I have come into Canada through the Maritime Provinces, which lie on the Atlantic Coast between our own state of Maine and the mouth of the St. Lawrence. The Provinces are Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island. Their area is almost equal to that of our six New England states, and in climate and scenery they are much the same. Their population, however, is only about one million, or little more than one fourth as many as the number of people living in Massachusetts. These provinces were the first British possessions in Canada, and like New England they have seen the centre of population and progress move ever westward.

Nova Scotia is the easternmost province of the Dominion of Canada. Its capital and chief city is Halifax, situated on the Atlantic on one of the world’s best natural harbours. This is a deep water inlet ten miles in length, which is open all the year round. Montreal and Quebec are closed to navigation during the winter months on account of the freezing of the St. Lawrence.

Halifax is six hundred miles closer to Europe than is New York, and nearer Rio de Janeiro than is New Orleans. As the eastern terminus of the Canadian National Railways, it has direct connections with all Canada. With these advantages, the city hopes to become one of the great shipping centres on the North Atlantic.

Halifax has long been noted as the most English city in Canada. It was once the military, naval, and political centre of British North America, and gay with the social life of British officers and their ladies. Now, both the warships and the soldiers are gone, and the city is devoting itself to commercial activities.

As we steamed past the lighthouses and the hidden guns on the headlands guarding the entrance, I was reminded of all that this harbour has meant to America. The city was founded by Lord Cornwallis in 1749 at the suggestion of Boston merchants who complained that the French were using these waters as a base for their sea raiders. Less than thirty years later it provided a haven for Lord Howe when he was driven out of Boston by our soldiers of the Revolution, and became the headquarters for the British operations against the struggling colonies. In the war of 1812, the American warship Chesapeake was brought here after her defeat by the British frigate Shannon. During our Civil War Halifax served as a base for blockade runners, and the fortunes of some of its wealthy citizens of to-day were founded on the profits of this dangerous trade. No one dreamed then that within two generations England and America would be fighting side by side in a World War, that thousands of United States soldiers would sail from Halifax for the battlefields of Europe, or that an American admiral, commanding a fleet of destroyers, would establish his headquarters here. Yet that is what happened in 1917–18. All that now remains of the former duels on the sea is the annual sailing race between the fastest schooners of the Gloucester and the Nova Scotia fishing fleets.

Halifax is built on a hillside that rises steeply from the water-front to a height of two hundred and sixty feet above the harbour. The city extends about halfway up the hill, and reaches around on both sides of it. The top is a bare, grassy mound, surmounted by an ancient citadel.

Stand with me on the edge of the old moat, and look down upon Halifax and its harbour. Far to our left is the anchorage where occurred one of the greatest explosions the world ever knew. Just as the city was eating breakfast on the morning of December 6, 1917, a French munitions ship, loaded with benzol and TNT, collided with another vessel leaving the harbour, and her cargo of explosives blew up in a mighty blast. Nearly two thousand people were killed, six thousand were injured, and eleven thousand were made homeless. Hardly a pane of glass was left in a window, and acres of houses were levelled to the ground. A deck gun was found three miles from the water, and the anchor of one of the vessels lies in the woods six miles away, where it was thrown by the explosion. A street-car conductor was blown through a second-story window, and a sailor hurled from his ship far up the hillside. Since then much of the devastated area has been rebuilt along approved town-planning lines, but the scars of the disaster are still visible. For a long time after the explosion, the local institution for the blind was filled to capacity, and one saw on the streets many persons wearing patches over one eye.

Standing on the hill across the harbour one sees the town of Dartmouth, where much of the industrial activity of the Halifax district is centred. There are the largest oil works, chocolate factories, and sugar refineries of Canada. Vessels from Mexico, South America, and the British West Indies land their cargoes of tropical products at the doors of the works. Fringing the water-front are the masts of sailing vessels and the smokestacks of steamers. Among the latter is a cable repair ship, just in from mending a break in one of the many submarine telegraph lines that land on this coast. Next to her is a giant new liner, making her first stop here to add to her cargo some twenty-five thousand barrels of apples from the Annapolis Valley. This valley, on the western side of Nova Scotia, is known also as “Evangeline Land.” It was made famous by Longfellow’s poem based on the expulsion of the French Acadians by the English because they insisted on being neutral in the French-British wars. It is one of the finest apple-growing districts in the world, and sends annually to Europe nearly two million barrels. Many descendants of the former French inhabitants have now returned to the land of their ancestors.

Looking toward the mouth of the harbour, we see the new terminal, a twenty-five million dollar project that has for some years stood half completed. Here are miles and miles of railroad tracks, and giant piers equipped with modern machinery, a part of the investment the Dominion and its government-owned railway system have made to establish Halifax as a first-class port. Beyond the port works another inlet, Northwest Arm, makes its way in between the hills. I have motored out to its wooded shores, which in summer time are crowded with the young people of Halifax, bathing and boating. It is the city’s chief playground and a beautiful spot.

