Canada and Newfoundland

by Frank G. Carpenter

Imagine yourself aboard ship with me. We are steaming along off the coast of Newfoundland, bound north for St. John’s, the capital and chief port of the oldest and smallest British dominion. Just before daybreak this morning I was awakened by a glaring light flashing full in my face. I jumped from my berth and looked out of the porthole. As I did so three blasts from the whistle tore the air and made the ship tremble, and were answered a moment later by the w-h-a-a-n-g of a foghorn from over the water. The dazzling light that had awakened me flashed around again. I knew then that we were saluting Cape Race, the southeast tip of Newfoundland, and chief signal station for the ocean traffic of the North Atlantic.

We were hardly a mile from the shore. If it had been daylight, we would have steamed closer in. The lighthouse towered high in the air, the flash seeming to come from out of the sky. Cape Race light is more than three hundred feet above the water, and, with its foghorn and the wireless station close by, tells thousands of mariners their position at sea. It is usually the first land sighted in coming to Canada across the Atlantic, and marks the point where practically every vessel in these waters changes its course.

Day has dawned since we passed Cape Race, and we can see for miles over the bright blue ocean, silvered and dancing under the sun. The air is so fresh and crisp it is almost intoxicating. Even the dolphins, leaping and diving in graceful curves beside the ship, seem to share our feeling that it is a wonderful morning on which to be alive and at sea.

Now turn to the map in this book, and see just where we are. Like most Americans, I had always thought of Newfoundland as a sub-arctic country far to the north of us. Since leaving New York I have felt like an explorer on his way to the Pole. The fact is, however, that we have been steaming much more to the east than to the north, and are at this moment only about sixteen hundred miles from the west coast of Ireland. We have come hardly three hundred miles north of New York, but so far to the eastward that we are half way to Liverpool. We are still south of England, in the same latitude as Paris, and are not far from the shoals that form the Grand Banks of Newfoundland, famous the world over as cod-fishing grounds. Here the bed of the ocean rises to within less than five hundred feet of the surface, and the cold arctic currents meet the Gulf Stream, causing the fogs so much dreaded in this part of the Atlantic.

As seen on the map, Newfoundland is a triangle of land that nearly fills, like a plug, the gaping mouth of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, but it also commands the sea routes of the North Atlantic, and its possession by an enemy power would menace both Canada and the United States. It has an area of forty-two thousand square miles, being larger than Ireland and of about the same size as Tennessee. At first glance it seems a part of the mainland, but a closer look shows the Strait of Belle Isle separating the island from the Labrador coast. Though in some places only eight or ten miles wide, this strait furnishes a summer-time passage for transatlantic liners to Canada.

For some years there has been talk of building a dam across the Strait of Belle Isle, to stop the icy waters of the Labrador current coming through the Strait into the Gulf of St. Lawrence. This, it is claimed, would force the Gulf Stream closer to Newfoundland, and give that country and eastern Quebec a climate as warm as that of New Jersey. How England would fare in this shifting of ocean waters no one can say; the history of the world would have been vastly different but for the present course of the Gulf Stream in relation to the British Isles. However, no one has yet offered to pay for this project, and shipping men say it would be impossible to make a dam strong enough to withstand the enormous pressure of ice, which comes down from the arctic every year in great floes of from five hundred to one thousand square miles and sometimes piles up on shore to the height of a five-story building.

The Newfoundland coast greatly resembles that of Norway. Looking shoreward, we see great headlands jutting out into the ocean, their precipitous sides rising straight out of the water for three or four hundred feet. Between them are deep bays and inlets, walled with sheer rock. At the heads of the coves and smaller bays we can see the white houses of little villages, clinging to the hillsides above tiny beaches. On top, these great rock ridges are covered with low scrub, now in red and brown autumn dress.

Now we are approaching St. John’s, which has one of the famous natural harbours of the world. Our steamer heads for what seems an unbroken wall of rock, five hundred feet high, and surmounted by a mighty stone tower. This is Cabot Tower, erected to commemorate the discovery of Newfoundland in 1497 by John Cabot, the Venetian mariner commissioned by Henry VII of England to find him new dominions. Except for the Vikings, five centuries earlier, Cabot was really the first to discover the North American continent, as Columbus did not reach the mainland until some years later.

Just south of the Cabot Tower is Cape Spear, the “farthest east” point of all North America. It was on these hills that Marconi received the first wireless message flashed across the Atlantic, and from them that the first transatlantic hydroplane flight was begun. On these shores, also, several of our transatlantic cables are landed.