However, this is a ruin kept in
remarkably
good repair.
Thoreau - Excursions and Poems
Then, wishing to learn if they used the cradle, and not
knowing any French word for this instrument, I set up the knives and
forks on the blade of the sickle to represent one; at which they all
exclaimed that they knew and had used it. When _snells_ were mentioned
they went out in the dark and plucked some. They were pretty good.
They said they had three kinds of plums growing wild,--blue, white,
and red, the two former much alike and the best. Also they asked me if
I would have _des pommes_, some apples, and got me some. They were
exceedingly fair and glossy, and it was evident that there was no worm
in them; but they were as hard almost as a stone, as if the season was
too short to mellow them. We had seen no soft and yellow apples by the
roadside. I declined eating one, much as I admired it, observing that
it would be good _dans le printemps_, in the spring. In the morning
when the mistress had set the eggs a-frying she nodded to a thick-set,
jolly-looking fellow, who rolled up his sleeves, seized the
long-handled griddle, and commenced a series of revolutions and
evolutions with it, ever and anon tossing its contents into the air,
where they turned completely topsy-turvy and came down t'other side
up; and this he repeated till they were done. That appeared to be his
duty when eggs were concerned. I did not chance to witness this
performance, but my companion did, and he pronounced it a masterpiece
in its way. This man's farm, with the buildings, cost seven hundred
pounds; some smaller ones, two hundred.
In 1827, Montmorenci County, to which the Isle of Orleans has since
been added, was nearly as large as Massachusetts, being the eighth
county out of forty (in Lower Canada) in extent; but by far the
greater part still must continue to be waste land, lying as it were
under the walls of Quebec.
I quote these old statistics, not merely because of the difficulty of
obtaining more recent ones, but also because I saw there so little
evidence of any recent growth. There were in this county, at the same
date, five Roman Catholic churches, and no others, five cures and five
presbyteries, two schools, two corn-mills, four sawmills, one
carding-mill,--no medical man or notary or lawyer,--five shopkeepers,
four taverns (we saw no sign of any, though, after a little
hesitation, we were sometimes directed to some undistinguished hut as
such), thirty artisans, and five river crafts, whose tonnage amounted
to sixty-nine tons! This, notwithstanding that it has a frontage of
more than thirty miles on the river, and the population is almost
wholly confined to its banks. This describes nearly enough what we
saw. But double some of these figures, which, however, its growth will
not warrant, and you have described a poverty which not even its
severity of climate and ruggedness of soil will suffice to account
for. The principal productions were wheat, potatoes, oats, hay, peas,
flax, maple-sugar, etc. , etc. ; linen cloth, or _etoffe du pays_,
flannel, and homespun, or _petite etoffe_.
In Lower Canada, according to Bouchette, there are two tenures,--the
feudal and the socage. _Tenanciers_, _censitaires_, or holders of land
_en roture_ pay a small annual rent to the seigneurs, to which "is
added some articles of provision, such as a couple of fowls, or a
goose, or a bushel of wheat. " "They are also bound to grind their corn
at the _moulin banal_, or the lord's mill, where one fourteenth part
of it is taken for his use" as toll. He says that the toll is one
twelfth in the United States where competition exists. It is not
permitted to exceed one sixteenth in Massachusetts. But worse than
this monopolizing of mill rents is what are called _lods et ventes_,
or mutation fines,--according to which the seigneur has "a right to a
twelfth part of the purchase-money of every estate within his
seigniory that changes its owner by sale. " This is over and above the
sum paid to the seller. In such cases, moreover, "the lord possesses
the _droit de retrait_, which is the privilege of preemption at the
highest bidden price within forty days after the sale has taken
place,"--a right which, however, is said to be seldom exercised.
"Lands held by Roman Catholics are further subject to the payment to
their curates of one twenty-sixth part of all the grain produced upon
them, and to occasional assessments for building and repairing
churches," etc. ,--a tax to which they are not subject if the
proprietors change their faith; but they are not the less attached to
their church in consequence. There are, however, various modifications
of the feudal tenure. Under the socage tenure, which is that of the
townships or more recent settlements, English, Irish, Scotch, and
others, and generally of Canada West, the landholder is wholly
unshackled by such conditions as I have quoted, and "is bound to no
other obligations than those of allegiance to the king and obedience
to the laws. " Throughout Canada "a freehold of forty shillings yearly
value, or the payment of ten pounds rent annually, is the
qualification for voters. " In 1846 more than one sixth of the whole
population of Canada East were qualified to vote for members of
Parliament,--a greater proportion than enjoy a similar privilege in
the United States.
The population which we had seen the last two days--I mean the
habitans of Montmorenci County--appeared very inferior, intellectually
and even physically, to that of New England. In some respects they
were incredibly filthy. It was evident that they had not advanced
since the settlement of the country, that they were quite behind the
age, and fairly represented their ancestors in Normandy a thousand
years ago. Even in respect to the common arts of life, they are not so
far advanced as a frontier town in the West three years old. They have
no money invested in railroad stock, and probably never will have. If
they have got a French phrase for a railroad, it is as much as you can
expect of them. They are very far from a revolution, have no quarrel
with Church or State, but their vice and their virtue is content. As
for annexation, they have never dreamed of it; indeed, they have not a
clear idea what or where the States are. The English government has
been remarkably liberal to its Catholic subjects in Canada, permitting
them to wear their own fetters, both political and religious, as far
as was possible for subjects. Their government is even too good for
them. Parliament passed "an act [in 1825] to provide for the
extinction of feudal and seigniorial rights and burdens on lands in
Lower Canada, and for the gradual conversion of those tenures into the
tenure of free and common socage," etc. But as late as 1831, at least,
the design of the act was likely to be frustrated, owing to the
reluctance of the seigniors and peasants. It has been observed by
another that the French Canadians do not extend nor perpetuate their
influence. The British, Irish, and other immigrants, who have settled
the townships, are found to have imitated the American settlers and
not the French. They reminded me in this of the Indians, whom they
were slow to displace, and to whose habits of life they themselves more
readily conformed than the Indians to theirs. The Governor-General
Denouville remarked, in 1685, that some had long thought that it was
necessary to bring the Indians near them in order to Frenchify
(_franciser_) them, but that they had every reason to think themselves
in an error; for those who had come near them and were even collected
in villages in the midst of the colony had not become French, but the
French who had haunted them had become savages. Kalm said, "Though
many nations imitate the French customs, yet I observed, on the
contrary, that the French in Canada, in many respects, follow the
customs of the Indians, with whom they converse every day. They make
use of the tobacco-pipes, shoes, garters, and girdles of the Indians.
They follow the Indian way of making war with exactness; they mix the
same things with tobacco [he might have said that both French and
English learned the use itself of this weed of the Indian]; they make
use of the Indian bark-boats, and row them in the Indian way; they
wrap square pieces of cloth round their feet instead of stockings; and
have adopted many other Indian fashions. " Thus, while the descendants
of the Pilgrims are teaching the English to make pegged boots, the
descendants of the French in Canada are wearing the Indian moccasin
still. The French, to their credit be it said, to a certain extent
respected the Indians as a separate and independent people, and spoke
of them and contrasted themselves with them as the English have never
done. They not only went to war with them as allies, but they lived at
home with them as neighbors. In 1627 the French king declared "that
the descendants" of the French, settled in New France, "and the
savages who should be brought to the knowledge of the faith, and
should make profession of it, should be counted and reputed French
born (_Naturels Francois_); and as such could emigrate to France, when
it seemed good to them, and there acquire, will, inherit, etc. , etc. ,
without obtaining letters of naturalization. " When the English had
possession of Quebec, in 1630, the Indians, attempting to practice the
same familiarity with them that they had with the French, were driven
out of their houses with blows; which accident taught them a
difference between the two races, and attached them yet more to the
French. The impression made on me was that the French Canadians were
even sharing the fate of the Indians, or at least gradually
disappearing in what is called the Saxon current.
The English did not come to America from a mere love of adventure,
nor to truck with or convert the savages, nor to hold offices under
the crown, as the French to a great extent did, but to live in earnest
and with freedom. The latter overran a great extent of country,
selling strong water, and collecting its furs, and converting its
inhabitants,--or at least baptizing its dying infants (_enfans
moribonds_),--without _improving_ it. First went the _coureur de bois_
with the _eau de vie_; then followed, if he did not precede, the
heroic missionary with the _eau d'immortalite_. It was freedom to
hunt, and fish, and convert, not to work, that they sought. Hontan
says that the _coureurs de bois_ lived like sailors ashore. In no part
of the Seventeenth Century could the French be said to have had a
foothold in Canada; they held only by the fur of the wild animals
which they were exterminating. To enable the poor seigneurs to get
their living, it was permitted by a decree passed in the reign of
Louis the Fourteenth, in 1685, "to all nobles and gentlemen settled in
Canada, to engage in commerce, without being called to account or
reputed to have done anything derogatory. " The reader can infer to
what extent they had engaged in agriculture, and how their farms must
have shone by this time. The New England youth, on the other hand,
were never _coureurs de bois_ nor _voyageurs_, but backwoodsmen and
sailors rather. Of all nations the English undoubtedly have proved
hitherto that they had the most business here.
Yet I am not sure but I have most sympathy with that spirit of adventure
which distinguished the French and Spaniards of those days, and made
them especially the explorers of the American Continent,--which so
early carried the former to the Great Lakes and the Mississippi on the
north, and the latter to the same river on the south. It was long
before our frontiers reached their settlements in the West. So far as
inland discovery was concerned, the adventurous spirit of the English
was that of sailors who land but for a day, and their enterprise the
enterprise of traders.
There was apparently a greater equality of condition among the
habitans of Montmorenci County than in New England. They are an almost
exclusively agricultural, and so far independent population, each
family producing nearly all the necessaries of life for itself. If the
Canadian wants energy, perchance he possesses those virtues, social
and others, which the Yankee lacks, in which case he cannot be
regarded as a poor man.
FOOTNOTE:
[2] From McCulloch's Geographical Dictionary we learn that
"immediately beyond the Island of Orleans it is a mile broad; where
the Saguenay joins it, eighteen miles; at Point Peter, upward of
thirty; at the Bay of Seven Islands, seventy miles; and at the Island
of Anticosti (above three hundred and fifty miles from Quebec), it
rolls a flood into the ocean nearly one hundred miles across. "
CHAPTER IV
THE WALLS OF QUEBEC
After spending the night at a farmhouse in Chateau Richer, about a
dozen miles northeast of Quebec, we set out on our return to the city.
We stopped at the next house, a picturesque old stone mill, over the
_Chipre_,--for so the name sounded,--such as you will nowhere see in
the States, and asked the millers the age of the mill. They went
upstairs to call the master; but the crabbed old miser asked why we
wanted to know, and would tell us only for some compensation. I wanted
French to give him a piece of my mind. I had got enough to talk on a
pinch, but not to quarrel, so I had to come away, looking all I would
have said. This was the utmost incivility we met with in Canada. In
Beauport, within a few miles of Quebec, we turned aside to look at a
church which was just being completed,--a very large and handsome
edifice of stone, with a green bough stuck in its gable, of some
significance to Catholics. The comparative wealth of the Church in
this country was apparent; for in this village we did not see one good
house besides. They were all humble cottages; and yet this appeared to
me a more imposing structure than any church in Boston. But I am no
judge of these things.
Reentering Quebec through St. John's Gate, we took a caleche in Market
Square for the Falls of the Chaudiere, about nine miles southwest of
the city, for which we were to pay so much, besides forty sous for
tolls. The driver, as usual, spoke French only. The number of these
vehicles is very great for so small a town. They are like one of our
chaises that has lost its top, only stouter and longer in the body,
with a seat for the driver where the dasher is with us, and broad
leather ears on each side to protect the riders from the wheel and
keep children from falling out. They had an easy jaunting look, which,
as our hours were numbered, persuaded us to be riders. We met with
them on every road near Quebec these days, each with its complement of
two inquisitive-looking foreigners and a Canadian driver, the former
evidently enjoying their novel experience, for commonly it is only the
horse whose language you do not understand; but they were one remove
further from him by the intervention of an equally unintelligible
driver. We crossed the St. Lawrence to Point Levi in a French-Canadian
ferry-boat, which was inconvenient and dirty, and managed with great
noise and bustle. The current was very strong and tumultuous; and the
boat tossed enough to make some sick, though it was only a mile
across; yet the wind was not to be compared with that of the day
before, and we saw that the Canadians had a good excuse for not taking
us over to the Isle of Orleans in a pirogue, however shiftless they
may be for not having provided any other conveyance. The route which
we took to the Chaudiere did not afford us those views of Quebec which
we had expected, and the country and inhabitants appeared less
interesting to a traveler than those we had seen. The Falls of the
Chaudiere are three miles from its mouth on the south side of the St.
