the pilgrims have brought from home, are blessed by the priests in attendance. Another source of revenue is the sale of the shrine magazine, which has a circulation of about eighty thousand. Subscribers whether “living or dead, share in one daily mass” said at the shrine. Pilgrims are also invited to join the Association of the Perpetual Mass, whose members, for the sum of fifty cents a year, may share in a mass “said every day for all time.”

The Director of Pilgrimages told me that the past summer had been the best season in the history of the shrine. The pilgrims this year numbered more than three hundred thousand, their contributions were generous, and the number of cures, or “favours,” large. About one third of these, said the Director, prove to be permanent. The Fathers take the name and address of each pilgrim who claims to have experienced a miraculous cure, and inquiries are made later to find out if relief has been lasting. The shrine has quantities of letters and photographs as evidences of health and strength being restored here, and I have from eye-witnesses first-hand accounts of the joyous transports of the lame, the halt, and the blind when their ailments vanish, apparently, in the twinkling of an eye.

I have referred to Quebec as the American capital of French Catholicism. It is not only a city of many churches, but is also headquarters for numerous Catholic orders, some of which established themselves here after being driven from France. The value of their property holdings now amounts to a large sum, and one of the new real-estate sub-divisions is being developed by a clerical order. Many of the fine old mansion homes, with park-like grounds, once owned by British Canadians, are now in the hands of religious organizations. The Ursuline nuns used to own the Plains of Abraham, and were about to sell the tract for building lots when public sentiment compelled the government to purchase it and convert it into a park. A statue of General Wolfe marks the spot where he died on the battlefield. It is the third one erected there, the first two having been ruined by souvenir fiends.

The homes of the Catholic orders in Quebec supply priests for the new parishes constantly being formed in Canada. They also send their missionaries to all parts of the world, and from one of the nunneries volunteers go to the leper colonies in Madagascar. Other orders maintain hospitals, orphanages, and institutions identified with the city’s historic past. Before an altar in one of the churches two nuns, dressed in bridal white, are always praying, night and day, each couple being relieved every half hour. In another a lamp burning before a statue of the Virgin has not been extinguished since it was first lighted, fifteen years before George Washington was born. Some of the churches contain art treasures of great value, besides articles rich in their historical associations.

Driving in the outskirts of Quebec I met a party of Franciscan monks returning from their afternoon walk. They were bespectacled, studious-looking young men, clad in robes of a gingerbread brown, fastened with white girdles, and wearing sandals on their bare feet. All were tonsured, but I noticed that their shaved crowns were in many instances in need of a fresh cutting. These men alternate studies with manual labour in the fields. In front of the church of this order is a great wooden cross bearing the figure of Christ. Before it is a stone where the devout kneel and embrace His wounded feet. Near by is also a statue of St. Ignatius, founder of the Jesuit Order, standing with one foot on the neck of a man who represents the heretics.

There are in Quebec a few thousand Irish Catholics, descendants of people who came here to escape the famine in Ireland. They have built a church of their own. Another church, shown to visitors as a curiosity, is that of the French Protestants, who, according to the latest figures, number exactly one hundred and thirty-five.

Though a city of well over one hundred thousand people, Quebec has an enviable record for peace and order and for comparatively few crimes. The credit for this is generally given to the influence of the Church, which is also responsible, so I am told, for the success of the French Canadian in “minding his own business.” The loyalty of the people to their faith is evidenced by the fact that even the smallest village has a big church. Outside the cities the priest, or curé, is in fact the shepherd of his flock, and their consultant on all sorts of matters. I am told, however, that the clergy do not exercise the same control over political and worldly affairs as was formerly the case, and not nearly so much as is generally supposed. It is still true, however, that the Catholic religion is second only to the French language in keeping the French Canadians almost a separate people.

CHAPTER IX
MONTREAL

Following the course of the French explorers, I have come up the St. Lawrence to the head of navigation, and am now in Montreal, the largest city of Canada and the second port of North America. It is an outlet for much of the grain of both the United States and Canada, and it handles one third of all the foreign trade of the Dominion. Montreal is the financial centre of the country and the headquarters for many of its largest business enterprises. In a commercial sense, it is indeed the New York of Canada, although totally unlike our metropolis.

In order to account for the importance of Montreal, it is necessary only to glance at the map. Look first at the Gulf of St. Lawrence and the broad mouth of the river! See how they form a great funnel inviting the world to pour in its people and goods. Follow the St. Lawrence down to Quebec and on by Montreal to the Great Lakes, which extend westward to the very heart of the continent. There is no such waterway on the face of the globe and none that carries such a vast commerce into the midst of a great industrial empire.

