The Project Gutenberg eBook of Romantic Canada
Title: Romantic Canada
Author: Victoria Hayward
Illustrator: Edith S. Watson
Release date: March 20, 2018 [eBook #56800]
Most recently updated: January 24, 2021
Language: English
Credits: Produced by Melissa McDaniel, Chuck Greif and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
file was produced from images generously made available
by The Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries)
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List of Illustrations (etext transcriber's note) |
ROMANTIC CANADA
ROMANTIC CANADA
BY
VICTORIA HAYWARD
ILLUSTRATED WITH PHOTOGRAPHS
BY
EDITH S. WATSON
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
EDWARD J. O’BRIEN
TORONTO: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
OF CANADA, LTD. AT ST. MARTIN’S HOUSE
1922
Copyright, Canada, 1922, by
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY OF CANADA, LIMITED
Toronto
CONTENTS
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
PUBLISHER’S FOREWORD
We are proud to announce what we think will come to be regarded as a really outstanding book of travel. We think it fitting that the first important book in this category which we have published should treat of our own country.
“Romantic Canada” aims to give, and from the hands of two women singularly fitted to give it, the story of Canada in the romance of its simple industries simply accomplished. It gives the story, in word and in picture, of all sorts and conditions of folk, as they are to be found in the faraway and little-visited territories of the Dominion. Author and artist have left the beaten track, for it is in the highways and by-ways that this particular Canada, which is passing as we grow in population, and as steel links territory to territory the more easily and the more quickly, is to be found. The photographs and discussion of this hinterland of Canada are quite unique in the history of Canadian literature and photographic art.
The author and artist have gone from Canadian coast to Canadian coast. They have thought it not unwise also to include matter descriptive of their travels in Labrador and Newfoundland.
The author and artist and ourselves desire to say “Thank you” to all those who have helped to make this book what it is. Specifically we are indebted to “Asia, the Magazine of the Asiatic Society”, for permission to reproduce the photographs bearing the captions “Domesticity” and “Pulling Flax”; to the “Century Magazine” in the same regard as to “Hearty at Eighty”, “Island Woman of St. Pierre et Miquelon”, and “The Figure on the Bow”; to “Town and Country”, as to “Fort Mississauga”, and “View from His Britannic Majesty George III’s Chapel to the Mohawks, near Brantford”; to the “Canadian Home Journal” as to “Early Home of Alexander Graham Bell”, and “Drawing Water from the Columbia”; and to the Toronto “Saturday Night” as to “An Old Ontario Homestead”.
We are also vastly indebted to the editor and proprietors of “The Canadian Magazine”.
INTRODUCTION.
By Edward J. O’Brien.
It is a happy comradeship which has made this interesting volume possible. Those who know and love the by-ways of Canada have frequently encountered Miss Watson and Miss Hayward in the pursuit of a self-imposed task. Hardly a task we should call it, but a delight, to record with the camera and the pen those unique and beautiful racial traditions which have survived in Canada and flourished, while the passion for conformity to a provincial process of standardization has crushed them in the United States. In Canada, the Scottish Highlander, the Acadian, and the Doukhobor, for example, have not been compelled to abandon their memories. The life of their forefathers has flourished when transplanted to a new soil. That wise tolerance and appreciative catholicity which is not always found in a new land has preserved old loveliness here, and the magic of Miss Watson’s camera has arrested this beauty at many significant moments.
I have more than once had occasion to allude to the invaluable labours of Mr. C. M. Barbeau in harvesting the folksongs and tales of Quebec and Ontario. Although the general public may not realize it, he is conferring a new literature upon Canada and adding rich chapters to her imaginative history. Well, these pictures with their fine sense of composition and warm human values provide this literature with its just setting, and the social record they afford is of permanent significance. The quality of life changes even in a generation, and those who may turn over the leaves of this book a century from now will know, as they could not otherwise have known, what beautiful life has flourished in hidden places.
The Magdalen Islands, for example, are an unknown land to Canadian city dwellers. The service of Miss Watson and Miss Hayward in introducing them alone to those who have never visited them is one for which any happy traveller should be very grateful.
Cambridge, England.
ROMANTIC CANADA
CHAPTER I.
