Читать книгу Canada: The Foundations of Its Future - Стивен Ликок - Страница 7

Table of Contents

The New Discovery of America—Formation of the Continent—Man’s Transit to America—The Norsemen in America—The Aborigines and the Empty Continent—European Expansion and the New World—The Search for the East—Voyages and Explorations of the Fifteen Hundreds—Misdirection of Effort—The Empty Continent still waits.

The poet Jemmy Thomson, in writing Rule Britannia in 1740, tells us that Britain originally “arose from out the azure main.” This is exactly what it did, except that the main was not azure. It rose, very properly accompanied by the rest of the British Empire and in fact preceded by Canada. The “main” was not azure because there was no sunlight to make it so. Around our unformed globe was still wrapped the dense volume of steamy cloud that shrouded it in the half-darkness that still holds the planet Venus. Under this moved and stirred the heaving and silent water later to be the windswept, sunlit ocean. Within the first crust that thus emerged and remained above the water, was the rim of desolate rock that surrounds the Hudson Bay, the central ring of inner Canada. This is perhaps the oldest country in the world. Till yesterday it seemed destined to eternal solitude. The discovery of America has begun again. Much of it, and especially of Canada, such as the El Dorado in the northern wilderness or the Aladdin’s cave of radium beside the Great Bear Lake, moves from useless desolation to the foreground of human interest. In the world’s production of wealth and search for welfare the emphasis of human effort has shifted from tropic plants to northern minerals, from the jungle to the rock, from the forced labour of the Egyptian slave to the leaping power of the northern waterfall. This alters entirely the outlook of the world towards Canada. Less than a century ago the famous British historian, Sir Archibald Alison, “History of Europe,” Chap. 76 could state that “probably seven-eighths of this immense surface, British North America, are doomed to eternal sterility from the excessive severity of the climate, which yields only a scanty herbage to the reindeer, the elk and the musk-ox.” But it is now as if the globe had shifted on its axis and tilted Canada towards the sun. Thus does history reveal that continued migration “Northward Course of Empire,” V. Stefansson, 1922 of civilization so finely called the “northward course of empire.” The palaces of Nineveh are buried under the Mesopotamian sand, and the Assyrian, who once came down like a wolf on the fold and whose banners were gleaming in purple and gold, now sells rugs in a palatial hotel in what was once the “desert of the Saskatchewan.” This sense of the illimitable resource of our future—not boastful but earnest—should be the inspiring idea of a proper study of Canada.

These great changes have had much to do with the change and development of our globe itself. Where nature built and fashioned broadcast, man has groped and burrowed. Every last thing was thrown down lavishly for us millions of years ago. Only knowledge lingered. So we can perhaps best understand the structure and resources of our country or our continent by turning back to the earliest hour of earth’s time and seeing it in its formation. Our globe, once a ball of fire torn from the J.W. Gregory, “The Making of the Earth,” 1912 sun, cooled, shrank and solidified. As it cooled, so the geologists tell us, it underwent the same pressure of stress and strain as attend the collapse of a balloon losing gas, or a football losing air. Like these it tried to draw itself into a solid figure of four sides, each side a triangle, like the little four-sided glass pyramids seen as table ornaments. Its own rotary motion counteracted this, trying to re-make it to a smaller sphere. But the enlightened eye can still see in the structure of our continents and oceans, the huge outline of these four triangular faces, washed by the seven seas. One great triangle outline, the easiest to detect, is that of America—all America with the Atlantic—from its wide base along the arctic rim to its “toe” in the antarctic. The great gash where the Gulf of Mexico is torn out of the continental outline is said by scientists to mark the place where it was detached in its formation from the side of Africa that once joined it. Slide our American continent east again along its parallels and it would refit with Africa. But as a matter of fact—of science—it is still slowly sliding the other way, west. Canada is estimated to be moving away from Europe at the rate of a few yards a year. This is excellent, except that it brings us nearer Japan. But this picture at least emphasizes, if only as in a parable, the unity of all America.

Per contra, what we call the Old World, Asia with its appended Europe, along with Africa and the Indian Ocean tapering south, forms another face. The Pacific Ocean gives the natural and simple outline of another triangle, sunk beneath the sea. The broad cap of the arctic regions, unfamiliar as a unit in our maps, marks the fourth face—the top, or lid, as it were, as we generally picture the upright globe. As the outline formed, as the ridges rose and the seas retreated, there may well have been alternate rises and falls, lost land, land bridges and bygone islands, such as human fancy, ever since Plato, has loved to restore. All this for the most part long before man; but not of necessity before emerging life.

