Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 779
Such was the background and such was the legend which led Jacques Cartier to his immortal discovery of the Saint Lawrence. It is characteristic of the period that he passed a large French ship from the Port of Rochelle as he went in through Belle Isle Strait. He thought nothing of it: no doubt there were plenty. Contrary winds and the Anticosti currents drove him away in 1534 but he came again in 1535, ascended the River to “Canada” and clear past it to Hochelaga and began therewith our Canadian history. Religious wars at home, the first call upon a religious people, kept the French away for half a century more. Then came Champlain and the definite foundation of New France.
THE BATEAUX OF THE ST. LAWRENCE — THE DAYS BEFORE THE STEAMBOAT
The word bateau in French means in the general sense any boat or craft. But in our Canadian history it is specially applied to the type of boats used for the navigation of the St. Lawrence in the days before steamboats and canals. These bateaux were shallow, flat-bottomed boats about forty feet long, of so little draft that they could be poled or hauled through the rapids. They carried masts and lugsails and could also be rowed with oars in calm water. A bateau carried about five tons. After 1809 the steamboat replaced them between Quebec and Montreal and with the opening of canals after 1821 their utility ended altogether.
CHAPTER FOUR IN THE DAYS OF NEW FRANCE
New England Follows the Sea, New France the Forest — The Bateaux of the St. Lawrence — La Salle’s Project of Ships on the Lakes — Success and Shipwreck of the Griffon — War Fleets of Canoes — Ships of War on Lake Ontario — The Oswego and the Ontario of 1755
THE HISTORY OF New France, of the Old French Régime in Canada, is mainly an inland story. The French, the Channel coast apart, are not a sea-faring nation. Their beautiful compact territory contrasts with the broken outlines of England wrapped in the mists of the sea, no place in it more than seventy miles from salt water. Hence the people of New England also kept their close touch with the sea, their fishing boats, their coastwise navigation, and used, as soon as they could rise to it, shipbuilding and the West Indies trade as the basis of a new commerce clear across to Africa and out in the boundless world. To Africa they sailed with rum to buy “niggers,” thence to the West Indies to sell “niggers” and buy sugar, then home to New England to turn sugar into rum and off again — with a profit all round the triangle. Thus rose the counting houses and the mahogany homes of Boston while the settlers of New France were out in the forests playing Indian, or lost in the heart of the continent, finding rivers for the English to use later.
New France turned its back upon the sea. It left the fisheries of the Newfoundland Banks, as far as they were French at all, to another set of Frenchmen. Ocean ships in the old days of French Canada practically all stopped at Quebec. The ascent of the river to Montreal was made by skiffs and sailboats, in particular by the kind called par excellence “bateaux.” These were large shallow, flat-bottomed boats, sharp at each end, about forty feet long, with masts and lugsails but also oars for calm water and ironshod poles for work in the shallows. A bateau carried about five tons — plenty for the limited commerce of the day. Rarely did ships come up from the sea. The delays of calms and currents and shoals prevented for the most part the ascent of ocean ships. Even below Quebec they sailed in a haphazard fashion. The river was not sounded and charted till Admiral Sanders’s officers, principally Captain James Cook, took the job in hand for Wolfe’s expedition.
In this, as in everything, the economic life of New France was given a false lead, by the attraction and profit of the fur trade. Here men might find a “natural liberty” — the phrase is that of the day — denied by a paternal government; the hope at least of inordinate gain — as with the gold prospectors of today — and above all the claim of the unknown, the adventurous, the infinite. Hence agriculture languished, leaving the best soil unknown, manufacture was forbidden, F. Parkman, “The Old Régime in Canada,” Chap. XX minerals but little worked and ships and the sea neglected. The everlasting Indian and his canoeful of beaver skins filled the whole horizon, while down in New England there was the sound of the hammer and the saw, the ship building on its cradle, the farm and the field, and the axe clearing the forest. To these busy people the Indian was just a curse and a nuisance, seen best along the barrel of a shot gun. Anyone acquainted with the annals of Indian savagery will agree that the last of the Mohicans was the best.
