Westward with the Prince of Wales

by W. Douglas Newton

CHAPTER I

NEWFOUNDLAND

I

St. John's, Newfoundland, was the first city of the Western continent to see the Prince of Wales. It was also the first to label him with one of the affectionate, if inexplicable sobriquets that the West is so fond of.

Leaning over the side of the Dauntless on the day of the Prince's visit, a seaman smiled down, as seamen sometimes do, at a vivid little Newfoundland Flapper in a sunset-coloured jumper bodice, New York cut skirt, white stockings and white canvas boots. The Flapper looked up from her seat in the stern of her "gas" launch (gasolene equals petrol), and smiled back, as is the Flapper habit, and the seaman promptly opened conversation by asking if the Flapper had seen the Prince.

"You bet," said the Flapper. "He's a dandy boy. He's a plush."

His Royal Highness became many things in his travels across America, but I think it ought to go down in history that at St. John's, Newfoundland, he became a "plush."

Newfoundland also introduced another Western phenomenon. It presented us to the race of false prophets whom we were to see go down in confusion all the way from St. John's to Victoria and back again to New York.

Members of this race were plentiful in St. John's. As we spent our days before the Prince's arrival picking up facts and examining the many beautiful arches of triumph that were being put up in the town, we were warned not to expect too much from Newfoundland. St. John's had not its bump of enthusiasm largely developed, we were told; its people were resolutely dour and we must not be disappointed if the Prince's reception lacked warmth. In all probability the weather would conform to the general habit and be foggy.

Here, as elsewhere, the prophets were confounded. St. John's proved second to none in the warmth of its affectionate greeting—that splendid spontaneous welcome which the whole West gave to the Prince upset all preconceived notions, swept away all sense of set ceremonial and made the tour from the beginning to the end the most happy progress of a sympathetic and responsive youth through a continent of intimate personal friends.

II

The Dauntless went out from St. John's on Sunday, August 10, to rendezvous with Renown and Dragon, and the three great modern warships came together on a glorious Western evening.

There was a touch of drama in the meeting. In the marvellous clear air of gold and blue that only the American Continent can show, we picked up Renown at a point when she was entering a long avenue of icebergs. There were eleven of these splendid white fellows in view on the skyline when we turned to lead the great battleship back to the anchorage in Conception Bay, north of St. John's, and as the ships followed us it was as though the Prince had entered a processional way set with great pylons arranged deliberately to mark the last phase of his route to the Continent of the West.

Some of these bergs were as large, as massive and as pinnacled as cathedrals, some were humped mounds that lifted sullenly from the radiant sea, some were treacherous little crags circled by rings of detached floes—the "growlers," those almost wholly submerged masses of ice that the sailor fears most. Most of the bergs in the two irregular lines were distant, and showed as patches of curiously luminant whiteness against the intense blue of the sky. Some were close enough for us to see the wonderful semi-transparent green of the cracks and fissures in their sides and the vivid emerald at the base that the bursting seas seemed to be eternally polishing anew.

When Renown was sighted, a mere smudge on the horizon, we saw the flash of her guns and heard faintly the thud of the explosions. She was getting in some practice with her four-inch guns on the enticing targets of the bergs.

We were too far away to see results, but we were told that as a spectacle the effect of the shell-bursts on the ice crags was remarkable. Under the explosions the immense masses of these translucent fairy islands rocked and changed shape. Faces of ice cliffs crumbled under the hits and sent down avalanches of ice into the furious green seas the shocks of the explosions had raised.

This was one of the few incidents in a journey made under perfect weather conditions in a vessel that is one of the "wonder ships" of the British Navy. The huge Renown had behaved admirably throughout the passage. She had travelled at a slow speed, for her, most of the time, but there had been a spell of about an hour when she had worked up to the prodigious rate of thirty-one knots an hour. Under these test conditions she had travelled like an express with no more structural movement than is felt in a well-sprung Pullman carriage.

The Prince had employed his five day's journey by indulging his fancy for getting to know how things are done. Each day he had spent two hours in a different part of the ship having its function and mechanism explained to him by the officer in charge.

As he proved later in Canada when visiting various industrial and agricultural plants, His Royal Highness has the modern curiosity and interest for the mechanics of things. Indeed, throughout the journey he showed a distinct inclination towards people and the work that ordinary people did, rather than in the contemplation of views however splendid, and the report that he said at one time, "Oh, Lord, let's cut all this scenery and get back to towns and crowds," is certainly true in essence if not in fact.