The globe cooled; the clouds lifted; the sun came; the waters sparkled and there was life. How it came in we do not know. What it is, we cannot tell. We mark its self-adapting change, its will to be. Its mystery we cannot read. Even before the sunlight, great plants, giant ferns, rose in the half-darkness to sink and submerge as future coal fields. Animate life no doubt appeared under the water and then crawled hideous to the land. It grew in size before it grew in adaptability. Huge animals dragged their flabby length, pulpy, non-resistant and premature. But nature always toned the process to strength, endurance and beauty. There came a time when the prairie blossomed with flowers and the birds sang in the woods, and the earth waited for man; waited and waited for such uncounted thousands of years that science cannot count them now. Indeed our scientists seem to lengthen their conjectures with every passing decade. Sir Arthur Keith, “The Antiquity of Man,” 1925 Lord Kelvin estimated the age of the earth at 100,000,000 years. Our later knowledge of radio-active elemental change alters the estimate to perhaps 4,000,000,000 years. Life may have existed hundreds of millions of years ago. But the space between the first appearance of life, and the first appearance of man, perhaps 500,000 years ago, seems inconceivably vast.

But at last man came. He was by descent a sort of super-baboon, or a first-cousin ape. The scientific name is an “aberrant primate.” Like most of us he cannot trace his direct family—just his “people” at large. Such as they were, he parted company with them. Man came down from the trees, stopped climbing, stood to attention and began using his hands. His particular trick was that of “opposing” his thumb to his fingers. They say that that made him.

At any rate man set to work to make something of himself, and presently succeeded, and there he was! Body and mind, man beat his cousin apes on every lap; turned growls and chuckles into speech; made sticks into tools; and so parted company with all the rest of the world.

This was in Asia. Man undoubtedly was evolved in one area and from it spread out over the globe. But our New World of America knew nothing of man for a long time. We have never found, as in Europe and Asia, those ancient skulls buried deep under rocks that prove their age by the calendar of geology. Here is the famous “Piltdown” skull of some man who once lived in Sussex; the Pithecanthropus of Java; or the recently found Mongolian man, the last addition to the “old gang.” Now and then a false alarm, as started by the Los Angeles find of 1924, awakens vain hopes of ancestry. But so far all our discoveries of skulls in rock betray a later burial, and not the solemn, primeval rest of the Sussex man.

Man, then, came to America from the Old World. There was no difficulty about it, as we see it in the light of modern knowledge. Indeed there were so many ways of coming, and man probably came by so many different ways, that the only surprising thing is that there was no regular coming and going to the mainland of America till the time of Christopher Columbus. That was the trouble—the coming and going. Primitive people might come, and did come, but they couldn’t go back; or they came by so slow a journey, spread over generations, that they forgot where they came from and presently thought they came from the sky.

Ellsworth Huntington, “The Red Man’s Continent”

Here are some of the ways in which mankind came to America. A glance at the globe shows that Asia and America are almost connected territory. We seldom realize that the long peninsula of Alaska, which is part of the United States, reaches out so far west that the most westerly of the Aleutian Islands, which form its continuation, are due north of New Zealand. In other words this long peninsula and its island stepping-stones reach to within 200 miles of the Peninsula of Kamchatka, in Siberia. Early men, even with only primitive means of water transport, could have drifted or been blown across this gap. It could never have been in prehistoric times a known and travelled passage. It was at best a disappearance into the black night of the ocean, like the passage beyond Gibraltar to the early Mediterranean people. But the Bering Strait itself, though about 800 miles farther north, is only fifty-six miles wide, with two small islands that reduce its longest water gap to thirty-five miles. In some winters the whole strait freezes to a solid stretch of ice. Nothing but the climate of this desolate Asiatic region prevented mankind from moving eastward out of Asia as easily as westward into Mediterranean Europe. But between the truly habitable parts of Eastern Asia—as the valley of the Amoor River—and the Bering Strait, there lies a stretch of two to three thousand miles of the coldest and most forbidding territory on the globe. Life shudders in the cold, its flame almost extinct. The winter temperature at Verkhoyansk, the “cold pole” of north-east Siberia, shows a January average of 59 degrees below zero, while the minimum recorded (so far) is 94 below. In such a region Ellsworth Huntington, “The Red Man’s Continent” the means of life are scant and precarious, the winter an unending darkness, the summer a glare of meaningless sunshine. Scholars do not doubt that prehistoric man crossed this territory, but never as a single and remembered transit. It was a slow migration, generation after generation long, farther and farther into the mist and cold, till it filtered down the Alaskan coast of America into the sunshine—its origins forgotten. But where man’s memory fails, the stamp that nature sets on him persists. Our Eskimos of Canada and our Indians reproduce beyond all doubt the Mongolian type of man. The native custom and mode of life of our Pacific Indians, as first discovered, still connects with Asiatic culture.