Some wiser Frenchmen saw it all, as notably Jean Talon, the first of the Intendants of the colony, officials intended “The Great Intendant Chronicles of Canada,” 1913 to aid the governor as business managers. Talon was all for sea trade and ship building. Ships had indeed been built by the French from the earliest colonial days. Pont Gravé, the associate of Champlain, built two little vessels at Port Royal in 1606 to use for reconnaissance. A ship called the Galiole, was built at Quebec in 1663 and rigged as a brigantine. But Jean Talon — unfortunately only in New France from 1665 to 1671 — went to work in earnest. He had men search the forests for the right timber and began experimenting at his own cost. The home government, the famous minister Colbert, encouraged the idea, supplying funds for building ships and for exporting timber to France. This would have put the clock forward a hundred and fifty years to the great days of shipbuilding at Quebec and the timber trade. Everything was all there except a sufficient continuing of interest. Three small vessels were built at Quebec (1670) for the French West Indies trade. Talon built a five hundred ton ship and had three hundred and fifty men at work in shipyards at Quebec, and this of a total population of some seven thousand. Ship building went on to a certain extent at Quebec all through the French régime both for the West Indies trade and for home voyages. But the ships never equalled in number or in quality those from France. Not enough care or experiment was given to the selection of timbers and to the difference of environment. Ship building in the old world, like everything else there, took time. Timbers must be weathered, must set, and must wait. It was a matter of years. Nelson’s Victory was laid down in 1758 and launched in 1765. But then ships were built to last. Nelson’s Victory floated for over a century and a half and is still propped up in dry dock. Lloyd’s Register shows that many ships that were afloat when Queen Victoria came to the throne outlived her reign by ten years or more. The record seems to be that of a Danish sloop the Constanz launched in 1723 and going strong as a coastal vessel till the Great War of 1914.
Hence the initial difficulty of colonial ship building. The circumstances called for rapid completion with untried timbers. It was not possible to make “a proper job” of it. Our own Maritime ship building, presently so glorious a success, met with this same trouble at the start. The French never had time to get over it.
It is possible that it was the use of unweathered timber that occasioned the shipwreck of La Salle’s Griffon (Griffin), the ship he built for the Upper Lakes, in the very moment of its obvious success. The famous explorer Robert Cavelier de La Salle (1643-1687) was a man as far ahead of his time as most people of his time were behind it — or behind its potentialities. He came to New France in 1666 and became fascinated with a vision of the opening up of North America. All that came later he saw then. There was no limit to where exploration might reach — to the Southern Sea, all the way to China. Round his seigneurie (on Montreal Island, at its west end) La Salle’s visions and preparations became a joke, as when Noah built the Ark. They christened the place “China” — and roared over it so heartily that it is still Lachine. One joke went a long way then. It had to.
But La Salle had really had the insight to see, as no one yet had, or had yet tried to realize, the full meaning of the navigation of the Great Lakes. Here were vast inland seas with a reach and access to half a continent, with excellent harbours, navigable everywhere except where the great Fall of Niagara cut the chain in two, and the heavy current of the Sault Ste-Marie to some extent cuts off Lake Superior. But in each section boats, or rather, ships, could sail at will in a region abounding with native resources of timber, fish and furs, and a tributory population to gather these treasures at the price of a few blankets and trinkets, cheap guns and cheaper rum. All that was needed was ships, real ships, not a little birch bark toy floating like a lily, and carrying about as much freight.
Why did not the Europeans at once build ships on the Lakes? Why did they wait for a hundred years after La Salle? Why did they have to wait for the urgency of war (1754-63) to teach them, as it always does, the things they might have learned in peace? The answer is that in the first place the Europeans were not yet really on the Lakes. The English and the Dutch sailed up and down the Hudson — from Manhattan to Orange, that is, from New York to Albany — but navigation beyond that was impossible except by streams and portages through the forest. The French access reached to Montreal but there navigation from the sea was terminated. To reach the Great Lakes they must portage around waterfalls, carrying heavy loads through miles of bush, or, harder labour still, haul and push flat-bottomed boats, their typical river bateaux against the current that swept along beside the river bank. By the time they reached Lake Ontario the French voyageurs were so out of breath, so to speak, that it never occurred to them to begin again — to build ships and go on.