Montreal is the greatest inland port in the world. It ships more grain than any other city. It is only four hundred and twenty miles north of New York, yet it is three hundred miles nearer Liverpool. One third of the distance to that British port lies between here and the Straits of Belle Isle, where the Canadian liners first meet the waves of the open sea. The city is the terminus of the canal from the Great Lakes to the St. Lawrence and of Canada’s three transcontinental railways. Vessels from all over the world come here to get cargoes assembled from one of the most productive regions on the globe. Although frozen in for five months every winter, Montreal annually handles nearly four million tons of shipping, most of which is under the British flag. It has a foreign trade of more than five hundred million dollars. The annual grain movement sometimes exceeds one hundred and sixty bushels for each of the city’s population of almost a million.

In the modern sense, the port is not yet one hundred years old, though Cartier was here nearly four centuries ago, and Champlain came only seventy years later. Both were prevented from going farther upstream by the Lachine Rapids, just above the present city. Cartier was seeking the northwest passage to the East Indies, and he gave the rapids the name La Chine because he thought that beyond them lay China.

At the foot of the rapids the Frenchmen found an island, thirty miles long and from seven to ten miles wide, separated from the mainland by the two mouths of the Ottawa River. It was then occupied by a fortified Indian settlement. The presence of the Indians seemed to make the island an appropriate site on which to lay the foundations of the new Catholic “Kingdom of God,” and the great hill in the background, seven hundred and forty feet high, suggested the name, Mont Real, or Mount Royal.

Although the Indians seemed to prefer fighting the newcomers to gaining salvation, the religious motive was long kept alive, and it was not until early in the last century that the city began to assume great commercial importance. During the first days of our Revolution, General Montgomery occupied Montreal for a time, and Benjamin Franklin begged its citizens to join our rebellion. It had then about four thousand inhabitants. Even as late as 1830 Montreal was a walled town, with only a beach in the way of shipping accommodations. The other day it was described by an expert from New York as the most efficiently organized port in the world.

I have gone down to the harbour and been lifted up to the tops of grain elevators half as high as the Washington Monument. I have also been a guest of the Harbour Commission in a tour of the water-front. The Commission is an all-powerful body in the development and control of the port. Its members, who are appointed by the Dominion government, have spent nearly forty million dollars in improvements. This sum amounts to almost five dollars a head for everyone in Canada, but the port has always earned the interest on its bonds, and has never been a burden to the taxpayers.

An American, Peter Fleming, who built the locks on the Erie Canal, drew the first plans for the harbour development of Montreal. That was about a century ago. Now the city has its own expert port engineers, and last summer one of the firms here built in ninety days a grain elevator addition with a capacity of twelve hundred and fifty thousand bushels. A giant new elevator, larger than any in existence, is now being erected. It will have a total capacity of fourteen million bushels of grain.

Montreal’s future, like her present greatness, lies along her water front. Here the giant elevators load the grain crop of half a continent into vessels that sail the seven seas.

On a clear day one may stand on Mt. Royal, overlooking Montreal and the St. Lawrence, and see in the distance the Green Mountains of Vermont and the Adirondacks of New York.

The port handles at times as much as twenty-three hundred thousand bushels of wheat in a day. It is not uncommon for a lake vessel to arrive early in the morning, discharge its cargo, and start back to the head of the lakes before noon. Rivers of wheat are sucked out of the barges, steamers, and freight cars, and flow at high speed into the storage bins. There are sixty miles of water-front railways, most of which have been electrified. Every operation possible is performed by machinery, and there are never more than a few workmen anywhere in sight. Yet the grain business is a source of great revenue to the city, and furnishes a living to thousands of people. One of the industries it has built up is that of making grain sacks, of which one firm here turns out two and one half millions a year.

But let me tell you something of the city itself—or, better still, suppose we go up to the top of Mount Royal and look down upon it as it lies under our eyes. We shall start from my hotel, a new eight-million-dollar structure erected chiefly to accommodate American visitors, and take a coach. As a concession to hack drivers, taxis are not allowed on top of Mount Royal.

Our way lies through the grounds of McGill University, and past one of the reservoirs built in the hillside to supply the city with water pumped from the river. McGill is the principal Protestant educational institution in the province of Quebec. Here Stephen Leacock teaches political economy when he is not lecturing or writing his popular humorous essays. Besides colleges of art, law, medicine, and applied science, McGill has a school of practical agriculture. It also teaches young women how to cook. It has branches at Victoria and Vancouver in British Columbia. The medical school is rated especially high, and many of its graduates are practicing physicians in the United States.

