CHAPTER LIV.
SLOW SAILING BY THE BAY OF ISLANDS.—THE RIVER HUMBER.—ST. GEORGE’S RIVER, CAPE, AND BAY.—A BRILLIANT SUNSET.
Tuesday, July 19. We have a brilliant morning and a favoring breeze, but a vexatious current. What a net of these currents has the tyrannous Neptune set around his beloved Newfoundland! Like a web in a dim cellar window, it is perpetually entangling some fly of a craft in its subtle meshes. Buzz and struggle as we will, he has got us by the foot, and, spider-like, may look on, and enjoy our perplexity. We advance with insufferable slowness, notwithstanding the considerable speed of our rounded bows, through the water. “That is the Bay of Islands,” they said, early in the morning. It is the Bay of Islands still. We are a long time sailing by the Bay of Islands. But it gives us time to look, and talk about it with the Captain. Beyond the forest-covered hills which surround it, are lakes as beautiful, and larger than Lake George, the cold, clear waters of which flow to the bay under the name of the river Humber. It has a valley like Wyoming, and more romantic scenery than the Susquehanna. The Bay of Islands is also a bay of streams and inlets, an endless labyrinth of cliffs and woods and waters, where the summer voyager would delight to wander, and which is worth a volume sparkling with pictures.
How fine a blue the waters of the gulf are in this light! We seem to be upon the broad Atlantic. What a realm of seas and shores, islands, bays and rivers, is this St. Lawrence world, in the midst of which we now are, and of which our people know so little! Where are our young men, who have the time and money to skip, from summer to summer, in the fashionable rounds of travel, that they do not seek this virgin scenery? One long, loud yell of the black loon, deep diver of these lakes and fiords, pealing through the silent evening, would ring in their recollection long after the music of city parks abroad had been forgotten.
Late in the day, and Cape St. George in view, a bold and clifted point pushed out from the mainland twenty miles or more, and commanding extensive prospects both inland and along the coast. A month would not suffice for all its many landscapes. St. George’s River is a wild, rapid stream, and St. George’s Bay is quite a little sea, deep, and darkened by the shadows of fine mountains, and broad woodlands. Like the Bay of Islands, it is a paradise for the huntsman, and the fisher. Awake, ye devotees of the fishing-rod and rifle, and the red camp-fire beneath the green-wood trees, and know that to visit St. George’s cape and bay and river, and all that is St. George’s, is better late than never.
The sun is in the waves, and yonder we have those wonderful heavens again. The west is all one bath of colors, colors of the rainbow. And clouds like piled-up fleeces, and like fleeces pulled apart and scattered, and fleeces spun into soft and woolly threads, and again those threads woven into downy fabrics, are weltering in the glory. The wind has fallen, and the waves have put out all their white, flashing lights, and now mould themselves into the flowing lines and the sweetest forms of beauty. We go down with glad hearts, and ask protection for the night.