Canada and Newfoundland

by Frank G. Carpenter

Montreal is the greatest inland port in the world. It ships more grain than any other city. It is only four hundred and twenty miles north of New York, yet it is three hundred miles nearer Liverpool. One third of the distance to that British port lies between here and the Straits of Belle Isle, where the Canadian liners first meet the waves of the open sea. The city is the terminus of the canal from the Great Lakes to the St. Lawrence and of Canada’s three transcontinental railways. Vessels from all over the world come here to get cargoes assembled from one of the most productive regions on the globe. Although frozen in for five months every winter, Montreal annually handles nearly four million tons of shipping, most of which is under the British flag. It has a foreign trade of more than five hundred million dollars. The annual grain movement sometimes exceeds one hundred and sixty bushels for each of the city’s population of almost a million.

In the modern sense, the port is not yet one hundred years old, though Cartier was here nearly four centuries ago, and Champlain came only seventy years later. Both were prevented from going farther upstream by the Lachine Rapids, just above the present city. Cartier was seeking the northwest passage to the East Indies, and he gave the rapids the name La Chine because he thought that beyond them lay China.

At the foot of the rapids the Frenchmen found an island, thirty miles long and from seven to ten miles wide, separated from the mainland by the two mouths of the Ottawa River. It was then occupied by a fortified Indian settlement. The presence of the Indians seemed to make the island an appropriate site on which to lay the foundations of the new Catholic “Kingdom of God,” and the great hill in the background, seven hundred and forty feet high, suggested the name, Mont Real, or Mount Royal.

Although the Indians seemed to prefer fighting the newcomers to gaining salvation, the religious motive was long kept alive, and it was not until early in the last century that the city began to assume great commercial importance. During the first days of our Revolution, General Montgomery occupied Montreal for a time, and Benjamin Franklin begged its citizens to join our rebellion. It had then about four thousand inhabitants. Even as late as 1830 Montreal was a walled town, with only a beach in the way of shipping accommodations. The other day it was described by an expert from New York as the most efficiently organized port in the world.

I have gone down to the harbour and been lifted up to the tops of grain elevators half as high as the Washington Monument. I have also been a guest of the Harbour Commission in a tour of the water-front. The Commission is an all-powerful body in the development and control of the port. Its members, who are appointed by the Dominion government, have spent nearly forty million dollars in improvements. This sum amounts to almost five dollars a head for everyone in Canada, but the port has always earned the interest on its bonds, and has never been a burden to the taxpayers.

An American, Peter Fleming, who built the locks on the Erie Canal, drew the first plans for the harbour development of Montreal. That was about a century ago. Now the city has its own expert port engineers, and last summer one of the firms here built in ninety days a grain elevator addition with a capacity of twelve hundred and fifty thousand bushels. A giant new elevator, larger than any in existence, is now being erected. It will have a total capacity of fourteen million bushels of grain.

Montreal’s future, like her present greatness, lies along her water front. Here the giant elevators load the grain crop of half a continent into vessels that sail the seven seas.

On a clear day one may stand on Mt. Royal, overlooking Montreal and the St. Lawrence, and see in the distance the Green Mountains of Vermont and the Adirondacks of New York.