Cape Breton Island has a French name, but it is really the land of the Scotch, where village pastors often preach in Gaelic, and the names in their flocks sound like a gathering of the clans.
CHAPTER VI
THE MARITIME PROVINCES
I have come into Canada through the Maritime Provinces, which lie on the Atlantic Coast between our own state of Maine and the mouth of the St. Lawrence. The Provinces are Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island. Their area is almost equal to that of our six New England states, and in climate and scenery they are much the same. Their population, however, is only about one million, or little more than one fourth as many as the number of people living in Massachusetts. These provinces were the first British possessions in Canada, and like New England they have seen the centre of population and progress move ever westward.
Nova Scotia is the easternmost province of the Dominion of Canada. Its capital and chief city is Halifax, situated on the Atlantic on one of the world’s best natural harbours. This is a deep water inlet ten miles in length, which is open all the year round. Montreal and Quebec are closed to navigation during the winter months on account of the freezing of the St. Lawrence.
Halifax is six hundred miles closer to Europe than is New York, and nearer Rio de Janeiro than is New Orleans. As the eastern terminus of the Canadian National Railways, it has direct connections with all Canada. With these advantages, the city hopes to become one of the great shipping centres on the North Atlantic.
Halifax has long been noted as the most English city in Canada. It was once the military, naval, and political centre of British North America, and gay with the social life of British officers and their ladies. Now, both the warships and the soldiers are gone, and the city is devoting itself to commercial activities.
As we steamed past the lighthouses and the hidden guns on the headlands guarding the entrance, I was reminded of all that this harbour has meant to America. The city was founded by Lord Cornwallis in 1749 at the suggestion of Boston merchants who complained that the French were using these waters as a base for their sea raiders. Less than thirty years later it provided a haven for Lord Howe when he was driven out of Boston by our soldiers of the Revolution, and became the headquarters for the British operations against the struggling colonies. In the war of 1812, the American warship Chesapeake was brought here after her defeat by the British frigate Shannon. During our Civil War Halifax served as a base for blockade runners, and the fortunes of some of its wealthy citizens of to-day were founded on the profits of this dangerous trade. No one dreamed then that within two generations England and America would be fighting side by side in a World War, that thousands of United States soldiers would sail from Halifax for the battlefields of Europe, or that an American admiral, commanding a fleet of destroyers, would establish his headquarters here. Yet that is what happened in 1917–18. All that now remains of the former duels on the sea is the annual sailing race between the fastest schooners of the Gloucester and the Nova Scotia fishing fleets.
Halifax is built on a hillside that rises steeply from the water-front to a height of two hundred and sixty feet above the harbour. The city extends about halfway up the hill, and reaches around on both sides of it. The top is a bare, grassy mound, surmounted by an ancient citadel.
Stand with me on the edge of the old moat, and look down upon Halifax and its harbour. Far to our left is the anchorage where occurred one of the greatest explosions the world ever knew. Just as the city was eating breakfast on the morning of December 6, 1917, a French munitions ship, loaded with benzol and TNT, collided with another vessel leaving the harbour, and her cargo of explosives blew up in a mighty blast. Nearly two thousand people were killed, six thousand were injured, and eleven thousand were made homeless. Hardly a pane of glass was left in a window, and acres of houses were levelled to the ground. A deck gun was found three miles from the water, and the anchor of one of the vessels lies in the woods six miles away, where it was thrown by the explosion. A street-car conductor was blown through a second-story window, and a sailor hurled from his ship far up the hillside. Since then much of the devastated area has been rebuilt along approved town-planning lines, but the scars of the disaster are still visible. For a long time after the explosion, the local institution for the blind was filled to capacity, and one saw on the streets many persons wearing patches over one eye.
Standing on the hill across the harbour one sees the town of Dartmouth, where much of the industrial activity of the Halifax district is centred. There are the largest oil works, chocolate factories, and sugar refineries of Canada. Vessels from Mexico, South America, and the British West Indies land their cargoes of tropical products at the doors of the works. Fringing the water-front are the masts of sailing vessels and the smokestacks of steamers. Among the latter is a cable repair ship, just in from mending a break in one of the many submarine telegraph lines that land on this coast. Next to her is a giant new liner, making her first stop here to add to her cargo some twenty-five thousand barrels of apples from the Annapolis Valley. This valley, on the western side of Nova Scotia, is known also as “Evangeline Land.” It was made famous by Longfellow’s poem based on the expulsion of the French Acadians by the English because they insisted on being neutral in the French-British wars. It is one of the finest apple-growing districts in the world, and sends annually to Europe nearly two million barrels. Many descendants of the former French inhabitants have now returned to the land of their ancestors.