Westward with the Prince of Wales

by W. Douglas Newton

CHAPTER V

CHARLOTTETOWN, PRINCE EDWARD ISLAND, AND HABITANT, CANADA

I

The Prince of Wales and his cruiser escort left Halifax on the night of Monday, August 18th, for Prince Edward Island, in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, arriving at the capital of that province the next morning.

Owing to the difficulty of getting across country, the Press correspondents were unable to be present at this visit, and went direct by train to Quebec to await the Prince's arrival.

We were sorry not to visit this tiny, self-contained province of the Dominion, for we had heard much concerning its charm and individuality in character. It is a fertile little island, rich in agriculture, sport and fishing. It is an island of bright red beaches and green downs set in a clear sea, an Eden for bathers and holiday-makers.

It is also one of the last rallying-points of the silver fox, which is bred by the islanders for the fur market. This is a pocket industry unique in Canada. The animals are tended with the care given to prize fowls, each having its own kennel and wire run. Such domesticity renders them neither hardy nor prolific, and the breeding is an exacting pursuit.

At the capital, Charlottetown, His Royal Highness had a real Canadian welcome, tinged not a little with excitement. While he was on the racecourse one of the stands took fire, and there was the beginning of a panic, men and women starting to clamber wildly out of it and dropping from its sides. The Prince, however, kept his place and continued to watch the races. His presence on the stand quieted the nervous and checked what might have been an ugly rush, while the fire was very quickly got under.

Off Charlottetown the Prince transferred again to the battle-cruiser Renown, and finished the last section of his sea voyage up the great St. Lawrence on her.

II

Our disappointment at not seeing Prince Edward Island was mitigated by the glimpses we had from our train of the country of New Brunswick and the great area of the habitants that surrounds Quebec.

On the morning of August 19th we woke to the broken country of New Brunswick. The forests of spruce, pine, maple and poplar made walls on the very fringe of the single-line railway track for miles, giving way abruptly to broad and placid lakes, or to sharp narrow valleys, in which shallow streams pressed forward over beds of white stone and rock. At this time the streams were narrowed down to a slim channel, but the broad area of white shingle—frequently scored by many subsidiary thin channels of water—gave an idea of what these streams were like in flood.

There was a great deal of unfriendly black rock in the land pushing itself boldly up in hills, or cropping out from the thin covering soil. Here and there were the clearings of homesteaders, who lived sometimes in pretty plank houses, sometimes in the low shacks of rough logs that seemed to be put in the clearings—some of them not yet free of the high tree stumps—in order to give the land its authentic local colour.

On the streams that flow between the walls of trees there were always logs. Logs sometimes jamming the whole fairway with an indescribable jumble, logs collected into river bays with a neatness that made the surface of the water appear one great raft, and by these "log booms" there was, usually, the piles of squared timber, and the collection of rough wooden houses that formed the mill.

The mills have the air of being pit-head workings dealing with a cleaner material than coal. About them are lengthy conveyors, built up on high trestle timbers, that carry the logs from the water to the mill and from the mill to the dumps, that one instantly compares to the conveyors and winding gear of a coal mine. Beneath the conveyors are great ragged mounds of short logs cut into sections for the paper pulp trade, and jumbled heaps of shorter sections that are to serve as the winter firing for whole districts; these have the contours of coal dumps, while fed from chutes are hillocks of golden sawdust as big and as conspicuous as the ash and slag mounds of the mining areas.

In the mill yards are stacks and stacks of house planks that the great saws have sliced up with an uncanny ease and speed, stacks of square shingles for roofs and miles of squared beams.

We passed not a few but a multitude of these "booms" and mills, and our minds began to grasp the vastness of this natural and national industry. And yet it is not in the main a whole-time industry. For a large section of its workers it is a side line, an occupation for days that would otherwise be idle. It is the winter work of farmers, who, forced to cease their own labours owing to the deep snow and the frosts, turn to lumbering to keep them busy until the thaw sets in.

That fact helps the mind to realize the potentialities of Canada. Here is a business as big as coal mining that is largely the fruit of work in days when there is little else to do.

We saw this industry at a time when the streams were congested and the mills inactive. It was the summer season, but, more than that, the lack of transport, owing to the sinking, or the surrender by Canada for war purposes, of so much ship space, was having its effect on the lumber trade. The market, even as far as Britain, was in urgent need of timber, and the timber was ready for the market; but the exigencies, or, as some Canadians were inclined to argue, the muddle of shipping conditions, were holding up this, as well as many other of the Dominion industries.

In this sporting country there are many likely looking streams for fishermen, as there are likely looking forests for game. At New Castle we touched the Miramichi, which has the reputation of being the finest salmon-fishing river in New Brunswick; the Nepisiquit, the mouth of which we skirted at Bathurst, is also a great centre for fishermen, and, indeed, the whole of this country about the shores of the great Baie de Chaleur—that immense thrust made by the Gulf of St. Lawrence between the provinces of New Brunswick and Quebec—is a paradise for holiday-makers and sportsmen, who, besides their fishing, get excellent shooting at brant, geese, duck, and all kinds of game.

