Careers of Danger and Daring

by Cleveland Moffett

WOULD you see the most skilful pilots in the world, men who know all the tricks with ocean liners and the Indian tricks as well, who fight the rush of seventy-foot tides in the Bay of Fundy, or drive their frail canoes through furious gorges, or coolly turn the nose of a thousand-ton steamboat into the white jaws of rock-split rapids where a yard either way or a second's doubt would mean destruction, or hitch long hawsers to a log raft big as a city block (the lumber in a single raft may be worth a hundred thousand dollars), and swing her down a tumbling waterway hundreds of miles, with a peril in every one, and land her safe? If you would see all this, go to the wonderful St. Lawrence, which sweeps in wide and troubled reaches from the Great Lakes to the sea.

Of course I do not mean that any one man can do all these things,—that would be asking too much,—but each in his own line, half-breed or Indian or fur-bundled voyageur, has such quickness of eye, such surety of hand, that you will be glad to watch the rafters on their rafts, and ask no more of them, or the canoeists at their paddles, or the big-craft pilots at their wheels.

Let us stand on the long iron bridge that spans the St. Lawrence just above Montreal, the very place to study the river as it narrows and runs swifter for its smashing plunge through yonder rapids to the east, the dreaded Lachine Rapids, whose snarling teeth flash white in the sun. Look down into the greenish rush, and see how the waters hurl past these good stone piers, sharp-pointed up-stream against the tearing of winter ice! Here goes the torrent of Niagara and the inland ocean of Superior and Erie and Ontario, all crushed into a funnel of land by this big island at the left that blocks the flow, and gorged by the in-pour of the Ottawa a few miles back that brings down the floods of southern Canada. As fast as a horse can gallop runs the river here, and faster and faster it goes as the long slant takes it, ten, twelve, fourteen miles an hour (which is something for a river), until a dozen islands strewn across the funnel's lower end goad the rapids to their greatest rage. Here is where they kill. Then suddenly all is quiet, and the river, spreading to a triple width, rests, after its madness, in Montreal's placid harbor.

"BIG JOHN" STEERING A BOAT THROUGH THE LACHINE RAPIDS.

Standing here, I think of my first experience in shooting these rapids (it was on one of the large river boats), and I must confess that it gave me no very thrilling sense of danger. There were two or three plunges, to be sure, at the steepest part, and a little swaying or lurching, but, so far as movement goes, nothing to disturb one accustomed to the vicissitudes of, say, ordinary trolley-car navigation. However, when I came to the reason of this fairly smooth descent, and saw what it means to stand at the wheel through that treacherous channel, I found my wonder growing. I thought of the lion-tamer, whose skill is shown not so much by what happens while he is in the cage as by what does not happen. A hundred ways there are of doing the wrong thing with one of these boats, and only a single way of doing the right thing. For four miles the pilot must race along a squirming, twisting, plunging thread of water, that leaps ahead like a greyhound, and changes its crookedness somewhat from day to day with wind and tide. In that thread alone is safety; elsewhere is ruin and wreck. Instantly he must read the message of a boiling eddy or the menace of a beckoning reef, and take it this way or that instantly, for there are the hungry rocks on either hand. He must know things without seeing them; must feel the pulse of the rapids, as it were, so that when a mist clouds his view, or the shine of a low-hung rainbow dazzles him, he may still go right. It is a fact that with all the pilots in this pilot-land, and all the hardy watermen born and brought up on the St. Lawrence, there are not ten—perhaps not six—men in Canada to-day, French or English or Indian, who would dare this peril. For all other rapids of the route, the Gallop Rapids, the Split-rock Rapids, the Cascades, and the rest, there are pilots in plenty; but not for those of Lachine. And, to use the same simile again, I saw that the shooting of these Lachine Rapids is like the taming of a particularly fierce lion; it is a business by itself that few men care to undertake.

So it came that I sought out one of these few, Fred Ouillette, pilot and son of a pilot, an idol in the company's eyes, a hero to the boys of Montreal, a figure to be stared at always by anxious passengers as he peers through the window atop the forward deck, a man whom people point to as he passes: "There's the fellow that took us through the rapids. That's Ouillette." This unsought notoriety has made him shy. He does not like to talk about his work or tell you how it feels to do this thing. A dash of Indian blood is in him, with some of the silent, stoic, Indian nature. Yet certain facts he vouchsafed, when I went to his home, that help one to an understanding of the pilot's life.

He emphasized this, for instance, as essential in a man who would face that fury of waters, he must not be afraid. One would say that the rapids feel where the mastery is, whether with them or with the pilot, and woe to him if pounding heart or wavering hand betray him. The rapids will have no mercy. And there are pilots, it appears, who know the Lachine Rapids, every foot of them, and could do Ouillette's work perfectly if Ouillette were standing near, yet would fail utterly if left alone. Every danger they can overcome but the one that lies in themselves. They cannot brave their own fear. He cited the case of a pilot's son who had worked in the Lachine Rapids for years, helping his father, and learned the river as well as a man can know it. At the old man's death, this son announced that he would take his father's place, and shoot the rapids as they always had done; yet a season passed, then a second season, and always he postponed beginning, and, with one excuse or another, took his boats through the Lachine Canal, a safe but tame short cut, not likely to draw tourists.

"Not start heem right, that fadder," said Ouillette. "Now too late. Now nevair he can learn heem right."