But now take a look at the city itself, stretching along the water-front below where we stand. The big red brick building just under our feet is the municipal market. There, on Saturdays, one may see an occasional Indian, survivor of the ancient Micmacs, and Negroes who are descendants of slaves captured by the British in Maryland when they sailed up the Potomac and burned our Capitol. Farther down the hillside are the business buildings of the city, none of them more than five stories high, and all somewhat weatherbeaten. I have seen no new construction under way in downtown Halifax; the city seems to have missed the building booms of recent years. Most of the older houses are of stone or brick. Outside the business district the people live in wooden frame houses, each with its bit of yard around it. One would know Halifax for an English town by its chimney pots. Some of the houses have batteries of six or eight of these tiles set on end sticking out of their chimneys.

The streets are built on terraces cut in the hillside, or plunging down toward the water. Some of them are so narrow that they have room for only a single trolley track, on which are operated little one-man cars. I stepped for a moment into St. Paul’s Church, the first English house of worship in Canada. Its front pew, to the left of the centre aisle, is reserved for the use of royal visitors. Passing one of the local newspaper offices, I noticed a big crowd that filled the street, watching an electric score board that registered, play by play, a World Series baseball game going on in New York. The papers are full of baseball talk, and the people of this Canadian province seem to follow the game as enthusiastically as our fans at home.

My nose will long remember Halifax. In lower Hollis Street, just back from the water-front, and not far from the low gray stone buildings that once quartered British officers, I smelled a most delicious aroma. It was from a group of importing houses, where cinnamon, cloves, and all the products of the East Indies are ground up and packed for the market. If I were His Worship, the Mayor of Halifax, I should propose that Hollis street be renamed and called the Street of the Spices. Just below this sweet-scented district, I came to a tiny brick building, with a sign in faded letters reading “S. Cunard & Co., Coal Merchants.” This firm is the corporate lineal descendant of Samuel Cunard, who, with his partners, established the first transatlantic steamship service nearly a century ago, and whose name is now carried all over the world by some of the greatest liners afloat.

Another odour of the water-front is not so sweet as the spices. It is the smell of salt fish, which here are dried on frames built on the roofs near the docks. Nova Scotia is second only to Newfoundland in her exports of dried cod, and all her fisheries combined earn more than twelve million dollars a year. They include cod, haddock, mackerel, herring, halibut, pollock, and salmon. Lunenburg, down the coast toward Boston, is one of the centres of the deep-sea fishing industry, and its schooners compete on the Grand Banks with those from Newfoundland, Gloucester, and Portugal.

I talked in Halifax with the manager of a million-dollar corporation that deals in fresh fish. He was a Gloucester man who, as he put it, “has had fish scales on his boots” ever since he could remember.

“We operate from Canso, the easternmost tip of Nova Scotia,” he said. “Our steamers make weekly trips to the fishing grounds, where they take the fish with nets. They are equipped with wireless, and we direct their operations from shore in accordance with market conditions. While the price of salt fish is fairly steady, fresh fish fluctuates from day to day, depending on the quantities caught and the public taste. Such fish as we cannot sell immediately, we cure in our smoking and drying plants.

“All our crews share in the proceeds of their catch, and the captains get no fixed wages at all. We could neither catch the fish nor sell them at a profit without the fullest coöperation on the part of our men, most of whom come from across the Atlantic, from Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, and also from Iceland. Next to the captain, the most important man on our ships is the cook. Few fish are caught unless the fishermen are well fed. The ‘cook’s locker’ is always full of pies, cakes, and cookies, to which the men help themselves, and the coffee-pot must be kept hot for all hands to ‘mug up.’”

From Halifax I crossed Nova Scotia by rail into the adjoining province of New Brunswick. Nova Scotia is a peninsula that seems to have been tacked on to the east coast of Canada. It is three hundred and seventy-four miles long, and so narrow that no point in it is more than thirty miles from the sea. The coast does not run due north and south, but more east and west, so that its southernmost tip points toward Boston. The Bay of Fundy separates it from the coasts of Maine and New Brunswick, and leaves only an isthmus, in places not more than twenty miles wide, connecting Nova Scotia with the mainland. The lower or westernmost half of the province is encircled with railroads, which carry every year increasing thousands of tourists and hunters from the United States. The summer vacationists and the artists go chiefly to the picturesque shore towns, while those who come up for hunting and fishing strike inland to the lakes and woods. Deer and moose are still so plentiful in Nova Scotia that their meat is served at Halifax hotels during the season.