It was in the beautiful morning of August 11th that the Prince made his first landfall in the West, and saw in the distance the great curtain of high rock that makes the grim coast-line of Newfoundland.

For reasons of the Renown's tonnage he had to go into Conception Bay, one of the many great sacks of inlets that make the island something that resembles nothing so much as a section of a jig-saw puzzle. The harbour of St. John's could float Renown, but its narrow waters would not permit her to turn, and the Prince had to transfer his Staff and baggage to Dragon in order to complete the next stage of the voyage.

Conception Bay is a fjord thrusting its way through the jaws of strong, sharp hills of red sandstone piled up in broken and stratified masses above grey slate rock. On these hills cling forests of spruce and larch in woolly masses that march down the combes to the very water's edge. It is wild scenery, Scandinavian and picturesque.

In the combes—the "outports" they are called—are the small, scattered villages of the fishermen. The wooden frame houses have the look of the packing-case, and though they are bright and toy-like when their green or red or cinnamon paint is fresh, they are woefully drab when the weather of several years has had its way with them.

In front of most of the houses are the "flakes," or drying platforms where the split cod is exposed to the air. These "flakes" are built up among the ledges and crevices of the rock, being supported by numberless legs of thin spruce mast; the effect of these spidery platforms, the painted houses, the sharp stratified red rock and the green massing of the trees is that of a Japanese vignette set down amid inappropriate scenery.

Cod fishing is, of course, the beginning and the end of the life of many of these villages on the bays that indent so deeply the Newfoundland coast. It is not the adventurous fishing of the Grand Banks; there is no need for that. There is all the food and the income man needs in the crowded local waters. Men have only to go out in boats with hook and line to be sure of large catches.

Only a few join the men who live farther to the south, about Cape Race, in their trips to the misty waters of the Grand Banks. Here they put off from their schooners in dories and make their haul with hook and line.

A third branch of these fishers, particularly those to the north of St. John's, push up to the Labrador coast, where in the bays, or "fishing rooms," they catch, split, head, salt and dry the superabundant fish.

By these methods vast quantities of cod and salmon are caught, and, as in the old days when the hardy fishermen of Devon, Brittany, Normandy and Portugal were the only workers in these little known seas, practically all the catch is shipped to England and France. During the war the cod fishers of Newfoundland played a very useful part in mitigating the stringency of the British ration-cards, and there are hopes that this good work may be extended, and that by setting up a big refrigerating plant Newfoundland may enlarge her market in Britain and the world.

With the fishery goes the more dangerous calling of sealing. For this the men of Newfoundland set out in the winter and the spring to the fields of flat "pan" ice to hunt the seal schools.

At times this means a march across the ice deserts for many days and the danger of being cut off by blizzards; when that happens no more news is heard of the adventurous hunters.

Every few years Newfoundland writes down the loss of a ship's company of her too few young men, for Newfoundland, very little helped by immigration, exists on her native born. "A crew every six or eight years, we reckon it that way," you are told. It is part of the hard life the Islanders lead, an expected debit to place against the profits of the rich fur trade.

Solidly blocking the heart of Conception Bay is a big island, the high and irregular outline of which seems to have been cut down sharply with a knife. This is Bell Island, which is not so much an island as a great, if accidental, iron mine.

Years ago, when the island was merely the home of farmers and fishermen, a shipowner in need of easily handled ballast found that the subsoil contained just the thing he wanted. By turning up the thin surface he came upon a stratum of small, square slabs of rock rather like cakes of soap. These were easily lifted and easily carted to his ship.

He initiated the habit of taking rock from Bell Island for ballast, and for years shipmasters loaded it up, to dump it overboard with just as much unconcern when they took their cargo inboard. It was some time before an inquiring mind saw something to attract it in the rock ballast; the rock was analyzed and found to contain iron.

Turned into a profiteer by this astonishing discovery, the owner of the ground where the slabs were found clung tenaciously to his holding until he had forced the price up to the incredible figure of 100 dollars. He sold with the joyous satisfaction of a man making a shrewd deal.

His ground has changed hands several times since, and the prices paid have advanced somewhat on his optimistic figure; for example, the present company bought it for two million dollars.