It is true, the bridge of language between Asia and America is broken beyond recall, the connection, if any, a mere matter of guess-work. Language in America is multiplied and divided even more than in the Old World. It is estimated that there are at least 1,000 original distinct languages on the American continent, that is to say, languages, mutually unintelligible and not, as dialects, mutually comprehensible. These all interconnect from the Eskimos to the Patagonians. But nowhere do they connect with the speech of other continents. This is the more striking since elsewhere surviving similarities of language stretch over a connection of thousands of miles of distance and forgotten centuries of history. You may trace the Uro-Altaic family of languages, H. de Windt, “Paris to New York by Land,” 1903 from Finland and Turkey across the whole stretch of Asia. The numerals from one to ten, as existing in Turkish, are virtually the same as those used at Yakutsk. This marks the track of the great Asiatic migration westward and north-eastward from its first starting point. Similarities of language, as said, run through and across all America. But as from continent to continent there is no bridge. Yet this only bespeaks the vast antiquity of the migration and its slow transit.

But this undoubted movement of man into America was no doubt supplemented in some small degree with arrivals by other routes. We need consider but little the possibility of land bridges joining America to the Old World. Such there undoubtedly were. The American continent, as has been said, may once have adhered to Europe and to Africa, from which we may imagine it, as in the fancy of love songs, reluctantly drifting apart. But few scientists would allow us to imagine man as part of its reluctant flight. His time was yet to come. Similarly the North Atlantic may have had its Atlantis, now sunk beneath the waves, and the “banks” of Newfoundland, the “continental shelf” of Greenland, may once have joined to Iceland and the British Isles. But there is a lack of any evidence that this was in man’s brief yesterday.

But in one direction from America there is such evidence. The Polynesian Islands of the Pacific which are the still projecting heights of the earth-face that collapsed, reach all the way from the Australian waters to where they end at a distance of some 2,000 miles from South America. Across the whole island world of the Pacific, there is, and always has been, transit and intercourse reflected in the bond of language and culture. The phrase “the cannibal isles,” once covered them all. Now Easter G. Routledge, “The Mystery of Easter Island” Island, the farthest outpost towards South America, is distant from it 2,000 miles. To the nearest inhabited island on the west, Pitcairn, the distance is 1,100 miles. But on Easter Island are huge stone monuments, fashioned, beyond all doubt, by man and not by nature. Some of them represent human figures, as high as 37 feet and 50 tons in weight, evidently cut from the still traceable quarries in the island lava. Who put them there? Not the puny population of an island of 55 square miles. It was, at first discovery (1722), estimated at perhaps 2,000; never more; at present 250. This original population knew nothing of either stone work or mechanics. The monuments were certainly not transported from Asia or America. The only conclusion is that Easter Island was once part of a much bigger place with a great population and with arts unknown now, and that most of it subsided under the ocean. The tidal wave of its subsidence may well have washed its people away, or perhaps they left in terror. New-comers, thousands of years later perhaps, took the island and the stones as they found them. If this were true, a lot of queer resemblances between South America and Polynesian culture would find an easy explanation. Constructive imagination, once started, could make the mystery of Easter Island rival the life of William Shakespeare.

On the other side of America is another “dead certainty” of primitive migration. There is no doubt that long ago men from the old world made their way—or had their way made for them—to Central America. Physically this is all too easy since the direction of the winds, blowing over temperate seas, makes such a transit a simple accident of storm and weather. Here then in Yucatan, and in adjoining regions of Central America, overgrown in the jungle, lost from memory for centuries, are the stone walls and sunken corridors that mark what was once the seat of Mayan civilization. Painstaking scholarship has deciphered its calendars, its star pictures and its records, only one degree from alphabet writing. Now primitive people, tending their flocks, know and watch the night sky—a thing unseen and forgotten in our cities. They note imaginary resemblances in a group of stars—highly fanciful mostly—to a dipper or a wagon or a chair. By these resemblances they name the stars, by word or picture. And the Mayan symbols for the stars around the Zodiac—the ram, the bull, the heavenly twins, etc.—are the same as ours, the ones the Old World made up thousands of years ago. The likeness between the constellation and the thing from which it is named could never account for this. There is too little likeness. Mathematically the chance of twelve “same” names in a line, beats out infinity. The only conclusion is that the “Mayans” blew in from “home.” Unfortunately that seems all of it. After the first glow of our comradeship, the realization that they too are of European descent, there is nothing left.