Lawrence. Though they were the largest which I saw in Canada, I was
not proportionately interested by them, probably from satiety. I did
not see any peculiar propriety in the name _Chaudiere_, or caldron. I
saw here the most brilliant rainbow that I ever imagined. It was just
across the stream below the precipice, formed on the mist which this
tremendous fall produced; and I stood on a level with the keystone of
its arch. It was not a few faint prismatic colors merely, but a full
semicircle, only four or five rods in diameter, though as wide as
usual, so intensely bright as to pain the eye, and apparently as
substantial as an arch of stone. It changed its position and colors as
we moved, and was the brighter because the sun shone so clearly and
the mist was so thick. Evidently a picture painted on mist for the men
and animals that came to the falls to look at; but for what special
purpose beyond this, I know not. At the farthest point in this ride,
and when most inland, unexpectedly at a turn in the road we descried
the frowning citadel of Quebec in the horizon, like the beak of a bird
of prey. We returned by the river road under the bank, which is very
high, abrupt, and rocky. When we were opposite to Quebec, I was
surprised to see that in the Lower Town, under the shadow of the rock,
the lamps were lit, twinkling not unlike crystals in a cavern, while
the citadel high above, and we, too, on the south shore, were in broad
daylight. As we were too late for the ferry-boat that night, we put up
at a _maison de pension_ at Point Levi. The usual two-story stove was
here placed against an opening in the partition shaped like a
fireplace, and so warmed several rooms. We could not understand their
French here very well, but the _potage_ was just like what we had had
before. There were many small chambers with doorways, but no doors.
The walls of our chamber, all around and overhead, were neatly ceiled,
and the timbers cased with wood unpainted. The pillows were checkered
and tasseled, and the usual long-pointed red woolen or worsted
nightcap was placed on each. I pulled mine out to see how it was made.
It was in the form of a double cone, one end tucked into the other;
just such, it appeared, as I saw men wearing all day in the streets.
Probably I should have put it on if the cold had been then, as it is
sometimes there, thirty or forty degrees below zero.
When we landed at Quebec the next morning a man lay on his back on the
wharf, apparently dying, in the midst of a crowd and directly in the
path of the horses, groaning, "O ma conscience! " I thought that he
pronounced his French more distinctly than any I heard, as if the
dying had already acquired the accents of a universal language. Having
secured the only unengaged berths in the Lord Sydenham steamer, which
was to leave Quebec before sundown, and being resolved, now that I had
seen somewhat of the country, to get an idea of the city, I proceeded
to walk round the Upper Town, or fortified portion, which is two miles
and three quarters in circuit, alone, as near as I could get to the
cliff and the walls, like a rat looking for a hole; going round by the
southwest, where there is but a single street between the cliff and
the water, and up the long wooden stairs, through the suburbs
northward to the King's Woodyard, which I thought must have been a
long way from his fireplace, and under the cliffs of the St. Charles,
where the drains issue under the walls, and the walls are loopholed
for musketry; so returning by Mountain Street and Prescott Gate to the
Upper Town. Having found my way by an obscure passage near the St.
Louis Gate to the glacis on the north of the citadel proper,--I
believe that I was the only visitor then in the city who got in
there,--I enjoyed a prospect nearly as good as from within the citadel
itself, which I had explored some days before. As I walked on the
glacis I heard the sound of a bagpipe from the soldiers' dwellings in
the rock, and was further soothed and affected by the sight of a
soldier's cat walking up a cleated plank into a high loophole designed
for _mus-catry_, as serene as Wisdom herself, and with a gracefully
waving motion of her tail, as if her ways were ways of pleasantness
and all her paths were peace. Scaling a slat fence, where a small
force might have checked me, I got out of the esplanade into the
Governor's Garden, and read the well-known inscription on Wolfe and
Montcalm's monument, which for saying much in little, and that to the
purpose, undoubtedly deserved the prize medal which it received:--
MORTEM . VIRTUS . COMMUNEM .
FAMAM . HISTORIA .
MONUMENTUM . POSTERITAS .
DEDIT
(Valor gave them one death, history one fame, posterity one monument. )
The Government Garden has for nosegays, amid kitchen vegetables,
beside the common garden flowers, the usual complement of cannon
directed toward some future and possible enemy. I then returned up St.
Louis Street to the esplanade and ramparts there, and went round the
Upper Town once more, though I was very tired, this time on the
_inside_ of the wall; for I knew that the wall was the main thing in
Quebec, and had cost a great deal of money, and therefore I must make
the most of it. In fact, these are the only remarkable walls we have
in North America, though we have a good deal of Virginia fence, it is
true. Moreover, I cannot say but I yielded in some measure to the
soldier instinct, and, having but a short time to spare, thought it
best to examine the wall thoroughly, that I might be the better
prepared if I should ever be called that way again in the service of
my country. I committed all the gates to memory, in their order, which
did not cost me so much trouble as it would have done at the
hundred-gated city, there being only five; nor were they so hard to
remember as those seven of Boeotian Thebes; and, moreover, I thought
that, if seven champions were enough against the latter, one would be
enough against Quebec, though he bore for all armor and device only an
umbrella and a bundle. I took the nunneries as I went, for I had
learned to distinguish them by the blinds; and I observed also the
foundling hospitals and the convents, and whatever was attached to, or
in the vicinity of the walls. All the rest I omitted, as naturally as
one would the inside of an inedible shell-fish. These were the only
pearls, and the wall the only mother-of-pearl for me. Quebec is
chiefly famous for the thickness of its parietal bones. The technical
terms of its conchology may stagger a beginner a little at first, such
as _banlieue_, _esplanade_, _glacis_, _ravelin_, _cavalier_, etc. ,
etc. , but with the aid of a comprehensive dictionary you soon learn
the nature of your ground. I was surprised at the extent of the
artillery barracks, built so long ago,--_Casernes Nouvelles_, they
used to be called,--nearly six hundred feet in length by forty in
depth, where the sentries, like peripatetic philosophers, were so
absorbed in thought as not to notice me when I passed in and out at
the gates. Within are "small arms of every description, sufficient for
the equipment of twenty thousand men," so arranged as to give a
startling _coup d'oeil_ to strangers. I did not enter, not wishing
to get a black eye; for they are said to be "in a state of complete
repair and readiness for immediate use. " Here, for a short time, I
lost sight of the wall, but I recovered it again on emerging from the
barrack yard. There I met with a Scotchman who appeared to have
business with the wall, like myself; and, being thus mutually drawn
together by a similarity of tastes, we had a little conversation _sub
moenibus_, that is, by an angle of the wall, which sheltered us. He
lived about thirty miles northwest of Quebec; had been nineteen years
in the country; said he was disappointed that he was not brought to
America after all, but found himself still under British rule and
where his own language was not spoken; that many Scotch, Irish, and
English were disappointed in like manner, and either went to the
States or pushed up the river to Canada West, nearer to the States,
and where their language was spoken. He talked of visiting the States
some time; and, as he seemed ignorant of geography, I warned him that
it was one thing to visit the State of Massachusetts, and another to
visit the State of California. He said it was colder there than usual
at that season, and he was lucky to have brought his thick togue, or
frock-coat, with him; thought it would snow, and then be pleasant and
warm. That is the way we are always thinking. However, his words were
music to me in my thin hat and sack.
At the ramparts on the cliff near the old Parliament House I counted
twenty-four thirty-two-pounders in a row, pointed over the harbor,
with their balls piled pyramid-wise between them,--there are said to
be in all about one hundred and eighty guns mounted at Quebec,--all
which were faithfully kept dusted by officials, in accordance with the
motto, "In time of peace prepare for war;" but I saw no preparations
for peace: she was plainly an uninvited guest.
Having thus completed the circuit of this fortress, both within and
without, I went no farther by the wall for fear that I should become
wall-eyed. However, I think that I deserve to be made a member of the
Royal Sappers and Miners.
In short, I observed everywhere the most perfect arrangements for
keeping a wall in order, not even permitting the lichens to grow on
it, which some think an ornament; but then I saw no cultivation nor
pasturing within it to pay for the outlay, and cattle were strictly
forbidden to feed on the glacis under the severest penalties. Where
the dogs get their milk I don't know, and I fear it is bloody at best.
The citadel of Quebec says, "I _will_ live here, and you shan't
prevent me. " To which you return, that you have not the slightest
objection; live and let live. The Martello towers looked, for all the
world, exactly like abandoned windmills which had not had a grist to
grind these hundred years. Indeed, the whole castle here was a
"folly,"--England's folly,--and, in more senses than one, a castle in
the air. The inhabitants and the government are gradually waking up to
a sense of this truth; for I heard something said about their
abandoning the wall around the Upper Town, and confining the
fortifications to the citadel of forty acres. Of course they will
finally reduce their intrenchments to the circumference of their own
brave hearts.
The most modern fortifications have an air of antiquity about them;
they have the aspect of ruins in better or worse repair from the day
they are built, because they are not really the work of this age. The
very place where the soldier resides has a peculiar tendency to become
old and dilapidated, as the word _barrack_ implies. I couple all
fortifications in my mind with the dismantled Spanish forts to be
found in so many parts of the world; and if in any place they are not
actually dismantled, it is because that there the intellect of the
inhabitants is dismantled. The commanding officer of an old fort near
Valdivia in South America, when a traveler remarked to him that, with
one discharge, his gun-carriages would certainly fall to pieces,
gravely replied, "No, I am sure, sir, they would stand two. " Perhaps
the guns of Quebec would stand three. Such structures carry us back to
the Middle Ages, the siege of Jerusalem, and St. Jean d'Acre, and the
days of the Bucaniers. In the armory of the citadel they showed me a
clumsy implement, long since useless, which they called a Lombard gun.
I thought that their whole citadel was such a Lombard gun, fit object
for the museums of the curious. Such works do not consist with the
development of the intellect. Huge stone structures of all kinds, both
in their erection and by their influence when erected, rather oppress
than liberate the mind. They are tombs for the souls of men, as
frequently for their bodies also. The sentinel with his musket beside
a man with his umbrella is spectral. There is not sufficient reason
for his existence. Does my friend there, with a bullet resting on half
an ounce of powder, think that he needs that argument in conversing
with me? The fort was the first institution that was founded here, and
it is amusing to read in Champlain how assiduously they worked at it
almost from the first day of the settlement. The founders of the
colony thought this an excellent site for a wall,--and no doubt it was
a better site, in some respects, for a wall than for a city,--but it
chanced that a city got behind it. It chanced, too, that a Lower Town
got before it, and clung like an oyster to the outside of the crags,
as you may see at low tide. It is as if you were to come to a country
village surrounded by palisades in the old Indian fashion,--interesting
only as a relic of antiquity and barbarism. A fortified town is like a
man cased in the heavy armor of antiquity, with a horse-load of
broadswords and small arms slung to him, endeavoring to go about his
business. Or is this an indispensable machinery for the good
government of the country? The inhabitants of California succeed
pretty well, and are doing better and better every day, without any
such institution. What use has this fortress served, to look at it
even from the soldiers' point of view? At first the French took care
of it; yet Wolfe sailed by it with impunity, and took the town of
Quebec without experiencing any hindrance at last from its
fortifications. They were only the bone for which the parties fought.
Then the English began to take care of it. So of any fort in the
world,--that in Boston Harbor, for instance. We shall at length hear
that an enemy sailed by it in the night, for it cannot sail itself,
and both it and its inhabitants are always benighted. How often we
read that the enemy occupied a position which commanded the old, and
so the fort was evacuated! Have not the schoolhouse and the
printing-press occupied a position which commands such a fort as this?