The ore is not high grade, but is easily obtained, and so can be handled profitably. In the beginning it was only necessary to turn over the turf and take what was needed, the labour costing less than a shilling a ton. Now the mines strike down through the rock of the island beneath the sea, and the cost of handling is naturally greater. It is worth noting that prior to 1914 practically all the output of this essentially British mine went to Germany; the war has changed that and now Canada takes the lion's share.

It was under the cliffs of Bell Island, near the point where the long lattice-steel conveyors bring the ore from the cliff-top to the water-level, that the three warships dropped anchor. As they swung on their cables blasting operations in the iron cliffs sent out the thud of their explosions and big columns of smoke and dust, for all the world as though a Royal salute was being fired in honour of the Prince's arrival.

III

During the day His Royal Highness went ashore informally, mainly to satisfy his craving for walking exercise. Before he did so, he received the British correspondents on board the Renown, and a few minutes were spent chatting with him in the charming and spacious suite of rooms that Navy magic had erected with such efficiency that one had to convince oneself that one really was on a battleship and not in a hotel de luxe.

We met a young man in a rather light grey lounge suit, whose boyish figure is thickening into the outlines of manhood. I have heard him described as frail; and a Canadian girl called him "a little bit of a feller" in my hearing. But one has only to note an excellent pair of shoulders and the strength of his long body to understand how he can put in a twenty-hour day of unresting strenuosity in running, riding, walking and dancing without turning a hair.

It is the neat, small features, the nose a little inclined to tilt, a soft and almost girlish fairness of complexion, and the smooth and remarkable gold hair that give him the suggestion of extreme boyishness—these things and his nervousness.

His nervousness is part of his naturalness and lack of poise. It showed itself then, and always, in characteristic gestures, a tugging at the tie, the smoothing-down of the hair with the flat of the hand, the furious digging of fists into pockets, a clutching at coat lapels, and a touch of hesitance before he speaks.

He comes at you with a sort of impulsive friendliness, his body hitched a little sideways by the nervous drag of a leg. His grip is a good one; he meets your eyes squarely in a long glance to which the darkness about his eyes adds intensity, as though he is getting your features into his memory for all time, in the resolve to keep you as a friend.

He speaks well, with an attractive manner and a clear enunciation that not even acute nervousness can slur or disorganize. He is, in fact, an excellent public speaker, never missing the value of a sentence, and managing his voice so well that even in the open air people are able to follow what he says at a distance that renders other speakers inaudible.

In private he is as clear, but more impulsive. He makes little darting interjections which seem part of a similar movement of hands, or the whole of the body, and he speaks with eagerness, as though he found most things jolly and worth while, and expects you do too. Obviously he finds zest in ordinary human things, and not a little humour, also, for there is more often than not a twinkle in his eyes that gives character to his friendly smile—that extraordinarily ready smile, which comes so spontaneously and delightfully, and which became a byword over the whole continent of the West.

It is this friendly and unstudied manner that wins him so much affection. It makes all feel immediately that he is extraordinarily human and extraordinarily responsive, and that there are no barriers or reticences in intercourse with him.

He is not an intellectual, and he certainly is not a dullard. He rather fills the average of the youth of modern times, with an extreme fondness for modern activities, which include golfing, running and walking; jazz music and jazz dancing (when the prettiness of partners is by no means a deterrent), sightseeing and the rest, and my own impression is, that he is much more at home in the midst of a hearty crowd—the more democratic the better—than in the most august of formal gatherings.

The latter, too, means speech-making, and he has, I fancy, a young man's loathing of making speeches. He makes them—on certain occasions he had to make them three times and more a day—and he makes good ones, but he would rather, I think, hold an open reception where Tom, Dick, Vera, Phyllis and Harry crowded about him in a democratic mob to shake his hand.

Yet though he does not like speech-making, he showed from the beginning that he meant to master the repugnant art. To read speeches, as he did in the early days of the tour, was not good enough. He schooled himself steadily to deliver them without manuscript, so that by the end of the trip he was able to deliver a long and important speech—such as that at Massey Hall, Toronto, on November 4—practically without referring to his notes.

During his day in Conception Bay, the Prince went ashore and spent some time amid the beautiful scenery of rocky, spruce-clad hills and valleys, where the forests and the many rocky streams give earnest of the fine sport in game and fish for which Newfoundland is famous.

