The Low Tide of Fundy is indeed its most prominent feature, playing an important part in the despatch of passenger and mail steamers from both Saint John and Digby. Indeed, the Bay-steamers actually play a game with the tide. If the steamer is “in” and the tide “out”, the steamer must wait for the tide to come “in” before she can go “out”, on its brimming fullness through Digby Cut. So, the schooners and square-riggers all come “in” and go “out” when the tide is full. But they load the deal in West Bay whichever way the tide “sets” ’round Cape Split. So, too, the stateliest Square-rigger or most sail-crowded schooner going up the bay for a load of plaster has the water out from under her keel when the Mower scythes the waves and sweeps them away to the ocean, leaving all keels, whether great or small, hard and fast in Fundy Sound.
The Bay of Fundy is the greatest natural drydock in the world. And in its day, which began the evening the stately ship of Sieur de Monts first floated in on its flood tide to found a settlement at Annapolis Royal, it has docked thousands of craft of all rigs and sizes. As drydock, as well as sheltering harbour, while it belongs in particular to New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, in a wider sense it belongs to all Canada. So that in the great future in trade now before Canada, it requires no great foreknowledge to venture that the volume of vessels frequenting the Bay in the palmiest days of the past, will soon be eclipsed both in number of ships and in increased displacement. As yet, the Bay of Fundy is like a masterpiece hanging in a gallery, which we have not sat down to look at carefully and appraisingly.
No other country apart from the thought of it as a drydock enjoys such a haven for ships as Canada possesses in the Bay of Fundy. The Bay of Fundy whose “power” is the tremendous ebb and flow of its tides, has hitherto seemed something “out of us”, and beyond our power to turn to account.
Bliss Carman, it will be remembered, penned a beautiful lament in “The Ships of Saint John”. But we may take it that the condition lamented was but temporary, merely “the ebb tide” in affairs and that when the tide comes again, roaring round Blomidon, the tide of Canadian shipping, it will be such a brimming tide of prosperity as old-timers of these parts never even dreamed of. The ships of the world will surely dock again in numbers where “The fog still hangs on the long tide-rips.” One saw during the years of the war a re-birth of old-time trade around the shore in the large number of square-riggers calling at Bay-ports for deal. You could count them three and four deep in West Bay by Partridge Island out of Parrsboro. And how all the forests and sawmills around were touched at once into new life by a mere sight of these stately old craft, many, an hundred years or thereabouts in age, in their turn awakened from graveyards in out-of-the-way havens of the Old World by the clash of arms.
IN THE RAQUETTE.
DIGBY, NOVA SCOTIA.
THE BAY OF FUNDY IS THE GREATEST
NATURAL DRYDOCK IN THE WORLD.
To all the people living on the Bay of Fundy shores these old vessels, newly painted, with their “yards” abeam and “figureheads” on the bow refurbished, were happy sights indeed. It was like their own youth come back, in case of the old. To the young they brought “vision”. Old ports thought dead awoke to new life. In “trade” around the Bay it was no longer “ebb tide”.