But of far greater meaning and with a bearing on the future as well as on the past, is the coming of the Norsemen to America, five hundred years before Columbus. A thousand years ago the Norsemen roved the seas of north-west Europe. Their home “Narrative and Critical History of America,” 8 Vols. Edited by Justin Winsor, Vol. I, Chapter II was on the coast of Scandinavia and on the narrow seas below, but their toil was on the sea, and every settlement their harvest. They were themselves driven forward by the eternal pressure of Asia upon Europe. They turned from piracy and plunder to settlement. All the east and south of Britain became theirs in a slow conquest that in a century and a half pushed back the Britons to the mountains and to the far west coast and islands. They settled down, turned Christian, and presently their inland farms and homesteads heard the village church bells in place of the sound of the sea—and that was England. The fire of the maritime spirit died down, to be kindled again five hundred years later with the winds of American discovery, to blaze in glory in the beacons of the Armada—as yesterday in the night sky above Dunkirk. Thus leads a main thread of our history from the Norsemen till to-day.

ADAM SHERRIFF SCOTT, A.R.C.A., MONTREAL, P.Q., 1941

“A thousand years ago, the Norsemen roved the seas ...”—page 10

But other Norsemen clung to the far north. They passed Great Britain by and settled in Iceland (a.d. 874). They built up a cultured civilization, a community of some 50,000 souls. There in a treeless land of lava, fiord and open grass, adventure could not fall asleep as in the Sussex farmstead. They blew westward on the wings of the wind and established a farther settlement in Greenland. The chance voyage of a boat driven in a storm (Gunnbjörn, about a.d. 900) first revealed this land. Two generations later an outlaw leader, Eric the Red, led his followers to Greenland, (a.d. 980), and a little later a whole company of settlers to this new home. It also was treeless, but that mattered to them less than nothing. There was a bright carpet of summer grass glistening on the hillsides, like Ireland in the rain, and so they called the place Greenland. This Greenland establishment lasted for four hundred years. The settlers raised cattle and sheep, built stone houses and churches and traded back to their homeland, and so to Europe, with cattle hides and seal skins and walrus ivory.

It was inevitable that the Norsemen should blow on from Greenland to America. The transit was nothing to people whose Fridtjof Nansen, “In Northern Mists,” 1911 great open boats, often over seventy feet long, strong and buoyant, driven with banks of oars or a huge square sail, could ride the seven seas. Due west from the Greenland settlement is the mouth of the Hudson Strait, at a distance of about 600 miles; south-west about 800 miles is the Strait of Belle Isle, leading to the Gulf of the St. Lawrence and the heart of the continent. There was nothing to stop the Norsemen from “discovering” America. They did. The record of it all is preserved for us in the Sagas of the Norsemen and in a sort of Domesday Book, the Land-Names-Book, kept in the Icelandic settlement. Chance led the way. We read how Biarni, son of Heriulf, striking westward from Iceland for Greenland in the year 986, was driven too far, and found a land covered with woods and with low coasts without mountains in sight. So Biarni knew it was not Greenland and steered away. Then came a great wind from the south and blew the ship in four days to Greenland. After Biarni came Leif, the son of the Red Eric who first colonized Greenland itself. Leif bought Biarni’s ship, and sailed on set purpose with a crew of thirty-five. This was in the year a.d. 1000. They easily reached land, but this time it was all covered with snow, and on the shore were great slabs of stone and in the background empty and desolate hills. Leif called it Helluland, which sounds in our English like what it was, but he meant the “Land of Stones.” There is little doubt that this was Labrador.

Leif and his crew sailed on down the seas—south and east and then south it must have been, but there is no count of days, no landmarks of places. No doubt they caught sight here and there of the coast and stood out to sea and on. They landed again at a place where they saw broad beaches of white sand. Here there were thick forests all along the shore. So they called it Markland, the country of trees. This could have been Newfoundland, or Cape Breton, or Nova Scotia. There is no way to tell. They sailed again, a north-east wind behind them, and then, in two days, landed again. This time they had reached the place that every schoolboy knows as Vinland. Here were lakes and rivers filled with salmon, and beautiful woods and trees easy to fashion into houses. It was not cold, though the autumn was well on, and the days had not drawn in so short as in Greenland. They found patches of wild grain and one day one of the sailors found bushes with berries on, which he said were the grapes from which wine was made in southern countries. None of the Norsemen had seen such things as vines, but the man who brought the grapes is called by the saga a “Turk,” meaning a man from the south, and so they took for granted that he knew. They gathered boatloads of American wild grapes, and presumably made wine and anticipated the horrors of the prohibition era by nine hundred years. Leif called this place Vinland and they stayed all the winter through. When they got back they told all about it and others came in new voyages, Leif’s brother Thorvald and different people.

For a few years there were many Vinland voyages. One leader, Thorfinn Karlsefni, tried to make real settlement (a.d. 1007), with a hundred and sixty men in his ships, with many of their wives, and with cattle. They built houses and traded with the savages and were there four years. At least one child was born in America, and christened Snorri, the first hundred-per-cent white American. Then came hardship and quarrels with the savages and the settlers learned for the first time the lurking danger of savage ambush in the woods, that darkens the annals of America. Karlsefni saw his people killed by savages who did not fight like men. Presently so many settlers were killed that the terror of it drove the rest away—back to God’s country, all bright ice and snow, and with no trees to shelter savages.

