James Ritchie - Pictures of Canadian Life - A Record of Actual Experiences

We have on board a party of fifty-one lads, sent out by Dr. Bowman Stephenson, who has a depôt somewhere near Hamilton, and a helper is on board to take care of them. Some of them are of very juvenile years, and, it is to be believed, in Canada will find a far more favourable lot than they ever could in the streets and slums of the East End.

‘What are you going to do?’ said I to one of them the other morning.

‘Please, sir, I am going to be adopted,’ was the reply; and adopted he will be by some worthy couple who, having no children of their own, are ready to give the little outcast a home such as he never could have found in the old country.

We have also an agent on board, who, for a certain sum, agrees to take young fellows out and to find them suitable situations. That is a course I should not recommend. A young fellow had far better keep that extra cash in his pocket, get out as far into the North-west as he can, there hire himself to some settler, who at this time of year is sure to be in need of his services, and then in a year or two he will be able to get a grant of land on his own account, on which, after three years of real hard work, he will be able to live in peace and comfort, and to achieve an independence of which he has no chance on our side of the Atlantic.

It quite grieves me to think of the poor farmers I have known at home, wasting their time and capital and strength in a hopeless effort to make both ends meet, who might be doing well out here, with the certainty that their families will be left in a comfortable position as far as this world’s goods are concerned. One thing, however, I must strongly impress upon the emigrant, and that is, the necessity of coming out in the spring.

It is madness to cross the Atlantic in the autumn; when he lands at Quebec, he will find nothing to do, and must live on his capital, or starve till next spring; and if I might recommend a ship, it certainly would be the Sarnia , on which I now write. She is slow but sure. Her commander, Captain Gibson, is all that a captain should be – not a brilliant conversationalist, not one of those men who set the table in a roar; but cautious, skilful, fully alive to the responsibilities of his position and the dangers of his calling. As to the dangers, it is impossible to exaggerate them. There are more than a thousand of us on board, and were anything to happen, not more than three hundred of us could, I should think, be crowded into the boats, provided that the sea were quite calm, and that we had plenty of time to leave the ship; and in a panic and in bad weather, it is clear that even such boats as the Sarnia is supplied with would be of little avail. Safety seems to me a mere matter of chance. You hit on an iceberg, and down goes the ship with all on board, leaving no record behind.

As a matter of fact, I believe these big steamers often, on a dark night, run down the vessels engaged in fishing off the Newfoundland banks. When we passed, the season had scarcely commenced. It is in May, towards the end of the month, that the fishing commences. The chief fishermen are the French, who mostly hail from St. Malo, and who have in the Gulf of Newfoundland two small islands, which they use for fish-curing. You get an idea of the extent of these fisheries, when I tell you that the total value of them amounts to three millions a year, and that the supply seems inexhaustible. Romanists and High Churchmen who indulge in salt cod in Lent have little cause to fear that that aid to true religion will cease – at any rate, in our time. The fishing season lasts until November, when the shoals pass on to their winter quarters in deeper waters.

The delicate and the consumptive have many reasons for thankfulness in connection with this fishery. What they would do without the cod-liver oil, which has saved and lengthened many a valuable life, it were hard to say. It is to England that almost all the cod-liver oil comes. The cod roe, pickled and barrelled, is exported almost entirely to France, where it is in great demand, as ground-bait for the sardine fishery. How great that demand is, the reader will at once perceive when I tell him that no fewer than 13,000 boats on the coast of Brittany are engaged in the sardine fishery alone.

I ought to say that these Quebec steamers are, as regards saloon accommodation, and the class of people you meet with on board, not quite on a par with those which ply between Liverpool and New York. Perhaps the latter are fitted up almost too splendidly. ‘When the stormy winds do blow’ – when everyone is ill – when you are in that happy state of mind when man delights you not, or woman either – the gilded saloons, the velvet cushions, the plate glass and ornamented panels, seem quite out of place; to say nothing of the luxurious dinners, which not everyone is able to enjoy. Such things are better fitted for summer seas and summer skies.

Once more I am on terra firma , and on Canadian soil, where I breathe a balmier air and rejoice in a clearer atmosphere than you in England can have any idea of. After all, we were in twenty-four hours before the mail steamer, the Sarmatian , which you must own is a feather in the cap of the Sarnia . One hears much of the St. Lawrence, but it is hard to exaggerate its beauties. When you are fairly in it, after having escaped the fog of the Newfoundland Banks and the icebergs of the Gulf, on you sail all day and night amidst islands, and past mountains, their tops covered with snow, stretching far away into the interior, guarding lands yet waiting to be tilled, and primeval forests yet ignorant of the woodcutter’s axe. A hardy people, mostly of French extraction, inhabit that part of the province of Quebec; but as you reach nearer to the capital, the land becomes flatter, and the signs of human settlement more frequent in the shape of wooden houses, each with its plot of ground, where the rustics carry on the daily work of the farm, or in the shape of villages, inhabited by ship-wrecked fishermen, who have intermarried with the French, and whose children, if they bear the commonest of English names, are at the same time utterly ignorant, not only of the tongue that Shakespeare spake, but of the faith and morals Milton held. They are a lazy people, living chiefly on the harvest of the sea, and doing little when that harvest is over. Men are wanted to cut down timber, and they come in gangs of two or three hundred, and spend a week in riotous debauchery before they can be got to work. Few English settlers go into that region, yet they can easily make a living there if they are inclined to rough it in the bush, and are not afraid of coarse living and hard work. Villages, churches, hotels, are all built of wood on a stone foundation, and, painted as the houses are, they remind one not a little of Zaandam, and the little wooden cottages you may see in that old quarter of the world. But the original colonists are a poor people, living frugally and with little desire for the comforts and luxuries of life. It is the same in Quebec, where the poor all talk French, and where the Protestants are in a very small minority. In Quebec there is little to attract the stranger. It looks its best at it stands on its picturesque rock rising out of the St. Lawrence. You see the French University, founded as far back as 1663 by that De Laval whose name is so deeply interwoven with the French history of the province. It is thus that his contemporaries describe him. ‘He began,’ writes Mother Juchiereau de Saint Denis, Superior of the Hôtel Dieu, ‘in his tenderest years the study of perfection, and we have reason to believe he reached it, since every virtue which St. Paul demands in a bishop was seen and admired in him.’ Mother Marie, Superior of the Ursulines, wrote: ‘I will not say that he is a saint, but I may say with truth that he lives like a saint and an apostle. We have ample evidence of the austerity of his life. His servant, a lay-brother, testified after his death that he slept on a hard bed, and would not suffer it to be changed, even when it became full of fleas. So great was his charity that he gave fifteen hundred or two thousand francs to the poor every year.’ ‘I have seen him,’ writes Houssart, ‘keep cooked meat five or six, seven or eight days, in the heat of summer, and when it was all mouldy and wormy, he washed it in warm water, and ate it, and told me it was very good. I determined to keep everything I could that had belonged to his holy person, and after his death to soak bits of linen in his blood when his body was opened, and take a few bones and cartilages from his breast, cut off his hair, and keep his clothes and such things to serve as most precious relics.’