Westward with the Prince of Wales

by W. Douglas Newton

St. John's has laboured under its disadvantages ever since those days. The town has been pinched between the steep hills, and forced to straggle back for miles along the harbour inlet. On the southern side of the basin the slope has beaten the builder, and on the dominant green hill, through the grass of which thrusts grey and red-brown masses of the sharp-angled rock stratum, there are very few houses.

On the north, humanity has made a fight for it, and the white, dusty roads struggle with an almost visible effort up the heavy grade of the hill until they attain the summit. The effect is of a terraced and piled-up city, straggling in haphazard fashion up to the point where the great Roman Catholic cathedral, square-hewn and twin-towered, crowns the mass of the town.

Plank frame houses, their paint dingy and grey, with stone and brick buildings, jostle each other on the hill-side streets, innocent of sidewalks. The main thoroughfare, Water Street, which runs parallel with the harbour and the rather casual wharves, is badly laid, and given to an excess of mud in wet weather, mud that the single-deck electric trams on their bumpy track distribute lavishly. The black pine masts that serve as telegraph-poles are set squarely and frequently in the street, and overhead is the heavy mesh of cables and wires that forms an essential part of all civic scenery in the West. The buildings and shops along this street are not imposing, and there seems a need for revitalization in the town, either through a keener overseas trading and added shipping facilities, or a broader and more encouraging local policy.

Most of the goods for sale were American, and some of them not the best type of American articles at that. It was hard to find indications of British trading, and it seemed to me that here was a field for British enterprise, and that with the easing of shipping difficulties, which were then tying up Newfoundland's commerce, Britain and Newfoundland would both benefit by a vigorous trade policy. Newfoundlanders seemed anxious to get British goods, and, as they pointed out, the rate of exchange was all in their favour.

Through Water Street passes a medley of vehicles; the bumpy electric trams, horse carts that look like those tent poles the Indians trail behind them put on wheels, spidery buggies, or "rigs," solid-wheeled country carts, and the latest makes in automobiles.

The automobiles astonish one, both in their inordinate number and their up-to-dateness. There seemed, if anything, too many cars for the town, but then that was only because we are new to the Western Continent, where the automobile is as everyday a thing as the telephone. All the cars are American, and to the Newfoundlander they are things of pride, since they show how the modern spirit of the Colony triumphs over sea freight and heavy import duty. Motor-cars and electric lighting in a lavish fashion that Britain does not know, form the modern features of St. John's.

When the two warships steamed through the Narrows into the harbour, St. John's, within its hills, was looking its best under radiant sunlight. The fishermen's huts clinging to the rocky crevices of the harbour entrance on thousands of spidery legs, let crackers off to the passing ships and fluttered a mist of flags. Flags shone with vivid splashes of pigment from the water's edge, where a great five-masted schooner, barques engaged in the South American trade, a liner and a score of vessels had dressed ships, up all the tiers of houses to where strings of flags swung between the towers of the cathedral.

From the wharves a number of gnat-like gasolene launches, gay with flags, pushed off to flutter about both cruisers until they came to anchor. From one of the quays signal guns were fired, and the brazen and inordinate bangings of his Royal salute echoed and re-echoed in uncanny fashion among the hills that hem the town, so that when the warships joined in, the whole cup of the harbour was filled with the hammerings of explosions overlapping explosions, until the air seemed made of nothing else.

On the big stacks of Newfoundland lumber at the harbour-side, on the quays, on the freight sheds and on the roofs of buildings, Newfoundland people, who, like the weather, were giving the lie to the prophets, crowded to see the Prince arrive. He came from Dragon in the Royal barge in the wake of the Dauntless' launch, which was having a worried moment in "shooing" off the eager gasolene boats, crowding in, in defiance of all regulations, to get a good view.

There was no doubt about the warmth of the welcome. It was a characteristic Newfoundland crowd. Teamsters in working overalls, fishermen in great sea boots and oilskins, girls garbed in the smartness of New York, whose comely faces and beautiful complexions were of Ireland, though there was here and there a flash of French blood in the grace of their youth, little boys willing to defy the law and climb railings in order to get a "close up" photograph, youths in bubble-toed boots—all proved that their dourness was not an emotion for state occasions, and that they could show themselves as they really were, as generous and as loyal as any people within the Empire.