ROMANTIC CANADA

THE SHRINE.

ROMANTIC CANADA

BY
VICTORIA HAYWARD
ILLUSTRATED WITH PHOTOGRAPHS
BY
EDITH S. WATSON
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
EDWARD J. O’BRIEN
TORONTO: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
OF CANADA, LTD. AT ST. MARTIN’S HOUSE
1922
Copyright, Canada, 1922, by
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY OF CANADA, LIMITED
Toronto

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

PUBLISHER’S FOREWORD

We are proud to announce what we think will come to be regarded as a really outstanding book of travel. We think it fitting that the first important book in this category which we have published should treat of our own country.

“Romantic Canada” aims to give, and from the hands of two women singularly fitted to give it, the story of Canada in the romance of its simple industries simply accomplished. It gives the story, in word and in picture, of all sorts and conditions of folk, as they are to be found in the faraway and little-visited territories of the Dominion. Author and artist have left the beaten track, for it is in the highways and by-ways that this particular Canada, which is passing as we grow in population, and as steel links territory to territory the more easily and the more quickly, is to be found. The photographs and discussion of this hinterland of Canada are quite unique in the history of Canadian literature and photographic art.

The author and artist have gone from Canadian coast to Canadian coast. They have thought it not unwise also to include matter descriptive of their travels in Labrador and Newfoundland.

The author and artist and ourselves desire to say “Thank you” to all those who have helped to make this book what it is. Specifically we are indebted to “Asia, the Magazine of the Asiatic Society”, for permission to reproduce the photographs bearing the captions “Domesticity” and “Pulling Flax”; to the “Century Magazine” in the same regard as to “Hearty at Eighty”, “Island Woman of St. Pierre et Miquelon”, and “The Figure on the Bow”; to “Town and Country”, as to “Fort Mississauga”, and “View from His Britannic Majesty George III’s Chapel to the Mohawks, near Brantford”; to the “Canadian Home Journal” as to “Early Home of Alexander Graham Bell”, and “Drawing Water from the Columbia”; and to the Toronto “Saturday Night” as to “An Old Ontario Homestead”.

We are also vastly indebted to the editor and proprietors of “The Canadian Magazine”.

INTRODUCTION.
By Edward J. O’Brien.

It is a happy comradeship which has made this interesting volume possible. Those who know and love the by-ways of Canada have frequently encountered Miss Watson and Miss Hayward in the pursuit of a self-imposed task. Hardly a task we should call it, but a delight, to record with the camera and the pen those unique and beautiful racial traditions which have survived in Canada and flourished, while the passion for conformity to a provincial process of standardization has crushed them in the United States. In Canada, the Scottish Highlander, the Acadian, and the Doukhobor, for example, have not been compelled to abandon their memories. The life of their forefathers has flourished when transplanted to a new soil. That wise tolerance and appreciative catholicity which is not always found in a new land has preserved old loveliness here, and the magic of Miss Watson’s camera has arrested this beauty at many significant moments.

I have more than once had occasion to allude to the invaluable labours of Mr. C. M. Barbeau in harvesting the folksongs and tales of Quebec and Ontario. Although the general public may not realize it, he is conferring a new literature upon Canada and adding rich chapters to her imaginative history. Well, these pictures with their fine sense of composition and warm human values provide this literature with its just setting, and the social record they afford is of permanent significance. The quality of life changes even in a generation, and those who may turn over the leaves of this book a century from now will know, as they could not otherwise have known, what beautiful life has flourished in hidden places.

The Magdalen Islands, for example, are an unknown land to Canadian city dwellers. The service of Miss Watson and Miss Hayward in introducing them alone to those who have never visited them is one for which any happy traveller should be very grateful.

Cambridge, England.

ROMANTIC CANADA

CHAPTER I.
NOVA SCOTIA.

No call sounded....

O call sounded by the pipes of this New Era is more insistent than that of the Canadian Sea-coast. One sometimes wonders if Canadians as a whole even yet realize the important gift bestowed, when Heaven gave to Canada so magnificent a coastline as that which the constant sword-play of land and sea traces from Saint John, New Brunswick, to the Newfoundland-Labrador Boundary? The map of Eastern Canada is “a study in charts” worthy of closest attention. For it is here the Dominion rings up the outside world.

But to get the real “lay of the land”, the true spirit of its people, one must not be a stay-at-home, a mere map-student only, but a follower of the Piper leading by the ’longshore road through New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Cape Breton, and Prince Edward Island. Canadians must be able to say, “these are our Maritime Provinces”, and say it with a pleasurable, personal, as well as deep, national sense. And visitors from other lands must be able to become personally possessive if they are to enjoy the life etched quaintly enough of Grand Pré, of the Valley of the Gaspereau, of the bonnie Hielands o’ Cape Breton. One hardly sets foot in any part of this long stretch, without being at once conscious that the sea invades all the life of Bluenose-land, that the marine spirit is here in a beautiful, intimate sense, like the figurehead on a ship, both soul and mascot of the “half-island”.

Sailing-vessels in themselves, are genre crowding the Nova Scotia stage. Her earliest discoverer came hither, over the sea, in the picturesque craft of a Norse Dragon-ship. And the immediate chapters of her history, after these half-shadowy voyages of the Norsemen, were written by Basque and Breton fishboats a-sail, drawn across the Atlantic Ocean in the wake of Cod.

Cod is still, more than ever, King in Bluenoseland and beyond. Over all the vast stretch of the Canadian “Maritime” his huge fleet holds sway. And what is so romantic as a fleet-winged schooner speeding away under full sail on her voyage to the Banks? Unless it be the one coming in, her decks almost awash, with the full load? Oars and sails, and the tripping bows of the Dragon-ships and Breton bateaux founded this long line of “Bankers” and Dories—laid the foundation of Nova Scotia’s talent for ship-building. The “gift” which turned out the big square-riggers from the Hantsport and Parrsboro “ways” was a natural sequence of the maritime beginning of this land, where thought turns so naturally to the sea, and to sea-power. It was those wooden wind-jammers, wind-jammers with mere boat-beginnings, which paved the way to the ocean-greyhounds which now home true to Halifax and Saint John. Oh, the “Maritime” is the life-blood of Nova Scotian and Newfoundlander.

Halifax is the heart of the Marine circulatory system. And serving Halifax with fish for re-shipment, are innumerable little Havens and Outports, all up and down Saint Margaret’s Bay, Spry Bay, the Gut of Canso, and along the vast stretch reaching to Souris, P.E.I., and Havre Aubert in Les Madeleines. And in each of these little Outports there is, of course, a family behind every little “dory”. The morning greeting among all these people is not, “Good Day!” but, “How’s Fish?” To these coastal families, Halifax is not a mere cold city of business, but a “mother” to whom they can turn with the catch, be it great or small, and ask bread.

And so, in a morning spent on the Halifax waterfront, the lifting fog reveals schooner after schooner snugly riding against the old wet piers that artists love, or idly floating into dock amid harbour reflections, weathered spars and mildewed sails a-drip. Sometimes there is a clump of these schooners hitched together, all discharging at the same time. So in a single morning at a fish-receiving wharf here, we have chatted with skipper from Newfoundland, skipper from the Madeleine Islands in the Gulf, and skipper from Prince Edward Island, and not moved from the one dock.

Codfish overflows the roofs in the final stages of the drying, and lies upturned to the sun almost under the shadow of city cathedrals. And here on the wharves is an army of men and boys, the coopers and brine-mixers, moving about from barrel to barrel of mackerel, mending leaks and otherwise putting them in shape for trans-shipment; and over there, overflowing the basement of some old warehouse, the half and whole drums, called-for by the cod a-drying on the roof. Old scales are trundled back and forth to this schooner and that, as the flying cod hurtles through the air, hurled by some unseen hand at work in the hold of the “Nancy Ann”, “The Village Leaf”, or the schooner, “Passport.”

HER DAILY PORTION

“HOW’S FISH?”

In sharp contrast to the fish-schooners is the brig, brigantine, or barque, painted white, with water-casks the last thing in paint and fancy designs on deck. She is discharging hogsheads of molasses brought from Barbadoes or other of the British West Indies. Molasses has played its part and commandeered the sailing vessel of the Bluenose fleet from the earliest times. For in the rationing of the sea-craft up and down the coast molasses was the “sweetening”; and old-timers to this day prefer it to sugar.

* * * *

In addition to her fishing industry and tale of ships, Nova Scotia enjoys a pastoral side no less rich in genre. Farms are here. In following the highways and little by-paths rambling among apple orchards and gardens, potato fields and hay meadows—paths etched in Spring by the pink flush of apple-blossoms, or in autumn by boughs curving to earth under weight of rosy Baldwins or creamy Bellefleurs—one follows everywhere hard on the heels of romance. It is her hand that beckons into every little cottage snugly tucked away in valley and glen; where every grandmother sitting carding, spinning, hooking rugs, knitting or reading her daily portion of Scripture, can keep you entertained with tales and the recounting of interesting happenings and not go outside the range of the half-dozen houses which have been her little world for more than half a century.

Along these roads and about these inland homes, friendly old willows mingle atmospherically with tall and stately Lombardy poplars. It is on these uplands of Nova Scotia one follows the old Post-roads—roads that recall the dashing coach of other days and still cross rivers by old covered-bridges, and preserve the quaint, rambling old houses that served as Inns where passengers of old sought refreshment, or spent the night, while waiting to make connections with the coach to this or that objective.

Sitting down by the roadside to rest, some old-timer driving a span of oxen and urging them along with an apple-bough goad, is sure to come along and enter into conversation in that happy way which is half the charm of adventuring by Nova Scotia highways. This old farmer-carter well remembers Harry Killcup, the Robin Hood-Jehu of the Post-road from Annapolis Royal to Halifax. He relates how Harry was talking to a girl and didn’t pay attention to his horses, and drove them too near the edge of the bridge and they fell over, dragging the coach with them. “The river was in flood, too, but Harry managed to get the girl clear of the wreckage, and saved her, but the young man, with whom she travelled, was drowned.” It sounds like a movie stunt in the cold light of to-day, whereas, in fact, it was Victorian realism and a typical incident of the dashing times of the chaise in which Sam Slick engaged a permanent seat in that other “chaise of Canadian literature” by which Judge Haliburton eventually established his name in Canada’s Hall of Fame. The events live very graphically before you as recited by this old eye-witness; who, with many a “gee” and “whoa there”, again starts his oxen on the way.

