Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 780
The Oswego and the Ontario were rapidly followed by other larger boats, topsail schooners. The war fleets on Lake Ontario became a factor in the Seven Years War. The record of their combats and evolutions — more evolutions than combats — does not belong in this place. The curious may obtain a vivid picture of them by turning to the forgotten pages of Fenimore Cooper, “The Pathfinder,” 1840 Fenimore Cooper, himself a sailor, with a touch of old tar and salt sea and language not now heard in the lake resorts of Ontario. The fleets played no decisive part in the war. But their existence presaged later history. The war of 1812 was to show what naval power on the Lakes could mean; and with it what a force of disunion and separation naval establishments and rival naval preparation could mean for a continent already, in that critical epoch, sufficiently threatened with disunion. Fortunately common sense and common interest combined to banish the war ships from the lakes by the Rush-Bagot agreement of 1818. The Oswego and the Ontario made way for the great fleet of lake schooners whose sails for over a century lent to our Great Lakes an added charm that blended with their natural beauty.
THE TOPSAIL SCHOONER NANCY OF 1789 — ITS HULL IS STILL PRESERVED
The building of ships on the Great Lakes only began in earnest as the wars between Great Britain and France drew to their close. After the Cession of Canada ship building moved fast with the Provincial Marine as a branch of the Royal Navy. Lake vessels now began to depart from the ocean type and move towards the fore-and-aft rig later typical of the Lakes. The midway type is seen in the top sail Schooner Nancy launched in 1789. She was built of oak, had a keel length of 68 feet and a beam of 20 feet.
CHAPTER FIVE PEACE AND WAR ON HUDSON BAY
The French and the Hudson’s Bay Company — Radisson Changes Sides Again — Attacks from French Canada — The Crusade of the Chevalier de Troyes in 1686 by the Ottawa-Abitibi Route — Iberville’s Naval Victory of 1697 — Fort Prince of Wales — La Pérouse in the Bay 1782 — Capture of Fort Prince of Wales
THIS MARITIME CONFLICT between Great Britain and the French in what are now Canadian waters was not confined to the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence. The Hudson Bay was also a theatre of naval operations and for about a third of a century, from 1680 until 1713, the scene of ravage on shore and conflict at sea. It seems strange that war should have come even to these empty snow-covered latitudes where peace should have been as still and silent as the Aurora Borealis, and where life itself was heroic enough. But war will not have it so.
The explorers had long since given up the Arctic Seas as a bad job. They were convinced at last that the Khan of Tartary did not live there. Davis’s mark of 73° north latitude remained an unchallenged record. But the waters where Cabot and Frobisher, Davis and Hudson sought a passage to Asia turned out to be the entrance to a vast inland sea, Hudson Bay.
Hudson discovered it from the ocean. But a Frenchman, the coureur des bois Pierre Esprit Radisson, reached it from overland. Here was a strange forceful character who took on savagery at will, did and saw such wonderful things that he passed into the liar class, along with Herodotus, Pytheas, Marco Polo and those others who strained credulity with too much truth. As such our history long passed Radisson by. Ill-treated, as he thought, by the French government, Radisson sold out to England. Hence the Hudson’s Bay Company of 1670 and thence much else. At the time of which we speak (1680) the company had its posts established on James Bay at Fort Charles, at Fort Rupert and Fort Albany. They had four ships in regular service, and after having paid off the original cost of its ships, plants and equipment the Company was returning to its share-holders a profit of 200 per cent a year. But meantime the French had never accepted as valid this vast gift of half a continent from Charles II to a group of his subjects. They could set against it the gift of Francis I to Jacques Cartier which reached as far as Asia. They themselves had a fur company, the Compagnie du Nord, based on Quebec, and claiming anything it could reach.