So that, except for the mention in the saga of odd journeys to the Labrador coast and to the mainland elsewhere for timber, was the end of Vinland. And presently the night fell on the Greenland settlement itself. We do not know how and why it ended. Transit and communication with Iceland seem to have grown less. After the year 1410 the record ends. The last known voyage from Greenland to Norway is dated in that year. When John Davis, the Elizabethan navigator, saw the coast in 1585, there was no sign of any habitation. When settlement was started again by missionaries in 1721, there was no population V. Stefansson, “Unsolved Mysteries of The Arctic” found but the native Eskimos. Of the Norsemen’s colony there remained nothing but ruined stone and scattered rubble; no record; no writing; and over part of it the eternal glacier of Greenland had made its burial of ice. We do not know how the settlement met its end. It may have been that the plague of the Black Death, which passed westward across Europe in that epoch, laid its hand on the little colony. It may be that food ran short and the settlers moved westward, to become long afterwards the “blond Eskimos” of Coronation Gulf. Perhaps the Eskimo fell on the settlement and wiped it out. Readers who wish to pursue the topic further may find it in the fascinating pages of Vilhjalmur Stefansson’s book, The Unsolved Mysteries of the Arctic.

Meantime, whereabouts was Vinland? The simple truth is that we don’t know. It may have been anywhere down the east coast of Canada or of the United States. The saga tells us exactly how long the shortest winter day was. That would locate its latitude to a nicety; but we no longer understand the method of time measurement used in the chronicle. Fond fancy traces the Norsemen over a wide area. There is an old mill assigned to For illustration of the rock, see “Leif Ericson” them at Newport in Rhode Island. There is the famous Dighton Rock, with marks like Nordic runes traced on it, lying in the Taunton River in Massachusetts, and other tokens elsewhere. But, unfortunately, Nordic runes are extremely hard to distinguish from scratches, and old mills without a miller mean nothing. The latest speculations and investigations, of lively interest to us in Canada, are the attempts to prove that the Norsemen went due west from Greenland into the Hudson Bay and from there south into the interior. Evidence of this is offered in certain resemblances of language (a shaky matter to the trained philologist) and in the avowed discovery of Norse armour, swords, etc., all of which is set forth in Mr. James Curran’s recent volume, Vinland the Good.

In summary, it is perfectly clear from the record that the Norsemen discovered the mainland of America, visited it from Greenland again and again, and once at least attempted a settlement. But the main point of the episode has been, I think, entirely missed. They discovered America and had no particular use for it. To us the words “discovery of America” are so portentous with meaning that we stand aghast at the idea of people finding it and leaving it. We know now that it was really America! and behind it were New York and Hollywood and all sorts of things. To the Norsemen it meant nothing—an empty shore of slate, or at best a forest of wood; but with treacherous savages in ambush among the trees—not to be compared with the bright, clear sky of the north, the glittering icebergs all adrip, and the carpet of green grass and flowers, and the long winter sleep, and the goodwill towards man that drinks and sings and fights but knows no treachery. That is how the Norsemen must have viewed America.

But although it remained for centuries a closed chapter, this coming of the Norsemen to Canada is of more than academic or historic interest. It bears directly on our future. We want them back again. Of all the people who have come to settle among us, there are none to whom the Canadian climate and environment is as congenial as to the Scandinavian races. They are, in a sense, more Canadian than ourselves. I have heard it argued by one of the most illustrious scientists of McGill that the peculiar tone and rigour of our climate, or of most of it, will turn us all into Scandinavians before it has done with us. The Nova Scotian and such may well remain damp enough to be a Scotchman, but the rest of us, especially in the North-West, will “go Norwegian.” This may be a far cry, but even a far cry may have a nearer echo.

And the nearer echo is this. Immigration from the Scandinavian countries should be a major feature of our Canadian policy when at last British victory imposes peace on Europe. Such a peace will undoubtedly bring us a new migration from our home-lands such as never was seen before. But we can no longer dream of the open door of migration thrown wide to all nations. The British Empire can restore and impose peace and humanity and fair play, but it cannot create in the poisoned organism of continental Europe the trust and honour and mutual reliance now lost for generations in race hatred and in the creed of brute force. The hope of world peace, resting on power—for it can rest on nothing else, and on the humane use of it, or else it rots away—this hope lies only in our Empire and in America. The British Isles will be our European bulwark, buttressed with the adherence of nations kindred in race and ideals. In such companionship alone we can place our full faith.