However, this is a ruin kept in remarkably good repair. There are some
eight hundred or thousand men there to exhibit it. One regiment goes
bare-legged to increase the attraction. If you wish to study the
muscles of the leg about the knee, repair to Quebec. This universal
exhibition in Canada of the tools and sinews of war reminded me of the
keeper of a menagerie showing his animals' claws. It was the English
leopard showing his claws. Always the royal something or other; as at
the menagerie, the Royal Bengal Tiger. Silliman states that "the cold
is so intense in the winter nights, particularly on Cape Diamond, that
the sentinels cannot stand it more than one hour, and are relieved at
the expiration of that time;" "and even, as it is said, at much
shorter intervals, in case of the most extreme cold. " What a natural
or unnatural fool must that soldier be--to say nothing of his
government--who, when quicksilver is freezing and blood is ceasing to
be quick, will stand to have his face frozen, watching the walls of
Quebec, though, so far as they are concerned, both honest and
dishonest men all the world over have been in their beds nearly half a
century,--or at least for that space travelers have visited Quebec
only as they would read history! I shall never again wake up in a
colder night than usual, but I shall think how rapidly the sentinels
are relieving one another on the walls of Quebec, their quicksilver
being all frozen, as if apprehensive that some hostile Wolfe may even
then be scaling the Heights of Abraham, or some persevering Arnold
about to issue from the wilderness; some Malay or Japanese, perchance,
coming round by the northwest coast, have chosen that moment to
assault the citadel! Why, I should as soon expect to find the
sentinels still relieving one another on the walls of Nineveh, which
have so long been buried to the world. What a troublesome thing a wall
is! I thought it was to defend me, and not I it! Of course, if they
had no wall, they would not need to have any sentinels.
You might venture to advertise this farm as well fenced with
substantial stone walls (saying nothing about the eight hundred
Highlanders and Royal Irish who are required to keep them from
toppling down); stock and tools to go with the land if desired. But it
would not be wise for the seller to exhibit his farm-book.
Why should Canada, wild and unsettled as it is, impress us as an older
country than the States, unless because her institutions are old? All
things appeared to contend there, as I have implied, with a certain
rust of antiquity, such as forms on old armor and iron guns,--the rust
of conventions and formalities. It is said that the metallic roofs of
Montreal and Quebec keep sound and bright for forty years in some
cases. But if the rust was not on the tinned roofs and spires, it was
on the inhabitants and their institutions. Yet the work of burnishing
goes briskly forward. I imagined that the government vessels at the
wharves were laden with rottenstone and oxalic acid,--that is what the
first ship from England in the spring comes freighted with,--and the
hands of the Colonial legislature are cased in wash-leather. The
principal exports must be _gun_ny bags, verdigris, and iron rust.
Those who first built this fort, coming from Old France with the
memory and tradition of feudal days and customs weighing on them, were
unquestionably behind their age; and those who now inhabit and repair
it are behind their ancestors or predecessors. Those old chevaliers
thought that they could transplant the feudal system to America. It
has been set out, but it has not thriven. Notwithstanding that Canada
was settled first, and, unlike New England, for a long series of years
enjoyed the fostering care of the mother country; notwithstanding
that, as Charlevoix tells us, it had more of the ancient _noblesse_
among its early settlers than any other of the French colonies, and
perhaps than all the others together, there are in both the Canadas
but 600,000 of French descent to-day,--about half so many as the
population of Massachusetts. The whole population of both Canadas is
but about 1,700,000 Canadians, English, Irish, Scotch, Indians, and
all, put together! Samuel Laing, in his essay on the Northmen, to
whom especially, rather than the Saxons, he refers the energy and
indeed the excellence of the English character, observes that, when
they occupied Scandinavia, "each man possessed his lot of land without
reference to, or acknowledgment of, any other man, without any local
chief to whom his military service or other quit-rent for his land was
due,--without tenure from, or duty or obligation to, any superior,
real or fictitious, except the general sovereign. The individual
settler held his land, as his descendants in Norway still express it,
by the same right as the King held his crown, by udal right, or
adel,--that is, noble right. " The French have occupied Canada, not
_udally_, or by noble right, but _feudally_, or by ignoble right. They
are a nation of peasants.
It was evident that, both on account of the feudal system and the
aristocratic government, a private man was not worth so much in Canada
as in the United States; and, if your wealth in any measure consists
in manliness, in originality and independence, you had better stay
here. How could a peaceable, freethinking man live neighbor to the
Forty-ninth Regiment? A New-Englander would naturally be a bad
citizen, probably a rebel, there,--certainly if he were already a
rebel at home. I suspect that a poor man who is not servile is a much
rarer phenomenon there and in England than in the Northern United
States. An Englishman, methinks,--not to speak of other European
nations,--habitually regards himself merely as a constituent part of
the English nation; he is a member of the royal regiment of
Englishmen, and is proud of his company, as he has reason to be proud
of it. But an American--one who has made a tolerable use of his
opportunities--cares, comparatively, little about such things, and is
advantageously nearer to the primitive and the ultimate condition of
man in these respects. It is a government, that English one,--like
most other European ones,--that cannot afford to be forgotten, as you
would naturally forget it; under which one cannot be wholesomely
neglected, and grow up a man and not an Englishman merely,--cannot be
a poet even without danger of being made poet-laureate! Give me a
country where it is the most natural thing in the world for a
government that does not understand you to let you alone. One would
say that a true Englishman could speculate only within bounds. (It is
true the Americans have proved that they, in more than one sense, can
_speculate_ without bounds. ) He has to pay his respects to so many
things, that, before he knows it, he _may_ have paid away all he is
worth. What makes the United States government, on the whole, more
tolerable--I mean for us lucky white men--is the fact that there is so
much less of government with us. Here it is only once in a month or a
year that a man _needs_ remember that institution; and those who go to
Congress can play the game of the Kilkenny cats there without fatal
consequences to those who stay at home, their term is so short; but in
Canada you are reminded of the government every day. It parades itself
before you. It is not content to be the servant, but will be the
master; and every day it goes out to the Plains of Abraham or to the
Champ de Mars and exhibits itself and toots. Everywhere there appeared
an attempt to make and to preserve trivial and otherwise transient
distinctions. In the streets of Montreal and Quebec you met not only
with soldiers in red, and shuffling priests in unmistakable black and
white, with Sisters of Charity gone into mourning for their deceased
relative,--not to mention the nuns of various orders depending on the
fashion of a tear, of whom you heard,--but youths belonging to some
seminary or other, wearing coats edged with white, who looked as if
their expanding hearts were already repressed with a piece of tape. In
short, the inhabitants of Canada appeared to be suffering between two
fires,--the soldiery and the priesthood.
CHAPTER V
THE SCENERY OF QUEBEC; AND THE RIVER ST. LAWRENCE
About twelve o'clock this day, being in the Lower Town, I looked up at
the signal-gun by the flagstaff on Cape Diamond, and saw a soldier up
in the heavens there making preparations to fire it,--both he and the
gun in bold relief against the sky. Soon after, being warned by the
boom of the gun to look up again, there was only the cannon in the
sky, the smoke just blowing away from it, as if the soldier, having
touched it off, had concealed himself for effect, leaving the sound to
echo grandly from shore to shore, and far up and down the river. This
answered the purpose of a dinner-horn.
There are no such restaurants in Quebec or Montreal as there are in
Boston. I hunted an hour or two in vain in this town to find one, till
I lost my appetite. In one house, called a restaurant, where lunches
were advertised, I found only tables covered with bottles and glasses
innumerable, containing apparently a sample of every liquid that has
been known since the earth dried up after the flood, but no scent of
solid food did I perceive gross enough to excite a hungry mouse. In
short, I saw nothing to tempt me there, but a large map of Canada
against the wall. In another place I once more got as far as the
bottles, and then asked for a bill of fare; was told to walk up
stairs; had no bill of fare, nothing but fare. "Have you any pies or
puddings? " I inquired, for I am obliged to keep my savageness in check
by a low diet. "No, sir; we've nice mutton-chop, roast beef,
beefsteak, cutlets," and so on. A burly Englishman, who was in the
midst of the siege of a piece of roast beef, and of whom I have never
had a front view to this day, turned half round, with his mouth half
full, and remarked, "You'll find no pies nor puddings in Quebec, sir;
they don't make any here. " I found that it was even so, and therefore
bought some musty cake and some fruit in the open market-place. This
market-place by the waterside, where the old women sat by their tables
in the open air, amid a dense crowd jabbering all languages, was the
best place in Quebec to observe the people; and the ferry-boats,
continually coming and going with their motley crews and cargoes,
added much to the entertainment. I also saw them getting water from
the river, for Quebec is supplied with water by cart and barrel. This
city impressed me as wholly foreign and French, for I scarcely heard
the sound of the English language in the streets. More than three
fifths of the inhabitants are of French origin; and if the traveler
did not visit the fortifications particularly, he might not be
reminded that the English have any foothold here; and, in any case, if
he looked no farther than Quebec, they would appear to have planted
themselves in Canada only as they have in Spain at Gibraltar; and he
who plants upon a rock cannot expect much increase. The novel sights
and sounds by the waterside made me think of such ports as Boulogne,
Dieppe, Rouen, and Havre-de-Grace, which I have never seen; but I
have no doubt that they present similar scenes. I was much amused from
first to last with the sounds made by the charette and caleche
drivers. It was that part of their foreign language that you heard the
most of,--the French they talked to their horses,--and which they
talked the loudest. It was a more novel sound to me than the French of
conversation. The streets resounded with the cries, "_Qui donc! _"
"_Marche tot! _" I suspect that many of our horses which came from
Canada would prick up their ears at these sounds. Of the shops, I was
most attracted by those where furs and Indian works were sold, as
containing articles of genuine Canadian manufacture. I have been told
that two townsmen of mine, who were interested in horticulture,
traveling once in Canada, and being in Quebec, thought it would be a
good opportunity to obtain seeds of the real Canada crookneck squash.
So they went into a shop where such things were advertised, and
inquired for the same. The shopkeeper had the very thing they wanted.
"But are you sure," they asked, "that these are the genuine Canada
crookneck? " "Oh, yes, gentlemen," answered he, "they are a lot which I
have received directly from Boston. " I resolved that my Canada
crookneck seeds should be such as had grown in Canada.
Too much has not been said about the scenery of Quebec. The
fortifications of Cape Diamond are omnipresent. They preside, they
frown over the river and surrounding country. You travel ten, twenty,
thirty miles up or down the river's banks, you ramble fifteen miles
amid the hills on either side, and then, when you have long since
forgotten them, perchance slept on them by the way, at a turn of the
road or of your body, there they are still, with their geometry
against the sky. The child that is born and brought up thirty miles
distant, and has never traveled to the city, reads his country's
history, sees the level lines of the citadel amid the cloud-built
citadels in the western horizon, and is told that that is Quebec. No
wonder if Jacques Cartier's pilot exclaimed in Norman French, "Que
bec! " (What a beak! ) when he saw this cape, as some suppose. Every
modern traveler involuntarily uses a similar expression. Particularly
it is said that its sudden apparition on turning Point Levi makes a
memorable impression on him who arrives by water. The view from Cape
Diamond has been compared by European travelers with the most
remarkable views of a similar kind in Europe, such as from Edinburgh
Castle, Gibraltar, Cintra, and others, and preferred by many. A main
peculiarity in this, compared with other views which I have beheld, is
that it is from the ramparts of a fortified city, and not from a
solitary and majestic river cape alone, that this view is obtained. I
associate the beauty of Quebec with the steel-like and flashing air,
which may be peculiar to that season of the year, in which the blue
flowers of the succory and some late goldenrods and buttercups on the
summit of Cape Diamond were almost my only companions,--the former
bluer than the heavens they faced. Yet even I yielded in some degree
to the influence of historical associations, and found it hard to
attend to the geology of Cape Diamond or the botany of the Plains of
Abraham. I still remember the harbor far beneath me, sparkling like
silver in the sun, the answering highlands of Point Levi on the
southeast, the frowning Cap Tourmente abruptly bounding the seaward
view far in the northeast, the villages of Lorette and Charlesbourg on
the north, and, further west, the distant Val Cartier, sparkling with
white cottages, hardly removed by distance through the clear air,--not
to mention a few blue mountains along the horizon in that direction.