To the period of the Post Road belongs that old landmark of time and the road, Grand Pré Church, outstanding figure of the countryside in which dwelt Evangeline and her people. In order to catch its romantic spirit, the time to see Grand Pré church is in the evening, when there is just a wee flare of daylight and a soft mist arises from the waters of Minas, shedding itself like a diaphanous veil over the land, as one strolls up the country-road that comes through the village from the North, under willows and poplars, to the door of the old church and then rambles off to the South between clover fields and stacks of hay; the hay resembling Hottentot villages outlined against the ashes-of-roses sky. It is at dusk, that the rather austere lines of window, tower and roof lose their sharp, almost Quaker-like severity. It is at that hour that the old stones of the graveyard become time-softened, ivory-tinted pages of history assembled under the stately poplars. Inside the church, in the strong, simple lines of its painted box-pews and high pulpit; in the old gallery; and in the square windows with little panes, there is the quaint atmosphere which clings especially to old churches of the early Colonial Period. Sitting in these old pews during service is to be carried away on the wings of history to a pivotal point, whence to behold a Cyclorama of all Canada. To the left, on this great canvas—Glooscap and Micmac; succeeded by crude Breton and Portuguese fishermen in their strange bateaux; followed by stirring panels of Annapolis Royal and Louisburg, contrasted against panels of tenacious pioneer Scotch and English settlers; in the next, the clash between France and England for supremacy, not alone in this sweet countryside of Grand Pré, but in every other contained in the word Canada. These are followed by a panel of United Empire Loyalists—very realistic this, because, in the village, you have just been looking at an old oil-painting of Colonel Crane and fingering his fine old sword, that never wavered in its allegiance.

The other half of the Cycle, begins the New Order. First, a symbolic figure of the stream of emigration flowing through the Maritime Gate to the great Canadian West, followed by prairie scenes and mountain peaks, mining scenes, cattle scenes, tawny grain, and Trans-Canada trains, sisters of “Glooscap”, and “The Flying Bluenose”. That, is Grand Pré Church—a link between the Past and the Present.

CHAPTER II.
BARRELS.

One often wonders....

NE often wonders what it is in handmade things that warms the heart and enkindles the imagination? It is evident that the charm is there regardless of the value of the object. Perhaps the attraction lies in the human story, the life, the thought and care, that collected the material, conceived the form and colour of the object to be made, and then put it together. How else could the barrels discovered everywhere at harvest time in Bluenoseland be considered romantic? Yet that romance sits on every barrel-head in the Gaspereau Valley, in Paradise, ’longshore from Lunenburg to Sydney, and on the wharves at Halifax, no one who has seen them, would ever doubt. Trade, itself, here waits on the barrel. How can apples go to market if there be no barrel? Lives there a man who has ever heard of shipping potatoes in a—box? How could mackerel swim in brine, out of Halifax, to the ports of the world, were it not for the barrel? “Why, business just leans on a barrel-stave down our way,” a witty merchant of these parts was once heard to exclaim.

Each trade calls for a different barrel. There is a barrel for apples, another for potatoes, and still a third for the fish. And, behind each barrel stands the—Cooper—a character in the Gaspereau Valley. And housing the Cooper and his quaint trade, every so often, voyaging along these sweet country roads, one happens on the “Cooperage”, always a landmark of its neighbourhood.

Stepping into the door of a cooperage, one is met by the smell of scorching wood and the smoke thereof. Through the smoke, and bending over the barrel, whence it comes, behold, the cooper! Plenty of finished barrels stand about in the large room. The cooper nods his head toward one of them and we step quietly to the proffered seat. For a moment, one fears that the cooper will stop work to talk, and the spell be broken. But no, he goes on. In the “tub” or “jack”, with a groove in the bottom, he places new staves in a large iron ring or hoop the size of the barrel to be made. About the staves, creaking as the tourniquet is twisted tighter and tighter, a stout piece of Manilla rope slowly draws each stave to its fellow and all into a perfect round. Tauter and tauter the rope is wound, long after you think the breaking point has been reached. Then one’s eyes are drawn from the barrel to the man. His eye is like an eagle’s for clarity. He has forgotten everything in the world but the barrel. The tension in the room is so great one could hear a pin fall. Then, the hand relaxes, the spell is broken, the barrel is “set up”. Afterward, the barrel, having no bottom or head in it as yet, is set over the drum-stove in which there is a fire. And while it scorches and dries and toasts a golden brown on the inside, the cooper talks a little, turning the barrel. He “cut the birch boughs that make the hoops, from the woods, in winter, in the slack season when time hangs heavy.” No, “he does not work-up the staves.” Buys them from a sawmill down the road (the direction of the mill being indicated by a sweep of the arm). Keeps them for a time, to season the wood. So with the bundles of split birches. Then following his eye glancing aloft, one sees the ceiling, hung with the straight, tobacco-brown withes afforded by the Nova Scotia woods, especially provided of Nature it would seem, to gird up the sticks of dumb wood over in the corner into—staves.

The smell of the scorching barrel by this time fills the cooperage with its own peculiar perfume anew, like puffs of incense, from a censor replenished. Now the cooper turns again to his work, visitors out of mind. He lifts the barrel over the head of the stove, selects an adze and a split birch-wand. In a twinkling, a curve is swept around the barrel and with the eye alone, expert measurement is taken of the long wood-ribbon. Slish! The adze has cut! Attention is now drawn to a handmade arrangement into which the cooper is slipping the ribbon. His foot comes automatically in contact with a treadle and the withe is turned out, curved permanently. In a twinkling, the adze cuts the little jib-slit—two of them, one in each end—into which the hoop, now wound around the barrel has its ends locked forever. Set like a garland about the barrel-head the hoop is driven into place, tapped round and round and round. The inner edges of the staves are now bevelled off; the groove cut and the head hammered into place. Then on goes the last hoop. And, presto! The barrel is done and thrown over to one side among two or three score of its fellows. The cooper puts some of the shavings into the stove and starts at once, all over again on another barrel. You can see that in his mind’s eye he carries a vision of score upon score of waiting orchards, waiting for his barrels, the barrel that he feels it a moral obligation to supply.

INTERIOR OF AN APPLE-BARREL COOPERAGE
IN THE VALLEY OF THE GASPEREAU.

IN THE ORCHARD.

How much does he receive in payment for each barrel? Just five cents. The most expert of these “Old-timers” make as many as eighty barrels a day, or enough to keep one skilful apple-picker busy from sunrise to sunset, enough to ensure two full loads to the old cart that looks like some strange tortoise on the highway.

One could sit here forever and watch, fascinated, the cooper at his work, so clean, so redolent of the winter landscape in its hand-cut and split birch rods, the air filled with the peculiar, refreshing incense of the toasting staves, the barrel all completed in the mind of the cooper before it materializes in his skilful hand—the barrel, a new barrel, appearing as if by magic every six minutes. What visions one sees through the old door of the men who have come in the carts to its threshold; what tid-bits of news given and received in the half century since the old cooper picked up his trade by long association with the cooper ahead of him, and he in his turn from the cooper before him. What tales the old man could tell, and does, while the barrel toasts. One wonders why the story-teller has never wandered into this open door and sat him down on one of these barrel heads.

Riding away from this door, in one of the ox-drawn carts, always atmospheric and redolent of a romance denied to speedier transportation, one sets out to follow the barrel into the world, as it were. The ribbon road curves and turns by streams dashing under spreading willows or straight as a line it etches its way between rows of stately Lombardy poplars. We overtake other carts passing Grand Pré Church or standing idly for the moment before a local smithy, one ox looking as if Nirvana had descended upon him, while his fellow steps inside and endures the agony attending the acquisition of a pair of new shoes, the world over. Past creaking carts we go with oxen straining under full loads on their way to the large shipping centres of the railroad. It is a countryside glowing with crimson and yellow, and placid as only autumn that still lingers in the lap of summer, can be. Presently we come to the orchard where we would be. And there the family is gathered, laughing and chatting, waiting for barrels, for orchards and many hands give the cooper and the carter all they can do to supply them with the sweet-smelling barrels.

It is a family party, even the baby is here holding an apple in hand. The family cat rubs its nose on every pair of legs before strolling to hunt a field mouse. A mother wagers with her lad, willowy as an apple branch, that she can beat him filling a barrel. Tall ladders, home-made, loll against the topmost branches of Bellefleur and Baldwin. The father of the family cuts out the full barrels for a trip to the Station or Packing house to which he sells. The general conversation may centre around apples or it may wander off, as it is likely to, into an epic of hunting, shooting and bringing home the moose John got yesterday. Or, it may take a turn and become a tale of adventure, telling how Jamie, coming into the orchard this morning, encountered two bears, berry-hunting, directly in the path.

In time we board the cart again and roll around to the Packing House. And one may pick and choose, for the line of the D. A. R. runs through the heart of the fruit region from Digby to Halifax. And at any of these stations one comes upon the potato barrels, sisters to the apple barrels, and also creations of the skilful old individual, the cooper. We enter, as upon a tide, to behold spreading before the eye a sea of apples, with cataracts of them pouring into the sorting troughs. And barrels! Barrels are everywhere. As one goes around these rooms, one witnesses a sort of transfiguration in the old barrel. No longer is it a mere barrel but an argosy, bearing Nova Scotia products—apples and potatoes—on the high tide of Trade into the ports of the world. Here is a group of barrels, tripping it to London. This is by far the largest group, Great Britain being the largest “Foreign?” market for the Nova Scotia apple. The barrel must be a strong one that carries the fruit across ocean and through fog, to the markets of England. There is a group marked “inland Canada” and these individual barrels must travel far. And still other groups with the impress of “South Africa” and “South America,” where not the barrels alone must suffer hard usage but in the latter case the apples themselves grilled by the change of language, lose their English name and become—Manzana.

It takes some three or four million barrels to supply the demand made on them by the potato and apple crops alone, of Nova Scotia; not to speak of the fish which demands a barrel, and hence a cooper, of its own. What wonder if the barrel be called “a character” in the land, and if business leans upon it, as upon a staff of life?

CHAPTER III.
‘LONGSHOREMEN.

Standing firmly behind....