Here then was La Salle’s great idea, as simple as Newton’s apple or Archimedes’s lever. Till this time the European had been content to take over the Indian canoe, as hopeless for real trade as a walnut on a pond. The canoe was marvellous as an evolution, the only thing ever “evolved” by the North American Indian. The best canoes of the Lakes were made of birchbark on a wooden frame rendered water-tight Memoirs of the Late War Commander Peuchot, Lake Ontario Command, 1759 with what was then called “chewing gum” (spruce gum). Canoes made of elm bark were not so good. The Algonquins of central Canada excelled in the art. Before the whites came most canoes were about 16 to 18 feet long and only carried two men with a package of furs or freight between them. Some smaller canoes, only twelve feet long were handled by one man. A few canoes carried more than two paddlers but they were rare. The great “war canoes” that carried as many as twenty-four men, and which are still made for gala occasions of peace, were no part of the original Indian equipment. Their war parties travelled in fleets of small canoes. The French, with the aid of Indians, built larger and larger canoes, and the Indians then adopted the idea for war canoes. Hence was evolved what was called the “canot de maître,” of which the normal crew was eight paddlers and a guide: but larger ones were also made. The French government built such canoes at Three Rivers. The British fur companies, both the North West Company and the Hudson’s Bay Company, took over the idea and adopted the large canoe as their standard inland transport.
What La Salle saw was that canoes had no place on Francis Parkman, “La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West” the Great Lakes except for people who had nothing better. His vision was that of a succession of ‘ships,’ not canoes, a fleet on Lake Ontario, another, the main one, to cover and control all Lake Erie, Lake Huron with the Georgian Bay and Lake Michigan with Green Bay, and beyond that a fleet on Lake Superior and a fleet on the Mississippi. The idea was too large for his fellow colonists. It excited jealousy, opposition and intrigue from the start. It was the first “octopus of transportation” that always threatens to devour North America. Hence the ultimate ruin of La Salle’s fortunes, the failure of his hopes and his tragic death in the Mississippi wilderness (1687). It was a hundred years and more before his phantom fleets appeared as realities.
La Salle went roundly to it. He went back and forward to France: borrowed money: brought out shipwrights, carpenters, smith’s tools, cables and equipment. He built first a small sailing vessel at Cataraqui to carry supplies back and forward to the Niagara peninsula. His grand prize was to be not Ontario but the lakes beyond. He portaged the Niagara peninsula. At the mouth of Cayuga Creek he found a suitable spot with low shores, still water and timber ready at hand. There he laid out his shipyard and set up his forges. The Seneca Indians stood about, watching the work, waiting when to strike. They waited too long. La Salle’s Griffon slid backwards down its ways and floated out on the creek, its crew safe in their tall fortress.
The making of the Griffon illustrates, at its very outset, the way in which our Lake shipping has been copied from the original ships of the sea and gradually, by difference of environment, readapted out of all resemblance. What Neptune of the ocean would recognize a whale-back ore carrier as his offspring? What fast pinnace would not flee “like a fluttered bird” (the words are Tennyson’s) at the sight of its cousin, the halfmile long timber raft? Right here at the first launching of the first lakeship we touch the problem of the latest: can a sea boat be also a lake boat?
The Griffon couldn’t; but it perished too soon to know it. It was fashioned after a Dutch model (a galleot), designed for the shallow waters, the steady winds and the large cargoes of an opulent and drowsy trade. Its makers had not yet encountered the varying breezes, the sudden squalls, the awkward current and the unsuspected shoals of the Canadian Great Lakes. The Griffon was rigged as a brig with broad yards, a sail under the bowsprit and a spread of square canvas with shipwreck in every yard of it.
