Canada and Newfoundland

by Frank G. Carpenter

Looking toward the mouth of the harbour, we see the new terminal, a twenty-five million dollar project that has for some years stood half completed. Here are miles and miles of railroad tracks, and giant piers equipped with modern machinery, a part of the investment the Dominion and its government-owned railway system have made to establish Halifax as a first-class port. Beyond the port works another inlet, Northwest Arm, makes its way in between the hills. I have motored out to its wooded shores, which in summer time are crowded with the young people of Halifax, bathing and boating. It is the city’s chief playground and a beautiful spot.

But now take a look at the city itself, stretching along the water-front below where we stand. The big red brick building just under our feet is the municipal market. There, on Saturdays, one may see an occasional Indian, survivor of the ancient Micmacs, and Negroes who are descendants of slaves captured by the British in Maryland when they sailed up the Potomac and burned our Capitol. Farther down the hillside are the business buildings of the city, none of them more than five stories high, and all somewhat weatherbeaten. I have seen no new construction under way in downtown Halifax; the city seems to have missed the building booms of recent years. Most of the older houses are of stone or brick. Outside the business district the people live in wooden frame houses, each with its bit of yard around it. One would know Halifax for an English town by its chimney pots. Some of the houses have batteries of six or eight of these tiles set on end sticking out of their chimneys.

The streets are built on terraces cut in the hillside, or plunging down toward the water. Some of them are so narrow that they have room for only a single trolley track, on which are operated little one-man cars. I stepped for a moment into St. Paul’s Church, the first English house of worship in Canada. Its front pew, to the left of the centre aisle, is reserved for the use of royal visitors. Passing one of the local newspaper offices, I noticed a big crowd that filled the street, watching an electric score board that registered, play by play, a World Series baseball game going on in New York. The papers are full of baseball talk, and the people of this Canadian province seem to follow the game as enthusiastically as our fans at home.

My nose will long remember Halifax. In lower Hollis Street, just back from the water-front, and not far from the low gray stone buildings that once quartered British officers, I smelled a most delicious aroma. It was from a group of importing houses, where cinnamon, cloves, and all the products of the East Indies are ground up and packed for the market. If I were His Worship, the Mayor of Halifax, I should propose that Hollis street be renamed and called the Street of the Spices. Just below this sweet-scented district, I came to a tiny brick building, with a sign in faded letters reading “S. Cunard & Co., Coal Merchants.” This firm is the corporate lineal descendant of Samuel Cunard, who, with his partners, established the first transatlantic steamship service nearly a century ago, and whose name is now carried all over the world by some of the greatest liners afloat.

Another odour of the water-front is not so sweet as the spices. It is the smell of salt fish, which here are dried on frames built on the roofs near the docks. Nova Scotia is second only to Newfoundland in her exports of dried cod, and all her fisheries combined earn more than twelve million dollars a year. They include cod, haddock, mackerel, herring, halibut, pollock, and salmon. Lunenburg, down the coast toward Boston, is one of the centres of the deep-sea fishing industry, and its schooners compete on the Grand Banks with those from Newfoundland, Gloucester, and Portugal.

I talked in Halifax with the manager of a million-dollar corporation that deals in fresh fish. He was a Gloucester man who, as he put it, “has had fish scales on his boots” ever since he could remember.

“We operate from Canso, the easternmost tip of Nova Scotia,” he said. “Our steamers make weekly trips to the fishing grounds, where they take the fish with nets. They are equipped with wireless, and we direct their operations from shore in accordance with market conditions. While the price of salt fish is fairly steady, fresh fish fluctuates from day to day, depending on the quantities caught and the public taste. Such fish as we cannot sell immediately, we cure in our smoking and drying plants.

“All our crews share in the proceeds of their catch, and the captains get no fixed wages at all. We could neither catch the fish nor sell them at a profit without the fullest coöperation on the part of our men, most of whom come from across the Atlantic, from Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, and also from Iceland. Next to the captain, the most important man on our ships is the cook. Few fish are caught unless the fishermen are well fed. The ‘cook’s locker’ is always full of pies, cakes, and cookies, to which the men help themselves, and the coffee-pot must be kept hot for all hands to ‘mug up.’”

From Halifax I crossed Nova Scotia by rail into the adjoining province of New Brunswick. Nova Scotia is a peninsula that seems to have been tacked on to the east coast of Canada. It is three hundred and seventy-four miles long, and so narrow that no point in it is more than thirty miles from the sea. The coast does not run due north and south, but more east and west, so that its southernmost tip points toward Boston. The Bay of Fundy separates it from the coasts of Maine and New Brunswick, and leaves only an isthmus, in places not more than twenty miles wide, connecting Nova Scotia with the mainland. The lower or westernmost half of the province is encircled with railroads, which carry every year increasing thousands of tourists and hunters from the United States. The summer vacationists and the artists go chiefly to the picturesque shore towns, while those who come up for hunting and fishing strike inland to the lakes and woods. Deer and moose are still so plentiful in Nova Scotia that their meat is served at Halifax hotels during the season.

The scenery is much like that of Maine. Rolling hills alternate with ledges of gray rock, while at every few miles there are lakes and ponds. Much of the country is covered with spruce, and many of the farms have hedges and tall windbreaks of those trees. The farmhouses are large and well built; they are usually situated on high ground and surrounded by sloping fields and pastures considerably larger than the farm lots of New England. In some places the broad hills are shaped like the sand dunes of Cape Cod. At nearly every station freshly cut lumber was piled up, awaiting shipment, while one of the little rivers our train crossed was filled with birch logs floating down to a spool factory.