TANDING firmly behind the craft, whether large or small, that crown both Bluenose Fishing and Bluenose Foreign Trade with success, is an army of men and boys heterogeneously grouped together as ’Longshoremen. We find them in each and every village-by-the-sea, wherever there is a boat. Here is a caulker, there a tar-boiler and pitch-runner, an old knitter of fishnet, an old sailmaker—needle and “palm”, in hand—a woodcarver, an oakum-picker, an old boat-builder, “the weather prophet”, and all the old fellows who lend a hand when a heavy boat is to be hauled up the beach, or to be pushed into the sea again. In the evolution of coastal-life these men are amphibious. In their youth they went to sea, but in old-age they retired, not to idleness, but to uphold what is known in the trade, as the “Shore-end” of fishing.

As one follows the long coastal road macadamized by the Maritime, the ‘Longshore men and the ‘Longshore women afford some of the most picturesque genre encountered anywhere in all Canada. They are unique, in that in every individual case, the product is “the Sea-coast’s Own”. And no two of them are exactly alike. They not only mend and reinforce, tar and paint, but they are the Historians, the Spinners-and-Weavers of Traditions, the story-tellers, that keep alive in the hearts of their listeners the sea-spirit—without which, ships are useless. And so, some morning, when you come along over the cliffs, and see a smoke, black as the traditional pine-cone over Vesuvius before the burial of Pompeii, you know that some old fisherman and his pals are tarring the old boat.

The old boat that calls for tar is certainly a personality. Coming nearer, and taking care to keep to windward, you stalk this group and watch. First there is the fiery cauldron, that is the Tar-pot, above its blaze of driftwood, with its own special attendant, looking like a Prince of Darkness, wielding the long-handled dipper; and at a little distance by the boat two other figures with long brushes, calling for ladles of tar. Good and thick they lay it into the old seams and over the old plank, the smoke pouring upward like smoke of incense, offered on the altar of the great out-of-doors.

Such scenes are imminently in danger of passing out of Canadian life. For the old boat that calls for tar, and “the old-timer” that believes in it, are everywhere giving way before the modern gasoline-driven launch—“Gasolener” the Newfoundlanders call it—with “speed” written all over it, and in its tanks “Power” to laugh in the face of gales and head winds. But whereas the “gasolener” may boast of these things, she can never boast of the atmosphere and spirit of romance emanating from such a scene as—“The tarring of the Old Boat.”

The men who tar the boat to-day may have turned their hands to something else by to-morrow. On fine days the old sails are spread out on the beach to dry or stood to flap-in-the-breeze from the mast-hole of some old boat on the beach, long ago condemned as unseaworthy and gradually being disintegrated by the elements. Oh what lovely seats these old gunwales make for the audience of men and boys, eyes aflame with imagination, as some old grandfather of the beach, in the role of raconteur, makes the details of a noted gale live anew in the vision of his listeners. To-morrow these listeners of to-day may themselves be tossing in the arms of a gale and half-drowned in the volume of green water encompassed by the “crest” and the “trough”.

Inanimate individualities of every beach are the spreading fish “stages” generally of green or auburn-tinted spruce-boughs. These stage the women of the ‘Longshore. It is a most interesting item of the Court of King Cod that the entire family is here, even to the baby.

Catching the Cod seems to be the least part of the work when one beholds the amount of labour expended on the Shore-End. Early and late, during the season, the women stand to their task of drying the fish. When the weather is fine two weeks often slip away before a batch of cod is properly hardened and “dry”. Fish, destined for the long voyage to the West Indies and where Tropic heat is likely to cause a sweat in the “hold”, the Canadian and Newfoundland fishwives “cure” until it is hard as the proverbial brickbat. The amount of fish-lore contained in the heads of these women with ballooning skirts, is amazing. As judges of weather, they often put the “Weather-man” to shame. Sometimes the coming cloud is entirely unseen by the mere stroller when these women begin pell-mell to take in the fish. And when a fine evening says it is safe to leave the fish out all night, these careful souls may be seen turning over each fish, “oil-skins” up, in case

TARRING THE BOAT.

A NONOGENARIAN GRANDFATHER PLACIDLY
CATCHING UP THE MESHES OF AN OLD NET.

of a shower. These women turn easily to housekeeping duties, and often the out-of-door tasks accomplished, continue the web of romance with knitting, spinning and hooking rugs.

The sailmaker is a romantic figure in the doorway of some old “gear” house, as he sits surrounded by billows of canvas, dark and mildewed, patching, roping and otherwise overhauling the old mainsail. His, too, is a figure in imminent danger of passing. The dashing motor boat, blowing the spume from her bow, says, “The day of sails is over.”

One summer, visiting with the Lighthouse-keeper’s family in their characterful little binnacle-home on the edge of the rocks at Peggy’s Cove, our last day for adventuring having arrived, and even as we waited for the coming of the mail-carrier’s cart by which we had engaged “outward passage”, we strolled down to the waterfront to say a last farewell to our “old-timers”. It was at that last moment, in what turned out to be the eleventh hour of his life, that we chanced upon a ninety-year-old grandfather in high boots and straw hat placidly catching up with his nonogenarian fingers the broken meshes of an old net. Mailcart or not, we must have this picture! Click! As it happened, mending this bit of net was his last task. For before the picture which we promised to send back to him could come into his hand, the Great Reaper had brought him to his last illness and he was soon awa’!

CHAPTER IV.
SEA-COAST HOMES OF THE MARITIME PROVINCES.

The open-door....

HE open-door to an understanding of the sea coast life, its enthusiasms, its joys, its sorrows and its toil, is by way of the little sea-coast homes edging the ‘long-shore road in out-of-the-way coves and harbours, remote from towns, cities and the big sea-ports. These little houses are as a voice in the land; as soon as one heaves in sight by a turn of the road or a dip of the land we instantly feel their personality. Their dimensions may be small, roofs low, windows few, doors narrow—all these things are overlooked because they all fit in with the whole, to make a sweet, lovable little place, where we might easily fancy ourselves living happily—the big world far away, the horizon of our wants satisfied by the vision and tang of the gray sea, and the fishboat putting out in the early morning, to come again with the sinews of the evening meal. There are many ways of approaching these sea-coast homes, but the preferable way is—afoot. The man or woman who takes to the open road and puts up where he can when dusk comes down over land and sea, is the voyager likely to have the best adventures and to make the most discoveries. He discovers, primarily, that many tongues are heard in these little sea-coast homes—English, Gaelic, Breton and Acadian-French, and should he go far north enough, some “Huskie”. He will even find little colonies of Jersey Islanders in the midst of the English-Gaelic-French stretches. Even so, the traveller coming to any of these sea-side doors in the evening light will never have to beg a place to lay his head. Hospitality is part of the unwritten code of these parts. An additional mouth to feed brings about absolutely no confusion. It matters not which language the housewife speaks. You may not be able to employ her Gaelic or she your English, but her heart is kind and friendly and the sea has taught her to be cosmopolitan. Her door is ajar to visitors; a small matter like languages will never close it. There are many common grounds on which to meet and always “sign” language and a little latent ability on both sides to “act out” any situation going beyond the combined vocabularies adds spice. Indeed I think the “acting out” one of the chief charms particularly in the little French homes.

The interiors of these sea-coast cottages in which we have frequently found ourselves guests, not one but many summers, are in every way as individual and winning as their exteriors are attractive. All the furniture is hand made, with odd “bits” here and there salvaged from wrecks, or which have otherwise “washed in with the tide”. It is fitting that as the house is home-made—it shelters homemade things. On the floors are round, plaited rag rugs—pretty spots of colour but not so brilliant or so highly prized as the rough, hooked rug showing large patterns designed from nearby objects or some treasured association—the family cat, the dog, the flowers from the wee garden. In some of the French shore homes both the plaited and hooked rug give way to the Catalon. Having duly examined and admired those on the floor, Madame takes the visitor up into the garret to see the ponderous loom that holds another in the making. Scattered about are her wools, spun and dyed and perhaps previously sheared by herself. Catalons furnish material enough for hours of conversation and if the visitor is fortunate enough to be a guest under Madame’s roof the chest of floor rugs and homespun couverts may be opened to view. Some of these couverts may be old, the work of Madame’s or M’sieu’s mother. Oh, many are the stories woven into the couverts of the Magdalen Islands and the Gulf of St. Lawrence shores from Quebec to Cheticamp—stories in detail more than one summer long.

In the Gaelic homes conversation is made easy if the visitor is interested in old-time China-figures. The Gaelic woman warms to you at once if you notice her “Highland Laddie” in kilties or the wee “lambie”, or the faithful sheep-dog that stands upon the shelf. These all have a story too. Some of these China-pieces are very rich and handsome both in the quality of China and in colour, to say nothing of design—“Mary and her little Lamb”, “The Sailor Boy”, “The Lovers”, “A Victorian Lady”, in hooped skirt, poked bonnet and blue shawl, etc. A few of these figures are heirlooms. Others were bought by their present owner from some travelling salesman chancing into the glen half a century ago, when she was young. Sometimes the figure came from a wreck and was salvaged by the skipper in his little fishboat—fragile figures that survived the fury of the storm which smashed the great ship, which carried them, to kindling.

This tale of wrecks brings into the story of the little sea-coast homes the men whose handiwork the houses are. The vikings of the Maritime Provinces are home-builders! In their turn wrecks and brave men introduce another type

WITHIN SIGHT OF HOME.
SAMBRO, NOVA SCOTIA.

DOOR-WAY OF THE LIGHTHOUSE-KEEPER’S
HOME AT CAPE SHARP, NOVA SCOTIA.

of home common enough to these parts, a necessity in fact, but unknown to inland Canada—the lighthouse keeper’s little nest with which goes the white tower with its lamp connected with the house on isolated headlands and far away on the point, by itself, in others. A chart of the eastern coastline reveals hundreds of such lighthouses; and for every lighthouse, followers of the piper know, there is a little cottage tucked away somewhere. Great camaraderie exists between the unpainted, weathered, shingled cottage of the fisherman and the home of the man whose light and bell guide home through the fog the little dory to its place. The one is more fixed up than the other having the government behind it in the matter of paint, but both know what it is to crouch for shelter among the boulders. In time of storm “the holdings is what counts”, as Big John puts it. There is just one thing that the sea-coast folk fear above the storms of winter, and that is—fire. There being no fire-department in these parts, every householder takes precaution by putting a ladder across the roof from eave to ridgepole alongside the chimney. This fire “prophylactic” is a fixture built-in with the house and looks like some “idea” in the architecture so universal is it.

