Canada, the Spellbinder

by Lilian Whiting

One of the interesting features of this town, which is one full of surprises lying in wait for the alert and expectant traveller, is the great dry dock of the Grand Trunk Pacific and Ship Repair Company, which has cost something like three million dollars, and was completed in 1915. This ship-building and repair plant is virtually three docks in one; and it can handle a ship of twenty thousand tons displacement and a length of six hundred feet, drawing thirty feet of water; moreover, it can deal with three ships at a time. It has derricks that can lift out, for repair, boilers weighing sixty tons, and after passing them through the shops replace them in the ship. It also furnishes power, light, compressed air, with wharf and storage space. The dock, in conjunction with the machine and the repair shops, can handle any class of work, wood or steel, boilers or any kind of mechanism. During its construction over a hundred and fifty men were employed, with a pay-roll that ran to some twelve thousand dollars a month. The inestimable convenience of such a plant for vessels in these waters in need of repair can hardly be over-estimated.

In June 1915 the great enterprise was undertaken across the harbour opposite Prince Rupert of clearing seven hundred acres for residential use. Within three months one hundred acres of this was prepared, but from causes connected with the war, and temporary conditions of finance, the entire completion of the work is delayed for a time. In Prince Rupert the site for the magnificent terminal station is already cleared; and when the war shall be ended and conditions in the Dominion resume their prosperity, these buildings will be erected. The telegraph service of Prince Rupert is admirable. There is a direct service establishing through communication with the East, and the rates between Prince Rupert and Vancouver have been reduced to one dollar for a ten-word message. There is direct communication by telephone with Hazleton, Skeena Crossing, and with the mine of the Montana Development Company at Carnaby.

The civic affairs of Prince Rupert are well administered. The city has adopted the single-tax plan. It owns its electric lighting and power, its telephone and water systems. The fire department is equipped with the most modern appliances. It has twenty-one miles of planked roadways; it has five miles of plank pavements for pedestrians; and has already three miles of sewers. Five parks aggregate nearly a hundred acres of reservation for the city's recreation.

The lumber industry in British Columbia is one of the utmost importance as the northern part of the province alone produces an annual output of some twelve million feet. The southern portion of the province also makes considerable shipments. The Forestry Department of the Provincial Government of the Dominion report that there is available, in Prince Rupert district, twenty-five million acres averaging over fifteen thousand feet to the acre. In addition there is a tract which will be available for commercial purposes, within the next half century, of an area of seventeen million acres. About half this timber is spruce, red cedar and hemlock come next in order, and there is perhaps ten per cent. of balsam and yellow cedar. The cannery repairs and boxes required for the salmon pack and for the halibut trade make enormous demands on lumber. This branch of commerce was completely transformed by the completion of the Grand Trunk Pacific. It enabled Prince Rupert to compete on an equal basis with many other points, for a direct railroad line running through the centre of the Prairie Provinces to Winnipeg, and especially a railroad that has a better grade and shorter haul than any other with which it competes, places Prince Rupert on a fortunate basis with regard to markets.

It is hardly possible to estimate the future that lies before Prince Rupert. As tributary resources it has an ocean and an Empire. To its port will come the ships from all countries. They will bring products from the East, of the various far-off continents, and they will sail away laden with lumber and the rich exports of the vast North-West. Never was a city more skilfully planned. The Dominion Government's Hydrographic Survey had made a complete survey of Prince Rupert Harbour and its approaches, discovering that from the entrance to the extreme end, a distance of fourteen miles, it was entirely free from rocks or obstructions of any kind, and that the depth afforded ample anchorage. The Provincial Government of British Columbia appropriated two hundred thousand dollars for preliminary improvements, in the construction of roads and pavements, of sewers and water mains, before the town site was opened. While the Provincial Government makes Prince Rupert its headquarters for the northern part of the Province, with a court-house and buildings for offices, the Dominion Government is erecting a permanent and handsome post-office and customs house. Surrounded by a country whose richness and variety of resources are beyond comparison, its rapid growth is inevitable.

