Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 759
This development was all based on the rise of the Port of Montreal under the influence of the steam tug, the river steamer, the ocean sailing steamer, and the ocean liner. The movement was already started in the year of depression just described. The Harbour Commissioners were authorized in 1850 to raise money to deepen the river channel. Commerce already justified the expense. In that season two hundred and twenty-two vessels came in from overseas, a total tonnage of forty-six thousand. Immigrants were arriving in Montreal at the rate of about thirty thousand a year. Hitherto the immigrants had been almost entirely settlers in transit going up to the farms and towns of Upper Canada. But after 1850 a great many stayed in Montreal. The building of the Grand Trunk Railway, now going on under the control of British contractors, brought, as it did everywhere, a flock of Irish “Navvies,” meaning originally and as a joke “Navigators,” fellows who travel. The Irish built the first railways in England, in France, and even in India, where Asiatic labor ate less but loafed more. With these and other Irish and British settlers came our “Griffintown,” the nickname given to the area west of McGill Street, between the new railway and the new canal. This wretched area, whose tumbled, shabby houses mock at the wealth of Montreal, was the first of our industrial “slums,” the gift of the machine age to replace the bush farm of the settler. It was and remained mainly Irish, a new breaking of the solid French area of Montreal. Others followed. The railway shops and works and the building of the great bridge made Point St. Charles. Factory industries began in Montreal on a real scale after 1850 with the factories rendered possible by the creation of rail and canal transport side by side. There came the rapid settlement of the riverbank beyond Point St. Charles, where used to run, still runs in part, the famous old Lachine Road, along the waterside. This made Verdun a separate town, now a separate city, crowded and almost metropolitan now with sixty thousand people, but still open ground at the time of which we speak. Yet between the buildings, the huge “plants” that outclass the factory as the factory once outclassed the shop and that border the Lachine Canal, and the close-built area of Verdun, and such, beside the river, there still lies an unoccupied space, along the line of the new aqueduct wide and open yet so screened on both sides by bush never cleared that the road through it is lonely to the verge of uncanniness. Montreal Island and its environs have many of those strangely isolated and lonely spots — the islands that divide the Lachine Rapids (Heron and Goat Island) and the north end of Isle Perrot where till a year or so back the express trains for Toronto and Chicago plunged through two miles of tangled bush, unchanged since the days of the Iroquois.
The port, we say, fed the industrial development. Tonnage increased each year; it reached fifty-eight thousand tons in 1851, a great total as compared with the ten thousand tons twenty years before, not so great as beside the nine million of 1938-39. Now begin the transatlantic steamers, ships combining sail and steam, which ran for the next forty years and which, almost till the end of the century, were the outstanding feature of the port. First to come was the Geneva, a boat built of iron, seven hundred tons and one hundred and sixty horsepower, and arriving in 1853. The same year saw the arrival of the Lady Eglington and the Sarah Sands (twelve hundred tons). With these boats began steamship mails. They took from two to three weeks to come out from Liverpool, but with the prevailing westerly winds were two days better in going home.
The Crimean War broke up traffic for the season of 1855, the steamships being commandeered as transports, but after it ocean steamers moved ahead with the formation of the Montreal Ocean Steamship Company, for which Hugh Allan acted as agent in making a contract for a fortnightly mail service from Montreal to Liverpool. The service almost at once (1858) became weekly, and the company after 1860 became the “H. and A. Allan Co.,” whose Allan Line passenger freight and mail became the outstanding name in the annals of Montreal known all over the world. All in all the Allan Line covered nearly a century, for it began in the sailing-ship day when Captain Alexander Allan sailed his brig from Glasgow to Quebec. The captain and his five sons followed up the trade. They built and owned ships, some of them clippers trading into Quebec. Hugh Allan sailed as a boy from the Clyde to enter a ship agent’s office in Montreal that became the scene of his life and achievement. His brother Andrew joined him. They were first agents, then owners. The first mail steamers (those named above) had, like Molson’s first Accommodation, too little power. The Allans boldly offered to put on ships with three hundred and fifty horsepower, to make (as they succeeded in making) the passage out from Liverpool in thirteen days and back in eleven.