She made what should have been an epoch-making voyage up Lake Erie, through “the Detroit,” Lake St. Clair, then so named, and its river and out across Lake Huron. It is true that a great gale on Lake Huron drove her before it, beyond all control, to the terror of all hands who fell down in supplication to St. Anthony of Padua, promising a chapel. Apparently St. Anthony knew Lake Huron. They came safely through the gale to the mission post at Michilli-machinac (Mackinaw). Thence the Griffon passed into Lake Michigan (Lac des Illinois) and so to Green Bay, the transit point for the Mississippi. There a flock of savages watched in amazement the unloading of the Griffon. “The George A. Cuthbertson, “Freshwater”, 1931 Pottawatommies,” writes Mr. Cuthbertson, were “dumfounded to see the prodigious quantities of goods which came out of the ship.” Well they might be. If the Griffon had a burden of sixty tons and if a two man canoe carried 500 lbs. of furs it would take a fleet of canoes three quarters of a mile long to compete with the cargo ship. The sight would dumbfound more than a Pottawatommie. It should have dumbfounded the managers of the fur trade. Instead it only awakened commercial suspicion and fear. The Griffon’s freight included the tools and equipment for more ships to be built further on. When all unloaded she filled up with a cargo of furs and started on her return. That was the end. The Griffon stood out into the Lake as the night fell on a gathering storm. From the shore they saw the flashes of intermittent lightning in the growing darkness and heard the salute of the ship’s guns; then a great storm overwhelmed lake and shore and the vessel was never seen again. The epoch-making event failed to make its epoch. There were no more commercial ships on the lakes for a hundred years.
Even for the purposes of war, itself the background of the North American scene, there was no realization of the potentiality of ships on the Lakes. After La Salle’s Griffon the French under Frontenac (1672-82) and his successor LaBarre built a few small vessels at Cataraqui, their dates, capacity and number uncertain. Governor Denonville’s ambitious but disastrous expedition of 1687 was carried by a vast war fleet but it only included three small sailing vessels, the mass of it consisted of a hundred and ninety-eight transports mostly flat-bottomed bateaux, built for the occasion, and a gathering of a hundred and forty-two canoes. This “fleet” carried two thousand men. One or two ships of war could have scattered them like a flock of loons. But the English had none. They had no ships, no harbours, no posts on the Lakes till they established Oswego in 1722. They left the control of the Lakes to their savage allies the Iroquois, strung out like a daisy chain all the way from the Hudson to Niagara, the Senecas, the most savage, the most cannibal, the most implacable holding the western end. The French, after La Salle, had no ships on the Upper Lakes nor had the English any.
It was only just before the throes of the final conflict (1754-1763) that both sides realized the value of “sea-power” on these inland seas and began building feverishly. The French were the first. At some time after their rebuilding at Cataraqui the Fort Frontenac, which had been abandoned (1688-1694) during the war, they began building schooners and apparently also brigs to connect Fort Frontenac with Fort Niagara. It would seem that they had four vessels by 1741. But they only began to build in earnest in 1755, with the Hurault, a square-topsail schooner of ninety tons, seventy-five feet overall, with a broadside of seven guns a side. Similar but larger was the Marquise de Vaudreuil of a hundred and twenty tons. Others followed in 1756.
The English began with haste equally feverish. Before any ships were built by them on the Lakes their flag had flown for over thirty years at the trading post of Oswego, a wretched spot isolated in marsh and forest, intended to connect with the trade route to Albany. Across this portage with infinite labour and industry Shirley the governor of Massachusetts (Lieutenant General of the Forces) hauled chains, cables, and naval equipment and laid out a dock yard. Fierce attacks of French Indians beset the builders at their work. Some were killed, some carried off to die at the stake. But the job was done. In the summer of 1755 the sloops Oswego and Ontario floated in the shallow harbour of Oswego. The sloop is a one masted vessel, the cart-horse brother of the race horse cutter. The word thus transplanted from Britain became and remained the common name for the rough single masted sail-boats of the Upper Canada settlers. But the Oswego sloops were large boats. They were forty feet over all, the mast up to the cross trees (where the topmast began) fifty-three feet, and the main boom fifty-five feet long. Cart horse, perhaps, as beside a racing cutter of a century later, they were things of beauty as beside the Santa Maria and La Salle’s Griffon. Gone are the tubby sides and the high castles; the hull runs smooth, the rail runs even; the “fore castle” is now, and remains, just a place under the deck, bad enough for the crew to sleep in. These boats carried five guns a side, eight and ten pounders. Like the French ships they carried square topsails one above the other, a rigging that reflected the design of the ships yards of Chatham and Toulon.