In the long miles it is noticeable that groups of these sea-coast one or two-roomed homes usually cluster together around some little harbour. These are companionably drawn together by the little sheet of water affording an anchorage or safe dry-dock in shelving shores for the little fish boats—breadwinners of the family. Peggy’s Cove, on St. Margaret’s Bay between French Village and Sambro on the south-western shore of Nova Scotia, is such a little rocky haven—looking like a miniature Newfoundland. The road fringes the shore for eighteen miles after one leaves the railroad at French Village and one may make it afoot and getting tired beg a lift in a passing ox-cart, or may engage passage with the mail-driver. The mail-driver is an institution in all these out-of-the-way regions, and one may cover most of the distance as a passenger in his cart.

Many a little home we look into away “Down North” from Inverness to Grand Etang on the one side of Cape Breton, and from English Town to Dingwall on the other, whose open door we have been able to make with the mail-driver’s, or the little coastal steamer’s assistance, or by driving ourselves in a hired team part way, and walking part way, regular pilgrims, staves in hand. But there are thousands of little homes along shores where no roads go except that over the sea. One is rewarded for “making” any of these, over the cliffs, carving out a road for oneself, if it be possible, if not, taking to the boat. In fact, one soon likes these most isolated homes best. Their originality and their strength appeal to the pioneer latent in us all. And here dwell the men and their families who have held “the line”, keeping alive the great fishing industry of Canada. Here dwell in truth our much to be admired codfish aristocracy. In fact, in all these little homes reside men upon whose personality “United Empire Loyalist” is indelibly stamped. These are people who accept the hardships of life with composure, relying less on outside supports than we of the cities. No stores are here to run to for supplies. The doctor comes not at all or only in summer. In the Magdalen Islands there is no communication except by telegraph from Christmas time till the following spring. Here, one winter, it became desirable to get “a mail” to the mainland. The men interested prepared a large cask, made it watertight, put the letters inside and headed it up. They gave it ballast and a little sail and consigned it to a strip of open sea, first painting on it a request to the finder to forward the “mail” to the nearest postoffice. Those letters reached their destination.

The Magdaleners are fisher-folk in the main, though of course in Havre Aubert and Grindstone there are a number of business, and a sprinkling of professional men. The homes here in these remote islands, being French, have the French touch of thrift well developed. Paint is here in most instances, and though the islands are bare of trees a little garden is generally managed with the aid of a fence made of bits of wood culled from sea-drift.

These real little homes may be a mile or a half mile inland among the smoothly rounded Damoiselles—a little unhandy to the boats—so the Frenchmen of Havre Aubert have built themselves a little row of summer cottages right on the shingle, so close to the waters of the Gulf on each side that they could almost step out of the boat into the front door, did it not happen to be on the second floor for safety from the waves in time of storm. Such a cottage has the double advantage of allowing greater despatch of the fishing and of saving the wear and tear on the “all the year round” home. We wonder it has never occurred to the coastal fishermen of other parts to have a summer home as well as a winter one.

Doubtless the new era will bring many changes and improvements into all this region of Canada. The new roads, the autos, the modern builder, the agriculturist, the large number of summer tourists, the shipbuilding, the improved methods of fishing, improved drinking water systems, direct and indirect foreign trade, library and lecture centres, expansion in railroads all radiating from and meeting again in Halifax—Queen of the Maritime cities holding in her hand the fate, among other things, of these little homes—will all come soon. But we hope the day will never come when these little gray cottages will disappear from the Canadian landscape. We hope sincerely that in their case it will not be necessary to destroy in order to build; that if their location is the one thing needed to conduct the fishing quickly they may be saved to form the fishing-season homes of our fishermen, an extension of the plan now followed out by the Magdalen Islanders, while a snugger situation may be chosen for the up-to-date winter home so well merited by those harvesting Canada’s fish and those other deep-sea voyagers carrying her ships and trade into foreign ports.

CHAPTER V.
LOW TIDE IN THE BAY OF FUNDY.

Of all the forces....

F all the forces of Nature governing human endeavour, none it would seem, are at once more intimate and exacting than Time and Tide.

But, while Time is everywhere, Tide is local. And though by a system of daylight-saving we have sought to get the best of Time, Tide, as wiseacres of old put it, “waits for no man.”

Such a play of thought and words as can scarcely be conceived, surge and race with “tide”. “A full tide,” “a brimming tide”, “high tide”, are synonyms for success in life, for progress, for the acquisition of wealth, for “Bon Chance”, as “good luck” is phrased in Quebec. Whereas “Low Tide”, “Ebbing Tide”, and kindred terms, we all know only too well what they mean—dull business and empty pockets. But over-riding all these is the cheerful swing of encouragement in “There’s a tide in the affairs of men, which taken at the flood leads on to Fortune.”

Nowhere does the daily life of a people hang so intimately on tide as down Bay of Fundy way. Tide there plays a titanic scale. It lengthens out the scant octave spanned of other shores to fifty, and in some places it is said, to sixty feet. The people of these parts live “on the landwash” as it were, with “high tide” and “low”, a daily portion. The Bay of Fundy apportions to its people the biggest slice of tide afforded to any people anywhere in the world. And, as it disregards the ordinary laws of all ordinary tides in the matter of ebb and flow, so, strangely enough, its physical “low tide” is more often than not, the “high tide” of business and affairs. It is when the edge of the Fundy Basin is a line of mud from St. John to Parrsboro, around the Minas Basin and back to Digby, that life awakens and things begin to happen. It is as if the old Bay said “Any old place can have a high tide but who can have a ‘low’ like mine?”

The Low Tide of Fundy is indeed its most prominent feature, playing an important part in the despatch of passenger and mail steamers from both Saint John and Digby. Indeed, the Bay-steamers actually play a game with the tide. If the steamer is “in” and the tide “out”, the steamer must wait for the tide to come “in” before she can go “out”, on its brimming fullness through Digby Cut. So, the schooners and square-riggers all come “in” and go “out” when the tide is full. But they load the deal in West Bay whichever way the tide “sets” ’round Cape Split. So, too, the stateliest Square-rigger or most sail-crowded schooner going up the bay for a load of plaster has the water out from under her keel when the Mower scythes the waves and sweeps them away to the ocean, leaving all keels, whether great or small, hard and fast in Fundy Sound.

The Bay of Fundy is the greatest natural drydock in the world. And in its day, which began the evening the stately ship of Sieur de Monts first floated in on its flood tide to found a settlement at Annapolis Royal, it has docked thousands of craft of all rigs and sizes. As drydock, as well as sheltering harbour, while it belongs in particular to New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, in a wider sense it belongs to all Canada. So that in the great future in trade now before Canada, it requires no great foreknowledge to venture that the volume of vessels frequenting the Bay in the palmiest days of the past, will soon be eclipsed both in number of ships and in increased displacement. As yet, the Bay of Fundy is like a masterpiece hanging in a gallery, which we have not sat down to look at carefully and appraisingly.

No other country apart from the thought of it as a drydock enjoys such a haven for ships as Canada possesses in the Bay of Fundy. The Bay of Fundy whose “power” is the tremendous ebb and flow of its tides, has hitherto seemed something “out of us”, and beyond our power to turn to account.

Bliss Carman, it will be remembered, penned a beautiful lament in “The Ships of Saint John”. But we may take it that the condition lamented was but temporary, merely “the ebb tide” in affairs and that when the tide comes again, roaring round Blomidon, the tide of Canadian shipping, it will be such a brimming tide of prosperity as old-timers of these parts never even dreamed of. The ships of the world will surely dock again in numbers where “The fog still hangs on the long tide-rips.” One saw during the years of the war a re-birth of old-time trade around the shore in the large number of square-riggers calling at Bay-ports for deal. You could count them three and four deep in West Bay by Partridge Island out of Parrsboro. And how all the forests and sawmills around were touched at once into new life by a mere sight of these stately old craft, many, an hundred years or thereabouts in age, in their turn awakened from graveyards in out-of-the-way havens of the Old World by the clash of arms.

IN THE RAQUETTE.
DIGBY, NOVA SCOTIA.

THE BAY OF FUNDY IS THE GREATEST
NATURAL DRYDOCK IN THE WORLD.

To all the people living on the Bay of Fundy shores these old vessels, newly painted, with their “yards” abeam and “figureheads” on the bow refurbished, were happy sights indeed. It was like their own youth come back, in case of the old. To the young they brought “vision”. Old ports thought dead awoke to new life. In “trade” around the Bay it was no longer “ebb tide”.

One never ceases to marvel at the number of other trades that spring to life in the wake of shipping. Ships and big “waterfronts”, such as Canada’s are the things to make dreams come true. Ships resemble railroad trains in the matter of faithfulness to prescribed routes, having ports for stations. And there’s not an ocean wanderer of them all, or a skipper of importance, but knows the Bay of Fundy and its “tides”. Nevertheless, however important from the commercial point of view, hard and fast trade is not the only phase of Fundy life. It also has its romantic side.

“Low tide” fills the shoreline with the rich, wet colours which artists love to paint. It builds, too, new kinds of wharves, two-deckers with an upstairs and down, and greeny bronze seaweeds clinging to water-soaked piles; and “craft” of some kind, schooners, or tropic-bleached-and-warped old vessels with rakish yards, looking like pirate craft by reason of many trips in the white-light of Equatorial suns, leaning against them.

It is a signal, when the mud-line begins, to all the clam-diggers of the countryside to come out with shovels, forks, rake-hoes, or any old garden tools that can be used to dig clams. Sometimes one sees here some old woman alone, using a rake-hoe as a staff, her skirts blowing in the wind and a genuine joy in her heart every time an oozy squish is emitted by her old boots. The tide of life has come and gone for her to the accompaniment of the ebb and flow of the waters of Fundy. In them she has found comfort and by them, perhaps, a living. They have been the outlook of a lifetime, companionable whatever their mood.