You look out from the ramparts of the citadel beyond the frontiers of
civilization. Yonder small group of hills, according to the
guide-book, forms "the portal of the wilds which are trodden only by
the feet of the Indian hunters as far as Hudson's Bay. " It is but a
few years since Bouchette declared that the country ten leagues north
of the British capital of North America was as little known as the
middle of Africa. Thus the citadel under my feet, and all historical
associations, were swept away again by an influence from the wilds and
from Nature, as if the beholder had read her history,--an influence
which, like the Great River itself, flowed from the Arctic fastnesses
and Western forests with irresistible tide over all.
The most interesting object in Canada to me was the River St.
Lawrence, known far and wide, and for centuries, as the Great River.
Cartier, its discoverer, sailed up it as far as Montreal in
1535,--nearly a century before the coming of the Pilgrims; and I have
seen a pretty accurate map of it so far, containing the city of
"Hochelaga" and the river "Saguenay," in Ortelius's _Theatrum Orbis
Terrarum_, printed at Antwerp in 1575,--the first edition having
appeared in 1570,--in which the famous cities of "Norumbega" and
"Orsinora" stand on the rough-blocked continent where New England is
to-day, and the fabulous but unfortunate Isle of Demons, and Frislant,
and others, lie off and on in the unfrequented sea, some of them
prowling near what is now the course of the Cunard steamers. In this
ponderous folio of the "Ptolemy of his age," said to be the first
general atlas published after the revival of the sciences in Europe,
only one page of which is devoted to the topography of the _Novus
Orbis_, the St. Lawrence is the only large river, whether drawn from
fancy or from observation, on the east side of North America. It was
famous in Europe before the other rivers of North America were heard
of, notwithstanding that the mouth of the Mississippi is said to have
been discovered first, and its stream was reached by Soto not long
after; but the St. Lawrence had attracted settlers to its cold shores
long before the Mississippi, or even the Hudson, was known to the
world. Schoolcraft was misled by Gallatin into saying that Narvaez
discovered the Mississippi. De Vega does _not_ say so. The first
explorers declared that the summer in that country was as warm as
France, and they named one of the bays in the Gulf of St. Lawrence the
Bay of Chaleur, or of warmth; but they said nothing about the winter
being as cold as Greenland. In the manuscript account of Cartier's
second voyage, attributed by some to that navigator himself, it is
called "the greatest river, without comparison, that is known to have
ever been seen. " The savages told him that it was the "chemin du
Canada,"--the highway to Canada,--"which goes so far that no man had
ever been to the end that they had heard. " The Saguenay, one of its
tributaries, which the panorama has made known to New England within
three years, is described by Cartier, in 1535, and still more
particularly by Jean Alphonse, in 1542, who adds, "I think that this
river comes from the sea of Cathay, for in this place there issues a
strong current, and there runs there a terrible tide. " The early
explorers saw many whales and other sea-monsters far up the St.
Lawrence. Champlain, in his map, represents a whale spouting in the
harbor of Quebec, three hundred and sixty miles from what is called
the mouth of the river; and Charlevoix takes his reader to the summit
of Cape Diamond to see the "porpoises, white as snow," sporting on the
surface of the harbor of Quebec. And Boucher says in 1664, "from there
[Tadoussac] to Montreal is found a great quantity of _Marsouins
blancs_. " Several whales have been taken pretty high up the river
since I was there. P. A. Gosse, in his "Canadian Naturalist," p. 171
(London, 1840), speaks of "the white dolphin of the St. Lawrence
(_Delphinus Canadensis_)," as considered different from those of the
sea. "The Natural History Society of Montreal offered a prize, a few
years ago, for an essay on the _Cetacea_ of the St. Lawrence, which
was, I believe, handed in. " In Champlain's day it was commonly called
"the Great River of Canada. " More than one nation has claimed it. In
Ogilby's "America of 1670," in the map _Novi Belgii_, it is called "De
Groote River van Niew Nederlandt. " It bears different names in
different parts of its course, as it flows through what were formerly
the territories of different nations. From the Gulf to Lake Ontario
it is called at present the St. Lawrence; from Montreal to the same
place it is frequently called the Cateraqui; and higher up it is known
successively as the Niagara, Detroit, St. Clair, St. Mary's, and St.
Louis rivers. Humboldt, speaking of the Orinoco, says that this name
is unknown in the interior of the country; so likewise the tribes that
dwell about the sources of the St. Lawrence have never heard the name
which it bears in the lower part of its course. It rises near another
father of waters,--the Mississippi,--issuing from a remarkable spring
far up in the woods, called Lake Superior, fifteen hundred miles in
circumference; and several other springs there are thereabouts which
feed it. It makes such a noise in its tumbling down at one place as is
heard all round the world. Bouchette, the Surveyor-General of the
Canadas, calls it "the most splendid river on the globe;" says that it
is two thousand statute miles long (more recent geographers make it
four or five hundred miles longer); that at the Riviere du Sud it is
eleven miles wide; at the Traverse, thirteen; at the Paps of Matane,
twenty-five; at the Seven Islands, seventy-three; and at its mouth,
from Cape Rosier to the Mingan Settlements in Labrador, near one
hundred and five (? ) miles wide. According to Captain Bayfield's
recent chart it is about _ninety-six_ geographical miles wide at the
latter place, measuring at right angles with the stream. It has much
the largest estuary, regarding both length and breadth, of any river
on the globe. Humboldt says that the River Plate, which has the
broadest estuary of the South American rivers, is ninety-two
geographical miles wide at its mouth; also he found the Orinoco to be
more than three miles wide at five hundred and sixty miles from its
mouth; but he does not tell us that ships of six hundred tons can sail
up it so far, as they can up the St. Lawrence to Montreal,--an equal
distance. If he had described a fleet of such ships at anchor in a
city's port so far inland, we should have got a very different idea of
the Orinoco. Perhaps Charlevoix describes the St. Lawrence truly as
the most _navigable_ river in the world. Between Montreal and Quebec
it averages about two miles wide. The tide is felt as far up as Three
Rivers, four hundred and thirty-two miles, which is as far as from
Boston to Washington. As far up as Cap aux Oyes, sixty or seventy
miles below Quebec, Kalm found a great part of the plants near the
shore to be marine, as glasswort (_Salicornia_), seaside pease (_Pisum
maritimum_), sea-milkwort (_Glaux_), beach-grass (_Psamma arenaria_),
seaside plantain (_Plantago maritima_), the sea-rocket (_Bunias
cakile_), etc.
The geographer Guyot observes that the Maranon is three thousand miles
long, and gathers its waters from a surface of a million and a half
square miles; that the Mississippi is also three thousand miles long,
but its basin covers only from eight to nine hundred thousand square
miles; that the St. Lawrence is eighteen hundred miles long, and its
basin covers more than a million square miles (Darby says five hundred
thousand); and speaking of the lakes, he adds, "These vast fresh-water
seas, together with the St. Lawrence, cover a surface of nearly one
hundred thousand square miles, and it has been calculated that they
contain about one half of all the fresh water on the surface of our
planet. " But all these calculations are necessarily very rude and
inaccurate. Its tributaries, the Ottawa, St. Maurice, and Saguenay,
are great rivers themselves. The latter is said to be more than one
thousand (? ) feet deep at its mouth, while its cliffs rise
perpendicularly an equal distance above its surface. Pilots say there
are no soundings till one hundred and fifty miles up the St. Lawrence.
The greatest sounding in the river, given on Bayfield's chart of the
gulf and river, is two hundred and twenty-eight fathoms. McTaggart, an
engineer, observes that "the Ottawa is larger than all the rivers in
Great Britain, were they running in one. " The traveler Grey writes: "A
dozen Danubes, Rhines, Taguses, and Thameses would be nothing to
twenty miles of fresh water in breadth [as where he happened to be],
from ten to forty fathoms in depth. " And again: "There is not perhaps
in the whole extent of this immense continent so fine an approach to
it as by the river St. Lawrence. In the Southern States you have, in
general, a level country for many miles inland; here you are
introduced at once into a majestic scenery, where everything is on a
grand scale,--mountains, woods, lakes, rivers, precipices,
waterfalls. "
We have not yet the data for a minute comparison of the St. Lawrence
with the South American rivers; but it is obvious that, taking it in
connection with its lakes, its estuary, and its falls, it easily bears
off the palm from all the rivers on the globe; for though, as
Bouchette observes, it may not carry to the ocean a greater volume of
water than the Amazon and Mississippi, its surface and cubic mass are
far greater than theirs. But, unfortunately, this noble river is
closed by ice from the beginning of December to the middle of April.
The arrival of the first vessel from England when the ice breaks up
is, therefore, a great event, as when the salmon, shad, and alewives
come up a river in the spring to relieve the famishing inhabitants on
its banks. Who can say what would have been the history of this
continent if, as has been suggested, this river had emptied into the
sea where New York stands!
After visiting the Museum and taking one more look at the wall, I made
haste to the Lord Sydenham steamer, which at five o'clock was to leave
for Montreal. I had already taken a seat on deck, but finding that I
had still an hour and a half to spare, and remembering that large map
of Canada which I had seen in the parlor of the restaurant in my
search after pudding, and realizing that I might never see the like
out of the country, I returned thither, asked liberty to look at the
map, rolled up the mahogany table, put my handkerchief on it, stood on
it, and copied all I wanted before the maid came in and said to me
standing on the table, "Some gentlemen want the room, sir;" and I
retreated without having broken the neck of a single bottle, or my
own, very thankful and willing to pay for all the solid food I had
got. We were soon abreast of Cap Rouge, eight miles above Quebec,
after we got under weigh. It was in this place, then called _Fort du
France Roy_, that the Sieur de Roberval with his company, having sent
home two of his three ships, spent the winter of 1542-43. It appears
that they fared in the following manner (I translate from the
original): "Each mess had only two loaves, weighing each a pound, and
half a pound of beef. They ate pork for dinner, with half a pound of
butter, and beef for supper, with about two handfuls of beans without
butter. Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays they ate salted cod, and
sometimes green, for dinner, with butter; and porpoise and beans for
supper. Monsieur Roberval administered good justice, and punished each
according to his offense. One, named Michel Gaillon, was hung for
theft; John of Nantes was put in irons and imprisoned for his fault;
and others were likewise put in irons; and many were whipped, both men
and women; by which means they lived in peace and tranquillity. " In an
account of a voyage up this river, printed in the Jesuit Relations in
the year 1664, it is said: "It was an interesting navigation for us in
ascending the river from Cap Tourmente to Quebec, to see on this side
and on that, for the space of eight leagues, the farms and the houses
of the company, built by our French, all along these shores. On the
right, the seigniories of Beauport, of Notre Dame des Anges; and on
the left, this beautiful Isle of Orleans. " The same traveler names
among the fruits of the country observed at the Isles of Richelieu, at
the head of Lake St. Peter, "kinds (_des especes_) of little apples or
haws (_senelles_), and of pears, which only ripen with the frost. "
Night came on before we had passed the high banks. We had come from
Montreal to Quebec in one night. The return voyage, against the
stream, takes but an hour longer. Jacques Cartier, the first white man
who is known to have ascended this river, thus speaks of his voyage
from what is now Quebec to the foot of Lake St. Peter, or about
half-way to Montreal: "From the said day, the 19th, even to the 28th
of the said month [September, 1535], we had been navigating up the
said river without losing hour or day, during which time we had seen
and found as much country and lands as level as we could desire, full
of the most beautiful trees in the world," which he goes on to
describe. But we merely slept and woke again to find that we had
passed through all that country which he was eight days in sailing
through. He must have had a troubled sleep. We were not long enough on
the river to realize that it had length; we got only the impression of
its breadth, as if we had passed over a lake a mile or two in breadth
and several miles long, though we might thus have slept through a
European kingdom. Being at the head of Lake St. Peter, on the
above-mentioned 28th of September, dealing with the natives, Cartier
says: "We inquired of them by signs if this was the route to Hochelaga
[Montreal]; and they answered that it was, and that there were yet
three days' journeys to go there. " He finally arrived at Hochelaga on
the 2d of October.
When I went on deck at dawn we had already passed through Lake St.