One other bearing on our present world has this bygone chapter of our annals. It throws into a strong light the anomalous position occupied by the territory of Greenland. An accident of history, broken from all meaning, connects it with European sovereignty. Till yesterday this fact was of no consequence. This vast region, one-fifth the size of the United States, is nothing more than a huge bed of ice such as once buried all Canada. Alaska, at first sight its western counterpart, was derisively called, when Secretary Seward bought it in 1867, “Seward’s ice box.” Yet when the box was opened the Alaskan birds began to sing. But Greenland is, and remains, a chunk of ice. Of its area of 730,000 square miles, all but 30,000 is buried under ice. The “green” of Greenland is too small to matter. The fact is that Greenland is suited only for the Devil’s work of air bases and hidden stations of attack from which to threaten the real continent. Even such mineral deposit as its cryolite, known since 1784 and found on the Arksut Fiord, in the ice-free corner of Greenland, is contributory rather to the uses of war than to those of peace. No one can think that the inhabitants of Greenland wish their territory to be a continuing menace to the peace of the world and of themselves. Their parent country, in chains or out, can never guarantee its own security, let alone that of a territory of 730,000 square miles, three thousand miles away. These Danes can play an important role in the world’s future and one that will not be inconsistent with an accepted change in the international status of Greenland after the war.

With the close of the Norse voyages all definite connection between the mainland of North America and Europe came to an end. The continent remained, as it had been for uncounted centuries, empty. We think of prehistoric North America as inhabited by the Indians, and have based on this a sort of recognition of ownership on their part. But this attitude is hardly warranted. The Indians were too few to count. Their use of the resources of the continent was scarcely more than that by crows and wolves, their development of it nothing. Estimates of their numbers varied. But a recent scientific survey Mooney, Smithsonian Institute Papers, 1928 gives the figure of 1,100,000 to cover all the Indians in what is now the United States and Canada. This estimate, according to other authorities, is, if anything, an overstatement. But even at that, it only means one Indian to every seven square miles. But that again gives a false impression. The great bulk of the continent was far emptier than that. Such Indians as existed were in many places grouped together in considerable bodies; such as the 17,000 Iroquois between the Mohawk River and the Great Lakes, or still more, the coast Indians of British Columbia.

This meant that enormous stretches of territory such as those around the Great Lakes and on the Atlantic seaboard, were made up of unbroken forests, impassable except by lake and stream, where the voyager might wander for days without meeting, or expecting to meet, the face or trace of other human beings. The fiction of Fenimore Cooper and the history of Francis Parkman have preserved for us the aspect of what it Francis Parkman, “Half Century of Conflict,” Vol. I, Chap. III once was. “Seen from above,” says Parkman, in speaking of this primeval forest, “the mingled tops of the trees spread in a sea of verdure basking in light; seen from below, all is shadow, through which spots of timid sunshine steal down among legions of lank, mossy trunks, toad-stools and rank ferns, protruding roots, matted bushes and rotting carcasses of fallen trees.” Even “The Prairies,” 1842 more lonely, but with the strange attraction of its very loneliness of grass and flowers, were the wide savannahs, the open prairies that stretched “in airy undulation” from where William Captain (later General Sir William) Butler, “The Great Lone Land” Cullen Bryant saw them in the Ohio territory till they reached the sunset of the far Canadian West below the Rockies. As late as at the first establishment of Manitoba (1870) Captain Butler could write of our North-West, “there is no other portion of the globe, in which travel is possible, where loneliness can be said to dwell so thoroughly. One may wander five hundred miles in a straight line without seeing a human being.” Such, and no more, is the meaning and extent of the Indian ownership of North America.

From this long sleep the continent was awakened by the tumult of the age of discovery that brought the voyage of Christopher Columbus in 1492. His discovery came, like everything else, because it had to. It was a part of the new awakening of Europe when the night of the Middle Ages gave way to the dawn of the modern world. Many causes contributed. The invention of gunpowder ruined feudalism. There are in warfare two permanent enemies, the attack and the defence. First one and then the other is uppermost. In the Middle Ages defence had utterly beaten attack. Huge stone castles on hillsides and escarpments, with well-water and ample provisions, could resist indefinitely. Then came the train of artillery and the castles fell. The attack prevailed and stayed uppermost for centuries, till the Boer war of 1899 first showed trench warfare, that was to mean the deadlock of triumphant defence in the Great War. Now has come the new chapter of aerial bombardment; attack leads as never before.

Thus the close of the Middle Ages saw feudalism give way to De Revolutionibus Orbium Celestium, 1543 great national states with trains of artillery and the cannon of ships of war. That meant a new political order. With it came the awakening mind; the art of printing; the rediscovery of Greek learning; the new mathematics and astronomy, Copernicus A.D. 1610 and Galileo’s telescope. The old heaven and earth literally passed away.