The crews of the battleships went ashore, also, to the scattered little hamlet of Topsail, lured there, perhaps, by the legend that Topsail is called the Brighton of Newfoundland. It is certainly a pretty place, with its brightly painted, deep-porched wooden houses set amid the trees in that rugged country, but the inhabitants were led astray by local pride when they dragged in Brighton. The local "Old Ship" is the grocer's, who also happened to be the Selfridge's of the hamlet, and his good red wine or brown ale, or whatever is yours, is Root Beer!

For many of the battleships' crews it was the first impact with the Country of the Dry, and the shock was profound.

"I was ashore five hours, waiting for the blinkin' liberty boat to come and take me off," said one seaman, in disgust. "Five hours! And all I had was a water—and that was warm."

IV

On Tuesday, August 12, the Prince transferred to Dragon and in company with Dauntless steamed towards St. John's, along the grim, sheer coast of Newfoundland, where squared promontories standing out like buttresses give the impression that they are bastions set in the wall of a castle built by giants.

The gateway to St. John's harbour is a mere sally-port in that castle wall. It is an abrupt opening, and is entered through the high and commanding posts of Signal and the lighthouse hills.

One can conceive St. John's as the ideal pirate lair of a romance-maker of the Stevensonian tradition, and one can understand it appealing to the bold, freebooting instincts of the first daring settlers. A ring of rough, stratified hills grips the harbour water about, sheltering it from storms and land enemies, while with the strong hills at the water-gate to command it, and a chain drawn across its Narrows, it was safe from incursion of water-borne foes.

It was the fitting stronghold of the reckless Devon, Irish and Scots fishermen who followed Cabot to the old Norse Helluland, the "Land of Naked Rocks," and who vied and fought with, and at length ruled with the rough justice of the "Fishing Admirals" the races of Biscayan and Portuguese men who made the island not a home but a centre of the great cod fishery that supplied Europe.

St. John's has laboured under its disadvantages ever since those days. The town has been pinched between the steep hills, and forced to straggle back for miles along the harbour inlet. On the southern side of the basin the slope has beaten the builder, and on the dominant green hill, through the grass of which thrusts grey and red-brown masses of the sharp-angled rock stratum, there are very few houses.

On the north, humanity has made a fight for it, and the white, dusty roads struggle with an almost visible effort up the heavy grade of the hill until they attain the summit. The effect is of a terraced and piled-up city, straggling in haphazard fashion up to the point where the great Roman Catholic cathedral, square-hewn and twin-towered, crowns the mass of the town.

Plank frame houses, their paint dingy and grey, with stone and brick buildings, jostle each other on the hill-side streets, innocent of sidewalks. The main thoroughfare, Water Street, which runs parallel with the harbour and the rather casual wharves, is badly laid, and given to an excess of mud in wet weather, mud that the single-deck electric trams on their bumpy track distribute lavishly. The black pine masts that serve as telegraph-poles are set squarely and frequently in the street, and overhead is the heavy mesh of cables and wires that forms an essential part of all civic scenery in the West. The buildings and shops along this street are not imposing, and there seems a need for revitalization in the town, either through a keener overseas trading and added shipping facilities, or a broader and more encouraging local policy.

Most of the goods for sale were American, and some of them not the best type of American articles at that. It was hard to find indications of British trading, and it seemed to me that here was a field for British enterprise, and that with the easing of shipping difficulties, which were then tying up Newfoundland's commerce, Britain and Newfoundland would both benefit by a vigorous trade policy. Newfoundlanders seemed anxious to get British goods, and, as they pointed out, the rate of exchange was all in their favour.

Through Water Street passes a medley of vehicles; the bumpy electric trams, horse carts that look like those tent poles the Indians trail behind them put on wheels, spidery buggies, or "rigs," solid-wheeled country carts, and the latest makes in automobiles.

The automobiles astonish one, both in their inordinate number and their up-to-dateness. There seemed, if anything, too many cars for the town, but then that was only because we are new to the Western Continent, where the automobile is as everyday a thing as the telephone. All the cars are American, and to the Newfoundlander they are things of pride, since they show how the modern spirit of the Colony triumphs over sea freight and heavy import duty. Motor-cars and electric lighting in a lavish fashion that Britain does not know, form the modern features of St. John's.