In the matter of clam-digging the Bay of Fundy has a decided rival in the long-stretching sandspits or barachois of the Madeleine Islands in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence. There, one sees a score or more of habitant women, their skirts tucked about the middle, wading in the shallow water with their horses and carts and even dog-carts, themselves working for hours digging tubful after tubful of clams for as long as they can beat the tide to it. But, on the white sand of the Madeleines one sees no vessel careening in friendly fashion as on the soft mud of Fundy. It is on the Bay of Fundy one sees ordinary ladders of the farm, home-made affairs, no relation whatever to the usual ship’s ladder, let down over a schooner’s side with men going up into the ship or down to walk ashore over the mud, avoiding runnels and pools, while the anchor lies a little way off, in plain sight, on the cushion of mud. This is an unique picture peculiar to the Fundy region.

At another spot the kelp-gatherer is at work. Edible kelp can be bought in many Wolfville and other Bay of Fundy-town grocery shops. And in season the kelp-gatherer, with his sack, is an interesting figure of the Digby and Parrsboro tide-flats and algae-covered rocks.

Romantic treasures are uncovered by the low tides, in the amethyst geodes to be picked up along shore. Amethyst outcroppings provide a romantic objective for taking geologist hammer in hand in a jaunt to the cliffs of Blomidon and the jagged, beetling wall presented by Partridge Island on its southern side to the sweep of the Bay. Nor is amethyst alone, here. Other semi-precious crystals abound, making the gamut run by Romance one of great range. For, when the tide is low, over against the fire of the Glooscap jewels, are set the figures of carts going out over the wet mud, scintillating with the colours that artists love, to the amphibious little Bay coasting-schooners, stranded, for the time being, like so many jellyfish.

Then come out the caulkers, caulking-irons in hand. Then are old seams filled, old leaks and new made tight—the caulking mallet in a race against the fast-coming tide. For the caulker knows that with the return of that great force, gathering in strength with every inch of rise, the old plaster-carrier will slowly right herself, lifting, lifting herself out of the mud, “locked” to the higher level, by that greatest of natural forces—the flooding tide of Fundy, till, presently sitting like a swan on the water, she declares herself afloat and ready for the race to Boston with her cargo of “Plaster-of-Paris”, out of Acadie.

CHAPTER VI.
CAPE BRETON.

Not until the waters....

OT until the waters of the Gut of Canso sweep into the line of one’s vision, does the fact that Cape Breton is an island have any special meaning for the traveller by train from Halifax to North Sydney. But when you feel your car actually quitting the land for the deck of a steamer, then the insularity of Cape Breton becomes something personal.

The “Gut of Canso” is—“The Grand Canal of the Maritime Provinces”, one of the clearest, bluest, most beautiful strips of water in the world.

It is, as anyone can see, the short cut from the Atlantic to the Gulf of Saint Lawrence. But it is not until you cast off upon its waters yourself that you realize how constant is the stream of vessels using this ocean highway! That material galore for picture and story hourly runs to waste here, is not the fault of the Grand Canal.

Cross this water-street when you will, schooners, “two”, “three-masters”, with big mildewed mainsails still hoisted, wait at anchor off Port Hawkesbury for a fair wind to carry them through, the while fleet-winged schooners from the Gulf, like the “Birds of Passage” that they are, take it, literally, “on the run”. One wonders, watching them on-coming “wing and wing”, if ever migratory birds strung out in a fairer perspective?

Your sea-adventuring train deigns after awhile to come ashore on the “Island”, and after that it keeps to the straight and narrow path etched by the land, wherein trains may run, but it never seems just an ordinary train to you after its sea-going fling. And so you are quite prepared for the way it skims across the Bras D’Or at “The Narrows” and sets you down there to a “fish supper” in a little restaurant, and waits while you eat.

At Iona, it stops again, and sets down the passengers for Baddeck. And after that it hugs the lakeshore, till North Sydney reminds one that “business is business” and that one has arrived in the heart of it.

To speak of North Sydney is to think of coal. Yet, unless you undertake “the mines”, look them up, because you have a fancy to from the viewpoint of Romance, they are not only not intrusive but they actually lend a hand in adding to the “figures” in the harbour. There the picturesque, black-hulled, red-bottomed steamers at anchor, are “colliers” awaiting their turn to load. These steamers make just the contrast needed to set off the fish-schooners riding at anchor, amid dancing reflections, when the setting sun of a calm evening mirrors every spar, rope and sail in the silvery waters of the harbour.

At Sydney the outlook is easterly. New elements creep into the atmosphere. “Over there,” is Newfoundland. These waters that lap at your feet bring Europe within hail. That little, weather-worn steamer lying there by the wharf-side will to-morrow morning hitch to the Quai in Saint Pierre et Miquelon.

The “colliers” that came in yesterday, in a day or two may be nosing up the Saint Lawrence in the wake of palatial ocean liners to Quebec. Sydney stands for the extended hand of Canada; extended to Newfoundland as a link in transportation; extended in invitation to the British Isles and to Old Europe to send more settlers of the hardy type of Hieland folk and Breton sailor, who, in the early dawn of her history, stepped into Canada through these portals.

The interesting fact about Cape Breton is that it has preserved all the characteristics, the language, the customs of its Gallic and Gaelic settlers. Geographically, as well as ethnologically, there is a Gaelic Cape Breton in the North and a Breton Cape Breton in the south. They divide the land between them, and live in the same friendly fashion as did Scotland and France in the days of the Stuarts. Stepping into the northern part of Cape Breton is like adventuring in the Highlands of Auld Scotia. Stepping to the South is an adventure in Brittany.

There are three main ways of entering the “Highlands”. Finding one’s self in Sydney, take that “character” among coastal traders, the little S.S. “Aspey”. The “Aspey” makes all the harbours between North Sydney and Cape North. Make her acquaintance and she will introduce you to “Who’s Who”, for she knows all the folk who are worth knowing, from Englishtown to Ingonish and from Ingonish to Nail’s Harbour and Dingwall.

The second way to reach “the land of the Macs” is to take a train of the Inverness Railroad at Port Hawkesbury. By this road, which follows the shore-line of the Gulf side of the Island, you come immediately into the Scotch atmosphere. Scotch place-names stand out bravely from the name-boards of the railroad stations. The very scenery is Highland—mountains and mists

ON THE “GALLERY”.

BOYHOOD DREAMS OF THE DAY WHEN
“THEIR TURN WILL COME”.

along the shore side, while through the opposite windows of your car, the waters of the Gulf, spread out, like a “loch”.

The third, and ideal way to make the acquaintance of Cape Breton, is to hire an old horse and drive yourself, making leisurely trips in all directions, lingering wherever Fancy dictates, and putting up each night in any village, town or farmhouse which promises a comfortable night’s lodging.

With your own horse you are at liberty to turn in at “gates” even though no houses are in sight, and continue in faith along the road until one appears. And, when the house—a “Crofter’s Cot” transplanted—is reached, it is quite in keeping with the Highland atmosphere if only the man of the family speaks English, the women being happy in “Gaelic only”—Gaelic which they learned from mothers and grandmothers.

This difference in language makes no difference, however, in their hospitality. And oh, the pictures sketched by these little cottages so snugly tucked away in the glen!

The language of beauty which they speak is easily understood. Beauty that belongs to simple architecture speaks from every line of door and window and roof; speaks in every line of the great, whitewashed chimney, which, never lacking fuel, proclaims in friendly smoke seen curling up out of the glen—long before the cottage comes to view—that tea brews on the hearth.

The people of this part of Cape Breton, striking inland, and across country to Saint Ann’s Bay and Ingonish, are, in the main, agriculturists. This is the farming section. So, in August and September, in the tawny fields of oats and barley, the figures of the reapers and gleaners, especially in the neighborhood of Ingonish, proclaim that Breton-Canada no less than Breton-France affords many “a Millet subject”.

But even the farmer of these parts turns fisherman in season. Alongshore “Old man with lobster-pots” is a frequent “character”, from Mabou all down the Gulf shore, doubling Cape North, and back along the south shore of the peninsula to Point Aconi; and, of course, on the Atlantic side, about Gabarouse and Saint Peter’s. One of the dominating physical features of Cape Breton is Cape Smoky, towering a thousand feet above the waters where the Atlantic and Saint Ann’s Bay meet. Smoky is a personality. Because its stern, old brow is always softened by an ever-moving fog-wreath, the English-speaking people call it “Smoky”; the French folk “Enfumez”. It is worth travelling far to view Cape Smoky after rain, especially in the afternoon when the westering sun turns the shifting fog into rainbows, flitting, flashing, jewel-like bits of colour, gone in a moment.

There is something unexplainably winning about Cape Smoky. Cape Breton folk look to it as Nova Scotians to Blomidon. In speaking of it they sometimes say “Dear Old ‘Smoky’,” as if they loved it.

“Sugar-Loaf,” near Dingwall, and “Cape North”, the Lands’ End of Canada, are each distinctive in character, and “landmarks” of navigation.

A feature of the road familiar in these parts is the mail-carrier. With an old wagon and his trusty horse, the road over Smoky presents no difficulties to the Jehu of “His Majesty’s Mail”. And when you watch for him to appear on the shingle at Ingonish from “Down North”, if he has no passengers, it is an adventure to jump into his cart and ride over Smoky, even if you have to walk the six miles back, as we once did.

The Bay at Ingonish is sheltered by Cape Smoky, and so this small harbour has become a happy anchorage for fishing-schooners, and South Ingonish a place where codfish dries on fish stages. There is a family lobster cannery here, seldom boasting more than two big iron pots aboil in a sheltered nook of the shingle, but creating a romantic atmosphere with its driftwood fire.

Lads lend a hand with the fish-drying at Ingonish. It is from here, watching the fishing schooners going out to meet the ocean swell around Smoky, that, in dreams, they reach out to the day when their turn will come to sail away in a fishing-schooner to “The Grand Banks”.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

The MacDonalds, MacLeods, MacLeans, MacPhersons, and all the other Scotch families of Cape Breton are greatly in evidence on Sundays. It is then, driving over these roads, one encounters team after team on the way to the Gaelic meeting-house, or church. The church service is conducted in Gaelic and lasts practically all day.

FIT SUBJECT FOR A
MILLET.

DUSK.
SOUTH BAY, INGONISH.

CHAPTER VII.
NEWFOUNDLAND.

Having stepped aboard....

AVING stepped aboard the Newfoundland mail-and-passenger boat at North Sydney, a little before ten p.m., the hour of sailing, one awakes next morning at Port aux Basques, in Newfoundland, hardly aware that one is out of Canada, until the courteous Customs Official with “Newfoundland” written on his cap, comes to examine one’s baggage.

