Canada and the Canadians, Vol. 1

by Sir Richard Henry Bonnycastle

Canada, as it is well known, was French, both by claim of discovery and by the more powerful right of possession.

Stimulated by the fame of Cabot, and ambitious to be pilots of the Meta Incognita, that visionary channel which was to conduct European valour to the golden Cathay and to the rich Spice Islands of the East, French adventurers eagerly sought the coveted honours which such a voyage could not fail to yield them, and to combine overflowing wealth with chivalric renown. France, England, Spain, Portugal, and Italy, sent forth those daring spirits whose hopes were uniformly crushed, either by encountering the unbroken line of continental coast, or dashed to pieces amidst the terrors of that truly Cimmerian region, where ice and fog, cold and darkness, contend for empire.

Of all those heroic navigators, who would have rivalled Columbus under happier circumstances, none were successful, even in a limited sense, in attempting to reach China by the northern Atlantic, excepting the French alone, who may fairly be allowed the merit of having traversed nearly one half of the broadest portion of the New World in the discovery of the St. Lawrence and its connecting streams, and in having afterwards reached Mexico by the Mississippi.

Even in our own days, nearly four centuries after the Columbian era, the idea of reaching China by the North Pole has not been abandoned, and is actively pursuing by the most enlightened naval government in the world, and, very possibly, will be achieved; and, as coal exists on the northern frozen coasts, we shall have ports established, where the British ensign will fly, in the realms of eternal frost—nay, more, we shall yet place an iron belt from the Atlantic to the Pacific, a railroad from Halifax to Nootka Sound, and thus reach China in a pleasure voyage.

I recollect that, about twelve years ago, a person of very strong mind, who edited the "Patriot," a newspaper published at Toronto, Mr. Thomas Dalton, was looked upon as a mere enthusiast, because one of his favourite ideas, frequently expressed, was, that much time would not elapse before the teas and silks of China would be transported direct from the shores of the Pacific to Toronto, by canal, by river, by railroad, and by steam.

Twelve years have scarcely passed since he first broached such an apparently preposterous notion, as people of limited views universally esteemed it; and yet he nearly lived to see an uninterrupted steamboat communication from England to Lake Superior—a consummation which those who laughed at him then never even dreamt of—and now a railroad all the way to the Pacific is in progress of discussion.

Mac Taggart, a lively Scotch civil engineer, who wrote, in 1829, an amusing work, entitled "Three Years in Canada," was even more sanguine on this subject; and, as he was a clerk of works on the Rideau Canal, naturally turned his attention to the practicability of opening a road by water, by the lakes and rivers, to Nootka Sound.

Two thousand miles of water road by the Ottawa, the St. Lawrence, and the Welland, has been opened in 1845, and a future generation will see the white and bearded stranger toiling over the rocky barriers that alone remain to repel his advances between the great Superior and the Pacific. A New Simplon and a peaceful Napoleonic mind will accomplish this.

The China trade will receive an impulse; and, as the arms of England have overcome those of the Celestial Empire, and we are colonizing the outer Barbarian, so shall we colonize the shores of the Pacific, south of Russian America, in order to retain the supremacy of British influence both in India and in China. The vast and splendid forests north of the Columbia River will, ere long, furnish the dockyards of the Pacific coast with the inexhaustible means of extending our commercial and our military marine.

And who were the pioneers? who cleared the way for this enterprise? Frenchmen! The hardy, the enduring, the chivalrous Gaul, penetrated from the Atlantic, in frail vessels, as far as these frail barks could carry him; and where their service ceased, with ready courage adopted the still more fragile transport afforded by the canoe of the Indian, in which, singing merrily, he traversed the greater part of the northern continent, and actually discovered all that we now know, and much more, since lapsed into oblivion.