The Canadian of the cities has his country cottage in this splendidly beautiful area, which he comes to for his recreation, and at other times leaves in charge of a local farmer, who fills his wood shed with fire logs from the forest in the summer, and his ice house with ice from the rivers in winter.

III

In this district, and long before we reached the Quebec border, we came to the country of the habitant farmer. As we stopped at sections to water or change engines, we saw that this was a land where man must be master of two tongues if he is to make himself understood. It is a land where we read on a shop window the legend: "J. Art Levesque. Barbier. Agent du Lowdnes Co. Habits sur commande." Here the habitant does business at La Banque Nationale, and takes his pleasure at the Exposition Provinciale, where his skill can win him Prix Populaires.

On the stations we talked with men in British khaki trousers who told us in a language in which Canadian French and camp English was strangely mingled of the service they had seen on the British front.

It is the district where the clever and painstaking French agriculturist gets every grain out of the soil, a district where we could see the spire of a parish church every six miles, the land of a people, sturdy, devout, tenacious and law-abiding, the "true 'Canayen' themselves,"

"And in their veins the same red stream;
The conquering blood of Normandie
Flowed strong, and gave America
Coureurs de bois and voyageurs
Whose trail extends from sea to sea!"

as William Henry Drummond, a true poet who drew from them inspiration for his delightful dialect verse, describes them.

The railway passes for hundreds of miles between habitant farms. The land is beautifully cared for, every fragment of rock, from a boulder to a pebble, having been collected from the soil through generations, and piled in long, thin caches in the centres of the fields. The effect of passing for hundreds of miles between these precisely aligned cairns is strange; one cannot get away from the feeling that the rocky mounds are there for some barbaric tribal reason, and that presently one will see a war dance or a sacrifice taking place about one of them.

The farms themselves have a strange appearance. They have an abnormally narrow frontage. They are railed in strips of not much greater breadth than a London back garden, though they extend away from the railway to a depth of a mile and more. At first this grouping of the land appears accidental, but the endlessness of the strange design soon convinces that there is a purpose underlying it.

Two explanations are offered. One is that the land has been parcelled out in this way, and not on a broad square acreage, because in the old pioneer days it afforded the best means of grouping the homesteads together for defence against the Red Man. The other is that it is the result of the French-Canadian law which enforces the division of an estate among children in exact proportion, and thus the original big farms have been split up into equal strips among the descendants of the original owner. Either of these explanations, or the combination of them, can be accepted.

At Campbellton, a pretty, toy-like town, close up to La Baie de Chaleur, there is gathered a remnant of the Micmac Indians, whom the first settlers feared. They have a settlement of their own on a peak of the Baie, and one of their chiefs had travelled to Halifax to be among those who welcomed the son of the Great White Chief.

Campbellton let us into the lovely valley of the Matapedia, an enchanted spot where the river lolls on a broad bed through a grand country of grim hills and forests. Now and then, indeed, its channel is pinched into gorges where its water shines pallidly and angrily amid the crowded shadows of rock and tree; usually it is the nursemaid of rich, flat valleys and the friend of the little frame-house hamlets that are linked across its waters by a spidery bridge of wooden trestles. At times beneath the hills it is swift and combed by a thousand stony fingers, and at other times it is an idler in Arcadie, a dilettante stream that wanders in half a dozen feckless channels over a desert of white stones, with here and there the green humpback of an island inviting the camper.

Beyond Matapedia we got the thrill of the run, an abrupt glimpse of the St. Lawrence, steel-blue and apparently infinite, its thirty miles of breadth yielding not a glimpse of the farther side. A short distance on, beyond Mont Joli, a place that might have come out of a sample box of French villages, the railway keeps the immense river company for the rest of the journey.

The valley broadened out into an immense flat plain with but few traces of the wilder hills of New Brunswick. About the line is a belt of prosperity forty miles deep, all of it worked by the habitant owners of the narrow farms, all of it so rich that in the whole area from the border to the city of Quebec there is not a poor farmer.

Before reaching Riviere du Loup we saw the high peaks of the Laurentine Mountains on the far side of the St. Lawrence, and on our side of the stream passed a grim little islet called L'Islet au Massacre, where a party of Micmac Indians, fleeing from the Iroquois in the old days, were caught as they hid in a deep cave, and killed by a great fire that their enemies built at the mouth.

We saw a few seals on the rocks of the river, but not a hint of the numbers that gave Riviere du Loup its name. It is a cameo of a town with falls sliding down-hill over a chute of jumbled rocks into a logging pool beneath.

Riviere du Loup is in the last lap of the journey to Quebec. There are a score or so of little hamlets, the names of which—St. Alexandre, St. Andre, St. Pascal, St. Pacome, St. Valier and so on—sound like a reading from the Litany of the Saints. And, passing the last of them, we saw across the narrowed St. Lawrence a trail of lace against the darkness of the Laurentine hills, a mass of filigree that moved and writhed, so that we understood when some one said:

"The Montmorency Falls."

A moment later we saw across the stream the city of Quebec, a hanging town of fairyland, with pinnacle and spire, bastion and citadel delicate against the quick sky. A city of romance and charm, to which we hurried by the very humdrum route of the steam ferry that crosses to it from the Levis side.