One hundred and twenty miles is the brief length of Cabot Strait which separates Newfoundland from Canada, but when one has crossed this Arm of the Atlantic, it is to find one’s self in a new world, a world complete in itself. For Newfoundland embodies all that rugged, independent spirit, which, in part, belongs to all islands—notably to the British Islands—and, in addition, it has all the distinction which is a natural attribute of its position as Great Britain’s Oldest Colony. National sense is very keenly developed in the Newfoundlander. “Love of the Empire and their Island” stirs strongly in the blood of every man from Port aux Basques to Saint John, and from Cape Race to the Straits of Belle Isle.

A casual glance at a map of Newfoundland reveals its striking resemblance to the map of England. And ties of blood and association, that intimately bind this oldest Daughter to the Mother-country, trail down the centuries from the day that Cabot first sighted Bonavista, until now. If you wish to step right into the atmosphere of a fine English society that is still “the Island’s Own product”, take the train to Saint John’s, the oldest colonial capital in the British Empire.

But the Island of Newfoundland has yet another claim to distinction in its scenery. There is nothing quite like, or perhaps quite equal to, the scenery of Newfoundland, in all America. It so strongly resembles the scenery of Norway that the island is frequently spoken of as “The Norway of the New World”; and its deep inlets and bays are just as frequently referred to as “fiords”. But, in reality, Newfoundland scenery gains nothing by these comparisons. The time will come shortly when the scenery of Newfoundland will need no such extraneous supports. It will be sufficient for the voyager to say “I have just returned from Newfoundland” for his coterie of friends to know he has voyaged among scenes of superlative beauty.

Cruising around the Newfoundland coast, taking one or more of its deep bays in a summer, reveals innumberable little outports tucked away in hollows around every headland, and all held shelteringly in the hand of the larger bay. Of these larger bays, White Bay, Notre Dame Bay, Bonavista, Trinity and Conception lie to the North, while Saint Mary’s, Placentia, and Fortune upturn to navigation on the South.

Newfoundland is, of course, the heart of the Cod-fishing industry of the Western Atlantic. The Grand Banks, the playground of the fishing-fleets of France, of the United States, of Nova Scotia, are, when all is said, “The Grand Banks of Newfoundland.” Figuratively and literally speaking “The Banks” are the island “Bread-Box.” And the banking schooners—Newfoundland-owned, Newfoundland-skippered and sailed—are justly the pride of Newfoundland. Seamanship is so natural in a born Newfoundlander that it comes to him like a “sixth sense” or, as some of them say, “natural as sleeping and waking”.

Modern “Vikings of the North”, they are as much at home afloat, as ashore. It was thus the Newfoundlander stepped with such consummate ease from the thwart of the fish-dory, the deck of “The Banker”, to that larger deck in the British Navy, during the War, where they covered themselves with glory and added fresh honours to the record already achieved through the centuries, by their Island-home in its Four Centuries of Sea-going!

By far the greater part of the population of Newfoundland is domiciled on the coast. To reach the fishing is, therefore, a mere step, and the adventure of it practically sits on every door-step.

Travelling inland on the continent of North America, one is often enough struck by the sameness of the houses, towns and settlements etched by Agriculture. One often hears that they “all look alike”. But such could never be the complaint of these Newfoundland villages, products of the Sea and its Harvest. They are as variable as the sea’s own moods. So, in cruising among the Newfoundland bays, every little headland turned reveals a different grouping, as well as different setting, of the tiny church, the little homes, the chief store; and a different arrangement of the wooden stages in wharf-like lines along the irregular waterfront.

As the island is one large unit, so in turn each of these tiny settlements is a unit, going its own sea-gait in its own craft; and commanding its own mail-service, and commisariat-service, from Saint John or Placentia.

BELLEORAM.

PATH END.

So little are these sea-coast folk inland travellers, that there is often no road from one village to another, entrance and exit always being accomplished over the sea; by boat or steamer.

Settling down in any of these villages is to be constantly entertained by the variety of scenes afforded by the life. Early in the morning “the fish-boats” are under weigh with their tanned sails and homemade oars creaking against the pin. Later, the women go about their household duties, studying “the signs of the weather” from door or window. The old ’longshoremen open the fish-house doors and potter about with old ropes and picturesque “killicks” or homemade anchors, heavy, smooth stones held together in skeleton-frames of old bits of wood and a lashing of odd pieces of wire-rigging salvaged from some old wreck. But all the time, the men, like the women, have their weather-eye centred on the “signs of the mornin’.” For the day’s work, is—the fish.

The first peep of sunlight through the gray clouds or the fog, sees men, women and children, on the “fish stages”, as the platforms are called, fish in hand. In the afternoon, the scene is reversed, with each “hand” driving hard to get the fish in again before night.

A cloud, during the day, sees the ever-watchful women coming on the run from all quarters to get the fish in before it rains. Codfish must not get wet.

The Newfoundlanders are especially happy in the place-names they have given to their towns, villages and “outports”. Sea-folk are always, more or less, noted for romantic place-names. So, in summer, adventuring in Newfoundland, such names as Push-through, Thoroughfare, Come-by-Chance, Seldom-Come-By, Step-Aside, Happy Adventure, Heart’s Delight, Heart’s Content, Path End, write themselves indelibly in your memory map. Especially appropriate are the names given to the mountains. To realize the full beauty of some of these peak-names, one must fancy Newfoundland as a “ship”, the surface as the deck. Then one has the viewpoint of the men who sponsored these in baptism. Then, the single peaks, springing up tall against the sky, have a beautiful psychology of their own. Here is “The Gaff Topsail”, “The Main Topsail”, “The Mizzen Topsail”, “The Fore-Topsail”. Collectively they are referred to, picturesquely enough, as, “The Tops’ls”. Other individual peaks are “Blow-me-Down”, a sort of challenge to the elements and, “The Butter-Pot”, a maritime concession to the menu of maritime cabin-tables.

The surface of Newfoundland, its rocks and hills, is at its best in the fall of the year when the brush of Autumn paints all the foliage and fruit of the Bake-Apple, Partridge-Berries, wild red and black currants, Rowan berries, etc., gorgeous yellows, reds and browns. After the frost, the “marshes and barrens” afford miles of colour.

Among the treasures of the Newfoundland wildflowers are Gentians and Orchids.

It is at this time, when the berries are ripe, that the villagers turn out in family groups to pick bake-apples and Fox-berries to make jam. Bake-apples are a fruit peculiar to Newfoundland and Labrador. And Bake-apple jam is a dish of almost national magnitude. To express interest in the bake-apples and their picking is an open sesame to outport hearts. And no end of invitations and jaunts are assured you, if you become an ardent berry-picker. At this time human figures are everywhere to be seen. Children with a motley collection of pails are everywhere on the nearby hills. The best blueberries of all grow in the cracks and scarpings of the cliffs where one would not suppose a thimbleful of earth could cling. At Saint John, Cabot Head, gray and bluff, is a happy hunting-ground of the berry-picker. Many a morning have we spent there, hunting blueberries behind the lighthouse of this grim old Cape. Many a morning, too, have they been the goal of a scramble over the cliffs of Big Wild Cove and Little Wild Cove. And what is more romantic than tea with the lighthouse-keeper’s little family at Twillingate, where one sits at a spotless table and is served with a heaping dish of delectable homemade Partridge-berry jam smothered in thick Island cream?

In the Newfoundland Outports, two days’ work is crowded into one, of a Saturday. For the Newfoundlanders are very strict in the observation of the Sabbath Day, to do no work therein. Neither dories nor “Bankers” fish on Sundays. And Saturday night sees all the schooners which can possibly get there, in port; the drying fishnet hanging in festoons from the masthead being about the only concession to business.

Ashore, the women will not even draw water from the well on Sunday, unless under the stress of some dire necessity. On Saturday, therefore, a double supply of water must be drawn, and laid in for use over Sunday. The Outport well is usually situated at one end of the village and sometimes at a distance from it. And so, on Saturday afternoons, a stream of women, each carrying two buckets of water, flows along the undulating, rocky highway that is the village main street. A large hoop, in the midst of which the water-carrier steps, helps to relieve the weight and keep the water from spilling as the woman steps briskly along. This method of carrying water seems to be the Newfoundlander’s own invention. The Water-Hoop is here one of the furnishings of every household.

Saturday is the day of the week for getting wood. And wood-getting in the outports involves a longer or shorter trip to the cliffs and hills where the low spruce-scrub affords many a scraggly bough for fuel. Along the footpaths, worn by centuries of wood-gatherers, and by the road into the village, one happens on many a figure carrying bundles of boughs on their backs and making pictures no less distinctive from a genre viewpoint than the water-carriers, with their picturesque hoops. Other figures of the road are the women and children carrying hay over their shoulders, tied-up in a piece of old net or the family pieced bed-quilt.

Owing to the rocky nature of the cliffs, hay is a scarce article. Some of the best is undoubtedly afforded by the little churchyard cemeteries, on the principle that “never blooms so red the rose, as where some buried Caesar lies”.

Goats with curious wooden yokes around their necks, and the family cow, are well-known characters of these cliff, by-shore, village-highways.

Against the incursions of these roaming pirates-of-green, are set up the curious rodded-fences of the irregular-shaped little potato and turnip gardens. In summer the gipsying cow can forage for herself, but in winter there is nothing for her to do but fall back upon the little wisps of hay her owner garnered in the quilt against just such days as these. But the cow is grateful. Never anywhere does cow produce richer cream to go with the raspberries, the Bake-apple and Fox-berry jam, than these same seacoast cows of Newfoundland.

Considering the wholesome out-of-door life called for by the industries of the Newfoundland outports, it is not surprising that hand-weaving in the homes is rare. Another reason may be the scarcity of pasturage for sheep in the sea-going villages and their vicinity. Inland Newfoundland affords fine opportunities for agriculture, and sheep of a fine type yield splendid fleeces in the Codroy Valley, around Doucets and Little River.

Although the loom is rare, the spinning-wheel is not infrequently happened upon, yielding hand-laid yarn to supply the needs of the home-knitter. And her needs are many, for no one seems to wear out socks like a fisherman.

The knitter is therefore a figure by the window when the cool days denote the approach of winter.

