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Chronicles of Canada Volume 31 - All Afloat: A Chronicle of Craft and Waterways

{16} <h3> CHAPTER II </h3> <h3> CANOES </h3> 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. Every succeeding explorer made use of the Indian canoe, up to the time of Mackenzie,[1] who paddled north to the Arctic in 1789, along the mighty river which bears his name; and who, four years {17} later, closed the age of great discoveries by crossing the Great Divide to the westward-flowing Fraser and reaching the Pacific by way of its tributary, the Blackwater, an Indian trail overland, and the Bella Coola. Mackenzie had found the canoe route; and when he painted the following record on a fiord rock he was bringing centuries of arduous endeavour to a befitting close: 'Alexander Mackenzie, from Canada, by land, the 22nd of July, 1793.' This crowning achievement with paddle and canoe seems very far away from the reader of the twentieth century. Yet François Beaulieu, one of Mackenzie's voyageurs, only died in 1872, and was well known to many old North-Westers who are still alive. The Indian birch-bark canoe is pre-eminently characteristic of Canada. But it is not the most primitive type of small craft; and it was often superseded for various purposes by the more advanced types introduced by the whites. There are three distinct types of small craft all the world over. Like everything else, they have followed the invariable order of evolution, from the simple to the complex. First came the simple log, which served the earliest man to cross some little stretch of water by the aid of pole or paddle. Next came {18} the union of several logs, which formed the clumsy but more stable raft. Then some prehistoric genius found that the more a log was hollowed out the better it would float; and so the dug-out was invented. Log, raft, and dug-out all belong to the first and simplest type, in which there are no artificial parts to fit together. The second type is exemplified by the birch-bark canoe, which has three parts in its frame—gunwale, cross-bars, and ribs—and a fourth part, the skin, to complete it. The third type is distinguished from the second by its keel, as clearly as vertebrate animals are distinguished from invertebrates by their backbone. The common keeled boat, with all its variations, represents this third and, so far, final type. All three types have played their parts in Canada, both jointly and separately, and all three play their parts to-day. But they are best understood if taken one by one. First, then, the log, the raft, and the dugout canoe. Any one watching a 'log drive' to-day can see the shantymen afloat in much the same way, though for a very different purpose, as their remotest human ancestors hundreds of thousands of years ago. The raft, like the log, is now a self-carrying cargo, not a passenger craft. But there it is, much as it {19} always was. Indeed, it is simpler now than it used to be some years ago, before the days of tugs and railways. 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. At one time it rose to the dignity of being the liner and the man-of-war of the Pacific coast; for the giant trees there favoured a kind of dug-out that the savage world has never seen elsewhere, except in certain parts of equatorial Africa. At another time, only a century or two ago, dug-outs of twenty feet or so were used in trade between the St Lawrence and the Hudson. They were of white pine, red or white cedar, or of tulip tree; and their crews poled standing or paddled kneeling, for they had no thwarts. They carried good loads, went well, with their canoe-shaped ends, and lasted ten or twelve {20} years if tarred or painted. They were, indeed, one-piece canoes, which they had a perfect right to be, as the word canoe comes from the name the West Indian natives gave their dug-outs when questioned by Columbus. Nowadays the dug-out is generally used for the dirtier work of 'longshore fisheries. It has lost its elegance of form, and may be said to have reverted to a lower type. But this reversion only serves the better to remind the twentieth century of what all sorts of craft were like, not twenty, but two hundred, centuries ago. Secondly comes the Indian bark canoe, so justly famous in the history, romance, and poetry of Canada. As in the case of other craft, its form, size, and material have never been what we call 'standardized.' Indians living outside the birch belt had to use inferior kinds of bark. But the finest type was always made, and is still made, with birch-bark. At least three kinds of tree are necessary for the best results: the birch for the skin, the fir to caulk it with, and the cedar for the sewing fibres and the frame. Only a single tool is needed—a knife; and many a good canoe was built before the whites brought metal knives from Europe. The Indian looks out for the {21} biggest, soundest, and smoothest birch tree in his neighbourhood. He prefers to strip it in the early summer, when the bark is supple with the sap. Sap is as good for the bark as it is bad for the woodwork of canoes and every other kind of craft. The soft inside of the bark is always scraped as clean as a tanner scrapes a hide. If the Indian has to build with dry or frozen bark he is careful to use hot water in stripping the trunk, and he warms the bark again for working. Of course, it is a great advantage to have as few strips as possible, since every seam must first be sewn together by the squaws and then gummed over. Occasionally a tree will be found big and suitable enough to yield a single strip from which a seamless twenty-footer can be built. But this is very rare. The next thing is the frame—the gunwale, ribs, and cross-bars. Where many canoes are building there is generally some sort of model round which the ribs are bent. But a skilled Indian can dispense with any model when making the ribs with every requisite degree of curve, from the open ribs amidships, where the bottom is nearly flat, to the close ribs at the ends, where the shape becomes halfway between the letter 'U' and {22} the letter 'V.' The gunwale is quite the most important part of the canoe, as it holds all the other parts together and serves some of the constructional purposes of a keel. The voyageurs, recognizing this, call it le maître. It is laid on the ends of the ribs, which are made fast to it. Then the frame is completed by the three or more cross-bars, which keep the two sides of the gunwale from spreading apart. After this the birch-bark skin is stretched on the frame as tightly as possible, turned in over the gunwale, and clamped on there by the faux maître or super-gunwale. The two ends, both as sharp as an ordinary bow, are then sewn together by a sort of criss-cross fibre lacing, and every hole or seam in the bark is well gummed with melted rosin. The finishing touches are equally important, each in its own way. Thin boards are laid in lengthwise, either between the ribs and the skin or over the ribs, so as to protect the bark bottom from being injured by the cargo. The ends of the canoe are reinforced inside by the Indian equivalent for a collision bulkhead. This bulkhead sometimes rises well above the gunwale and is carved like a figurehead, which accounts for its voyageur name of le p'ti' bonhomme. A third finishing touch, {23} very common in earlier days, is the decoration of the outsides of both ends, which used to rise with a sharp sheer, and sometimes actually curved back. The usual decorations here were totem signs, generally made of porcupine quills, dyed in many colours, and serving the original purpose of a coat of arms. The familiar shape has never been greatly varied, though some canoes are built on finer lines for speed, and others on fuller lines for carrying cargo. But there has always been plenty of variety in size and material. The smallest canoe would hardly hold two persons, and could be carried in one hand. The big war canoes would hold more than twenty well-armed paddlers and required four men to carry them. The very biggest canoe probably did not exceed forty feet in length, six in breadth, and two in depth amidships. Fifty men or five tons of cargo could have been carried in it. But perhaps one quite so large was never built. When white cedar and birch were not to be had, all sorts of substitutes were used. Any roots with tough fibres would do for the sewing, and any light and tough wood served its turn as a more or less efficient substitute for the white cedar framing. But elm and other alternative barks {24} were all bad. The elm bark was used inside out, because the outside was too rough and brittle for the bottom of a canoe. It made dull paddling and never lasted the whole of a hard season, unlike the birch-bark, which sometimes had a life of six or seven years. The most modern material is canvas, which is generally painted red or green. It is light, easily repaired, and has much to recommend it, though trappers think it gives a taint which scares their game away. The paddles were and are of all shapes and sizes, long and short, broad and narrow, spoon-blade and square; and they were and are made of all kinds of wood, from the lightest spruce to the much heavier but handsomer bird's-eye maple. Sails were and are only used with light winds dead aft, and not often in birch-barks even then, because there is no 'stiffness' without a keel. There were skin as well as bark canoes among the Indians. But the typical skin canoe is the Eskimo kayak. This is a shuttle-shaped craft, about fifteen feet long and just wide enough to let its single paddler sit flat on the bottom. It differs from the Indian canoe in being entirely decked over. The skin of the grey seal, when that best of canoe skins can be found, is carefully sewn, so as to be quite {25} waterproof, and then stretched as tightly as a drumhead all over the frame, except for the little 'well' where the Eskimo sits with his double-bladed paddle. As he tucks himself in so closely that water cannot enter he does not fear to be capsized, for he can right himself with a sweep of his paddle. Kayaks are very light and handy, as the frame is made either of whalebone or spruce. The oomiak is the Eskimo's family boat and cargo carrier, flat-bottomed, not decked in, and sometimes big enough for twenty people with their gear. It is made of much the same materials. The white man's canoes, so well known—outside of Canada—as 'Canadian canoes,' are partly true canoes and partly a cross between canoes and boats. The fact that the skin is not made of bark or hide, but of canvas, wood, or metal, and the further innovation that machinery is freely used, make no essential difference, provided always that there is no semblance of a keel. But once the keel is introduced the whole constructional idea is changed and the ways of savages are left behind. A first-rate keeled canoe, built of white cedar, brass shod and copper fastened, fitted with air tanks and life-line, a lateen sail and portage handles, is the very perfection {26} of a handy little cruiser for all sorts of inland waters. One like this, but built of basswood, proved quite serviceable after more than ten years' work, in the course of which it covered several thousand miles along the Lower St Lawrence, where the seas are often rough and the low-tide landings always hard. But all similar craft, though looking like canoes afloat, are no more like the true canoes and kayaks in their constructional detail than a bird is like a butterfly. The keel makes all the difference. 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. An intermediate type that once did much service, and still does a little, is the white man's flat-bottomed boat, which could be {27} paddled, rowed, or sailed, according to build and circumstances. The common punt is the best known form of it; the dory by far the handiest all round; the cargo barge the biggest; and the old-fashioned 'bateau' the most characteristically Canadian. The modern 'bateau' is to be found only among keeled sailing craft. But the old 'bateau,' which Wolfe's local transport officers spelt battoe, was more of a rowboat. It was sharp at both ends, wall-sided, and fitted with oars, poles, and a square sail. The bottom had some sheer—that is, it was curved up at each end—but less than the top. Four men rowed, the fifth steered, and three tons of miscellaneous goods or thirty-five barrels of flour made a fair cargo. Bateaux like this were the craft in which the United Empire Loyalists went up the St Lawrence to settle Upper Canada. Afterwards the size and crew were increased till the average cargo amounted to about four tons and a half. But the Durham boat, introduced by American traders from the Mohawk valley, soon became a successful rival, which was not itself supplanted till canals enabled still larger craft to pass from one open water to another. The Durham was larger than the bateau; long, light, and shallow. It had a not quite flat {28} bottom and a moderate sheer in the sides. The best bateaux and Durhams were made with strong white oak bottoms and light fir sides. The bark canoe gave place to the boat, step by step, as civilized intercourse advanced. It disappeared first from the great national highway of the St Lawrence and the Lakes, where the French began using bateaux and sailing craft as early as the seventeenth century. During the eighteenth the boat gained steadily on the canoe, which was more and more confined to the Indians. The local craft in chief civilized use on both sides during the fight for Canada was the bateau; and the best crews then and afterwards were the French-Canadian voyageurs. But everywhere beyond the immediate spheres of French and British influence the canoe was universal. The Great West then began at the Lakes and the Mississippi, and was a land of wild adventure, rumour, and extravagant surmise. The map that formed the frontispiece to the standard authority of the time—Jefferys' French Dominions in America—is full of geographical romance. Once in the Kaministikwia, the map has no territorial divisions other than those between the {29} different tribal hunting grounds, each one of which was watered by a hundred streams and marked by the 'carrying places' where the canoes had to be 'portaged.' There lived the 'Nation of the Bear' and the 'Nation of the Snake,' whose special totems of course were worked in coloured quills on every war canoe; and there flowed many a river 'the course of which is uncertain.' Along the great Assiniboine lay the 'Warrior's track from the River of the West,' and just where the prairies ran out into the complete unknown there was the vista of a second Eldorado in the hopeful suggestion that 'Hereabouts are supposed to be the Mountains of Bright Stones mentioned in the Map of ye Indian Ochagach.' After the Conquest the tide of trade and settlement flowed faster and faster west; and with the white man's trade and settlement came the white man's boats. At last, in 1823, Sir George Simpson, the resident governor of the Hudson's Bay Company, finding that canoe transport was half as dear again as that done with boats, ordered that boats should supersede canoes all over the main trade routes of the Company's vast domain. This was the death-blow to the canoe as a real factor in Canadian life. From that time on it has been receding {30} farther and farther, from waterway to waterway, at first before the white man's boat with oars and sails, and now before his steamer. But in distant or secluded wilds it lingers still—the same craft to-day that it was when the Celtic coracles were paddled on the Thames before the Romans ever heard of England—the horse, the ship, the moving home of those few remaining nomads whose life is dying with its own. 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 nineteenth century saw its almost equally slow decline, which began in 1815, at the close of the war with the United States, and may be said to have been practically completed with the two North-West Rebellions of 1870 and 1885. The latter year, indeed, closed a real {31} epoch with three significant events: the end of the last Indian and half-breed war in Canada, the completion of the first trans-continental Canadian railway, and the return from Egypt of the first and last Canadians to go on an oversea campaign as professed voyageurs. Under the French régime the fur trade reached well past Lake Superior. Nepigon and the Kaministikwia were the two most important junctions of routes at the western end of the lake. Under British rule the Montreal 'fur lords' used the 'Grand Portage,' which ends on a bay of Lake Superior some way south of the modern Fort William. It was a regular bush road, nearly ten miles long, made to avoid the falls of the Pigeon. As early as 1783, the year in which King George III first recognized the United States as an independent power, the fur lords kept no less than five hundred men in constant work at the height of the season, during the latter half of August. Horses and oxen were used later on; but the voyageur himself was the chief beast of burden here, as everywhere else. There were two kinds of voyageur. One was the mere merchant carrier, who went from Montreal to the Grand Portage in big boats of four tons burden having a crew of ten men. These were the 'pork {32} eaters' or mangeurs de lard, who had nothing worse to face than well-known rapids. The others were a finer breed, the true and daring coureurs de bois, or pioneers of the bush, who went west in comparatively light canoes, each carrying not more than a ton and a half, who hunted their own game, risked a fight with the Indians, and were to the duller 'pork eaters' what a charger is to a cart-horse or a frigate to a barge. The regulation portage load was one hundred and fifty pounds, and many a man was known to carry this weight the whole ten miles and back within six hours. There was need to hurry. Supplies were going west to Lake Winnipeg, up the Saskatchewan, and even on to Athabaska; while furs were coming down for the autumn trade to Europe. As a rule the traders were Scottish and the voyageurs French Canadian. Indians and half-breeds were fairly common; they manned the canoes in the farther wilds, guided the pioneers, and did the actual trapping. To speak in terms of modern transportation: the Indians and their bark canoes produced the raw material and worked the branch lines; while the voyageurs met them at the junctions and took the goods down to {33} the head of ocean navigation, where everything was, of course, trans-shipped for Europe. The same sort of trade was carried on, in a slightly different way, in the Maritime Provinces. There are survivals of it still in Labrador. At the end of July, Nascaupees, some of whom take months to reach their hunting grounds by paddle and portage, may be seen at Seven Islands, on the north shore of the Gulf of St Lawrence, where huge modern pulp mills make paper for the New York press, and where the offing is alive with transatlantic shipping all season through. These inland voyages are as strange to the average Canadian of to-day as to contemporary Englishmen and Frenchmen. So it is perhaps worth while to record the ordinary features of what must soon become altogether a thing of the past. The incidents would be much the same with every kind of small craft that has served its turn along the interlocking network of Canadian waterways, whether an old-fashioned bateau or a Durham boat, a sharp-end dug-out, or a bark canoe. But the immemorial birch-bark is the best to choose for example, as it preceded and outlasted every other kind and is the most typically Canadian of them all. {34} Before starting, every broken seam and hole must be gummed over. Water is poured into the canoe and every point of exit marked for gumming. Loading must be done with unusual care, as the slightest crankness of such frail craft in such wild waters is likely to prove fatal. Crews always were their own stevedores, and it was a poor crew that could not load to perfection in a short five minutes, once the cargo had been settled. The actual paddling is not difficult to learn, that is, the paddling required from an ordinary member of the crew. But the man in the bow and, still more, the man in the stern need the highest kind of skilful daring to take them safely through. Paddling by oneself also requires a special touch, only to be learnt by long practice. Even in dead water it takes some time before a novice can send the canoe straight ahead when paddling on one side only. As the paddle goes aft the bow naturally tends to turn towards the other side. The trick of it consists in counteracting this tendency by a twist of the blade which brings the inner edge round, aftwise beside the canoe, till the blade becomes a rectifying rudder as well as a thrusting propeller at the end of every stroke. When a fall or impassable rapid is reached, {35} the 'bowman' jumps out before the canoe touches bottom and draws her safely ashore. He and the 'steersman' then carry her over the portage, while the rest carry the cargo on their backs. A man's own weight is a fair load; but with a sling across their foreheads, and clasped hands behind their heads, strong men have carried twice as much and more. When a rapid has to be ascended the canoe is lightened as much as need be, the steel-shod poles are got out, and the bow and stern paddlers stand up to their work, balancing themselves as easily as other men would on dry land. But it is when a rapid is to be 'run' that the finest skill is shown. If there is any doubt the steersman walks down to take a good look first. Then, if necessary, some or all of the cargo is taken out and portaged to the next 'steady' in the river. Rapids are so common in some journeys that canoemen think less of them than foxhunters think of five-barred gates. In most cases a mistake means death; so every nerve and muscle is kept tensely ready the whole run through. The current should be 'humoured'; for it does a surprising amount of the work itself. If rightly headed with the main throw of it the canoe will {36} naturally tend to seek the deepest and safest channel just as the body of the water does. Split channels must be met by instant decision; and it is when picking out the proper one that steerage way tells. As the pace of the rapid increases, so does the danger; for the slightest false thrust of a blade is enough to make a canoe swerve or upset. 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. All the white man's boats used by the voyageurs approximated more or less to the shape of the canoe: the various kinds of Hudson river dug-out, the bateau, the 'Durham,' and the 'York,' which last became the wooden successor of the birch-bark after Governor Simpson's general inspection of the Hudson's Bay domain. Only the rather {37} barge-like 'Mackinaw' was completely outside this venturesome class. It was a useful but humdrum cargo boat, laboriously poled along shallow, quiet waters, or rowed with lumbering sweeps; or sometimes even sailed, when it shovelled its way through the water with a very safe wind dead aft. This completes the tale of Canadian inland small craft that depended on pole and paddle, oar and towline, and only used a simple sail as an exceptional thing. 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. Simpson soon grasped the salient features of the people he had to deal with and very sensibly made his tours of inspection as much like a {38} royal progress as he could. Time and money were never neglected: his 'record runs' across the wilderness and the dividends at headquarters proved that to the full. He was determined to show every one concerned that thenceforth there was only one governing company, and that he was its proper representative. Then, as always, London was the general headquarters. But the Canadian headquarters were at Montreal; and Simpson fixed what might be called the field headquarters at Norway House, near the north end of Lake Winnipeg, a commanding strategic point in the heart of the great fur territories. Here he was always busy introducing discipline, enforcing a much-needed reduction in the ration of rum given to the Indians, and reporting home. As voyageurs, he thought the French Canadians much better than the men of any other race. 'Canadians preferable to Orkneymen. Orkneymen less expensive but slow. Less physical strength and spirits. Obstinate if brought young into the service. Scotch and Irish, when numerous, quarrelsome, independent, and mutinous.' He introduced fines as a punishment. But 'this will only do for Europeans. A blow is better for Canadians.' On July 12, 1828, Simpson left York Factory {39} on Hudson Bay for a state and business progress across the continent to Fort Vancouver on the Columbia. One of his staff, Archibald Macdonald, wrote an account of it, called Peace River: a Canoe Voyage from the Hudson Bay to the Pacific. The best of birch-barks were used to ensure speed; though the birch-bark had already been superseded as a cargo craft. There was a doctor in the party, which included nine voyageurs to each of the two canoes. Simpson's departure was the signal for a salute of seven guns, which was duly repeated at every subsequent fort. The whole population lined the waterside as the voyageurs struck up one of their old French folk-songs to beguile the way. The arrival at Norway House was still more imposing. The Union Jack, with the magic letters 'H. B. C.' on its fly, was hoisted, to the admiration of all the whites and Indians from that most important neighbourhood. Simpson's party had landed out of sight to put on their best clothes; after which they shot through the gorge at full speed, to the strains of the bagpipes from Simpson's canoe and bugles from the other. At Fort St James, the central point of 'New Caledonia,' the approach was made by land. 'Unfurling the British Ensign, it was given {40} to the guide, who marched first. After him came the band, consisting of buglers and bagpipers. Next came the governor, mounted, and behind him Hamlyn and Macdonald, also on horses. Twenty men loaded like beasts of burden formed the line, and finally M'Gillivray with his wife and family brought up the rear.' On the nineteenth day out from York Factory Simpson reached Fort Langley at the mouth of the Fraser. How far away it all seems now in this new twentieth century! And yet, as in the case of Alexander Mackenzie, there is a wonderfully intimate human link connecting that time with our own; for Lord Strathcona was born before the amalgamation of the rival companies in 1821; he became the last resident-governor of the Hudson's Bay Company while François Beaulieu, Mackenzie's centenarian voyageur, was still alive; and he lived until 1914, the year of the Great World War. [1] For the canoe voyages of Mackenzie, to the Arctic in 1789 and to the Pacific in 1793, see Adventurers of the Far North and Pioneers of the Pacific Coast in this Series. <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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