The years that followed are a record of maritime progress like the rush of steam itself. The Allans saw that the days of wood were over and so they built in iron. They installed more and more power. Larger and faster was the word of the day. The Anglo-Saxon made the Quebec-Liverpool voyage in nine days. There were twenty vessels in the Allan Fleet in 1861. Success in those days reaped a huge reward when the freight on wheat was thirty cents a bushel, the days being still unknown when standardized competition and mechanized transport were to cut it to four or five cents, or even less, or even the vanishing point, grain going practically as ballast. If the profits were great so were the risks. The lighting and buoying of the river, the training of pilots, all such things were in their infancy. There were terrible disasters on the route, eight great ships wrecked in eight years (1857-64). Nor were the losses only on ocean traffic. Appalling disasters happened when steam was new. The explosion of a boiler on a Montreal-Longueuil ferry (1856) killed thirty-five people, scalded and injured many others. Even worse was the tragedy of the river steamer Montreal that caught fire in the St. Lawrence when carrying five hundred Scottish immigrants bound from Quebec to Montreal. The boat grounded in an attempt to reach the shore; flames swept its wooden structures. There was a panic rush that swamped the boats. The scene of horror that ensued was saved from its full effect by the bravery of the crew of another steamer which brought boats alongside of the burning vessel and rescued many of the passengers and crew. It is not known how many lives were lost. Many had leaped into the water. It is thought that two hundred and fifty perished. Fifteen charred bodies, twelve of them children, gathered from the wreck were brought to Montreal for burial. They lie in two graves in the cemetery on Mount Royal.
Such was the price of progress, new dangers for old, as later with the navigation of the air. Yet navigation went on apace. The deepening of the river showed sixteen and a half feet in 1854, eighteen in 1857. The government of the province of Canada rook over the dredging of the river in 1860; by the time it handed it over to the new government of the Dominion in 1867 the channel was twenty feet deep. In the last year of the old province (1866) five hundred and sixteen ocean vessels entered the Port of Montreal, their total tonnage 205,775, an average of nearly four hundred tons.
With the development of steam transport by water, parallel to it but a little behind it, went the development of railways. Water routes by lake and river were so widespread throughout Canada that, but for the Canadian winter, the railway might have waited as long as it did in New Zealand for Auckland to be joined to Wellington, or in seagirt Australia where the railways to a great extent are waiting still. But in Canada winter held the trump card. Even at that railways came slowly. There was a lapse of twenty years between the scene of 1836 described in the previous chapter and when the Champlain and St. Lawrence was opened at the opening of the Montreal-Toronto (Grand Trunk) in 1856. Railways, as in the United States, were built in bits and later joined into trunk lines. The first road was followed by the Atlantic and St. Lawrence, chartered in 1845, which nibbled its way, Longueuil to Richmond, in 1851. Later, as part of the Grand Trunk (1860), it connected Montreal to Portland. The Grand Trunk itself was chartered in 1852, building in sections toward Chicago on the west and Rivière du Loup on the east. It connected Montreal with Brockville in 1855, with Toronto in 1856. Its special meaning to the town lay in its extensive yards at Point St. Charles. It established railway building shops and there constructed as its masterpiece the Royal Train, including a locomotive with a funnel shaped exactly like a funnel, which carried the Prince of Wales during his visit of 1860.
Along this path of alternative stagnation and progress, of difficulty and achievement, moved Montreal in the days of the province of Canada.