* * * *

The guide-books have a way of declaring Newfoundland to be “The Sportsman’s Paradise”, and, if you have ever taken your gun under arm and sallied forth after Caribou, or had a thirty-pound salmon rise to your fly in either the Big or the Little Codroy rivers, you can personally testify that the writers of those same guide-books do not exaggerate.

It is little to be wondered at, therefore, that the “Sportsman” from the New England States, from Canada and from Old England, is a figure often chanced upon in the glens, and “beating the streams” of the Codroy Mountains, in the West. Nothing is quite so romantic as sitting by a deep pool, the one selected by your guide as “the very best” and watching for the supreme moment when “the big one” springs to life at the end of your line.

But the tramp to get to the pool has its romance, too. For the scenery of inland Newfoundland, its fields of daisies, its sheep in the lanes, the fog lifting and swirling like wraith-figures of light dancers about the brows of the mountains, all combine to create an atmosphere of enchantment, the more enchanting perhaps, that the numbers of its discoverers are not yet so many as to wear away the edge of exclusiveness.

* * * *

Pursuit of the Romantic in Newfoundland sooner or later lands one in Saint John’s on the south side of the harbour, among the old, wooden square-riggers that compose that unique fleet peculiar to Terra Nova—the Sealers.

If you have ever seen a whaler of the old-type, belonging to the days of whale-boats and hand-harpoons, then you know something of the appearance of these old Sealers. Broad of beam, thick-planked, staunch-timbered, both steam-and-sail propelled, they go out of Saint John’s in March, blasting a channel for themselves through the ice with gunpowder. They carry a crew of several hundred, all of them seasoned sealers. The man of expert knowledge in picking up “Seals” hies him aloft to the barrel crow’s-nest.

And then begins that roaming quest of the seal that may stand these old Ramblers of the ice and the ocean, away to the northeast, or up toward “Belle Isle”, or even far into the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, anywhere that they can “pick up” the herd of drifting amphibians, which are to yield the invaluable sealskin.

THE WATER-CARRIER.

KNITTING.

CHAPTER VIII.
LABRADOR.

In the Newfoundland....

N the Newfoundland outports, especially those of the northern bays—Conception, Trinity, Bonavista and Notre Dame conversation with any old-timer is sure to turn sooner or later to experiences on “The Labrador”.

Soon these stories accumulate into a magnetizing force, drawing you to explore that wonderful Northern shore of which these old-timers relate such wonderful tales.

Our first trip to the Labrador was decided by an old fellow with a scythe, mowing a pocket-handkerchief of hay at Exploits. He wore at the time a pair of sabots. Upon our remarking on them as unusual footwear in these parts, he looked down with a smile—that pleasant smile that always flits across aged faces at the recollection of an adventure—and said, “Oh, aye, them’s my Denmarks. I bought them from a man on a square-rigger, on ‘The Labrador’.”

Two days after that we were haunting the telegraph office at Twillingate for news of “The Invermore” or “The Kyle” out of Saint John’s to the Labrador. The Invermore blew out her tubes somewhere down the coast, and had to put back to Saint John’s, and we had to wait several days for her substitute, who finally arrived at Twillingate in the middle of the night, so that we went up the ladder over her side with the bags of mail at two o’clock in the morning, carrying with us a feeling that perhaps we ought not to be going, as two old fellows encountered on the pier the night before, had said, in the face of a rather threatening sky, that it was “too late to go down on the Labrador.”

However, we made that voyage safely and have since made another, proving that wiseacres are not always true prophets or their sayings to be heeded.

From Newfoundland to Labrador is but a step across the Straits of Belle Isle. In winter these waters are the hunting grounds of some of the sealers out of Saint John’s. In summer they are the hunting ground of some of the “growlers” out of Labrador.

Navigators here in the first instance are happy at the cry of “seals!” from the crow’s nest, but the skipper of the mailboat on this route runs away as fast as may be from the beautiful but treacherous iceberg so like in figure to giant Portuguese Men-o’-War “fishing with paralyzing underseas tentacles seeking whom they may devour.” Then comes out on deck the figure least expected, the Moving Picture man, reeling off, like one possessed, the bergs that navigation fears. And so we land at Battle Harbour, first of the thirty or more ports of call made by these fine mail-and-passenger boats out of Saint John’s.

The charm of the Labrador is hard to define. That it is there all will agree. Some say that it lies in the fact that the slightest miscalculation on the part of those adventuring in these parts may lead to an accident—accident that on so exposed a coast is instantly metamorphosed into irremediable disaster, as in the case of H.M.S. Raleigh. In other words, danger is its charm, the danger that lies so near, around the corner of every bay and tickle; danger of hidden rocks, of sudden gale, of fog, of bergs, washed by some fanciful twist of ocean current out of the beaten track. Romance follows danger as a twin sister. So, on the Labrador, many “figures” strut across the little stage.

There is the little Eskimo that paddles off to the steamer in his kyak, to dance on deck, while the ship rides at anchor off some port. That he ever reaches the ship or the shore again in the little scallop-shell he calls “boat” is a miracle. But he dances away or sings “gospel hymns” learned from missionaries, as free from worry as any child. The words are in Eskimo, but the old tune, sung out here on deck by the flare of the ship’s lantern, carries with it a gripping power, the while the faces of strong men—fishermen coming or going, traders, missionaries, even Syrian fur-dealers—are intermittently lighted by the flare of the lantern.

Two old acquaintances, the “fishnet drying from the masthead” and the “pot-a-tilt” among stones of the ice-age, greet one on stepping ashore at a Labrador tickle. Spruce beer is also here to be had, if one has the good fortune to fall in with Liveyer’s family up from Newfoundland for the summer-fishing and living in a hut with sodded roof, wherein the blooms of fireplant and live-for-ever make a splash of color against the gray background of sea and rocks.

These little liveyer homes bear a striking resemblance to the pioneer homes of foreigners on the Prairie, with sodded roofs abloom.

Two new characters peculiar to the zone emerge along this northern edge of the ‘Longshore road—Eskimos, men, women and children, and Eskimo dogs; both of which Newfoundlanders invariably speak of as “Huskies”.

HEARTY AT EIGHTY.

AN ESKIMO GRANDMOTHER.

The Eskimo as hunter is the angle from which hunters, trappers, and fur merchants, view these children of the Northland. The missionary sees in them children to be taught; the ordinary voyager merely a new and interesting facet of life—men and women, masters of the secret of living under conditions under which the probabilities are the voyager himself would come a cropper. They fire the imagination for the same reasons as do the children of the Desert—an interesting peculiar people wholly masters of interesting peculiar circumstances.

Some of the features of Eskimo coastal life are portrayed in the pelts brought in to swell the large collections at the several Hudson’s Bay Company’s posts, and in the evidences of “native art” as shown in ivory and wood carvings brought down to sell to the ship.

These latter articles are of interest from two points of view. They were taken from life and so, have pictorial and story value—little ivory komatiks or sledges drawn by dogs in harness and little wooden dolls with typical Eskimo features of old man or woman dressed in sealskin, cut in the same model always in vogue with these people; the men with trousers and short middy, the women in trousers and middy, short in front but often with a sort of longer rounded effect at the back. These vendors to the ship display in addition seal-skin port-monies for women and tobacco-pouches for men, but these are less interesting because the idea is imitative, caught from things of similar intent in the hand of voyagers from the south and civilization.

Eskimo dogs are not seen to advantage in summer. Only a few appear at each outport, more at some than at others. But under the boardwalk, climbing to the post office, a half dozen roly-poly puppies will snarl and snap under your feet like little wolves. And these “miniatures” of the pack—away at this season on some island out of harm’s way and busy foraging for a scant support to life among fishheads cast up by the incoming fishboat—are merely little point-fingers of the road of the great untamed that stretches from here to Hudson’s Bay.

Except in the neighbourhood of the Hudson’s Bay Posts and the Moravian Missionary settlements, evidences of the native are comparatively few. The many outports of this rugged coast are posts held firmly in the strong capable hand of Newfoundland. It is said that thirty thousand Newfoundlanders yearly fish “The Labrador”. And romance lies in the wake of this yearly pilgrimage to the Northern Shrine of Cod.

As the landing mailboat rounds the barren headlands, vistas of schooners and fishboats stretch before, lying at anchor in the harbour or “tickle”. And if it be Sunday, as it is sure to be if the schooners are in port, a group of men and women are at the water’s edge to pick up news that the boat brings, or eagerly await at the Post Office the letter from home.

The coming of the steamer from Saint John’s and the ports of the Northern Bays of Newfoundland, once every ten days or so, is an event in these little settlements of summer-homes, clinging like so many crabs to the rugged shores of this outpost of Newfoundland, lying across Canada’s great Northeast and shutting it off from an Atlantic harbour north of Cape Breton.

Missionary work among the Eskimos has been maintained here for several centuries by the Moravians. Trading posts have been maintained for as long by the world-famous Hudson’s Bay Company. Sometimes the mission station and the H.B.C. Post occur at the same outport, as if in this northern land the desire for company had drawn them irresistibly together. But of course the mission must have decided that a fur-purchasing centre would concentrate the natives and they could be more easily reached, since the one sled-journey would answer all needs.

At Hopedale Mission there is a pathetic little “greenhouse” with a few flowers; and out in a corner of a garden, which is almost comical as gardens go, are seen a few struggling lettuce-plants though last year’s snow lies thick on the rising ground scarcely twenty yards away. If the tide of Canadian trade ever sets “full” out of Hudson Bay, who knows but a century from now many gardens will flourish here, descendants of this little pioneer straggler, hardily holding its own, to give the missionary-table vegetables.

To the Moravian Missionaries of early days belongs the credit of reducing the Eskimo tongue to a language. The large, well-bound grammar which the Missionary shows you becomes indeed a character in itself, as it is shown that this is not merely a key to a language but the humble means upon mastery of which hangs the missionary’s ability to interpret the “Old, Old Story” to these Nimrods of the North at home in Igloo, Komatik and Kyak.

Herein is the key to the hymn-singing, dancing figure that strikes such a colourful note on deck when the ship first makes this land of the Labrador.

At Hopedale, beside the Mission and the H. B. C. Store, with its simple stock of groceries and its pelt-rooms, sometimes packed and sometimes almost empty, according to the season, there are a few Eskimo wooden houses and a big community kitchen with a score of these short, round men and women gathered in the steam about the pot a-stew.