Now we are on the winding drive leading to the top of the hill. Steep flights of wooden stairs furnish a shorter way up for those equal to a stiff climb, and we pass several parties of horseback riders. All this area is a public park, and a favourite spot with the people of the city. See those three women dressed in smart sport suits, carrying slender walking sticks. They seem very English. Over there are two girls, in knickers and blouses, gaily conversing with their young men. They have dark eyes and dark hair, with a brunette glow on their cheeks that marks them as French.

Step to the railing on the edge of the summit. If the day were clear we could see the Adirondacks and the Green Mountains of Vermont. Like a broad ribbon of silver the St. Lawrence flows at our feet. That island over there is called St. Helene, bought by Champlain as a present for his wife. Since he paid for it out of her dowry, he could hardly do less than give it her name.

That narrow thread to the right, parallel with the river, is the Lachine Canal, in which a steamer is beginning its climb to the level of Lake St. Louis. The canal has a depth of fourteen feet, and accommodates ships up to twenty-five hundred tons. The shores of the lake, which is really only a widening out of the river, furnish pleasant sites for summer bungalows and cool drives on hot nights. Nearer the city the canal banks are lined with warehouses and factories. Montreal’s manufactures amount to more than five hundred million dollars a year.

There below us is Victoria Jubilee Bridge, one and three quarters miles long. Over it trains and motors from the United States come into the city. Another railroad penetrates the heart of Montreal by a tunnel under Mount Royal that has twin tubes more than three miles in length. The Canadian Pacific Railroad has bridged the St. Lawrence at Lachine.

Most of Montreal lies between Mount Royal and the river, but the wings of the city reach around on each side of the hill. The French live in the eastern section. The western suburbs contain the homes of well-to-do English Canadians. One of them, Westmount, is actually surrounded by the city, yet it insists on remaining a separate municipality.

Mark Twain said that he would not dare throw a stone in Montreal for fear of smashing a church window. If he could view the city to-day he would be even more timid. Almost every building that rises above the skyline is a church, and the largest structures are generally Catholic schools, colleges, hospitals, or orphanages.

In the heart of Montreal’s Wall Street is the huge Church of Notre Dame. It seats twelve thousand people, and in its tower is the largest bell in America, weighing about twenty-nine thousand pounds. That dome farther over marks the location of the Cathedral of St. James. It is a replica, on a reduced scale, of St. Peter’s at Rome. It seats several thousand worshippers; nevertheless, when I went there last Sunday morning hundreds were standing, and within fifteen minutes after one service was concluded it was again filled to capacity for the next.

Downtown Montreal is built largely of limestone. It has a massive look, but skyscrapers are barred by a city ordinance. Erection of modern steel and concrete office buildings is now under way, and they stand out conspicuously against the background of more old-fashioned structures. Big as it is and important commercially, Montreal seems a city without any Main Street. St. Catherine Street has the largest retail stores and the “bright lights” of theatres and cafés, but I have seen more impressive thoroughfares in much smaller places at home. This is essentially a French city, though less so than Quebec. The French do not naturally incline toward “big business.” They seem content with small shops, which since the days of their grandfathers have grown in numbers rather than in size. They are by nature conservative, and though they make shrewd business managers, they care little for innovations in either public or private affairs.

I have visited the biggest market, the Bonsecours. It is quite as French as those I have seen in southern France. This market takes up a wide street running from the heart of Montreal down to the wharves. The street is the overflow of the market proper, which fills a church-like building covering an acre of ground. When I arrived the open space was crowded with French farmers, who in the early morning had driven their cars and light motor trucks loaded down with fruits and vegetables into the city. Fully half of the wagons were in charge of women, who looked much like those in the Halles Central in Paris. As I pressed my way through the throng many of them called out to me in French and some thrust their wares into my face and urged me to buy.

The mayor of Montreal is always a French Canadian, and he is usually reëlected for several terms. I talked with His Honour and found him a most pleasant gentleman. Discussing his city, he said:

In the French market one feels he is indeed in a foreign land, and among a people of alien tongue. When he buys, however, he discovers that the farmers understand perfectly when money does the talking.

Kipling did not endear himself to Montreal when he called Canada “Our Lady of the Snows,” yet the people are really proud of their facilities for winter sports, which include a toboggan slide down Mt. Royal.