NOVA SCOTIA.
No call sounded....
O call sounded by the pipes of this New Era is more insistent than that of the Canadian Sea-coast. One sometimes wonders if Canadians as a whole even yet realize the important gift bestowed, when Heaven gave to Canada so magnificent a coastline as that which the constant sword-play of land and sea traces from Saint John, New Brunswick, to the Newfoundland-Labrador Boundary? The map of Eastern Canada is “a study in charts” worthy of closest attention. For it is here the Dominion rings up the outside world.
But to get the real “lay of the land”, the true spirit of its people, one must not be a stay-at-home, a mere map-student only, but a follower of the Piper leading by the ’longshore road through New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Cape Breton, and Prince Edward Island. Canadians must be able to say, “these are our Maritime Provinces”, and say it with a pleasurable, personal, as well as deep, national sense. And visitors from other lands must be able to become personally possessive if they are to enjoy the life etched quaintly enough of Grand Pré, of the Valley of the Gaspereau, of the bonnie Hielands o’ Cape Breton. One hardly sets foot in any part of this long stretch, without being at once conscious that the sea invades all the life of Bluenose-land, that the marine spirit is here in a beautiful, intimate sense, like the figurehead on a ship, both soul and mascot of the “half-island”.
Sailing-vessels in themselves, are genre crowding the Nova Scotia stage. Her earliest discoverer came hither, over the sea, in the picturesque craft of a Norse Dragon-ship. And the immediate chapters of her history, after these half-shadowy voyages of the Norsemen, were written by Basque and Breton fishboats a-sail, drawn across the Atlantic Ocean in the wake of Cod.
Cod is still, more than ever, King in Bluenoseland and beyond. Over all the vast stretch of the Canadian “Maritime” his huge fleet holds sway. And what is so romantic as a fleet-winged schooner speeding away under full sail on her voyage to the Banks? Unless it be the one coming in, her decks almost awash, with the full load? Oars and sails, and the tripping bows of the Dragon-ships and Breton bateaux founded this long line of “Bankers” and Dories—laid the foundation of Nova Scotia’s talent for ship-building. The “gift” which turned out the big square-riggers from the Hantsport and Parrsboro “ways” was a natural sequence of the maritime beginning of this land, where thought turns so naturally to the sea, and to sea-power. It was those wooden wind-jammers, wind-jammers with mere boat-beginnings, which paved the way to the ocean-greyhounds which now home true to Halifax and Saint John. Oh, the “Maritime” is the life-blood of Nova Scotian and Newfoundlander.
Halifax is the heart of the Marine circulatory system. And serving Halifax with fish for re-shipment, are innumerable little Havens and Outports, all up and down Saint Margaret’s Bay, Spry Bay, the Gut of Canso, and along the vast stretch reaching to Souris, P.E.I., and Havre Aubert in Les Madeleines. And in each of these little Outports there is, of course, a family behind every little “dory”. The morning greeting among all these people is not, “Good Day!” but, “How’s Fish?” To these coastal families, Halifax is not a mere cold city of business, but a “mother” to whom they can turn with the catch, be it great or small, and ask bread.
And so, in a morning spent on the Halifax waterfront, the lifting fog reveals schooner after schooner snugly riding against the old wet piers that artists love, or idly floating into dock amid harbour reflections, weathered spars and mildewed sails a-drip. Sometimes there is a clump of these schooners hitched together, all discharging at the same time. So in a single morning at a fish-receiving wharf here, we have chatted with skipper from Newfoundland, skipper from the Madeleine Islands in the Gulf, and skipper from Prince Edward Island, and not moved from the one dock.
Codfish overflows the roofs in the final stages of the drying, and lies upturned to the sun almost under the shadow of city cathedrals. And here on the wharves is an army of men and boys, the coopers and brine-mixers, moving about from barrel to barrel of mackerel, mending leaks and otherwise putting them in shape for trans-shipment; and over there, overflowing the basement of some old warehouse, the half and whole drums, called-for by the cod a-drying on the roof. Old scales are trundled back and forth to this schooner and that, as the flying cod hurtles through the air, hurled by some unseen hand at work in the hold of the “Nancy Ann”, “The Village Leaf”, or the schooner, “Passport.”