When the two warships steamed through the Narrows into the harbour, St. John's, within its hills, was looking its best under radiant sunlight. The fishermen's huts clinging to the rocky crevices of the harbour entrance on thousands of spidery legs, let crackers off to the passing ships and fluttered a mist of flags. Flags shone with vivid splashes of pigment from the water's edge, where a great five-masted schooner, barques engaged in the South American trade, a liner and a score of vessels had dressed ships, up all the tiers of houses to where strings of flags swung between the towers of the cathedral.

From the wharves a number of gnat-like gasolene launches, gay with flags, pushed off to flutter about both cruisers until they came to anchor. From one of the quays signal guns were fired, and the brazen and inordinate bangings of his Royal salute echoed and re-echoed in uncanny fashion among the hills that hem the town, so that when the warships joined in, the whole cup of the harbour was filled with the hammerings of explosions overlapping explosions, until the air seemed made of nothing else.

On the big stacks of Newfoundland lumber at the harbour-side, on the quays, on the freight sheds and on the roofs of buildings, Newfoundland people, who, like the weather, were giving the lie to the prophets, crowded to see the Prince arrive. He came from Dragon in the Royal barge in the wake of the Dauntless' launch, which was having a worried moment in "shooing" off the eager gasolene boats, crowding in, in defiance of all regulations, to get a good view.

There was no doubt about the warmth of the welcome. It was a characteristic Newfoundland crowd. Teamsters in working overalls, fishermen in great sea boots and oilskins, girls garbed in the smartness of New York, whose comely faces and beautiful complexions were of Ireland, though there was here and there a flash of French blood in the grace of their youth, little boys willing to defy the law and climb railings in order to get a "close up" photograph, youths in bubble-toed boots—all proved that their dourness was not an emotion for state occasions, and that they could show themselves as they really were, as generous and as loyal as any people within the Empire.

The Prince was received on the jetty by the Governor and the members of the legislature. With them was a guard of honour of seamen, all of them Newfoundland fishermen who had served in various British warships throughout the war. There was a contingent from the Newfoundland Regiment also, stocky men who had fought magnificently through the grim battles in France, and on the Somme had done so excellently that the name of their greatest battle, Gueudecourt, has become part of the Colony's everyday history, and is to be found inscribed on the postage stamps under the picture of the caribou which is the national emblem.

The Prince's passage through the streets was a stirring one. There were no soldiers guarding the route through Water Street and up the high, steep hills to Government House, and the eager crowd pressed about the carriage in such ardour that its pace had to be slowed to a walk. At that pace it moved through the streets, a greater portion of the active population keeping pace with it, turning themselves into a guard of honour, walking as the horses walked, and, if they did break into a trot, trotting with them.

The route lay under many really beautiful arches, some castles with towers and machicolations sheafed in the sweet-smelling spruce; others constructed entirely from fish boxes and barrels, with men on them, working and packing the cod; others were hung with the splendid fur, feathers and antlers of Newfoundland hunting.

Through that day and until midday of the next, lively crowds followed every movement of the "dandy feller," swopping opinions as to his charm, and his smile, his youthfulness and his shyness. They compared him with his grandfather who had visited St. John's fifty-nine years ago, and made a point of mentioning that he was to sleep in the very bedroom his grandfather had used.

There was the usual heavy program, an official lunch, the review of war veterans, a visit to the streets when the lavish electric light had been switched into the beautiful illuminations, when the two cruisers were mirrored in the harbour waters in an outline of electric lights, and when on the ring of hill-tops red beacons were flaring in his honour. There was a dance, with his lucky partners sure of photographic fame in the local papers of tomorrow, and then in the morning, medal giving, a peep at the annual regatta, famous in local history, on lovely Quidividi Lake among the hills, and then, all too soon for Newfoundland, his departure to New Brunswick.

There was no doubt at all as to the impression he made. The visit that might have been formal was in actuality an affair of spontaneous affection. There was a friendliness and warmth in the welcome that quite defies description. His own unaffected pleasure in the greeting; his eagerness to meet everybody, not the few, but the ordinary, everyday people as much as the notabilities, his lack of affectation, and his obvious enjoyment of all that was happening, placed the Prince and the people, welcoming him, immediately on a footing of intimacy. His tour had begun in the air of triumph which we were to find everywhere in his passage across the Continent.