Peter, and saw islands ahead of us. Our boat advancing with a strong
and steady pulse over the calm surface, we felt as if we were
permitted to be awake in the scenery of a dream. Many vivacious
Lombardy poplars along the distant shores gave them a novel and
lively, though artificial, look, and contrasted strangely with the
slender and graceful elms on both shores and islands.
knowing any French word for this instrument, I set up the knives and
forks on the blade of the sickle to represent one; at which they all
exclaimed that they knew and had used it. When _snells_ were mentioned
they went out in the dark and plucked some. They were pretty good.
They said they had three kinds of plums growing wild,--blue, white,
and red, the two former much alike and the best. Also they asked me if
I would have _des pommes_, some apples, and got me some. They were
exceedingly fair and glossy, and it was evident that there was no worm
in them; but they were as hard almost as a stone, as if the season was
too short to mellow them. We had seen no soft and yellow apples by the
roadside. I declined eating one, much as I admired it, observing that
it would be good _dans le printemps_, in the spring. In the morning
when the mistress had set the eggs a-frying she nodded to a thick-set,
jolly-looking fellow, who rolled up his sleeves, seized the
long-handled griddle, and commenced a series of revolutions and
evolutions with it, ever and anon tossing its contents into the air,
where they turned completely topsy-turvy and came down t'other side
up; and this he repeated till they were done. That appeared to be his
duty when eggs were concerned. I did not chance to witness this
performance, but my companion did, and he pronounced it a masterpiece
in its way. This man's farm, with the buildings, cost seven hundred
pounds; some smaller ones, two hundred.
In 1827, Montmorenci County, to which the Isle of Orleans has since
been added, was nearly as large as Massachusetts, being the eighth
county out of forty (in Lower Canada) in extent; but by far the
greater part still must continue to be waste land, lying as it were
under the walls of Quebec.
I quote these old statistics, not merely because of the difficulty of
obtaining more recent ones, but also because I saw there so little
evidence of any recent growth. There were in this county, at the same
date, five Roman Catholic churches, and no others, five cures and five
presbyteries, two schools, two corn-mills, four sawmills, one
carding-mill,--no medical man or notary or lawyer,--five shopkeepers,
four taverns (we saw no sign of any, though, after a little
hesitation, we were sometimes directed to some undistinguished hut as
such), thirty artisans, and five river crafts, whose tonnage amounted
to sixty-nine tons! This, notwithstanding that it has a frontage of
more than thirty miles on the river, and the population is almost
wholly confined to its banks. This describes nearly enough what we
saw. But double some of these figures, which, however, its growth will
not warrant, and you have described a poverty which not even its
severity of climate and ruggedness of soil will suffice to account
for. The principal productions were wheat, potatoes, oats, hay, peas,
flax, maple-sugar, etc. , etc. ; linen cloth, or _etoffe du pays_,
flannel, and homespun, or _petite etoffe_.
In Lower Canada, according to Bouchette, there are two tenures,--the
feudal and the socage. _Tenanciers_, _censitaires_, or holders of land
_en roture_ pay a small annual rent to the seigneurs, to which "is
added some articles of provision, such as a couple of fowls, or a
goose, or a bushel of wheat. " "They are also bound to grind their corn
at the _moulin banal_, or the lord's mill, where one fourteenth part
of it is taken for his use" as toll. He says that the toll is one
twelfth in the United States where competition exists. It is not
permitted to exceed one sixteenth in Massachusetts. But worse than
this monopolizing of mill rents is what are called _lods et ventes_,
or mutation fines,--according to which the seigneur has "a right to a
twelfth part of the purchase-money of every estate within his
seigniory that changes its owner by sale. " This is over and above the
sum paid to the seller. In such cases, moreover, "the lord possesses
the _droit de retrait_, which is the privilege of preemption at the
highest bidden price within forty days after the sale has taken
place,"--a right which, however, is said to be seldom exercised.
"Lands held by Roman Catholics are further subject to the payment to
their curates of one twenty-sixth part of all the grain produced upon
them, and to occasional assessments for building and repairing
churches," etc. ,--a tax to which they are not subject if the
proprietors change their faith; but they are not the less attached to
their church in consequence. There are, however, various modifications
of the feudal tenure. Under the socage tenure, which is that of the
townships or more recent settlements, English, Irish, Scotch, and
others, and generally of Canada West, the landholder is wholly
unshackled by such conditions as I have quoted, and "is bound to no
other obligations than those of allegiance to the king and obedience
to the laws. " Throughout Canada "a freehold of forty shillings yearly
value, or the payment of ten pounds rent annually, is the
qualification for voters. " In 1846 more than one sixth of the whole
population of Canada East were qualified to vote for members of
Parliament,--a greater proportion than enjoy a similar privilege in
the United States.
The population which we had seen the last two days--I mean the
habitans of Montmorenci County--appeared very inferior, intellectually
and even physically, to that of New England. In some respects they
were incredibly filthy. It was evident that they had not advanced
since the settlement of the country, that they were quite behind the
age, and fairly represented their ancestors in Normandy a thousand
years ago. Even in respect to the common arts of life, they are not so
far advanced as a frontier town in the West three years old. They have
no money invested in railroad stock, and probably never will have. If
they have got a French phrase for a railroad, it is as much as you can
expect of them. They are very far from a revolution, have no quarrel
with Church or State, but their vice and their virtue is content. As
for annexation, they have never dreamed of it; indeed, they have not a
clear idea what or where the States are. The English government has
been remarkably liberal to its Catholic subjects in Canada, permitting
them to wear their own fetters, both political and religious, as far
as was possible for subjects. Their government is even too good for
them. Parliament passed "an act [in 1825] to provide for the
extinction of feudal and seigniorial rights and burdens on lands in
Lower Canada, and for the gradual conversion of those tenures into the
tenure of free and common socage," etc. But as late as 1831, at least,
the design of the act was likely to be frustrated, owing to the
reluctance of the seigniors and peasants. It has been observed by
another that the French Canadians do not extend nor perpetuate their
influence. The British, Irish, and other immigrants, who have settled
the townships, are found to have imitated the American settlers and
not the French. They reminded me in this of the Indians, whom they
were slow to displace, and to whose habits of life they themselves more
readily conformed than the Indians to theirs. The Governor-General
Denouville remarked, in 1685, that some had long thought that it was
necessary to bring the Indians near them in order to Frenchify
(_franciser_) them, but that they had every reason to think themselves
in an error; for those who had come near them and were even collected
in villages in the midst of the colony had not become French, but the
French who had haunted them had become savages. Kalm said, "Though
many nations imitate the French customs, yet I observed, on the
contrary, that the French in Canada, in many respects, follow the
customs of the Indians, with whom they converse every day. They make
use of the tobacco-pipes, shoes, garters, and girdles of the Indians.
They follow the Indian way of making war with exactness; they mix the
same things with tobacco [he might have said that both French and
English learned the use itself of this weed of the Indian]; they make
use of the Indian bark-boats, and row them in the Indian way; they
wrap square pieces of cloth round their feet instead of stockings; and
have adopted many other Indian fashions. " Thus, while the descendants
of the Pilgrims are teaching the English to make pegged boots, the
descendants of the French in Canada are wearing the Indian moccasin
still. The French, to their credit be it said, to a certain extent
respected the Indians as a separate and independent people, and spoke
of them and contrasted themselves with them as the English have never
done. They not only went to war with them as allies, but they lived at
home with them as neighbors. In 1627 the French king declared "that
the descendants" of the French, settled in New France, "and the
savages who should be brought to the knowledge of the faith, and
should make profession of it, should be counted and reputed French
born (_Naturels Francois_); and as such could emigrate to France, when
it seemed good to them, and there acquire, will, inherit, etc. , etc. ,
without obtaining letters of naturalization. " When the English had
possession of Quebec, in 1630, the Indians, attempting to practice the
same familiarity with them that they had with the French, were driven
out of their houses with blows; which accident taught them a
difference between the two races, and attached them yet more to the
French. The impression made on me was that the French Canadians were
even sharing the fate of the Indians, or at least gradually
disappearing in what is called the Saxon current.
The English did not come to America from a mere love of adventure,
nor to truck with or convert the savages, nor to hold offices under
the crown, as the French to a great extent did, but to live in earnest
and with freedom. The latter overran a great extent of country,
selling strong water, and collecting its furs, and converting its
inhabitants,--or at least baptizing its dying infants (_enfans
moribonds_),--without _improving_ it. First went the _coureur de bois_
with the _eau de vie_; then followed, if he did not precede, the
heroic missionary with the _eau d'immortalite_. It was freedom to
hunt, and fish, and convert, not to work, that they sought. Hontan
says that the _coureurs de bois_ lived like sailors ashore. In no part
of the Seventeenth Century could the French be said to have had a
foothold in Canada; they held only by the fur of the wild animals
which they were exterminating. To enable the poor seigneurs to get
their living, it was permitted by a decree passed in the reign of
Louis the Fourteenth, in 1685, "to all nobles and gentlemen settled in
Canada, to engage in commerce, without being called to account or
reputed to have done anything derogatory. " The reader can infer to
what extent they had engaged in agriculture, and how their farms must
have shone by this time. The New England youth, on the other hand,
were never _coureurs de bois_ nor _voyageurs_, but backwoodsmen and
sailors rather. Of all nations the English undoubtedly have proved
hitherto that they had the most business here.
Yet I am not sure but I have most sympathy with that spirit of adventure
which distinguished the French and Spaniards of those days, and made
them especially the explorers of the American Continent,--which so
early carried the former to the Great Lakes and the Mississippi on the
north, and the latter to the same river on the south. It was long
before our frontiers reached their settlements in the West. So far as
inland discovery was concerned, the adventurous spirit of the English
was that of sailors who land but for a day, and their enterprise the
enterprise of traders.
There was apparently a greater equality of condition among the
habitans of Montmorenci County than in New England. They are an almost
exclusively agricultural, and so far independent population, each
family producing nearly all the necessaries of life for itself. If the
Canadian wants energy, perchance he possesses those virtues, social
and others, which the Yankee lacks, in which case he cannot be
regarded as a poor man.
FOOTNOTE:
[2] From McCulloch's Geographical Dictionary we learn that
"immediately beyond the Island of Orleans it is a mile broad; where
the Saguenay joins it, eighteen miles; at Point Peter, upward of
thirty; at the Bay of Seven Islands, seventy miles; and at the Island
of Anticosti (above three hundred and fifty miles from Quebec), it
rolls a flood into the ocean nearly one hundred miles across. "
CHAPTER IV
THE WALLS OF QUEBEC
After spending the night at a farmhouse in Chateau Richer, about a
dozen miles northeast of Quebec, we set out on our return to the city.
We stopped at the next house, a picturesque old stone mill, over the
_Chipre_,--for so the name sounded,--such as you will nowhere see in
the States, and asked the millers the age of the mill. They went
upstairs to call the master; but the crabbed old miser asked why we
wanted to know, and would tell us only for some compensation. I wanted
French to give him a piece of my mind. I had got enough to talk on a
pinch, but not to quarrel, so I had to come away, looking all I would
have said. This was the utmost incivility we met with in Canada. In
Beauport, within a few miles of Quebec, we turned aside to look at a
church which was just being completed,--a very large and handsome
edifice of stone, with a green bough stuck in its gable, of some
significance to Catholics. The comparative wealth of the Church in
this country was apparent; for in this village we did not see one good
house besides. They were all humble cottages; and yet this appeared to
me a more imposing structure than any church in Boston. But I am no
judge of these things.
Reentering Quebec through St. John's Gate, we took a caleche in Market
Square for the Falls of the Chaudiere, about nine miles southwest of
the city, for which we were to pay so much, besides forty sous for
tolls. The driver, as usual, spoke French only. The number of these
vehicles is very great for so small a town. They are like one of our
chaises that has lost its top, only stouter and longer in the body,
with a seat for the driver where the dasher is with us, and broad
leather ears on each side to protect the riders from the wheel and
keep children from falling out. They had an easy jaunting look, which,
as our hours were numbered, persuaded us to be riders. We met with
them on every road near Quebec these days, each with its complement of
two inquisitive-looking foreigners and a Canadian driver, the former
evidently enjoying their novel experience, for commonly it is only the
horse whose language you do not understand; but they were one remove
further from him by the intervention of an equally unintelligible
driver. We crossed the St. Lawrence to Point Levi in a French-Canadian
ferry-boat, which was inconvenient and dirty, and managed with great
noise and bustle. The current was very strong and tumultuous; and the
boat tossed enough to make some sick, though it was only a mile
across; yet the wind was not to be compared with that of the day
before, and we saw that the Canadians had a good excuse for not taking
us over to the Isle of Orleans in a pirogue, however shiftless they
may be for not having provided any other conveyance. The route which
we took to the Chaudiere did not afford us those views of Quebec which
we had expected, and the country and inhabitants appeared less
interesting to a traveler than those we had seen. The Falls of the
Chaudiere are three miles from its mouth on the south side of the St.