Not one but many scientists and navigators revived the Greek Justin Winsor, “Narrative and Critical History of America,” Vol. I theory that the earth was a sphere. Sail west long enough and you would get east. Several model “globes,” like that of Martin Behaim, had been made before Columbus sailed. Hence came new power and confidence in navigation and transport—the compass and the quadrant, and the art of sailing against the wind. Galley oars were packed away for ever in the new triumph of sail. Longer voyages were possible with new opportunities for commerce. The Portuguese ships reached farther and farther down Africa.

STANLEY ROYLE, R.B.A., R.C.A., SACKVILLE, N.B., 1941

“From this long sleep the continent was awakened ... by the voyage of Christopher Columbus ...”—page 20

Then came the precipitating cause that set all others into operation. The invading Turks overran Eastern Europe, took Constantinople (1453) and blocked the trade route to the East. From time immemorial trade had passed from Asia to Europe by overland caravans and by the Red Sea. The route was so long and varied that the Asiatic end was lost in the mist. When Marco Polo told Europe about it, they classed him with Herodotus A.D. 1298 and other such liars. Thus the East remained a place of myth and fable and magic attraction, containing somewhere Arabia Felix, and Prester John, and the Great Khan of Tartary, the Empire of Cathay and the Islands of Zipangu. These were the names that later lured Europe to discover empty America, where Cathay turned into New York, and Arabia Felix was Manitoba.

Such is the background of the voyage of Christopher Columbus. Let it be noted how filled with paradox are the annals of the discovery of America. It was accidentally found in their path by men who were certain it was not there. As Goldwin Smith has said of Columbus, “the new continent was discovered by “The United States,” 1893 the man who had staked most on the belief that no such continent existed.” Columbus died still thinking America part of the East Indies. Even when it had to be admitted that the continent was there, its “discoverers” still hoped to find a way round it or through it. They found it hard to believe that the globe is divided, as it is, by one huge mountain barrier reaching virtually from pole to pole. Cabot and, after him, the Elizabethans and Henry Hudson were trying to get round the top of the continent. This was the famous “North-West Passage” to Asia, the arctic mirage that ended only when Roald Amundsen’s voyage in the Gjöa in 1903 proved it feasible and worthless. Others tried to get through by going up the St. Lawrence. The name “Lachine,” even if given in irony, chronicles this waning belief in a passage to China. As late as 1634 Champlain sent Nicolet up the lakes to Wisconsin, which he thought was part of Asia. For R.G. Thwaites, “The Colonies,” 1901 it was hoped that the rivers of the interior might somehow lead to a portage “over the top,” as indeed they do in Central America. John Smith, in going up the Chickahominy in Virginia, carried letters to the Grand Khan. These eager hopes passed by as of no account the dense forests, the broad savannahs, and the silent waters of an empty continent—its real wealth. This frenzied expectation of palaces, of stores of gold and silk and precious stones, misdirected and distorted all the discovery of America. When the expectation turned to reality in the treasures of the Aztecs and the Incas, the wrong turn became the main highway. Thus the real America, our northern continent, had to wait for a hundred years. We have but to recall the calendar and course of discovery in the sixteenth century, to realize that this was not yet settlement, but search. Columbus landed on Watkin’s Island in 1492. John Cabot sailed the coast of Newfoundland in 1497. It was in the year following that Vasco da Gama successfully carried the Portuguese trade-route around the Cape of Good Hope to India. This eastern reality strengthened western effort. In 1501 Corte-Real, another Portuguese, explored the North American coast south of the St. Lawrence. In 1513 Nuñez Balboa made his way through the jungles of the Isthmus of Panama and looked out on the illimitable Pacific, “silent upon Keats of Cortez, in error a peak in Darien.” In the same year the ageing Ponce de Leon searched the “land of flowers” (Florida) looking for the Fountain of Youth, which was not there. Old men still seek it there in vain. Hernando Cortez (1519-20) first achieved reality in his seizure of Mexico and its treasure of precious metals. Velasquez landed in “Chicora,” now South Carolina, in 1625 to catch slaves, but found instead Indian savages. Narvaez tried again for Florida in 1528, landed at Pensacola, was lured inland by the savages and perished in the swamps with all of his three hundred followers except four. These men, eight years later, reached the California coast and were saved by Spaniards from Mexico. Coronado (1540) and other Spaniards explored the Rio Grande and spent three years on the south-western plains, looking for the fabulous “Seven Cities of Cibola.” These things are not part of the history of Canada except that they show the reason why there was no history of Canada. The search went on. The brothers Pizarro (1532) achieved an even greater result than Cortez in their discovery and conquest of Peru. Fernando de Soto went overland through the swamps and reached the Mississippi, where he died of swamp fever. Where the lure of gold failed, the sign of the Cross held firm. After the adventurers came the missions from Santa Fé in 1598 till the end of the chain in San Francisco (1776).

