We wound up our Newfoundland cruise with St. George's Bay, the last on the French Shore, and the only point at which any difficulty was raised about the exercise of our rights. We there found, in fact, a large fast-growing and increasingly prosperous Anglo-Canadian village, and in the presence of its inhabitants we went through the ceremony of formally forbidding them to fish, which ceremony was greeted by protests both amicable and bantering. Amicable, because half the population were French Canadians, talking our own language with a strong St. Malo accent, and in spite of everything else, the similarity of origin, language, religion, and habits, established friendly relations between us and them. Bantering, because first of all our fishermen no longer frequented St. George, and secondly, because the prohibition, which was compulsory during the four or five days in the year during which our warships were present, became simply a dead letter during the other three hundred and six days of the year. It was easy, of course, to see that our exclusive right to fish could not be maintained when once a sufficient indigenous population had settled there, but it was no less easy to judge that some local arrangement concerning these exceptional places, conciliating every interest, might easily be made. Would that be possible nowadays, when electioneering palaver has embittered the whole business? After leaving St. George, we spent a long time hunting for our colony of St. Pierre Miquelon in continuous fogs, and only succeeded in finding it by means of a plan of my own invention. The weather happening to be moderate, I had several triangular soundings made while we were under sail, and then endeavoured to make the mathematical triangle thus obtained tally as to depth and nature of bottom with Captain Lavaud's chart of the Newfoundland soundings. So excellent is the chart in question, that the plan was successful, and gave us bearings by which we got a direct line for the shore. St. Pierre Miquelon is a bare, wild, hideous islet, but with a first-class port. Admirable as a victualling station and mart for our fishermen, its military value as far as our trade is concerned is absolutely nil. Whatever may be done for it, it will always be at the mercy of whoever is master of the seas in time of war.
At Halifax, whither I went to meet the officer commanding the British naval station, we were put into quarantine on account of three convalescents, relics of the epidemic we had been suffering from. But it was taken off, thanks to the generous intervention of the Governor-General of Nova Scotia, Lord Falkland, a splendid-looking man, well known in Parisian society. Nobody could have been more obliging nor kinder than this "grand seigneur" and his wife, the daughter of William IV., were to us.
If Nova Scotia as seen from the sea, with its gloomy coast guarded by numberless black reefs, recalls that of Brittany, the same resemblance strikes the traveller who pushes towards the interior of the country, through its deep and smiling bays; and Halifax Bay in particular, when its fresh and verdant surroundings are lighted up by brilliant sunshine, leaves nothing to be desired in the way of charm. I saw it thus when I arrived, in all the excitement of a regatta, with the peculiar feature of a race for birch-bark canoes, paddled with incredible vigour by Mic Mac squaws, or Indian women, in blue blouses and floating black hair. What a splendid colony Nova Scotia is, too!
The advance post of the huge Canadian territory, protected by its almost insular position from the rigours of the northern climate, with all its ports open (not only Halifax, where the fleets of the whole world could find absolute safety, maritime and strategic, at once, but Sydney too, surrounded by immense beds of coal), while the St Lawrence is still choked with ice.
Our short stay in port was wound up by a great dinner given by my gunroom officers to those of the English frigate Winchester. The meal was of the merriest, if I may judge by the toasts, the cheers, and the songs I heard; and the merriment continued on shore, whither the young people betook themselves together. One of the English midshipmen, a good-looking lad with a thick crop of carroty hair, returned on board his own ship with beautiful jet black locks, to the great astonishment of the first lieutenant; while I beheld two of my cadets appear at a ball given by the officers of the garrison and indulge in such a remarkable style of dancing, that I was forced to give them immediate orders to return on board the Belle-Poule. One of these cadets, by the way, was a Turk, called Saly. His story was rather a strange one. He was the son of Saly Pasha, the pasha of Athens, and was a child in his mother's arms when the city was carried by assault by the Greeks and their philhellenic supporters, in I know not which year of the Greek insurrection. All the defenders were put to the sword, and in the excitement of the fight Saly's mother was murdered, but she had strength, as she died, to throw her infant into the arms of a Wurtembergian officer. He, much embarrassed by the gift, passed the child on, having previously christened it Gottlieb, to a French naval lieutenant of the name of Quernel, who commanded a vessel off that coast. When Quernel returned to Toulon, my Aunt Adelaide heard the incident mentioned. She interested herself in the little Turk, and had him brought up amongst us. The boy turned out well, entered the navy, and was a post captain when he died. From Halifax we went to New York, the frantic bustle and stir in which place contrasted strangely, in my eyes, with the calm of the Newfoundland deserts and the placidity of the Blue Noses, as the inhabitants of Nova Scotia are nicknamed. We were at New York to do some indispensable revictualling, consequent on the exceptionally rough voyage we had had. Besides much other damage, we had lost all our sails; they had been carried away one after the other, and it was absolutely necessary to have at least one set in good trim, instead of the patched rags still remaining to us, before undertaking our winter voyage across the ocean.