The French moreover had a readier access to the Bay than the English. They could reach it by the sea either from France or from Quebec, and reach it over land by the route of the Ottawa River, the Montreal, Lake Temiskaming and the Abitibi. Nor did they wait for the existence of normal war between the nations to begin their attacks on the Company’s Beckles Willson, “The Great Company,” 1900, Vol. I, Ch. IX posts. Radisson and his associate Groseillers, having again changed sides, obtained ships from Quebec and appeared in the Bay (1682), set up Fort Bourbon, on the Hayes river, on the west side of the Bay at the very time when the Company was establishing Fort Nelson lower down. From then until the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 there was intermittent war and ravage on the Bay, lasting through King William’s war (1689-1697) and Queen Anne’s war with a brief respite for the Peace of Ryswick of 1697.
The Chevalier de Troyes, an aged soldier of New France, led what he looked on as a crusade, overland from Montreal in 1686 to drive the English from the northern seas. With his expedition were thirty veteran soldiers, and, of still more worth, three sons of the famous Charles le Moyne, one of them the Sieur d’Iberville, the most heroic name of an epoch of heroism. At the earliest opening of the rivers they ascended the Ottawa and the Montreal, and passed the Temiskaming portage, little dreaming that under their feet as they passed was all the gold of Hollinger and Porcupine, far surpassing the spoils of Cortez and Pizarro in Mexico and Peru.
The crusaders seized and ravaged the helpless posts on James Bay, returning in triumph to Quebec with 50,000 beaver skins. A treaty patched things up as between King James and King Louis but gave place to open war between King Louis and King William. The ravages in the Bay, where the Company between 1682 and 1688 claimed to have lost already seven ships and six forts and factories — a money loss of £38,332/15s., were part of the grounds of the declaration of war. Both kingdoms now sent expeditions into the Bay and in a series of conflicts the forts changed hands, and changed names with the varying tide of success. As the most famous exploit of this remote forgotten war, history chronicles Iberville’s naval triumph of 1697. With his single ship the Pelican, forty-four guns and two hundred and fifty men, separated from his consorts, he fought three English ships of war, inferior singly but far superior as a force. Two were sunk, one escaped crippled, and Iberville was left in triumph, with ninety men struck down, his ship a wreck — a triumph empty but glorious.
“The Founding of Churchill,” J. F. Kenney. 1932 Churchill, destined ultimately to be the major port of the Bay, was first founded, then burnt and abandoned during these tumults (1688). Its permanent foundation took place (1717) after the Treaty of Utrecht, based on other victories elsewhere, had given the Hudson Bay Territory permanently to Great Britain. But in those days and for long after intermittent war between France and England seemed the natural destiny of the nations. One war over they planned for the next. After the Treaty of Utrecht the Hudson’s Bay Company determined never again to be exposed to ravage by the French. They rebuilt and strengthened their forts (Fort York) and established new ones, Henley House (1720) 150 miles up the Albany to check invasion at the source, and Moose Fort to command James Bay (1730). Above all they erected as a great central basis of defense Fort Prince of Wales beside the mouth of the Churchill River. Its crumbled remains still speak history. One could sit and muse on its ruined battlements (were it not for the cold or the flies) as on the ruins of Nineveh, or as some future philosopher may well sit on the Maginot Line. The musing is ever the same — that each advance in means of sustenance of human life must carry with it the dead weight of the increasing apparatus of death.
For Fort Prince of Wales was, so to speak, the Maginot Line D. MacKay, “The Honourable Company,” 1936 of Rupertsland. It was absolutely impregnable, provided it had so many men to defend it that they would have been impregnable without it. To be exact, it needed about four hundred. It was built first of wood (1718) then of stone (1734), from military plans used under Marlborough. Its walls were forty-two feet thick. It was built in a great square, some 170 feet across, with huge projected bastions, shaped like spearheads at the corners, with sunken stores and magazines, a “ravelin” to defend the gate and all the lost art of the days when the defence still beat the attack. Yet in the sequel La Pérouse took it (1782) for the asking.
War came again in 1744. It was delayed by the newer tendencies of the dawning dream of commercial peace but it came. The previous war was fought as to who should govern Spain: this time Europe was convulsed over the sovereignty of Austria; and already the curse of European dissension fell upon America.