With this Spanish adventure went that of France. It was conspicuous in the voyages of Jacques Cartier (1534-41), as discussed later. But it failed signally in attempted establishments in Florida and Carolina (1562-64) and on Sable Island, off our Nova Scotia (1568). The British calendar of exploration in North America showed a long gap after the Cabot voyages. Attention had turned elsewhere, to the Russian seas and to the Levant. Hakluyt chronicles a voyage to Newfoundland made by a leader called Hore, ending in misery and cannibalism, a poor “ad” for A.D. 1536 this country, as we should say. Then no one came till Martin Frobisher (1576), who sailed into our arctic seas, “for the search of the strait or passage to China.” He brought home what seemed C. P. Lucas, “History of Canada,” 1891 gold ore, came again and fetched back quite a cargo of “fool’s gold” (iron pyrites). Then came, just at the end of the chapter and of the century, when exploration was to be exchanged for settlement, Sir Humphrey Gilbert’s glorious but futile voyage and first attempt at English colonization.

Thus practically all this early enterprise in the New World was vitiated by its inferior purpose. It was based on the search for treasure, domination and the rapid fortune of conquest. It did not carry with it the fundamental justification of settlement and of a new home beyond the sea.

But even apart from this misdirection of enterprise towards gold and treasure, there were other reasons why much of the best part of the continent slept, and sleeps, so long; why the worst was taken and the best left. These reasons lay in the peculiar geography of access from Europe to the North American continent. One can hardly deny that the western, the Pacific, coast, offers the more attractive area of settlement. To realize this, one has only to think of the sunshine of California, the island paradise of Vancouver and the adjacent shores, and the soft climates and the warm currents that wrap these latitudes.

But there was no way to reach this western side of the A.D. 1519 continent. The voyages of Magellan through the straits named A.D. 1577-80 after him, and those of Drake and others round the Horn, proved that the Pacific could be reached by a sea voyage. But the route could not serve for commerce and migration till later centuries brought better means of transport and better control of scurvy. Balboa’s discovery made it possible to reach the farther ocean through the jungles and fever of Panama and to build ships on the Pacific coast. This served for Peruvian adventure and for the establishment of the Pacific missions but it also was out of J. M. Gibbon, “Steel of Empire,” 1935. Chap. IV the question, for centuries, as a broad path of migration. The Pacific indeed could be reached by an overland journey, as it presently was by Alexander Mackenzie in 1793. But this journey through a savage country of prairie, desert and mountain ranges could only become feasible long after Atlantic settlement had opened the way. Hence the far west stayed empty and unknown, and most of all the part of it that now is Canada. The penetration of North America on the east is facilitated by a coast line easy of access, with innumerable harbours. But the coast once occupied, access to the interior is impeded by the ranges of the Alleghanies. Hence the coast was first settled while the region of the Great Lakes and the Ohio territory remained empty. Access was found through the break offered by the Hudson River and the Mohawk Valley, and by the gap of the Potomac. On the south the tortuous channels of the Mississippi in a land of back-waters and bayous, waited long for commercial use. On the north-east, however, the St. Lawrence offers with the Great Lakes the widest fairway into the very heart of North America, a route still fully to come into its own. But it is ice-blocked in the winter, and in the early days of settlement the hostile tribes of the Five Nations lay across the path. North of the continent is the wide entrance of the Hudson Strait and Hudson Bay and James Bay and the tributary rivers that offer access to the western plains. But here the desolation of the ice-bound sea echoes to the desolation of the barren land. It is not without meaning that the names Hudson Bay and York Factory and Albany River, reproduce, as the counterpart of their christening, New York and Albany and the Hudson River. But the ports of this northern region, when occupied by the Hudson’s Bay Company, remained, as it were, island outposts in the frozen seas with no access to the main settlements in America. At as late a date A.D. 1811 as Lord Selkirk’s Red River Settlement, this isolation still prevailed.

Reflecting on these facts of geography and history, we can realize why the earlier settlement of North America left much of the best of it still untouched. The Western Peninsula of Upper Canada lay empty and untenanted. The fertile valleys of British Columbia and its fortunate islands called in vain. The North-West prairies blossomed and withered with each forgotten season while the moving sails, the waving banners and the marching feet of three hundred years of history passed them by.

Our country waited. Its mighty rivers moved, silent and mysterious, from the heart of an unknown continent. The waves thundered on the rugged coast where it fronted the Atlantic Ocean. For the passing ships that explored its shores all was silence and mystery. Beyond it was the unknown East and from it breathed, as the sun set behind its forests, a sense of history still to come, the murmur of many voices caught as the undertone of its rustling woods. Our country waited—whereby in the fullness of time it might play the larger part.