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Our Heritage of the Sea—A Coast Line of 14,820 Miles—The Harbours and Sheltered Seas of Canada—The Great Off-Shore Islands—The Lake and River Chain—A Country Open to the Sea

The present vast naval establishment of Canada, the merchant marine which floats beside it and the huge ship building industry on which both are based, bespeak the immediate interest of our Dominion in the sea. But indeed our interest, our use and custom of the sea and the abiding attraction which it has for us, go much further back in time than our Dominion itself, or even our national history. It is a part of our inheritance, a part of the origin and the life story of the two races from whom our people are chiefly descended.

It is true that a large part, by far the larger part, of the people of Canada live out of the sight and the sound of the sea. Two of our provinces are entirely landlocked with no harbour on the sea, and even the sea coast of Ontario (on James and Hudson Bay) which few of its people have ever seen, sounds as out of place as Shakespeare’s mistaken “sea coast of Bohemia.” But that does not lessen the importance of what the sea has meant to us in the development of race, of what it has meant in the evolution of our history, and of all that it means for our future. Canada with a sea coast on three great oceans is a maritime nation, and this outlook, this contact with the sea reaches to the quietest corners of inland Ontario and sends a breeze from the salt water across the grain fields of Saskatchewan. The sea is part of our destiny.

The sea coast of Canada fronts on all three oceans of the Northern Hemisphere—the Atlantic, the Arctic and the Pacific. It has a total length, as estimated by our Hydrographic Survey, of 14,820 statute miles. This means the coast line of the mainland measured as a more or less direct line. If we include the contour of the great islands which lie off the Canadian shores we get a total length of 34,659 miles of coast. Soviet Russia lying on the salt water of the Baltic and Black Seas and on the Arctic Ocean, its shores not yet accurately surveyed, has presumably a longer coast than ours. But coastline after all is a peculiar and varying index. Compare Chili, running towards a maximum of length with a minimum of breadth, and Australia, shaped like a circle, running towards a minimum of coast for its area. [1] H. W. Clark, “History of Alaska,” 1930 The case of our neighbour Alaska^[1] is peculiar. Its outline is to a great extent made up of islands; it reaches eastward with its “Panhandle”; westward it extends so far with its Aleutian chain that the end of it reaches past the international date-line of 180 degrees beyond which is always tomorrow—or would be but that the United States forbids it. Alaska indeed is so peculiarly shaped that if it were superimposed on the United States the top centre of it would be at Duluth, the Panhandle would be at Savannah, Georgia, and the outlaying Aleutians (very profitably) at Hollywood, California. Its coast is longer than all the rest of the continental coast of the United States.

There is no such “freakishness” about the coast of Canada. The wandering curves of its coasts only enhance the facility of communication and guarantee harbours and shelter. At its southern terminus are the Bay of Fundy and the great circle of the Gulf of St. Lawrence from Cape Breton Island to the Straits of Belle Isle. Hudson Strait and Hudson Bay open up a vast inland sea, and on the Pacific side the coast of British Columbia is one continuous stretch of bay and fiord, inlet and sea way. This indented coast is, and has been throughout history, one of the salient advantages of Canada and indeed of North America. The “stern and rock-bound coast” sounds grim in poetry but in reality it means a coast offering at every turn shelter and safety and points of embarkation. To its earliest explorers, to Champlain and those who followed, the Bay of Fundy must have offered a marvellous prospect—with each successive harbour, each wooded inlet, each sheltering island lovelier than the last.

To appreciate the beauty of our Canadian coast in this respect one has but to compare it with the hundreds, the thousands, of miles of the western coast of Africa. Here to the innocent eye of a child, or a painter, nature seems to blend and harmonize land and sea to one consenting contour—low, green shores, the sanded desert stretching to the sanded beach, together with an approach of sea to land, so soft, so slow, wooing the land—this, in reality, in the geological sense, is territory that the unending breaking of the sea has conquered. This is land of which the sea has made what it would fain make of the Channel Coast of England or the stubborn rock of Nova Scotia—this unending shore of Africa, all pounded and broken into sand where the sea meets it day and night, in calm and storm, with a long roll of breaking surf that forbids all access. Our Sable Island, 110 miles off Cape Canso, Nova Scotia, the “graveyard of the Atlantic” with over two hundred recorded wrecks, is, as it were, a little piece of Africa, broken off to warn us what the sea could do.