But the war of 1744-48, the war of the Austrian succession, never reached the Bay. The Company were too well prepared. A chain of defense was organized so that each post might aid the others. It warms one’s heart to read of the precise and vigorous instructions sent out (May 10, 1744) from London when the war broke out to the chief factors at Fort Albany and elsewhere: “We do hereby strictly direct you to be always on your guard and to keep a good watch . . . fix your cannon . . . keep them constantly loaded . . . exercise (drill) your men once a week . . . employ any Indians you can confide in . . . if overpowered, nail up the cannon, blow up the house destroying everything that can be of service to the enemy.” That was so to speak “the stuff.” It was too good for the French anyway. They never came: but partly no doubt because the capture (the first capture (1745)), of their great naval base at Louisburg impeded any attack by sea.
This same timely “preparedness” carried the Company’s forts safely through the Seven Years War of 1755-63. The conquest of Canada removed the danger of overland attack on the forts of the Bay, and brought apparently a false confidence that forgot preparedness and neglected precaution. As a result, in the War of American Independence, the French appeared again in the Hudson Bay. The famous Admiral La Pérouse — whose later shipwreck and loss in the southern seas became one of the mysteries of maritime history — appeared in the Bay in 1782. He had a powerful fleet, the Sceptre of seventy-four guns, the Astarte and the Engageante of thirty-six Stephen Leacock, “Adventurers of the Far North,” 1913 and a full equipment. Fort Prince of Wales with a garrison of thirty-nine men surrendered at discretion, August 8, 1782. In command of it was Samuel Hearne, the famous explorer of the Coppermine River, with but little stomach for war and less means of making it. Luckily the Company’s autumn ships had sailed for home. La Pérouse took away what guns and supplies he could. He also took the manuscript of Hearne’s famous Journey, but restored it when he witnessed Hearne’s distress at losing it. La Pérouse was an author also, and knew how it must feel. Powerless to destroy the vast stone fort La Pérouse burnt what he could of its “trimmings.” The rest, crumbled and weatherbeaten stands there still, being unable to do anything else. British and American writers who ought to know better have made much of the French depredations on the forts. “Utter looting of the fort . . . ,” “sacking, plundering and devastating,” etc. This is false colouring. War is war. And the record of the French carefully leaving food on the shore so that the English might not starve in the coming winter calls back a lost world, forgotten now.
THE ATLANTIC PACKET — THE SWAN SONG OF THE DAYS OF SAIL
The sailing ship only came into its own in point of maximum efficiency and speed, as in point of nautical beauty and seaworthiness, at the moment when its days were already numbered. The Atlantic Packets, stout and steady, all-sail vessels, carried the first flock of migration to America after the Napoleonic Wars. The Clipper Ships, designed for greater speed, succeeded the Packets and held the field till they also succumbed to the sail-and-steam ship that lasted out the century.
CHAPTER SIX BRITANNIA RULES THE LAKES
Lake Shipping after the Conquest — The Provincial Marine — First Vessels on Lake Superior — The New Lake Types of Sail — Fore and Aft Rig and Centre Boards — The Ships of War of 1812 — The Naval Attack on York in 1813 — Perry’s Victory — The Rush-Bagot Convention of 1818 bans War Vessels from the Lakes
THE DEFEAT OF France and the cession of Canada opened wide the reach and opportunity of British naval power and British maritime commerce. The interior of the continent lay open from the great sea way of the St. Lawrence and the thousand lakes and rivers connected with it. Not only the hostile force of France but the Indian power was gone. The great armies transported and recruited in America for the Seven Years War and the appearance of armed ships of war on the Lakes showed how powerless the Indians were against the Whites, as soon as the full force of European arms was brought into play. Henceforth Indian treachery might impede, Indian savages might ensanguine, but neither could 1763-64 block the path of the advance. After Pontiac’s War and the 1792-95 campaigns of General Anthony Wayne in the Ohio territory the Indian factor no longer controlled, as the Iroquois had done, the destiny of the continent. The Indian, apart from such single heroic figures as a Tecumseh or a Brant, an S. Morison, “History of the United States” Oskosh or a Sitting Bull, became nothing but the hireling savage ally, despised by both sides, then the humble dependent, and finally the vanishing race that cannot vanish — a historic ghost, held in a queer equilibrium.