The scenery is much like that of Maine. Rolling hills alternate with ledges of gray rock, while at every few miles there are lakes and ponds. Much of the country is covered with spruce, and many of the farms have hedges and tall windbreaks of those trees. The farmhouses are large and well built; they are usually situated on high ground and surrounded by sloping fields and pastures considerably larger than the farm lots of New England. In some places the broad hills are shaped like the sand dunes of Cape Cod. At nearly every station freshly cut lumber was piled up, awaiting shipment, while one of the little rivers our train crossed was filled with birch logs floating down to a spool factory.

Some two hours from Halifax we came to Truro at the head of Cobequid Bay, the easternmost arm of the Bay of Fundy. Scientists who have studied the forty-foot Fundy tides attribute them to its pocket-like shape. The tides are highest in the numerous deep inlets at the head of the Bay. In the Petitcodiac River, which forms the northernmost arm, as the tide comes in a wall of water two or three feet high rushes upstream. These tides are felt far back from the coast. The rivers and streams have deep-cut banks on account of the daily inrush and outflow of waters and are bordered with marshes through which run irrigation ditches dug by the farmers.

Truro is a turning-off point for the rail journey down the Bay side of Nova Scotia through “Evangeline Land” and the Annapolis Valley, and also for the trip north and east up to Cape Breton Island. This island is part of the province of Nova Scotia. It is separated from the mainland only by the mile-wide Strait of Canso, across which railroad trains are carried on ferries. In the southern part of the Island is the Bras d’Or Lake, an inland sea covering two hundred and forty square miles.

Though Cabot landed on the coast of Cape Breton Island after his discovery of the Newfoundland shore, it later fell into the hands of the French. They found its fisheries worth more than all the gold of Peru or Mexico. To protect the sea route to their St. Lawrence territories, they built at Louisburg a great fortress that cost a sum equal to twenty-five million dollars in our money. To-day, hardly one stone remains upon another, as the works were destroyed by the British in 1758. Not far from Louisburg is Glace Bay, where Marconi continued the wireless experiments begun in Newfoundland, and it was on this coast, also, that the first transatlantic cable was landed.

Cape Breton Island was settled mostly by Scotch, and even to-day sermons in the churches are often delivered in Gaelic. As a result of intermarriage sometimes half the people of a village bear the same family name. For generations these people lived mostly by fishing, but the opening of coal mines in the Sydney district brought many of them into that industry. The Sydney mines, which normally employ about ten thousand men, are the only coal deposits on the continent of North America lying directly on the Atlantic Coast. They are an asset of immense value to Canada, yielding more than one third of her total coal production. One of the mines at North Sydney has the largest coal shaft in the world. Because of these enormous deposits of bituminous coal, and the presence near by of dolomite, or limestone, steel industries have been developed in the Sydney district. Ownership of most of the coal and steel properties has been merged in the British Empire Steel Corporation, one of the largest single industrial enterprises in all Canada. It is this corporation, you will remember, that owns the Wabana iron mines in Newfoundland.

In the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and north of the isthmus connecting Nova Scotia with the mainland, is Prince Edward Island, the smallest, but proportionately the richest province in the Dominion of Canada. It is not quite twice the size of Rhode Island, and has less than one hundred thousand people, but every acre of its land is tillable and most of it is cultivated. The island is sometimes called the “Garden of the Gulf.”

Prince Edward Island is a favourite resort of Americans on vacation. It leaped into fame as the scene of the first successful experiments in raising foxes for their furs, and now has more than half of the fox farms in Canada. The business of selling fox skins and breeding stock is worth nearly two million dollars a year to the Prince Edward Islanders. The greatest profits are from the sales of fine breeding animals.

Most of the west shore of the Bay of Fundy and many of its northern reaches are in the third and westernmost of the three Maritime Provinces. This is the province of New Brunswick. It is Maine’s next-door neighbour, and almost as large, but it has less than half as many people. The wealth of New Brunswick, like that of Maine, comes chiefly from the farms, the fisheries, and the great forests that are fast being converted into lumber and paper. Its game and fresh-water fishing attract a great many sportsmen from both the United States and Canada.

St. John, the chief city of New Brunswick at the mouth of the St. John River, used to be a centre of anti-American sentiment in Canada. This was because the city was founded by the Tories, who left the United States after we won our independence. St. John to-day is a busy commercial centre competing with Halifax for first place as Canada’s all-year Atlantic port. It is the eastern terminal of the Canadian Pacific Railroad, whose transatlantic liners use the port during the winter. It enjoys the advantage over Halifax of being some two hundred miles nearer Montreal, but, like Halifax, suffers on account of the long railway haul and high freight rates to central Canada. As a matter of fact, New England, and not Canada, is the natural market for the Maritime Provinces, and every few years the proposal that this part of Canada form a separate Dominion comes up for discussion. Such talk is not taken seriously by the well informed, but it provides a good safety valve for local irritation.