I took advantage of the time these repairs took up to go and pay my respects to the President at Washington and thence to make a rapid dash into the West, in the footsteps of our ancient pioneers, and up to the farthest limits of civilisation (as they were then, in 1841).
The thing that strikes one most on arriving in the United States, and in New York in particular, as I have already said, is the extraordinary bustle that reigns everywhere, and which really stuns one at first. One feels so bewildered that any idea of a picturesque description disappears. The only thing one is aware of is bustle. Bustle on land, where everybody seems to rush as if they were demented—bustle on the water, where one keeps wondering why the ships of all sizes passing at full speed in every direction do not collide every other minute. In complete contrast to our boulevards, Broadway, when you walk along it, does not seem to contain a single idler. Are there any idle men in America? Yes, there are some millionaires, who pull up when they have made their fortunes. Their fellow-citizens assert that they are always ill at ease, amidst the general activity, and that they go and settle down in their idleness in Paris, among people like themselves, whose frivolity they end by copying. They are looked upon as "demoralised Americans." But they are few in number. As each man has only himself to reckon on, as he has no hoped-for inheritance to wait for and discount in idleness, seeing the man in possession owes nothing to his children, nor to anybody else, and is free to dispose of his property as he chooses, everybody being free to make his will as he likes, so each man feels that if he wants to get on he must work. And is not this the chief cause of the vigour and energy of the great American nation? If Broadway is a tumult of business, that in the port of New York is worth seeing too. This port is at the confluence of two arms of the sea, in front of the public walk called the Battery. Here, towards five o'clock in the evening, when the steamboats start, the huge floating palaces may be seen shooting off in every direction, shrieking hoarsely. It is a maritime pandemonium. In it the American is in his element. Dressed in black, with a stove-pipe hat, the quid in his cheek causing him to look as though he grinned sardonically, with one hand on the steering wheel and the other on the engine-room bell, he drives his ship full speed through the throng with an audacity, decision, and coolness which made me shiver at first!
In this manner I left New York and passed along the coast of New Jersey on my way to Washington, but not without receiving a very friendly welcome from the naval officer commanding there, Commodore Perry, a remarkable man, who, half by persuasion and half by force, concluded the first treaty with Japan, thus opening up that interesting country—I will not say to civilisation (for I do not know that Japan has progressed on that account), but to trade, and intercourse with nations of European origin.
In the very first train I got into I found myself opposite a big man wearing a moustache and imperial, with a huge walking stick between his legs, and was told he was the King, or rather Prince, Murat. Next we passed a fine country property belonging to King Joseph Buonaparte, and involuntarily I thought of a certain passage in the works of Voltaire, where Candide meets all the dethroned kings at Venice. There were others even then whose names I might have added to those of Murat and Joseph, and the number was to be increased before long. "Special line of Paris goods," we might almost say, in commercial phrase! Has this sort of export trade answered with us?
I saw Philadelphia once more, as charming as ever. There was a fine performance, that night, in the Chestnut Street Theatre, and I had sent to take places for it. But when I arrived I saw a huge poster over the door—"Prince de Joinville at 8.30," and beat an instant and hasty retreat. As soon as I got to Washington I repaired to the White House to pay my respects to General Tyler. He was a blunt-spoken man with a big nose, who had successively filled the posts of governor of his own State (Virginia) and of President of the United States, in each case in consequence of the death of the actual incumbents, whose deputy he was. He could not have done better in a hereditary monarchy! Our time at Washington was taken up with an interchange of compliments of all sorts. A dinner at the President's, visits to and from the diplomatic corps, a huge reception, at which I shook hands at least three thousand times, at the White House. And bouquets, too, in the "language of flowers!"