The conquest and the cession, we say, greatly stimulated the progress of navigation of the St. Lawrence. The fleet of boats and ships that came up from Quebec to carry General Murray’s section of Amherst’s army which forced the capitulation of Montreal (1760) contained 35 bateaux, three frigates and three gun boats. It put, as it were, a new face on the St. Lawrence. It was clear now that the great river and the lakes above could be used as highways of trade as they had been as a path of war. Even before the war was technically over British trade struck out on the new path. Alexander Henry, the famous pioneer trader, with two companions, reached Michillimackinack (Mackinaw) in 1761. An increasing flock of traders followed in his track. These were the nucleus of the later North West Company, tapping the Hudson’s Bay Company’s territory from Lake Superior. With the traders appeared farmers from New England as the vanguard of actual settlement. The government as early as 1762 built, at Navy Island in the Niagara, two 80 ton topsail schooners, the Huron and the Michigan to protect this growing trade and carry both troops and commercial goods.
Across the shifting scene swept the sudden ravage of Francis Parkman, “The Conspiracy of Pontiac” Pontiac’s war. Pontiac, a forest Caesar, planned to kill all the English and restore the French. To him the stubborn, calculating English meant land settlement and the deposition of his race; the easy, wandering French, trade and rum, and nothing more. His attempt failed — achieving nothing but random massacre. Indian power was gone. The schooner Huron anchored at night in the Detroit river, with all guns loaded to the muzzle, and blasted a night attack of Indian canoes into eternity.
With Pontiac gone, navigation and trade multiplied on the lakes — with Cataraqui (Kingston), Niagara, Detroit, and Mackinaw as the main ports. It would have increased faster but for the peculiar policy of the British government in trying to prevent all private building of ships. The government proposed itself to build the Lake ships and to have them serve at one and the same time as vessels of patrol and cargo carriers. Thus came into being the Provincial Marine, at first directly under the Admiralty, then indirectly, through the Governor General of Canada. The vessels were manned by seamen George A. Cuthbertson, “Freshwater,” 1931, Chap. VII brought from England and by others recruited on the Lakes. Among the earliest ships were the topsail schooner Kent (1776), 80 tons, and the cutter Caldwell of 1777. By 1780 the Provincial Marine had five vessels on Lake Ontario and nine on Lake Erie. The government monopoly had been relaxed in one instance even before this (1770) to permit to certain English interests to develop the copper deposits of Lake Superior which had early attracted attention. The enterprise failed, leaving behind it a sloop and barges, laid up on shore.
This restriction on private ship building served a useful purpose during the war of the American Revolution from 1776 to 1783. As the government controlled all floating craft of any account on the Lakes the war fortunately lacked those features of a naval war which were to form so large a chapter of the War of 1812.
But in between the two wars the development of lake shipping made continuous progress. The government monopoly proved impossible to retain. Repeated protest induced the Lords of Trade in London to relax the rules. Colonial officials were allowed to give permission to build and sail Lake vessels under regulations in something of the spirit of the famous British Navigation Acts of that period which lasted till 1849 — stipulations as to the status and nationality of officers and crew and as to trading regulations. With that, ship building started in earnest and never slackened for a hundred years, till it had dotted the great lakes with that vanished fleet of eighteen hundred sail which was once their most picturesque concomitant.
First in the field were the western traders. A sloop of 45 tons, christened all too soon the Beaver, was built on the Upper Lakes, to be hauled up the rapids of the Soo for use on Lake Superior. The current proved too strong. The Beaver had to fall back on the more commonplace voyages of Erie, Michigan and Huron. But the Otter, a seventy-five ton sloop (1785) built by the organized North West Company, sailed as the first vessel, apart from the abortive sloop and barges of the English mining syndicate, to navigate Lake Superior.
