William Wood

“ Sometimes, however, the rare occasion serves the rare harpooner, when the whale and canoe appear as if about to meet each other straight head-on. Then, in a flash, the man in the bow is up on his feet, with the harpoon so poised that the rocking water, the mettlesome canoe, and his watchful comrade in the stern, all form part of the concentrated energy with which he brings his every faculty to a single point of instantaneous action. ”

“ Then it was craft and cargo in one. It was steered by immense oars, as sailing vessels were before the days of rudders; other gigantic oars were occasionally used to propel it, like an ancient galley; it carried loose-footed square sails, like the ships of Tarshish; and its crew lived aboard in shacks and other simple kinds of shelter, like the earliest Egyptian cabins ages before the captivity of Israel.
The dug-out has the humblest, though the longest, history of any craft the hand of man has ever shaped. ”

“ And a fighting humpback in the Gulf of St Lawrence is no easy game to tackle with a hand-lance in a pram. Norwegians are thrifty folk, and bomb harpooning is expensive. So when the whale and steamer meet, at the end of the chase, a tiny pram is launched with two men rowing and a third standing up in the stern to wield the fifteen-foot lance. As the humpback's flippers are also fifteen feet long, and as they thrash about with blows that have sunk several prams and killed more than one crew, it still requires the fittest nerves and muscles to give the final stroke. ”

“ Directly the wind is out of it and it begins to shiver he yells, 'Raise tacks and sheets!' when, except that the foretack is held a bit to prevent the foresail from bellying aback, all the remaining ropes that held the ship on her old tack are loosed. A roar of wind-waves rushes through the sails, and a tremor runs through the whole ship from stem to stern. The skipper waits for the first decided breath on her new tack and then shouts, 'Mainsail haul!' when the yards come swinging round so quickly that the men can hardly take in the slack of the braces fast enough. ”

“ But, with the expert bowman on the keenest of look-outs and the course under the knowing touch of the still more expert steersman, a rapid may be run in perfect safety through racing waves which only just fail to leap aboard, on roaring water which drowns the human voice so completely that the bowman can only make use of signals, past rocks and snags on which a single graze would mean a wreck, and, often the worst of all, from one wild 'throw' to another with quite a different set and a wrench of two fierce currents where they meet. ”

“ Quick, for your lives, hang on, all!' A mountainous wall of black water suddenly leaps up and crashes through the windward rigging. The watch goes down to a man, some hanging on to the rope as if suspended in the middle of a waterfall, for the deck is nearly perpendicular, while others wash off altogether and fetch up with a dazing, underwater thud against the lee side. Inch by inch the men haul in, waist-deep most of the time and often completely under. ”

“ When all the other elements of sea-power are taken into consideration—the people who are directly dependent on the sea, the values constantly afloat, the credits involved, the enormous advantages enjoyed, and the clinching fact that British naval defeat means disaster and disaster means ruin—when all this is brought into the reckoning, it is safe to say that the combined maritime interests of the British Empire practically equal those of all the rest of the world put together. ”

“ Though there is three times as much sea as land in the world, it is safe to say that there is three hundred times as much knowledge of the land as there is of the sea. The ways of the sea are strange to most people in every country, excepting Norway and Newfoundland. Seamen have always been somewhat of a class apart, though they are less so now. Ignorance of everything to do with the water is exceedingly common, even in England and Canada. The British mercantile marine is one of the biggest commercial enterprises of all time. It is of very great importance to Canada. ”

“ The great historic age of inland small craft—the age of dug-out, bateau, and canoe; the age of Indian, pioneer, and voyageur—was the eighteenth century, when fresh-water sailing craft were few, when steamers were unknown, and when savage and civilized men and methods were mingled with each other in the fur trade over a larger area than they used in common either before that time or since. The seventeenth century saw the slow beginnings of this age after Champlain had founded Quebec in 1608 and had taken the warpath with the Hurons against the Iroquois. ”

“ The officer of the watch keeps one eye to windward, makes up his mind what sail he'll shorten, and then yells an order that pierces the wind like a shot, 'Stand by your royal halliards!' As the squall swoops down and the ship heels over to it he yells again, 'Let go your royal halliards, clew 'em up and make 'em fast!' Down come the yards, with hoarse roaring from the thrashing canvas. But then, if no second squall is coming, the mate will cut the clewing short with a stentorian 'Masthead the yards again!' on which the watch lay on to the halliards and haul—Ahay! ”

“ Both hands must be used, though the sail and foot-ropes rack your body and try their best to shake you off. If they succeed, a sickening thud on deck, or a smothered scream and a half-heard plopp! overside would be the end of you.
All hands work like fury, for a full Antarctic hurricane is on them. This great South Polar storm has swept a thousand leagues, almost unchecked, before venting its utmost rage against the iron coasts all round the Horn. The South Shetlands have only served to rouse its temper. ”

“ Their splendid clippers successfully challenged the slower Britishers on every trade route in the world. At the very time that the America was beating British yachts hull-down, the old British East Indiamen were still wallowing along with eighty hands to a thousand tons, while a Yankee thousand-tonner could sail them out of sight with forty. The British excuse was that East Indiamen required a fighting crew as well as a trading one, and that British vessels were built to last, not simply put together to make one flashy record. ”

