Canada and the Canadians, Vol. 1

by Sir Richard Henry Bonnycastle

Lake Ontario, the Beautiful Lake, is 180 miles long, 45 miles wide, 500 feet average depth, where sounded successfully, but said to be fathomless in some places, and contains 6,300 square miles. It is 232 feet above the tide of the St. Lawrence.

The Canadian lakes have been computed to contain 1,700 cubic miles of water, or more than half the fresh water on the globe, covering a space of about 93,000 square miles. They extend from west to east over nearly 15 degrees and a half of longitude, with a difference of latitude of about eight and a half degrees, draining a country of not less surface than 400,000 square miles.

The greatest difference is observable between the waters of all these lakes, arising from soil, depth, and shores. Ontario is pure and blue, Erie pure and green, the southern part of Michigan nothing particular. The northern part of Michigan and all Huron are clear, transparent, and full of carbonic gas, so that its water sparkles. But the extraordinary transparency of the waters of all these lakes is very surprising. Those of Huron transmit the rays of light to a great depth, and consequently, having no preponderating solid matters in suspension, an equalization of heat occurs. Dr. Drake ascertained that, at the surface in summer, and at two hundred feet below it, the temperature of the water was 56°.

One of the most curious things on the shallow parts of Huron is to sail or row over the submarine or sublacune mountains, and to feel giddy from fancy, for it is like being in a balloon, so pure and tintless is the water. It is, like Dolland's best telescopes, achromatic.

The lakes are subject in the latter portion of summer to a phenomenon, which long puzzled the settlers; their surface near the shores of bays and inlets are covered by a bright yellow dust, which passed until lately for sulphur, but is now known to be the farina of the pine forests. The atmosphere is so impregnated with it at these seasons, that water-barrels, and vessels holding water in the open air, are covered with a thick scum of bright yellow powder.

A curious oily substance also pervades the waters in autumn, which agglutinates the sand blown over it by the winds, and floats it about in patches. I have never been able to discover the cause of this; perhaps, it is petroleum, or the sand is magnetic iron. Singular currents and differently coloured streams also appear, as on the ocean; but, as all the lakes have a fall, no weed gathers, except in the stagnant bays.

The bottom of Ontario is unquestionably salt, and no wonder that it should be so, for all the Canadian lakes were once a sea, and the geological formation of the bed of Ontario is the saliferous rock.

I have often enjoyed on Ontario's shores, where I have usually resided, the grand spectacle which takes place after intense frost. The early morning then exhibits columns of white vapour, like millions of Geysers spouting up to the sky, curling, twisting, shooting upwards, gracefully forming spirals and pyramids, amid the dark ground of the sombre heavens, and occasionally giving a peep of little lanes of the dark waters, all else being shrouded in dense mist.

People at home are very apt to despise lakes, perhaps from the usual insipidity of lake poetry, and to imagine that they can exhibit nothing but very placid and tranquil scenery. Lake Erie, the shallowest of the great Canadian fresh-water seas, very soon convinces a traveller to the contrary; for it is the most turbulent and the most troublesome sea I ever embarked upon—a region of vexed waters, to which the Bermoothes of Shakespeare is a trifle; for that is bad enough, but not half so treacherous and so thunder-stormy as Erie.

Huron is an ocean, when in its might; its waves and swells rival those of the Atlantic; and the beautiful Ontario, like many a lovely dame, is not always in a good temper. I once crossed this lake from Niagara to Toronto late in November, in the Great Britain, a steamer capable of holding a thousand men with ease, and during this voyage of thirty-six miles we often wished ourselves anywhere else: the engine, at least one of them, got deranged; the sea was running mountains high; the cargo on deck was washed overboard; gingerbread-work, as the sailors call the ornamental parts of a vessel, went to smash; and, if the remaining engine had failed in getting us under the shelter of the windward shore, it would have been pretty much with us as it was with the poor fellow who went down into one of the deepest shafts of a Swedish mine.