Peculiar features of the life of the city at this stage of its growth were the recurrent “civic jubilifications,” held to mark each happy milestone of progress. For this the city was now the proper size (35,000 in 1839, 57,000 in 1852, 91,000 in 1861), big enough and not too big, for public rejoicing by all the people, for everybody to be happy over everything all at once. Such good fortune belongs only to the past. The people are too many today. Nothing short of a royal visit or an armistice can lift them all up together. The opening of a new fire hall lights up only the firemen; waterworks leave brewers cold and the public dry; a new wing added to a college fails to enthuse the stock exchange; a motor show is nothing to the ski club. But in the 1850s everybody was willing to be glad over everything, or at least to stop work, to drink its health, and follow in a torchlight procession. Paid amusement no doubt has also helped to displace these simpler rejoicings.
They had begun even in the bad times of the riots and fires and cholera. Montreal celebrated the London (Crystal Palace) Exhibition of 1851 by having a local exhibition of things going to the London Exhibition. “Immense throngs,” we are told, “visited the city during the week in which it was held.” “A regatta on the river . . . A dinner given by the Mayor and corporation, at which,” says the chronicle, “some excellent speeches were made . . .” Why not, indeed, since the history of Hochelaga began with Indian oratory? There was a great ball in which eight hundred “joined in the gay scene” and a torchlight procession under the management of the fire brigade. The brigade, as just shown, knew all about torches. The celebration ended with fireworks on the island wharf. But such an occasion was as nothing to what was done when good times began to join forces with glad hearts.
The same year witnessed the celebration of the St. Lawrence and Atlantic Railway mentioned above, with a “grand procession, ball and dinner and triumphal arches.” The decorations were hardly faded when there came the celebration of the Grand Trunk Portland Railway (in 1853); the dinner and demonstration for the arrival in port of the Geneva (as above); the celebration of the laying of Pier No. 1 of Victoria Bridge; the exhibition for five days (1855) of exhibits going to the Paris Exhibition, with “an immense number of strangers thronging the city,” with the Governor General, Sir Edmund Head, as the guest of the city; grand civic reception to French Commander De Belvège whose French ship of war was the first at Montreal since the conquest. But all this rejoicing sounds faint as beside the terrific reception accorded to the officers and men of the Thirty-ninth Regiment, Crimean veterans arriving in Montreal at the close of the war. Two special steamers brought them from Quebec, the guests of Montreal. “The citizens thronged the quays, parapet walls, the windows and roofs of the stores” . . . “The Montreal Artillery” . . . “roar of cannon” . . . “Cheer upon cheer” . . . “Address by the Mayor and corporation” . . . “a great procession” . . . “Banquet at the city concert hall” (Bonsecours Market Building still there) . . . all free . . . “One thousand two hundred guests,” all the regiment, the volunteers, Mayor, city council, and a flow of oratory that would have made Donnaconda seem silent.
“Continued excitement,” says the chronicle. Hardly was it over when there came the opening of the new McGill Buildings (Arts), the old Burnside Buildings having been burned down with or without the fire brigade in 1856. Right after that came the opening of the new waterworks with water thrown a hundred and ten feet high against the Notre Dame Church (October 10). Still breathless from that, the citizens rallied to the big celebration, November 12 and 13, 1856, of the opening of the Grand Trunk (Toronto-Montreal) Railway, which beat them all. Three thousand sterling was subscribed for “a procession, a banquet, an excursion and a ball.” As the day approached, says the record, “It was evident that the city was going to be a bumper” (a Victorian word now almost forgotten, meaning a huge drink) . . . “Immense trains of cars . . . crowds of strangers . . . the streets like Cheapside . . . a huge procession . . . a great banquet on the railway ground at Point St. Charles . . .” “The crowd was immense” . . . “Four thousand present” . . . “A sea of heads” . . . Speeches by the Governor General and other Indians, a torchlight procession, and that was only the first day . . . Next day a military review at Logan’s Farm, but why go further? Incidentally, it may be explained that Logan’s Farm was one of the most easterly and one of the largest of the great farms that lay above the city as marked on the map of 1856. A part of it is now the Parc Lafontaine. At this period it was the chosen ground for military reviews.