Lawrence. Though they were the largest which I saw in Canada, I was
not proportionately interested by them, probably from satiety. I did
not see any peculiar propriety in the name _Chaudiere_, or caldron. I
saw here the most brilliant rainbow that I ever imagined. It was just
across the stream below the precipice, formed on the mist which this
tremendous fall produced; and I stood on a level with the keystone of
its arch. It was not a few faint prismatic colors merely, but a full
semicircle, only four or five rods in diameter, though as wide as
usual, so intensely bright as to pain the eye, and apparently as
substantial as an arch of stone. It changed its position and colors as
we moved, and was the brighter because the sun shone so clearly and
the mist was so thick. Evidently a picture painted on mist for the men
and animals that came to the falls to look at; but for what special
purpose beyond this, I know not. At the farthest point in this ride,
and when most inland, unexpectedly at a turn in the road we descried
the frowning citadel of Quebec in the horizon, like the beak of a bird
of prey. We returned by the river road under the bank, which is very
high, abrupt, and rocky. When we were opposite to Quebec, I was
surprised to see that in the Lower Town, under the shadow of the rock,
the lamps were lit, twinkling not unlike crystals in a cavern, while
the citadel high above, and we, too, on the south shore, were in broad
daylight. As we were too late for the ferry-boat that night, we put up
at a _maison de pension_ at Point Levi. The usual two-story stove was
here placed against an opening in the partition shaped like a
fireplace, and so warmed several rooms. We could not understand their
French here very well, but the _potage_ was just like what we had had
before. There were many small chambers with doorways, but no doors.
The walls of our chamber, all around and overhead, were neatly ceiled,
and the timbers cased with wood unpainted. The pillows were checkered
and tasseled, and the usual long-pointed red woolen or worsted
nightcap was placed on each. I pulled mine out to see how it was made.
It was in the form of a double cone, one end tucked into the other;
just such, it appeared, as I saw men wearing all day in the streets.
Probably I should have put it on if the cold had been then, as it is
sometimes there, thirty or forty degrees below zero.
When we landed at Quebec the next morning a man lay on his back on the
wharf, apparently dying, in the midst of a crowd and directly in the
path of the horses, groaning, "O ma conscience! " I thought that he
pronounced his French more distinctly than any I heard, as if the
dying had already acquired the accents of a universal language. Having
secured the only unengaged berths in the Lord Sydenham steamer, which
was to leave Quebec before sundown, and being resolved, now that I had
seen somewhat of the country, to get an idea of the city, I proceeded
to walk round the Upper Town, or fortified portion, which is two miles
and three quarters in circuit, alone, as near as I could get to the
cliff and the walls, like a rat looking for a hole; going round by the
southwest, where there is but a single street between the cliff and
the water, and up the long wooden stairs, through the suburbs
northward to the King's Woodyard, which I thought must have been a
long way from his fireplace, and under the cliffs of the St. Charles,
where the drains issue under the walls, and the walls are loopholed
for musketry; so returning by Mountain Street and Prescott Gate to the
Upper Town. Having found my way by an obscure passage near the St.
Louis Gate to the glacis on the north of the citadel proper,--I
believe that I was the only visitor then in the city who got in
there,--I enjoyed a prospect nearly as good as from within the citadel
itself, which I had explored some days before. As I walked on the
glacis I heard the sound of a bagpipe from the soldiers' dwellings in
the rock, and was further soothed and affected by the sight of a
soldier's cat walking up a cleated plank into a high loophole designed
for _mus-catry_, as serene as Wisdom herself, and with a gracefully
waving motion of her tail, as if her ways were ways of pleasantness
and all her paths were peace. Scaling a slat fence, where a small
force might have checked me, I got out of the esplanade into the
Governor's Garden, and read the well-known inscription on Wolfe and
Montcalm's monument, which for saying much in little, and that to the
purpose, undoubtedly deserved the prize medal which it received:--
MORTEM . VIRTUS . COMMUNEM .
FAMAM . HISTORIA .
MONUMENTUM . POSTERITAS .
DEDIT
(Valor gave them one death, history one fame, posterity one monument. )
The Government Garden has for nosegays, amid kitchen vegetables,
beside the common garden flowers, the usual complement of cannon
directed toward some future and possible enemy. I then returned up St.
Louis Street to the esplanade and ramparts there, and went round the
Upper Town once more, though I was very tired, this time on the
_inside_ of the wall; for I knew that the wall was the main thing in
Quebec, and had cost a great deal of money, and therefore I must make
the most of it. In fact, these are the only remarkable walls we have
in North America, though we have a good deal of Virginia fence, it is
true. Moreover, I cannot say but I yielded in some measure to the
soldier instinct, and, having but a short time to spare, thought it
best to examine the wall thoroughly, that I might be the better
prepared if I should ever be called that way again in the service of
my country. I committed all the gates to memory, in their order, which
did not cost me so much trouble as it would have done at the
hundred-gated city, there being only five; nor were they so hard to
remember as those seven of Boeotian Thebes; and, moreover, I thought
that, if seven champions were enough against the latter, one would be
enough against Quebec, though he bore for all armor and device only an
umbrella and a bundle. I took the nunneries as I went, for I had
learned to distinguish them by the blinds; and I observed also the
foundling hospitals and the convents, and whatever was attached to, or
in the vicinity of the walls. All the rest I omitted, as naturally as
one would the inside of an inedible shell-fish. These were the only
pearls, and the wall the only mother-of-pearl for me. Quebec is
chiefly famous for the thickness of its parietal bones. The technical
terms of its conchology may stagger a beginner a little at first, such
as _banlieue_, _esplanade_, _glacis_, _ravelin_, _cavalier_, etc. ,
etc. , but with the aid of a comprehensive dictionary you soon learn
the nature of your ground. I was surprised at the extent of the
artillery barracks, built so long ago,--_Casernes Nouvelles_, they
used to be called,--nearly six hundred feet in length by forty in
depth, where the sentries, like peripatetic philosophers, were so
absorbed in thought as not to notice me when I passed in and out at
the gates. Within are "small arms of every description, sufficient for
the equipment of twenty thousand men," so arranged as to give a
startling _coup d'oeil_ to strangers. I did not enter, not wishing
to get a black eye; for they are said to be "in a state of complete
repair and readiness for immediate use. " Here, for a short time, I
lost sight of the wall, but I recovered it again on emerging from the
barrack yard. There I met with a Scotchman who appeared to have
business with the wall, like myself; and, being thus mutually drawn
together by a similarity of tastes, we had a little conversation _sub
moenibus_, that is, by an angle of the wall, which sheltered us. He
lived about thirty miles northwest of Quebec; had been nineteen years
in the country; said he was disappointed that he was not brought to
America after all, but found himself still under British rule and
where his own language was not spoken; that many Scotch, Irish, and
English were disappointed in like manner, and either went to the
States or pushed up the river to Canada West, nearer to the States,
and where their language was spoken. He talked of visiting the States
some time; and, as he seemed ignorant of geography, I warned him that
it was one thing to visit the State of Massachusetts, and another to
visit the State of California. He said it was colder there than usual
at that season, and he was lucky to have brought his thick togue, or
frock-coat, with him; thought it would snow, and then be pleasant and
warm. That is the way we are always thinking. However, his words were
music to me in my thin hat and sack.
At the ramparts on the cliff near the old Parliament House I counted
twenty-four thirty-two-pounders in a row, pointed over the harbor,
with their balls piled pyramid-wise between them,--there are said to
be in all about one hundred and eighty guns mounted at Quebec,--all
which were faithfully kept dusted by officials, in accordance with the
motto, "In time of peace prepare for war;" but I saw no preparations
for peace: she was plainly an uninvited guest.
Having thus completed the circuit of this fortress, both within and
without, I went no farther by the wall for fear that I should become
wall-eyed. However, I think that I deserve to be made a member of the
Royal Sappers and Miners.
In short, I observed everywhere the most perfect arrangements for
keeping a wall in order, not even permitting the lichens to grow on
it, which some think an ornament; but then I saw no cultivation nor
pasturing within it to pay for the outlay, and cattle were strictly
forbidden to feed on the glacis under the severest penalties. Where
the dogs get their milk I don't know, and I fear it is bloody at best.
The citadel of Quebec says, "I _will_ live here, and you shan't
prevent me. " To which you return, that you have not the slightest
objection; live and let live. The Martello towers looked, for all the
world, exactly like abandoned windmills which had not had a grist to
grind these hundred years. Indeed, the whole castle here was a
"folly,"--England's folly,--and, in more senses than one, a castle in
the air. The inhabitants and the government are gradually waking up to
a sense of this truth; for I heard something said about their
abandoning the wall around the Upper Town, and confining the
fortifications to the citadel of forty acres. Of course they will
finally reduce their intrenchments to the circumference of their own
brave hearts.
The most modern fortifications have an air of antiquity about them;
they have the aspect of ruins in better or worse repair from the day
they are built, because they are not really the work of this age. The
very place where the soldier resides has a peculiar tendency to become
old and dilapidated, as the word _barrack_ implies. I couple all
fortifications in my mind with the dismantled Spanish forts to be
found in so many parts of the world; and if in any place they are not
actually dismantled, it is because that there the intellect of the
inhabitants is dismantled. The commanding officer of an old fort near
Valdivia in South America, when a traveler remarked to him that, with
one discharge, his gun-carriages would certainly fall to pieces,
gravely replied, "No, I am sure, sir, they would stand two. " Perhaps
the guns of Quebec would stand three. Such structures carry us back to
the Middle Ages, the siege of Jerusalem, and St. Jean d'Acre, and the
days of the Bucaniers. In the armory of the citadel they showed me a
clumsy implement, long since useless, which they called a Lombard gun.
I thought that their whole citadel was such a Lombard gun, fit object
for the museums of the curious. Such works do not consist with the
development of the intellect. Huge stone structures of all kinds, both
in their erection and by their influence when erected, rather oppress
than liberate the mind. They are tombs for the souls of men, as
frequently for their bodies also. The sentinel with his musket beside
a man with his umbrella is spectral. There is not sufficient reason
for his existence. Does my friend there, with a bullet resting on half
an ounce of powder, think that he needs that argument in conversing
with me? The fort was the first institution that was founded here, and
it is amusing to read in Champlain how assiduously they worked at it
almost from the first day of the settlement. The founders of the
colony thought this an excellent site for a wall,--and no doubt it was
a better site, in some respects, for a wall than for a city,--but it
chanced that a city got behind it. It chanced, too, that a Lower Town
got before it, and clung like an oyster to the outside of the crags,
as you may see at low tide. It is as if you were to come to a country
village surrounded by palisades in the old Indian fashion,--interesting
only as a relic of antiquity and barbarism. A fortified town is like a
man cased in the heavy armor of antiquity, with a horse-load of
broadswords and small arms slung to him, endeavoring to go about his
business. Or is this an indispensable machinery for the good
government of the country? The inhabitants of California succeed
pretty well, and are doing better and better every day, without any
such institution. What use has this fortress served, to look at it
even from the soldiers' point of view? At first the French took care
of it; yet Wolfe sailed by it with impunity, and took the town of
Quebec without experiencing any hindrance at last from its
fortifications. They were only the bone for which the parties fought.
Then the English began to take care of it. So of any fort in the
world,--that in Boston Harbor, for instance. We shall at length hear
that an enemy sailed by it in the night, for it cannot sail itself,
and both it and its inhabitants are always benighted. How often we
read that the enemy occupied a position which commanded the old, and
so the fort was evacuated! Have not the schoolhouse and the
printing-press occupied a position which commands such a fort as this?