“Montreal is thriving as never before. Our population is rapidly increasing and we expect soon to have more than a million. We have taken in some of the suburbs, as your great cities have done, and our increasing opportunities are constantly attracting new people.

“I believe we are one of the most cosmopolitan communities on the continent,” continued the Mayor. “About seventy per cent. of us are French, and a large part of the balance are English Canadians. We have also Americans, Germans, Belgians, Italians, and Chinese, besides large numbers of Irish and Scotch, and some of the peoples of southeastern Europe. We are the Atlantic gate to Canada, so that a large portion of our immigrants pass through here on their way west. Many of them go no farther, as they find employment in our varied industries.

“It costs us more than twenty million dollars a year to run Montreal, but we feel that we can afford it. The value of our taxable buildings amounts to nearly seven hundred and fifty millions, and is increasing at the rate of fifteen millions a year. We have more than one million acres of public parks, or in excess of an acre for every man, woman, and child in the city.”

Montreal is one of the great sport centres of Canada. In the warm months, the people play golf, baseball, football, and lacrosse. The latter is a most exciting game, borrowed from the Indians, with more thrills and rough play than our college football. It is a cross between hockey and basketball. A light ball is tossed from player to player by means of a little net on the end of a long curved stick, the object of each side being to get the ball into the opponents’ goal. In the game I saw, the players were often hit on the head and shoulders, and before the afternoon was over there had been a good deal of bloodshed from minor injuries. I was told, however, that this match was exceptionally rough.

In the winter, hockey is the great game of Canada. Every large city has its hockey rink, and, where there are many Scotch, curling rinks as well. In curling, great round soapstones are slid across a designated space on the ice toward the opponents, who stand guard with brooms. By sweeping the ice in front of the approaching stone, they try to veer it out of the course intended by the player who started it toward their goal.

As far as the masses of the people are concerned, skiing, snowshoeing, and coasting are the chief winter sports, and in them nearly everybody takes part. In Montreal, toboggan slides are built on the sides of Mount Royal, and its slopes are covered with young men and women on snowshoes and skis.

Montreal used to build an ice palace every winter. Then the business men feared the city was acquiring an antarctic reputation that would discourage visitors. Consequently, organized exploitation of winter sports fell off for a time, but this fall a fund of thirty thousand dollars is being subscribed to finance them on a large scale.

CHAPTER X
CANADA’S BIG BANKS

There are more than eight thousand national banks in the United States, but Canada has only sixteen. While new ones are organized in our country every month, the number in Canada tends constantly to grow less, and to-day is not half what it was twenty years ago. The banking system of the Dominion is patterned somewhat after the Scotch, and was worked out largely by men of that shrewd, hard-headed race. The people think it suits their conditions better than any other. Certainly it is true that while Canada has had its ups and downs, the people have suffered far less than we from bank failures and panics.

One might think that with all the banking business of Canada monopolized by only sixteen institutions, they might make fabulous profits. However, such is not the case. I have before me the current monthly statement which the government publishes regarding the condition and operation of each bank. This shows that all are making money, but their dividends range from six to sixteen per cent., and the Bank of Nova Scotia is the only one that paid the highest rate. Nine of the banks paid twelve per cent. on their capital stock last year, while the shareholders of five got less than ten per cent.

In the United States a handful of business men can start a bank on a few thousand dollars. Here it is not so easy a matter. Canadian law requires a minimum capital of five hundred thousand dollars, half of which must be paid in, before a bank can be chartered, and there are other conditions to be met that make the establishment of a new bank a big undertaking. The smallest bank in Canada, at Weyburn, Saskatchewan, is the only one with a capital of less than one million dollars, while the largest, the Bank of Montreal, has paid-up stock amounting to twenty-seven and one quarter millions. The total combined capital of all the banks is one hundred and twenty-three millions.

The great banks extend their service throughout the Dominion by means of branches. These now number nearly five thousand, and new ones are being constantly added. The branch plan is the most striking difference between Canada’s banking system and ours, which prohibits the establishment of branches except within a bank’s home city, and, under certain regulations, in foreign countries. The larger Canadian banks are represented by their own branches in every city, from coast to coast, while the Bank of Montreal alone has more than six hundred agencies. Nearly all the banks have their head offices in Eastern Canada. Six of them are located in the province of Quebec, seven in Ontario, and one each in Nova Scotia, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan. Three of the banks in Quebec are controlled by the French Canadians. Their combined capital is just under nine million dollars, or not quite half that of the Royal Bank of Canada, the second largest in the Dominion.

An official of the Canadian Bankers’ Association has explained to me some of the advantages of this system. He said: