Hull down on the trail of rapture
Mid the wonders of the sea.”
“The Western Sea” beyond the sunset shore of British North America always had a romantic and fascinating attraction for explorers and navigators. As indicated in a previous chapter, the hope of discovering a north-west passage by a sea channel from the Atlantic to the Pacific had lured some of the most dauntless navigators to hardship and death a few centuries ago. There is a picture somewhere of an old sea-rover in uniform and decorations, studying a map of British North America on which his clenched, determined hand rests, and underneath he is represented as saying, in this regard, to his eager little grandson, “This must be done, and Britain must do it.” Well, Britain’s seamen discovered, after endless persistence, that there was no north-west passage by sea. But gallant British explorers who remembered the motto on a famous battle-axe, “I either find a way or make one,” rested not till they forced a pathway by land to the ocean of their dreams.
For nearly a century after Alexander Mackenzie, the indomitable Stornaway Scot, made the pioneer trail to the West Coast, “from Canada by land in 1793,” a limited trade was carried on laboriously, by trail and canoe and packhorse, in the mountain region. But when Canada was brought into a Confederation by linking together the old Provinces in the East, men of vision saw the vast possibilities of the Western seaboard. In 1851, as already noted, Joseph Howe, in Nova Scotia, had outlined the future in a vivid word-painting and caused others to see the ever expanding destiny of British America. He pictured the day when not only would “the whistle of the locomotive be heard in the heart of the Rocky Mountains,” but when Canadian enterprise would reach out to trade with the teeming millions of the Orient that lay facing the Pacific shore. Nor should we forget that Sir Hugh Allan, the master-trader on the Atlantic out of Montreal, long ago coveted for Canada a business not only trans-Atlantic and trans-continental, but trans-Pacific as well.
These visions of trans-Pacific trade and passenger traffic came to swift realization soon after the Canadian Pacific Railway reached tide-water at Port Moody, on the West Coast, on July 4th, 1886. Port Moody, as we have seen, was the legal terminus of the steel trail across Canada. The Company sent a live-wire agent to Port Moody to look after the freight and passenger traffic. This agent was a young man named David E. Brown, who now lives retired in a beautiful home in Vancouver, appropriately named “The Bunkers,” and appropriately situated in the locality called Shaughnessy Heights. Brown was born of Scottish parents in the County of Grey, in Ontario, and still retains, on occasion, the distinctive accent of his people. He learned the way of Western railroading under that soldierly man, Mr. Robert Kerr, a great handler of freight traffic at Winnipeg, and Brown made such a place for himself in the esteem of his chief that he was assigned to the farthest strategic point where the rails struck tide-water at Port Moody. It was a great chance for a young man, and Brown had the will and the ability to make the most of it. Accustomed to handling freight inland, he was now to tackle coast traffic all along British Columbia and up to Alaska, for his line. And, to add to his responsibilities, he was only three weeks at Port Moody when a sailing brig, the W. B. Flint, an 800-ton clipper with a “Blue-nose skipper,” tied up at the wharf with a cargo of tea from Yokohama, to be shipped over the new Canadian Pacific Railway to the East. In some places and at some periods in our day the arrival of a brig with 800 tons of cargo would seem a quite insignificant event, but the prow of that particular brig clove open a new doorway to world commerce. She did not belong to the Canadian Pacific Railway, but led the way from the Orient for the Company’s steel-clad coursers which now bridge the oceans and link four continents under the ensign of the greatest transportation system in the world. But all that was not done in one day.
Following the pathfinding W. B. Flint to Port Moody in that July of 1886, came two other sailing vessels with similar cargo, only that the Oroyo, the last of the three, had its cargo so badly damaged by water, through imperfect hatches, that it was not worth much. Brown, the young agent, had some things to learn as to what constituted delivery and acceptance of cargo in such a case, but he met the situation so well that the Railway came out safely in the end. It was perhaps this resourceful handling of a new kind of business that so attracted the attention of headquarters at Montreal to the young agent at Port Moody that they sent Brown to the Antipodes and the Orient to work up business for the Railway from those regions.
This was an eventful commission, but before we follow Mr. Brown on the trip let us go back and see how the traffic from the Orient began with the three sailing vessels that came to Port Moody in 1886. It was through the New York firm of Everett, Frazar & Co., who had some connection in Yokohama, that Montreal headquarters of the Canadian Pacific Railway brought this about. It looks like the work of the persistent, courageous and far-seeing Van Horne. He used to say that he was “going to make it possible to send a traveller around the world on one ticket over one system.” And, no doubt, he also determined that as much as they could secure of the world’s freight traffic would be routed over the same far-flung lines of travel. He must have planned with his usual daring, because the tea clipper reached Port Moody on July 20th, 1886, and the first through train from Montreal had only arrived there on July 4th. It would have been awkward if the cargo of tea from Japan had to be dumped on the primitive wharf with no train in sight to carry that cargo to its destination in Eastern Canada. Perhaps, too, it was Mr. Van Horne who, through Mr. George Olds, of the traffic department, sent Brown to the Orient. Anyway, I have had the privilege of seeing a sheaf of personal, intimate autograph letters from Van Horne to Brown, extending over many years and discussing in the most delightful and self-revealing way, such artistic subjects as Chinese vases, pottery, antiques and curios, in which both were interested. Mr. Van Horne did not throw money away by any means, but here and there in the letters he asks Brown to purchase some special rarity at what looks to most of us very generous figures.
Mr. Brown established connection for the Canadian Pacific Railway with New Zealand and Australia also. Australia was rather hesitant, though interested, but Brown appealed to them on grounds of Empire loyalty—“hands across the sea and let the kangaroo shake hands with the beaver.” Brown waited in Australia and took part in a celebration that gave a hearty send-off to the first steamer on the way to Vancouver.
Mr. Brown made his headquarters at Hong-Kong for fourteen years, and in that time combed the Orient for traffic for his line. He made successful visits as far as Bombay and Calcutta, to establish connections, and called at the Island of Ceylon in the same connection.
A typical case was that of his call at Ceylon. He ascertained that the authorities were contemplating sending a large exhibit to the World’s Fair in Chicago in 1894. They did not know just how best to ship to points beyond New York. But Mr. Brown went to the Commissioner in charge and said “I represent the Canadian Pacific Railway, and I can give you transportation right into the exhibition grounds at Chicago.” They thought this was daring for so young a man, but they talked it over and finally Brown got the business, shipping over a P. & O. steamer to Hong-Kong, thence on his own line to Vancouver and on to Chicago by rail. It looks simple now, but it was a bold venture at the time. It was beginning to fulfil Mr. Van Horne’s expectations of sending people around the world on one ticket.