However, this is a ruin kept in remarkably good repair. There are some
eight hundred or thousand men there to exhibit it. One regiment goes
bare-legged to increase the attraction. If you wish to study the
muscles of the leg about the knee, repair to Quebec. This universal
exhibition in Canada of the tools and sinews of war reminded me of the
keeper of a menagerie showing his animals' claws. It was the English
leopard showing his claws. Always the royal something or other; as at
the menagerie, the Royal Bengal Tiger. Silliman states that "the cold
is so intense in the winter nights, particularly on Cape Diamond, that
the sentinels cannot stand it more than one hour, and are relieved at
the expiration of that time;" "and even, as it is said, at much
shorter intervals, in case of the most extreme cold. " What a natural
or unnatural fool must that soldier be--to say nothing of his
government--who, when quicksilver is freezing and blood is ceasing to
be quick, will stand to have his face frozen, watching the walls of
Quebec, though, so far as they are concerned, both honest and
dishonest men all the world over have been in their beds nearly half a
century,--or at least for that space travelers have visited Quebec
only as they would read history! I shall never again wake up in a
colder night than usual, but I shall think how rapidly the sentinels
are relieving one another on the walls of Quebec, their quicksilver
being all frozen, as if apprehensive that some hostile Wolfe may even
then be scaling the Heights of Abraham, or some persevering Arnold
about to issue from the wilderness; some Malay or Japanese, perchance,
coming round by the northwest coast, have chosen that moment to
assault the citadel! Why, I should as soon expect to find the
sentinels still relieving one another on the walls of Nineveh, which
have so long been buried to the world. What a troublesome thing a wall
is! I thought it was to defend me, and not I it! Of course, if they
had no wall, they would not need to have any sentinels.
You might venture to advertise this farm as well fenced with
substantial stone walls (saying nothing about the eight hundred
Highlanders and Royal Irish who are required to keep them from
toppling down); stock and tools to go with the land if desired. But it
would not be wise for the seller to exhibit his farm-book.
Why should Canada, wild and unsettled as it is, impress us as an older
country than the States, unless because her institutions are old? All
things appeared to contend there, as I have implied, with a certain
rust of antiquity, such as forms on old armor and iron guns,--the rust
of conventions and formalities. It is said that the metallic roofs of
Montreal and Quebec keep sound and bright for forty years in some
cases. But if the rust was not on the tinned roofs and spires, it was
on the inhabitants and their institutions. Yet the work of burnishing
goes briskly forward. I imagined that the government vessels at the
wharves were laden with rottenstone and oxalic acid,--that is what the
first ship from England in the spring comes freighted with,--and the
hands of the Colonial legislature are cased in wash-leather. The
principal exports must be _gun_ny bags, verdigris, and iron rust.
Those who first built this fort, coming from Old France with the
memory and tradition of feudal days and customs weighing on them, were
unquestionably behind their age; and those who now inhabit and repair
it are behind their ancestors or predecessors. Those old chevaliers
thought that they could transplant the feudal system to America. It
has been set out, but it has not thriven. Notwithstanding that Canada
was settled first, and, unlike New England, for a long series of years
enjoyed the fostering care of the mother country; notwithstanding
that, as Charlevoix tells us, it had more of the ancient _noblesse_
among its early settlers than any other of the French colonies, and
perhaps than all the others together, there are in both the Canadas
but 600,000 of French descent to-day,--about half so many as the
population of Massachusetts. The whole population of both Canadas is
but about 1,700,000 Canadians, English, Irish, Scotch, Indians, and
all, put together! Samuel Laing, in his essay on the Northmen, to
whom especially, rather than the Saxons, he refers the energy and
indeed the excellence of the English character, observes that, when
they occupied Scandinavia, "each man possessed his lot of land without
reference to, or acknowledgment of, any other man, without any local
chief to whom his military service or other quit-rent for his land was
due,--without tenure from, or duty or obligation to, any superior,
real or fictitious, except the general sovereign. The individual
settler held his land, as his descendants in Norway still express it,
by the same right as the King held his crown, by udal right, or
adel,--that is, noble right. " The French have occupied Canada, not
_udally_, or by noble right, but _feudally_, or by ignoble right. They
are a nation of peasants.
It was evident that, both on account of the feudal system and the
aristocratic government, a private man was not worth so much in Canada
as in the United States; and, if your wealth in any measure consists
in manliness, in originality and independence, you had better stay
here. How could a peaceable, freethinking man live neighbor to the
Forty-ninth Regiment? A New-Englander would naturally be a bad
citizen, probably a rebel, there,--certainly if he were already a
rebel at home. I suspect that a poor man who is not servile is a much
rarer phenomenon there and in England than in the Northern United
States. An Englishman, methinks,--not to speak of other European
nations,--habitually regards himself merely as a constituent part of
the English nation; he is a member of the royal regiment of
Englishmen, and is proud of his company, as he has reason to be proud
of it. But an American--one who has made a tolerable use of his
opportunities--cares, comparatively, little about such things, and is
advantageously nearer to the primitive and the ultimate condition of
man in these respects. It is a government, that English one,--like
most other European ones,--that cannot afford to be forgotten, as you
would naturally forget it; under which one cannot be wholesomely
neglected, and grow up a man and not an Englishman merely,--cannot be
a poet even without danger of being made poet-laureate! Give me a
country where it is the most natural thing in the world for a
government that does not understand you to let you alone. One would
say that a true Englishman could speculate only within bounds. (It is
true the Americans have proved that they, in more than one sense, can
_speculate_ without bounds. ) He has to pay his respects to so many
things, that, before he knows it, he _may_ have paid away all he is
worth. What makes the United States government, on the whole, more
tolerable--I mean for us lucky white men--is the fact that there is so
much less of government with us. Here it is only once in a month or a
year that a man _needs_ remember that institution; and those who go to
Congress can play the game of the Kilkenny cats there without fatal
consequences to those who stay at home, their term is so short; but in
Canada you are reminded of the government every day. It parades itself
before you. It is not content to be the servant, but will be the
master; and every day it goes out to the Plains of Abraham or to the
Champ de Mars and exhibits itself and toots. Everywhere there appeared
an attempt to make and to preserve trivial and otherwise transient
distinctions. In the streets of Montreal and Quebec you met not only
with soldiers in red, and shuffling priests in unmistakable black and
white, with Sisters of Charity gone into mourning for their deceased
relative,--not to mention the nuns of various orders depending on the
fashion of a tear, of whom you heard,--but youths belonging to some
seminary or other, wearing coats edged with white, who looked as if
their expanding hearts were already repressed with a piece of tape. In
short, the inhabitants of Canada appeared to be suffering between two
fires,--the soldiery and the priesthood.
CHAPTER V
THE SCENERY OF QUEBEC; AND THE RIVER ST. LAWRENCE
About twelve o'clock this day, being in the Lower Town, I looked up at
the signal-gun by the flagstaff on Cape Diamond, and saw a soldier up
in the heavens there making preparations to fire it,--both he and the
gun in bold relief against the sky. Soon after, being warned by the
boom of the gun to look up again, there was only the cannon in the
sky, the smoke just blowing away from it, as if the soldier, having
touched it off, had concealed himself for effect, leaving the sound to
echo grandly from shore to shore, and far up and down the river. This
answered the purpose of a dinner-horn.
There are no such restaurants in Quebec or Montreal as there are in
Boston. I hunted an hour or two in vain in this town to find one, till
I lost my appetite. In one house, called a restaurant, where lunches
were advertised, I found only tables covered with bottles and glasses
innumerable, containing apparently a sample of every liquid that has
been known since the earth dried up after the flood, but no scent of
solid food did I perceive gross enough to excite a hungry mouse. In
short, I saw nothing to tempt me there, but a large map of Canada
against the wall. In another place I once more got as far as the
bottles, and then asked for a bill of fare; was told to walk up
stairs; had no bill of fare, nothing but fare. "Have you any pies or
puddings? " I inquired, for I am obliged to keep my savageness in check
by a low diet. "No, sir; we've nice mutton-chop, roast beef,
beefsteak, cutlets," and so on. A burly Englishman, who was in the
midst of the siege of a piece of roast beef, and of whom I have never
had a front view to this day, turned half round, with his mouth half
full, and remarked, "You'll find no pies nor puddings in Quebec, sir;
they don't make any here. " I found that it was even so, and therefore
bought some musty cake and some fruit in the open market-place. This
market-place by the waterside, where the old women sat by their tables
in the open air, amid a dense crowd jabbering all languages, was the
best place in Quebec to observe the people; and the ferry-boats,
continually coming and going with their motley crews and cargoes,
added much to the entertainment. I also saw them getting water from
the river, for Quebec is supplied with water by cart and barrel. This
city impressed me as wholly foreign and French, for I scarcely heard
the sound of the English language in the streets. More than three
fifths of the inhabitants are of French origin; and if the traveler
did not visit the fortifications particularly, he might not be
reminded that the English have any foothold here; and, in any case, if
he looked no farther than Quebec, they would appear to have planted
themselves in Canada only as they have in Spain at Gibraltar; and he
who plants upon a rock cannot expect much increase. The novel sights
and sounds by the waterside made me think of such ports as Boulogne,
Dieppe, Rouen, and Havre-de-Grace, which I have never seen; but I
have no doubt that they present similar scenes. I was much amused from
first to last with the sounds made by the charette and caleche
drivers. It was that part of their foreign language that you heard the
most of,--the French they talked to their horses,--and which they
talked the loudest. It was a more novel sound to me than the French of
conversation. The streets resounded with the cries, "_Qui donc! _"
"_Marche tot! _" I suspect that many of our horses which came from
Canada would prick up their ears at these sounds. Of the shops, I was
most attracted by those where furs and Indian works were sold, as
containing articles of genuine Canadian manufacture. I have been told
that two townsmen of mine, who were interested in horticulture,
traveling once in Canada, and being in Quebec, thought it would be a
good opportunity to obtain seeds of the real Canada crookneck squash.
So they went into a shop where such things were advertised, and
inquired for the same. The shopkeeper had the very thing they wanted.
"But are you sure," they asked, "that these are the genuine Canada
crookneck? " "Oh, yes, gentlemen," answered he, "they are a lot which I
have received directly from Boston. " I resolved that my Canada
crookneck seeds should be such as had grown in Canada.
Too much has not been said about the scenery of Quebec. The
fortifications of Cape Diamond are omnipresent. They preside, they
frown over the river and surrounding country. You travel ten, twenty,
thirty miles up or down the river's banks, you ramble fifteen miles
amid the hills on either side, and then, when you have long since
forgotten them, perchance slept on them by the way, at a turn of the
road or of your body, there they are still, with their geometry
against the sky. The child that is born and brought up thirty miles
distant, and has never traveled to the city, reads his country's
history, sees the level lines of the citadel amid the cloud-built
citadels in the western horizon, and is told that that is Quebec. No
wonder if Jacques Cartier's pilot exclaimed in Norman French, "Que
bec! " (What a beak! ) when he saw this cape, as some suppose. Every
modern traveler involuntarily uses a similar expression. Particularly
it is said that its sudden apparition on turning Point Levi makes a
memorable impression on him who arrives by water. The view from Cape
Diamond has been compared by European travelers with the most
remarkable views of a similar kind in Europe, such as from Edinburgh
Castle, Gibraltar, Cintra, and others, and preferred by many. A main
peculiarity in this, compared with other views which I have beheld, is
that it is from the ramparts of a fortified city, and not from a
solitary and majestic river cape alone, that this view is obtained. I
associate the beauty of Quebec with the steel-like and flashing air,
which may be peculiar to that season of the year, in which the blue
flowers of the succory and some late goldenrods and buttercups on the
summit of Cape Diamond were almost my only companions,--the former
bluer than the heavens they faced. Yet even I yielded in some degree
to the influence of historical associations, and found it hard to
attend to the geology of Cape Diamond or the botany of the Plains of
Abraham. I still remember the harbor far beneath me, sparkling like
silver in the sun, the answering highlands of Point Levi on the
southeast, the frowning Cap Tourmente abruptly bounding the seaward
view far in the northeast, the villages of Lorette and Charlesbourg on
the north, and, further west, the distant Val Cartier, sparkling with
white cottages, hardly removed by distance through the clear air,--not
to mention a few blue mountains along the horizon in that direction.