Here and there an old grandmother attends to coarse socks a-drying and knocks the kinks out of skin boots and komatik harness on a sloping roof concentrating the weak sun from the South, the while she minds the children and keeps a wary eye on the few old dogs that pace wolfishly and unceasingly up and down.

Labrador, like Newfoundland, has an interesting list of place-names. A harbour with two openings, usually made by an island lying close to the mainland or to another island, is called a “tickle”. Not the least romantic feature of voyaging along the Labrador coast are these odd and appropriate place-names. Think of sailing by “The White Cockade Islands”, “Run-by-Guess”, or “Tumble-down-Dick”! Or of seeing the surf bursting over “Mad Moll’s Reef”! Or of steering past “Lord’s Arm”, “Lady’s Arm”, and “Caribou Castle!”

CHAPTER IX.
SAINT PIERRE ET MIQUELON.

Nine miles from....

INE miles from Newfoundland lies Sainte Pierre et Miquelon, Island Colony of France, her last remaining colonial possession in the “New World”, north of the West Indies.

It lies, geographically, in the group of island stepping-stones, a stone’s throw, a night out of North Sydney.

It is attended by “an old character” among sea-going craft, by name “Pro Patria”, which has been on the route between Halifax and Saint Pierre for perhaps more than a quarter of a century. She is little and worn and old, so that when she came in to the wharf on the morning of our sailing we were afraid to board her. But after awhile, seeing that the world around took her as a matter of course, we stepped across the little gang-plank, into a medley of general cargo, including several sheep on foot. Next morning we were at Saint Pierre, the harbour which has made it worth while to France to keep these “little rocky island-waifs of the western Atlantic.”

Rounding Cap l’Aigle, a little Saint Malo lies outspread before us. And from the mastheads of shipping at anchor, the tri-color of France waves spiritedly in the ocean breeze.

The “Pro Patria” drew up at the Quai de la Ronciere. The Quai was black with the crowd come to witness her coming and to welcome old friends among the new arrivals.

* * * *

All the maisons and shops about the Square that faces the Quai, have steep roofs like the parent roofs back in France and like their sisters in Quebec. On the way to the door of Madame Coste’s pension, which had been recommended, we passed the door of “The-Trans-Atlantic-Cable”, which lifts its western end out of the water here, and saw the little, yellow telegraph blank in a frame outside the door—the little sheet that is Saint Pierre’s one daily newspaper—a small “daily” this, but one the truth of whose news is wholly to be relied on. Every morning saw us reading the news with tout-le-monde gathered in front of this journal, itself literally wet and dripping from the Ocean! Marine Intelligence, indeed.

One of the earliest “signs” seen in a grocer’s window, read “Beurre frais de Cheticamp a vendre”. We looked out on it from our casement window at Madame C’s. And though “France” was written in every line of street, in every shop window, in the great feather bed on which we slept, on the smaller one with which we were supposed to cover ourselves, who could feel themselves cut off in a foreign world, with Cape Breton speaking each morning, just across the way? And when we started out anew each day, a little water-soaked schooner as often as not came gliding in to the Quai with “Down North” and “Up Along” written in every line from masthead to water-line. Ottawa, Saint Pierre and Saint John’s may be far apart, but Lamaline in Newfoundland, Cape North to Cheticamp, C.B., and Saint Pierre are as “The Three Musketeers” for brotherhood, drawn together by the ties of Trade, and the adventure that lies in “smuggling”.

We had not been long at Saint Pierre before we began to realize that the arrival of the little coastal Noah’s Arks with their floating menageries, the pigs grunting, cocks crowing, sheep too stunned to bleat, made a difference in our own menus. Madame C. chuckled whenever we were able to report a fresh arrival at the Quai.

Other old acquaintances beside these coasters were not long in coming to light. Cod is here, answering to the elegant title of “Monsieur Morue”. Boats for his capture are rated in this island fleet as bateaux.

France operates on the “Grand Banks”; Saint Malo at home, and Saint Pierre on the West, being her “bases”. But the fish-trade of Saint Pierre is not what it was when ten thousand fishermen came here every Spring to re-fit the “Bankers” put into winter-quarters here the previous Autumn. Most of the fish now goes to France “green”, the dinner tables of the world calling for more fresh fish than of old. Still, now and again the steam trawlers come here, and there’s always a cargo or two in “the making” on Ile aux Chiens, as well as on the south shore of the harbour.

It is over there across the harbour that one sees the fishwives and the women stevedores—women who take the fish in hand the day it comes from the boats and put it through every process up to the stowing in the transport’s hold. The master-stevedore chants the number of fish passing through her hands in a loud, clear voice heard across the harbour. She has evolved a dirge, a rich Litany to fish, “Un”, “deux”, “trois”, “quatre”, “cinq”, etc., as they go headlong to their last ocean voyage.

NEARING THE END.

AN ISLAND-WOMAN OF
SAINT PIERRE ET MIQUELON.

On Ile aux Chiens, women meet the incoming dories and aid in splitting and cleaning la morue. Strong personality and sweet womanhood mark these island women.

Ile aux Chiens has a trade in Caplin-curing. A host of women work among these small fish, so much in demand in Paris restaurants.

* * * *

There are no trolley-lines in Saint Pierre and but few voitures. The ox-cart is here, attendant on the Salt Vessels, carrying off the salt from them to the warehouses. It is a decidedly French cart, with high sides. And the oxen wear a curious neck-yoke adorned with a fluffy sheep-skin. A French driver urges the oxen to move, with many a “Marche donc”.

Not the least interesting sights on Saint Pierre streets are the gay uniforms of the gendarmes. But even these give place to the little dog-carts everywhere, looking as if they had been transplanted out of Belgium.

Two important and rather unique landmarks stand out at Saint Pierre above all others; one, the figure of the Blessed Virgin, life size, set in a deep niche of the cliff-side; the other, a huge Crucifix, mounted high on a slim wooden Cross, standing on the hills above the town, and silhouetted clear and strong against the sky.

Many stories centre around the origin of this cross. Some say it was erected by the citizens to show their gratitude for a miraculous preservation at the time of some great winter storm; others, that it was erected in order that sailors leaving port might be reminded to turn their thoughts and prayers to Him, Who alone has power to still the waves and give prosperity. Still another story runs, that it is for sailors entering port, to remind them to return thanks to Him Who has brought them safely out of dangers and given them, perhaps in addition, “a good catch”. To those who have lost—it points the only Comforter.

The street passing under the shadow of this Cross goes by the distinctive name of Rue Calvaire. It is not surprising, therefore, to have some fishwife, whose photograph you have just taken, tell you, when asked for her address, that she lives “up ag’in the Cross”; that is, if she is of Newfoundland origin, and speaks English; if she is French, “‘Rue Calvaire’, Madame, s’il vous plait”—the street of the Cross.

The women of Saint Pierre wash their clothes in the streams, of which there are several running down the hills at the back of the town. They dam up the water with stones so as to form little pools, and kneel in wooden boxes on the edge of these to wash. They slap the linen with a flat piece of wood to make it very clean and white, and when all is done, they carry it in a wet bundle on their backs up the hill, to spread it to dry on the great rocks at the foot of the Crucifix.

A long way below this curious landmark of the hills, lies the cemetery, one of the most beautiful spots in Saint Pierre. It has been made so by a great deal of work, for so solid is the barren rock here that each grave has had to be blasted out with charge after charge of dynamite. But in the end each grave is surrounded by a wooden coping surmounted at one end by a wooden cross painted black or white. The coping is filled in with earth sifted from the debris of the blasts or brought from a distance. In these enclosures flowers are massed till the entire cemetery has the appearance of one great garden.

Love of flowers is a marked characteristic of the Saint Pierrais people. Though there is practically no soil in the place, every window is a mass of potted blooms. All these lilies, geraniums, oleanders, cacti, begonias, etc., were brought from France. It is even said that the soil in one little garden was brought here from France. Every Saturday morning a little boy goes the rounds of the pensions and perhaps the cafes, on his arm a small basket with a few nosegays of sweet old-fashioned flowers. And these are bought up at once.

The central building of interest in Saint Pierre is the fine white church, built to replace the old Cathedral destroyed by fire several years ago, together with the Palais du Justice.

The new church possesses rare and valuable appointments. The stained glass windows, most of them with Biblical motifs having to do with the sea, are supported by rich altar appointments; but the note of originality is struck by the score or more of tiny sailboats and schooners which hang gracefully on wires suspended from the ceiling.

These miniature craft appear especially appropriate in this church that owes its being to the sea. Each little boat is of course the votive offering of some grateful mariner for miraculous preservation in some great hurricane, collision or shipwreck, while pursuing la morue in one of its many haunts, immediately off-shore or on the Grand Banks.

The Curé of this church has possibly the best garden in town. And morning and evening he may be seen—a gardener in a soutane—doing his best to coax along the flowers and vegetables. Mais, oui.

The celebration of La Messe and “Benediction” in this French-Colonial church is attended with an unusual degree of pomp and ceremony. A military air of precision is supplied by the commanding figure of Le Maitre de Chapelle wearing the uniform and hat of a soldier of the Swiss Guard, carrying a battle-axe over his shoulder, a sword by his side, and in his gloved right-hand a tall, heavy black mace surmounted by a massive silver ball.

In the processions, this imposing figure is followed by acolytes in crimson and white gowns, each carrying a pole supporting a red, violet, or blue lantern.

The music is wonderful, the “time” being kept by the “Suisse”, who also precedes the two demoiselles down the aisles when they take up the collection.

The church is situated at the opposite end of the town from the cemetery and, whenever there is a funeral, the procession passes afoot, heralded by a small boy with a beautiful voice, singing so ringingly the solemn chants set for these occasions, that he can be heard far across the harbour and distant points of the town, from which by reason of turns in the streets the procession itself is invisible.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Because of the geographical situation of the Saint Pierre et Miquelon group, and the fact that they are a French Colony, conditions are found here, possible nowhere else.

French wines and liqueurs flow here as naturally as in France itself. Prohibition in Canada and the United States has made this font of wines so close to the coast “a gift of the gods”. Smugglers deem it a good “base” from which to operate “spirits” in general. In this new trade, agents of the best Old Country distilleries have opened salesrooms here and consignments and cargoes are constantly coming and going or being placed in warehouses to await their chance of re-shipment.