Our coast is rendered more varied, more majestic and more sheltered still by the great number of islands, some of colossal size, which girdle it from end to end. One thinks at once of Grand Manan in the Bay of Fundy, of Cape Breton Island (3,120 square miles) split off from Nova Scotia by the mile-wide Strait of Canso and riven in twain by the Bras d’Or Lakes; of Prince Edward Island (2,184 square miles), itself a province, with a coast line as broken as that of the parent continent; of the Island of Anticosti, a hundred and thirty miles long, an area of 4,000 square miles (half the area of Wales); and as the greatest of all in size, significance and history, Newfoundland (42,734 square miles), our lost sister, or is it our truant mother?, bound to us in spite of itself by geology and geography.

But the islands most imposing in size are those of the great Arctic Archipelago in what used to be called, until it became unfashionable, the “frozen seas.” Of the economic value of these Arctic islands, in summer at best a fishing coast and a treeless pasture of grass and flowers and flies, in winter a desolation, we may none the less in this age of minerals entertain certain hopes. England’s acquaintance with them began when Martin Frobisher brought home to Queen Elizabeth a ship-load of gold (fool’s gold, iron pyrites) [2] Richard Hakluyt, “Principall Navigations of the English Nation,” 1598-1600 from Baffin Island^[2]. But the shipment may yet prove as momentous as when John Hawkins brought to the same Queen “niggers” from Guinea and Raleigh tobacco from America. But in size, as just said, the islands are truly imposing. Baffin Island, the largest, contains 200,000 square miles and is almost ten times the size of Nova Scotia; second to it are Victoria (80,000) and Ellesmere (75,000) and half a dozen others each larger than the Province of Prince Edward Island.

On the Pacific coast Vancouver Island (12,400 square miles) is world famous for its history, its beauty and its outlook on a new world in the making. Above it extends an innumerable chain of Pacific Coast Islands and notably the spacious and fertile group of the Queen Charlotte, temperate in climate, rich in resources, sleeping still, hardly known, scarcely used a century after their discovery (1787).

But the word “innumerable” quite rightly designates the islands, as also the lakes, of our fortunate country. Thus—to quote examples only from territory now accurately [3] ”Year Book of Canada,” 1941 surveyed^[3]—in an area of 6,094 square miles south and east of Lake Winnipeg there are 3,000 lakes; in an area of 5,294 square miles, accurately mapped, southwest of Reindeer Lake in Saskatchewan there are 7,500 lakes; in the area of the Georgian Bay there are, as commonly and currently estimated, some thirty thousand islands; and much of the Mistassini country in northern Quebec appears indistinguishable as to whether made of lakes surrounded by land, or islands surrounded by water.

The vast inland reservoirs of fresh water represented by the chain of lakes of the Mackenzie River system (Athabasca, Great Slave, Great Bear) and by the Great Lakes of the St. Lawrence basin, stand in a peculiar connection with the sea. They bring it as it were inland to the very heart of our country. We commonly think of rivers as running to the sea, as they undoubtedly do. But seafaring people think of the sea as running into the land, as, from their off shore viewpoint, it does. If we reverse the gear of our common thought to the opposite direction, and think of the St. Lawrence and the Mackenzie as running inland we find a sea way that penetrates into Canada from the Strait of Belle Isle and Cabot Strait inland 1,168 miles past Montreal to Fort William; and one that passes from Aklavik, the Arctic harbour of the North West Territories, for an unimpeded voyage to Fort Smith on the Slave River, beside the Alberta boundary, 1,292 miles away. Already ports far inland, such as Fort William and Port Arthur, are sea ports in so much that ships, actually from the distant seas, lie at their docks. The completion of the St. Lawrence Seaway, now an international certainty, will carry seafaring to the heart of the continent. Our Canadian transport began with the canoe and the portage. The cycle of innovation has turned a full circle. The ocean steamer and the canal have brought it back to where it started.