You look out from the ramparts of the citadel beyond the frontiers of
civilization. Yonder small group of hills, according to the
guide-book, forms "the portal of the wilds which are trodden only by
the feet of the Indian hunters as far as Hudson's Bay. " It is but a
few years since Bouchette declared that the country ten leagues north
of the British capital of North America was as little known as the
middle of Africa. Thus the citadel under my feet, and all historical
associations, were swept away again by an influence from the wilds and
from Nature, as if the beholder had read her history,--an influence
which, like the Great River itself, flowed from the Arctic fastnesses
and Western forests with irresistible tide over all.
The most interesting object in Canada to me was the River St.
Lawrence, known far and wide, and for centuries, as the Great River.
Cartier, its discoverer, sailed up it as far as Montreal in
1535,--nearly a century before the coming of the Pilgrims; and I have
seen a pretty accurate map of it so far, containing the city of
"Hochelaga" and the river "Saguenay," in Ortelius's _Theatrum Orbis
Terrarum_, printed at Antwerp in 1575,--the first edition having
appeared in 1570,--in which the famous cities of "Norumbega" and
"Orsinora" stand on the rough-blocked continent where New England is
to-day, and the fabulous but unfortunate Isle of Demons, and Frislant,
and others, lie off and on in the unfrequented sea, some of them
prowling near what is now the course of the Cunard steamers. In this
ponderous folio of the "Ptolemy of his age," said to be the first
general atlas published after the revival of the sciences in Europe,
only one page of which is devoted to the topography of the _Novus
Orbis_, the St. Lawrence is the only large river, whether drawn from
fancy or from observation, on the east side of North America. It was
famous in Europe before the other rivers of North America were heard
of, notwithstanding that the mouth of the Mississippi is said to have
been discovered first, and its stream was reached by Soto not long
after; but the St. Lawrence had attracted settlers to its cold shores
long before the Mississippi, or even the Hudson, was known to the
world. Schoolcraft was misled by Gallatin into saying that Narvaez
discovered the Mississippi. De Vega does _not_ say so. The first
explorers declared that the summer in that country was as warm as
France, and they named one of the bays in the Gulf of St. Lawrence the
Bay of Chaleur, or of warmth; but they said nothing about the winter
being as cold as Greenland. In the manuscript account of Cartier's
second voyage, attributed by some to that navigator himself, it is
called "the greatest river, without comparison, that is known to have
ever been seen. " The savages told him that it was the "chemin du
Canada,"--the highway to Canada,--"which goes so far that no man had
ever been to the end that they had heard. " The Saguenay, one of its
tributaries, which the panorama has made known to New England within
three years, is described by Cartier, in 1535, and still more
particularly by Jean Alphonse, in 1542, who adds, "I think that this
river comes from the sea of Cathay, for in this place there issues a
strong current, and there runs there a terrible tide. " The early
explorers saw many whales and other sea-monsters far up the St.
Lawrence. Champlain, in his map, represents a whale spouting in the
harbor of Quebec, three hundred and sixty miles from what is called
the mouth of the river; and Charlevoix takes his reader to the summit
of Cape Diamond to see the "porpoises, white as snow," sporting on the
surface of the harbor of Quebec. And Boucher says in 1664, "from there
[Tadoussac] to Montreal is found a great quantity of _Marsouins
blancs_. " Several whales have been taken pretty high up the river
since I was there. P. A. Gosse, in his "Canadian Naturalist," p. 171
(London, 1840), speaks of "the white dolphin of the St. Lawrence
(_Delphinus Canadensis_)," as considered different from those of the
sea. "The Natural History Society of Montreal offered a prize, a few
years ago, for an essay on the _Cetacea_ of the St. Lawrence, which
was, I believe, handed in. " In Champlain's day it was commonly called
"the Great River of Canada. " More than one nation has claimed it. In
Ogilby's "America of 1670," in the map _Novi Belgii_, it is called "De
Groote River van Niew Nederlandt. " It bears different names in
different parts of its course, as it flows through what were formerly
the territories of different nations. From the Gulf to Lake Ontario
it is called at present the St. Lawrence; from Montreal to the same
place it is frequently called the Cateraqui; and higher up it is known
successively as the Niagara, Detroit, St. Clair, St. Mary's, and St.
Louis rivers. Humboldt, speaking of the Orinoco, says that this name
is unknown in the interior of the country; so likewise the tribes that
dwell about the sources of the St. Lawrence have never heard the name
which it bears in the lower part of its course. It rises near another
father of waters,--the Mississippi,--issuing from a remarkable spring
far up in the woods, called Lake Superior, fifteen hundred miles in
circumference; and several other springs there are thereabouts which
feed it. It makes such a noise in its tumbling down at one place as is
heard all round the world. Bouchette, the Surveyor-General of the
Canadas, calls it "the most splendid river on the globe;" says that it
is two thousand statute miles long (more recent geographers make it
four or five hundred miles longer); that at the Riviere du Sud it is
eleven miles wide; at the Traverse, thirteen; at the Paps of Matane,
twenty-five; at the Seven Islands, seventy-three; and at its mouth,
from Cape Rosier to the Mingan Settlements in Labrador, near one
hundred and five (? ) miles wide. According to Captain Bayfield's
recent chart it is about _ninety-six_ geographical miles wide at the
latter place, measuring at right angles with the stream. It has much
the largest estuary, regarding both length and breadth, of any river
on the globe. Humboldt says that the River Plate, which has the
broadest estuary of the South American rivers, is ninety-two
geographical miles wide at its mouth; also he found the Orinoco to be
more than three miles wide at five hundred and sixty miles from its
mouth; but he does not tell us that ships of six hundred tons can sail
up it so far, as they can up the St. Lawrence to Montreal,--an equal
distance. If he had described a fleet of such ships at anchor in a
city's port so far inland, we should have got a very different idea of
the Orinoco. Perhaps Charlevoix describes the St. Lawrence truly as
the most _navigable_ river in the world. Between Montreal and Quebec
it averages about two miles wide. The tide is felt as far up as Three
Rivers, four hundred and thirty-two miles, which is as far as from
Boston to Washington. As far up as Cap aux Oyes, sixty or seventy
miles below Quebec, Kalm found a great part of the plants near the
shore to be marine, as glasswort (_Salicornia_), seaside pease (_Pisum
maritimum_), sea-milkwort (_Glaux_), beach-grass (_Psamma arenaria_),
seaside plantain (_Plantago maritima_), the sea-rocket (_Bunias
cakile_), etc.
The geographer Guyot observes that the Maranon is three thousand miles
long, and gathers its waters from a surface of a million and a half
square miles; that the Mississippi is also three thousand miles long,
but its basin covers only from eight to nine hundred thousand square
miles; that the St. Lawrence is eighteen hundred miles long, and its
basin covers more than a million square miles (Darby says five hundred
thousand); and speaking of the lakes, he adds, "These vast fresh-water
seas, together with the St. Lawrence, cover a surface of nearly one
hundred thousand square miles, and it has been calculated that they
contain about one half of all the fresh water on the surface of our
planet. " But all these calculations are necessarily very rude and
inaccurate. Its tributaries, the Ottawa, St. Maurice, and Saguenay,
are great rivers themselves. The latter is said to be more than one
thousand (? ) feet deep at its mouth, while its cliffs rise
perpendicularly an equal distance above its surface. Pilots say there
are no soundings till one hundred and fifty miles up the St. Lawrence.
The greatest sounding in the river, given on Bayfield's chart of the
gulf and river, is two hundred and twenty-eight fathoms. McTaggart, an
engineer, observes that "the Ottawa is larger than all the rivers in
Great Britain, were they running in one. " The traveler Grey writes: "A
dozen Danubes, Rhines, Taguses, and Thameses would be nothing to
twenty miles of fresh water in breadth [as where he happened to be],
from ten to forty fathoms in depth. " And again: "There is not perhaps
in the whole extent of this immense continent so fine an approach to
it as by the river St. Lawrence. In the Southern States you have, in
general, a level country for many miles inland; here you are
introduced at once into a majestic scenery, where everything is on a
grand scale,--mountains, woods, lakes, rivers, precipices,
waterfalls. "
We have not yet the data for a minute comparison of the St. Lawrence
with the South American rivers; but it is obvious that, taking it in
connection with its lakes, its estuary, and its falls, it easily bears
off the palm from all the rivers on the globe; for though, as
Bouchette observes, it may not carry to the ocean a greater volume of
water than the Amazon and Mississippi, its surface and cubic mass are
far greater than theirs. But, unfortunately, this noble river is
closed by ice from the beginning of December to the middle of April.
The arrival of the first vessel from England when the ice breaks up
is, therefore, a great event, as when the salmon, shad, and alewives
come up a river in the spring to relieve the famishing inhabitants on
its banks. Who can say what would have been the history of this
continent if, as has been suggested, this river had emptied into the
sea where New York stands!
After visiting the Museum and taking one more look at the wall, I made
haste to the Lord Sydenham steamer, which at five o'clock was to leave
for Montreal. I had already taken a seat on deck, but finding that I
had still an hour and a half to spare, and remembering that large map
of Canada which I had seen in the parlor of the restaurant in my
search after pudding, and realizing that I might never see the like
out of the country, I returned thither, asked liberty to look at the
map, rolled up the mahogany table, put my handkerchief on it, stood on
it, and copied all I wanted before the maid came in and said to me
standing on the table, "Some gentlemen want the room, sir;" and I
retreated without having broken the neck of a single bottle, or my
own, very thankful and willing to pay for all the solid food I had
got. We were soon abreast of Cap Rouge, eight miles above Quebec,
after we got under weigh. It was in this place, then called _Fort du
France Roy_, that the Sieur de Roberval with his company, having sent
home two of his three ships, spent the winter of 1542-43. It appears
that they fared in the following manner (I translate from the
original): "Each mess had only two loaves, weighing each a pound, and
half a pound of beef. They ate pork for dinner, with half a pound of
butter, and beef for supper, with about two handfuls of beans without
butter. Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays they ate salted cod, and
sometimes green, for dinner, with butter; and porpoise and beans for
supper. Monsieur Roberval administered good justice, and punished each
according to his offense. One, named Michel Gaillon, was hung for
theft; John of Nantes was put in irons and imprisoned for his fault;
and others were likewise put in irons; and many were whipped, both men
and women; by which means they lived in peace and tranquillity. " In an
account of a voyage up this river, printed in the Jesuit Relations in
the year 1664, it is said: "It was an interesting navigation for us in
ascending the river from Cap Tourmente to Quebec, to see on this side
and on that, for the space of eight leagues, the farms and the houses
of the company, built by our French, all along these shores. On the
right, the seigniories of Beauport, of Notre Dame des Anges; and on
the left, this beautiful Isle of Orleans. " The same traveler names
among the fruits of the country observed at the Isles of Richelieu, at
the head of Lake St. Peter, "kinds (_des especes_) of little apples or
haws (_senelles_), and of pears, which only ripen with the frost. "
Night came on before we had passed the high banks. We had come from
Montreal to Quebec in one night. The return voyage, against the
stream, takes but an hour longer. Jacques Cartier, the first white man
who is known to have ascended this river, thus speaks of his voyage
from what is now Quebec to the foot of Lake St. Peter, or about
half-way to Montreal: "From the said day, the 19th, even to the 28th
of the said month [September, 1535], we had been navigating up the
said river without losing hour or day, during which time we had seen
and found as much country and lands as level as we could desire, full
of the most beautiful trees in the world," which he goes on to
describe. But we merely slept and woke again to find that we had
passed through all that country which he was eight days in sailing
through. He must have had a troubled sleep. We were not long enough on
the river to realize that it had length; we got only the impression of
its breadth, as if we had passed over a lake a mile or two in breadth
and several miles long, though we might thus have slept through a
European kingdom. Being at the head of Lake St. Peter, on the
above-mentioned 28th of September, dealing with the natives, Cartier
says: "We inquired of them by signs if this was the route to Hochelaga
[Montreal]; and they answered that it was, and that there were yet
three days' journeys to go there. " He finally arrived at Hochelaga on
the 2d of October.
When I went on deck at dawn we had already passed through Lake St.
Peter, and saw islands ahead of us. Our boat advancing with a strong
and steady pulse over the calm surface, we felt as if we were
permitted to be awake in the scenery of a dream. Many vivacious
Lombardy poplars along the distant shores gave them a novel and
lively, though artificial, look, and contrasted strangely with the
slender and graceful elms on both shores and islands.