“ The fisheries of Canada are the most important in the world. True as this statement is, it needs some explanation. In the first place, Newfoundland is included, in accordance with its inclusion under all other headings in this book. Then, all the wholly or partly unexploited waters are taken into consideration, including Hudson Bay and the Arctic ocean. And, thirdly, the catch made by foreigners in all waters neighbouring the Canadian coasts is not left out. Thus the Canadian fisheries are held to mean all the fisheries, fresh and salt, in or nearest to the whole of British North America. ”

“ Steering is blown into you by the wind and soaked into you by the water. And you must also have {120} that inborn faculty of touch which tells you instinctively how to meet a vessel's vagaries—and no two vessels are alike—as well as how to make her fall in with all the humours of a wayward ocean. ”

“ The labour is lightened, as hand labour always has been lightened, by singing to the rhythm of the work. The seaman's working songs are chanties, a kind of homespun poetry which, once heard to its rolling music and the sound of wind and wave, will always bring back the very savour of the sea wherever it is heard again. ”

“ The anchor is then hove up, catted, and fished.
'All hands make sail!' sings out the mate. The wind is nicely on the starboard quarter, that is, abaft the beam and forward of the stern, which gives the best chance to every sail. A wind dead aft, blanketing more than half the canvas, is called a lubber's wind. A soldier's wind is one which comes square on the beam, and so makes equally plain sailing out and back again. What sail a full-rigged ship can carry! The Yankee Great Republic could spread nearly one whole acre of canvas to the breeze. ”

“ What the camel is to desert tribes, what the horse is to the Arab, what the ship is to the colonizing Briton, what all modern means of locomotion are to the civilized world to-day, that, and more than that, the canoe was to the Indian who lived beside the innumerable waterways of Canada. The Indian went fishing, hunting, campaigning, and sometimes even whaling, in his bark canoe. Jacques Cartier found Indians fishing in the Gulf of St Lawrence and sleeping under their upturned canoes, as many a white and Indian has slept since that long-past summer of 1534. ”

“ Everything in naval architecture springs from and is related to the keel. 'Laying the keel' means beginning the ship in the only possible way, and 'two keels to one' is an expression which every one understands as meaning a naval preponderance in that proportion. The keel is to the ribs of a ship exactly what the backbone is to the ribs of a man, and any craft built up from a keel, no matter how small and simple it may be, belongs to the third and apparently final type of craft, which is as far ahead of the canoe type as that is ahead of the dug-out, raft, and log. ”

“ A classical scholar would be irresistibly reminded of the Homeric vessels, not as they were in reality, but as they appear in the eager, sea-born suggestions of the Iliad and the Odyssey—long, sharp, swift, well-timbered, hollow, with many thwarts, and ends curved high like horns. ”

“ The heyday of the Canadian sailing ship was the third quarter of the nineteenth century. This period, indeed, was one of great activity in the history of mast and sail all the world over. There was intense rivalry between steam and sail. The repeal of the Navigation Act in England had brought the whole of British shipping into direct competition with foreigners. The Americans were pushing their masterful way into every sea. The rush to California was drawing eager fleets of Yankee, Bluenose, and St Lawrence vessels round the Horn. ”

“ Most of the crew and all the officers were to be British subjects—an important point when British seamen were liable to be 'pressed' into men-of-war in time of national danger.
The change of rule in 1763 meant that Canada left an empire that could not enforce its navigation laws and joined an empire that could. Whatever the value of the laws, Canadian shipping and sea trade continued to grow under them. In the eighteenth century {70} there was little internal development anywhere in America; and less in Canada than in what soon became the United States. ”

“ Standing in the gateway of Canada, Newfoundland was always a menace to New France. Thirty years before Champlain founded Quebec a traveller notes that, among the fishing fleets off Newfoundland, 'the English rule all there.' In other quarters, too, there was a menace to France. The British colonies were always feeling their way along the coast as well as along the Great Lakes. In spite of ordinances on both sides, forbidding trade between colonies of different powers, little trading craft, mostly British, would creep in with some enticing contraband, generally by way of Lake Champlain. ”

“ But the human interest would not be complete without some reference to the tours of inspection made by the magnates of the Hudson's Bay Company. The greatest tours of all were those of Sir George Simpson, the governor who took charge after the Company absorbed its warring rival in 1821. In modern business language he would be called the executive head of the great Canadian fur-trade 'merger.' He was a young promoted clerk, a Scotsman born, with little experience of the Canadian wilds, but with the natural faculty of rule and a good deal of diplomacy—the gauntlet in the velvet glove. ”

“ And only within almost as recent times has what may be called the natural history of Canadian fisheries begun to follow the inevitable trend of evolution which gradually changes the civilized fisherman from a hunter into a farmer. As man increases in number, and his means of hunting down game increase still faster, a time inevitably comes when he disturbs the balance of nature to such an extent that he must either exterminate his prey or begin to 'farm' it, that is, begin to breed and protect as well as kill it. Fisheries are no exception to this rule ”

“ The weather service is full of absorbing interest. And, what with wireless telegraphy, submarine bells, direction indicators, microthermometers as detectors of ice, and many other new appliances, the whole practice of navigation is becoming an equally interesting subject for a book filled with the 'fairy tales of science.' Even hydrography—that is, the surveying and mapping (or 'charting') of the water—has an appealing interest, to say nothing of its long and varied history. Jacques Cartier, though he made no charts, may be truly called the first Canadian hydrographer ”