From such fabric can we build up the past life of our city as no document or statistics can show it, and with it, the great change in the outlook of human life and fortune in the century, almost a century that separates us from it.
We can realize that when the Prince of Wales arrived in the city in 1860 the city was all ready for him. A main feature of his visit was to be the official opening of the new Victoria Bridge.
The project and enterprise of a bridge over the St. Lawrence was initiated by the Hon. John Young, a member of the Hincks cabinet (1854) and a Harbour Commissioner of Montreal, 1853-76. “Through his foresight,” so his monument of 1908 on the water front bears witness, “Montreal has become the national port of Canada.” A long, hard fight was needed to carry the idea of throwing a bridge over a mile and a half of water, with a flood level twenty-five feet above its normal surface, and a torrent of ice and snow bearing down on it every spring with all the flood of water gathered from Lake Superior and hurled at it by Lachine. The thing seemed madness, but in the end it was done.
The Victoria Tubular Bridge, tubular no longer since 1898, was one of the triumphs of the world’s engineering at a time when engineering was young. It was a first great lesson in that “ice engineering” which has become, under such men as Howard Barnes of McGill, one of the great specialized achievements of practical science.
Engineering in 1850 was limited, structural steel in its infancy. It was not possible to pass across the stream with the huge strides, the towering height, and vast steel structures of the stupendous Jacques Cartier Harbour Bridge of 1930, two miles downstream. Nor was it possible to span the river by a suspension bridge thrown across from cliff to cliff, as at Niagara, a kite first, with a string, the string pulling a wire, and then more till the gathering wires swung like cobwebs in the sky. In this instance there were no cliffs to suspend from. In any case the distance is too great. Even with present materials suspension ends, the engineers say, at about seven thousand feet.
So the bridge had to get across the river, pier by pier. The problem was how to set the piers to resist the ice. It was at first proposed by the engineers to make the piers of cribs so big, so solid, so close together, and so heavy and so foursquare that nothing could budge them. The irresistible force was to meet an immovable object. Local wisdom knew better. Immovable objects won’t do for ice. The bigger the crib, the harder the shove. Ice, like all the forces of nature, cannot be conquered; it must be led aside, fooled into doing something else. Such is the wind, glancing off a windmill, and the water “escaping” as it throbs through a Niagara turbine, or the radio wave, off into eternal space forever, but fooled into imitating a human voice in leaving. So with the ice. Each pier of the bridge on its upstream side thrusts out against the current a long stone foot, a cutwater, that is ninety-two feet long at its base with a cutting edge of smooth stone. Against this the ice may rip and tear, hurling itself sheet upon sheet, piling up only to fall again, but powerless, once thus divided to exercise its power of expansion by which it overthrows anything that shuts it in. Along the abutments of the bridge, two hundred and ninety feet on each side as first built, and chiefly on the St. Lambert side, the south side, which catches the full swing of the river, the ice smashes and piles thirty feet high. Let it pile. There’s lots of room in the air.
Such is the Victoria Bridge. As first constructed, it carried above its piers a great iron tube, or, rather, a series of twenty-five tubes fitted together to make one. These tubes were made of wrought iron, boiler plate, one quarter to three quarters of an inch thick. They were not round but rectangular, sixteen feet wide, and in height they began at each side of the river at eighteen feet, six inches, each tube coupled about the last one with a rise of six inches, making the center twenty-two feet high. Inside the tube ran a single track for a train. The tube had windows, its sides covered with boards, and over it a board and tin roof with a footwalk (not for the public) along the flattened peak. From the summer water level to the bottom side of the tube the distance was sixty feet. The purpose of the tube was to protect the track against the accumulating snow and ice of a Canadian winter. This was an engineering error in over-safety, corrected later. . . . But the main feature of the engineering plan, the piers against the ice, succeeded.
