III. Travels, Exploration, Sport.
Canada has a considerable quantity of the literature of travels, explorations and sport but the literary interest of the most of it is far from obvious. A really remarkable book in this genre is the elder Alexander Henry’s Travels and Adventures in Canada and The Indian Territories, published in New York in 1809. Henry was a man of acute observation, and also possessed a graphic pen for character limning. His Travels and Adventures engages both the intellect and the imagination, the scientist and the literary artist. For it contains the most interesting observations on the flora and fauna of the countries he visited, and really graphic and colorful pictures of the peoples and the characters he met and observed. Henry had also a gift like that of Thucydides—the gift and skill of dramatically reporting a speech as, for instance, the speech of the Ojibwa Chief Minavavana. The book really forms an entrancing and instructive volume of Travel and Adventure.
The same may be said of Sir Alexander Mackenzie’s Voyages From Montreal Through the Continent of North America, 1789-1793. This work was published at London in 1801. Mackenzie came from a people—the Gaels of the Island of Lewis—who have a racial gift of colorful imagination and of felicity of language in nature description. Mackenzie, moreover, was, like Henry, a keen observer. His Voyages, therefore, as might be expected, are marked by colorful style and the imaginative presentation of the scenes he visited and of the inspiring or sublime phenomena he observed. John Howison’s Sketches of Upper Canada conforms only to the ideal of fact. It is, as the title suggests, merely a series of ‘sketches,’ written in a vigorous style with only a touch here and there of finer literary style.
With the work of Anna Brownell Jameson we meet with the first ‘color-writing’ in and about Canada. Her Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada, published in London in 1838, has not yet been excelled by a native Canadian ‘color writer.’ At the time, Canada was a wilderness for the most part, with a few settlements, but Mrs. Jameson, with the eye of an artist, saw everywhere in Nature in Canada and in Canadian life and character much to delight the eye and the sensibilities and much to satisfy the pictorial and dramatic imagination. Her Winter Studies and Summer Rambles, in three volumes, are a library of winsome Nature sketches and critical appreciations of human personality—a work of art, and a permanent contribution to the Incidental Pioneer Literature of Canada.
The aesthetic sense and the artistic conscience were uppermost in Paul Kane’s Wanderings of An Artist Among The Indian Tribes of North America. Kane was a celebrated Canadian painter; and, having the gift of style, he wrote, with the eye of the pictorial artist, about his ‘wanderings’ among the western tribes. It is an informing volume and makes genuinely interesting and satisfying reading.
George M. Grant was a man of splendid force of character and strength of will tempered with a singular gift of humor and pathos. He travelled across Canada in the last five years of the first decade following Confederation, he met all peoples, dwelt in camps, visited trading posts, and stopped at the hotels of the larger centres. On his journey he was impressed by the life, energy, and the striving of the Canadian people for a self-reliant and worthy history and destiny. And so Grant’s volume of travel, Ocean to Ocean, is noted for its acute observation, for its colorful and vitalizing descriptions of Nature in Canada, and for its seriousness, at all times relieved by an unusual quality of humor and of pathos. In ‘color-writing’ too, the volume is, at times, incomparable.
J. W. Tyrrell’s Across the Sub-Arctics of Canada and his The St. Lawrence Basin and Its Border-Lands, Lawrence J. Burpee’s The Search for The Western Sea, Vilhjalmur Stefannson’s The Friendly Arctic and his Hunters of the Great North, Arthur Heming’s Drama of the Forests, are all noted for their literary style and for the dramatic pictures they make of Nature scenes and of human characters.
Two really notable books under the head of Sport, as a form of travel and adventure, are Arthur Silver’s Farm, Cottage, Camp and Canoe In Maritime Canada (1884) and Phil. H. Moore’s With Gun and Rod in Canada (1922). Silver’s volume makes pleasant reading, but the style is much more pedestrian than Moore’s work, which is heightened and colored by picturesque diction and images and by considerable characteristic humor. Midway between the greater books of Travel and Adventure and these books of Sport come Wilfred Grenfell’s volumes descriptive of Labrador and the late C. Gordon Hewitt’s Conservation of the Wild Life of Canada. The latter, though scientific in aim and method, is full of aesthetic and literary charm and is written in an interesting literary style.