The easy proximity of Prince Rupert to Alaska is one of the most important things in connection with this unique and brilliant young seaport of the Pacific. Seattle and Skagway are 1000 miles apart, and thus the round trip between Seattle and Skagway is 2000 miles; but from Prince Rupert to Skagway is of course a sail of far less distance. The trip is one of entrancing scenery, fiords, bays all mountain-locked in supreme majesty and beauty, arms of the sea extending into coast indentations with an unexcelled panorama of glancing lights, play of colours, and moving-picture panoramas of grandeur and picturesqueness. Between Seattle, Prince Rupert, and Skagway the entire round trip occupies some eleven days. It is a voyage unmatched on the entire globe. In the distance the towering peaks clothed in snow of dazzling whiteness rise beyond the mountain ranges in their royal purple with evanescent flitting gleams of gold and rose from the brilliant sun; the green water of the bays is alive with thousands of leaping salmon; and the shores are defined by the dark pine forests, standing in an impenetrable tangle of ferns and trailing undergrowth. Through this "Inside Passage," as it is called, a fleet of steamers has been employed by the Grand Trunk Pacific in a splendid coast service between Seattle and Skagway. "I am in the writing-room on the upper deck of the Prince George sailing amid such ineffable glory that I only write about one word to every ten minutes," said an enthusiastic voyager in a personal letter to a friend in the early September days of 1915; "only one word in ten minutes will be allotted to you, for I must LOOK! It is the time of my life, and I can write letters (at all events to you, to whom they write themselves) anywhere. But this voyage—it is the dream of a lifetime! I have sailed the enchanted Mediterranean with our rapturous callings at Algiers, rising on terraced hills in her unspeakable beauty; at Naples, with all the Neapolitan coast a very vision of the ethereal realms; I have sailed on to Genoa, with Ischia, dream-haunted by Victoria Colonna, Italy's immortal woman-poet, and made my pilgrimage to the island and over the ancient Castel d'Ischia by local boats from Naples; I once sailed through the Ionian Isles in the late afternoon of a May day that was all azure and gold; I have sailed the Italian lakes and cruised about on the Alpine lakes of Switzerland: but it still remained for this one enchanted voyaging to give me that thrill of untranslatable ecstasy. This combination of the sea and mountains in what they call the 'Inside Passage' is simply superb. And the Prince George is perfectly ideal in all conditions.

"I have a large, beautiful state-room alone—every state-room on these steamers is an outside one; the entire steamer is richly carpeted in soft moss-green; finished in the native woods, polished till you could use the woodwork for a mirror (and if it reflected you how decorative it would be!); beside that, there are mirrors galore, of the regulation order, and a news-stand with all the world's literature, so to speak; the most delightful bathrooms, but I don't spend the entire time at sea in salt baths, as you unkindly assert; the table is excellent, being rather noted, I am told, for its fine cuisine, and there is to me a very direct connection between delicious coffee and various accompaniments, and feeling 'up' to things for the day; anyway, everything is delicious, and the splendid, spacious decks to enjoy a paradise of walking on; writing-desks well stocked with stationery at every turn, on every deck; and these steamers are 'twin-screw' if you know what that means! I confess I don't! but apparently people who do know consider a 'twin' screw as of far more importance in the universe than one lone, lorn screw; and they are equipped with wireless telegraph (I do know what that means) and with oil engines, and every modern device of safety, and with fairly luxurious comfort; and, indeed, the whole voyage is ideal and has only one fault—alas! alas! that it will come to an end. If only it would never end! I count off the flying hours as a miser counts his gold, I can hardly bear to sleep to miss one hour of its glory and loveliness, yet sleep, too, is a joy in this magical air, and, at all events, this voyage will not be ended when it is over. I shall have it all the rest of my life ... to live over again and again 'in the ethereal,' where all outer experiences find their record. I am quite sure the Recording Angel sets this down in illuminated pages."

From Puget Sound 500 miles of the voyage is through Canadian waters, so vast is the Dominion. For one hundred and twenty miles the steamer is sailing through the Straits of Georgia, which separates the main land of British Columbia from Vancouver Island, with the range of the Olympic Mountains astern, from whence the gods look down on mortals. Do they not, indeed, dwell on Olympian heights? Passing into the Seymour Narrows from the Georgian Strait, the Channel is hardly more than one third of a mile wide, and the rocky walls with the lofty mountains just behind are so overgrown with trees as to present an almost solid wall of emerald green, tempting the passenger to reach out his hand and grasp the cedar needles that seem so near. On sunny days the reflections in the water are bewilderingly clear, and here and there pour down rushing cataracts of foam-crested water from the melting snow of the mountains.