Chapter 5

SAILING CRAFT: UNDER THE FLEURS-DE-LIS[1]

Every one knows that when Champlain stood beside Lake Huron, wondering if it had a western outlet towards Cathay, he was discovering the Great Lakes, those fresh-water seas whose area far exceeds the area of Great Britain. Every one knows that he became the 'Father of New France' when he founded Quebec in 1608; and that he was practically the whole civil and military government of Canada in its infant days. But few know that he was also a captain in the Royal Navy of France, an expert hydrographer, and the first man to advocate a Panama canal. And fewer still remember that he lived in an age which, like our own, had {55} its 'record-breaking' events at sea. Baffin's 'Farthest North,' reached in 1616, was latitude 77° 45'. This remained an unbroken record for two hundred and thirty-six years. Champlain's own voyage from Honfleur to Tadoussac in eighteen days broke all previous records, remained itself unbroken for a century, and would be a credit to a sailing ship to-day. His vessel was the _Don de Dieu_, of which he left no exact description, but which was easily reproduced for the tercentenary of Quebec in 1908 from the corresponding French merchant vessels of her day. She was about a hundred tons and could be handled by a crew of twenty. The nearest modern equivalent of her rig is that of a barque, though she carried a little square sail under her bowsprit and had no jibs, while her spanker had a most lateenish look. Her mainsail had a good hoist and spread. She had three masts and six sails altogether. The masts were 'pole,' that is, all of one piece. The tallest was seventy-three feet from step to truck, that is, from where the mast is stepped in over the keel to the disc that caps its top. She carried stone ballast; her rudder was worked by a tiller, with the help of a simple rope tackle to take the strain; and the poop contained three cabins.

{56}

Not long after the death of Champlain (1635) there was a world-wide advance in shipbuilding. Perhaps it would not be too much to say that the modern school of wooden sailing-ship designers began with Phineas Pett, who was one of a family that served England well for nearly two hundred years. He designed the _Sovereign of the Seas_, which brought English workmanship well to the front in the reign of Charles I. She surpassed all records, with a total depth from keel to lanthorn of seventy-six feet, which exceeds the centre line, from keel to captain's bridge, of modern 'fliers' with nearly twenty times her tonnage. The Cromwellian period also gave birth to a most effective fleet, which in its turn was succeeded by the British fleets that won the Second Hundred Years' War with France and decided the destiny of Canada. This long war, or series of wars, begun against Louis XIV in the seventeenth century, only ended with the fall of Napoleon at Waterloo. La Hogue in 1692, Quebec in 1759, and Trafalgar in 1805 were three of the great deciding crises. La Hogue and Trafalgar were purely naval; while Quebec was the result of a joint expedition in which the naval forces far exceeded the military. The general effect of this whole Second Hundred {57} Years' War was to confirm the British command of the sea for another century.

But the French designs in shipbuilding were generally better than the English. The French, then and afterwards, were more scientific, the English more rule-of-thumb. Yet when it came to actual handling under sail, especially in action, the positions were reversed. The English seafaring class was far larger in proportion to population and it had far more practice at sea. Besides, England had more and more at stake as her oversea trade and empire extended, till at last she had no choice, as an imperial power, but either to win or die.

The French kingdom rose to its zenith under Louis XIV, whose great minister, Colbert, did all he could to foster the Navy, the mercantile marine, and the French colonies in Canada. But the fates were against him. France was essentially a landsman's country. It had several land frontiers to attack or defend, and it used its Navy merely as an adjunct to its Army. Moreover, its people were not naturally so much inclined to colonize over-sea possessions as the British, and its despotic colonial system repressed all free development. The result was that the French dominions in America never reached a population of one {58} hundred thousand. This was insignificant compared with the twelve hundred thousand in the British colonies; while the disparity was greatly increased by the superior British aptness for the sea.

French Canada had all the natural advantages which were afterwards turned to such good account by the British. It had timber and population along a magnificently navigable river system that tapped every available trade route of the land. Had there only been a demand for ships New France might have also enjoyed the advantage of employing the scientific French naval architects. But the seafaring habit did not exist among the people as a whole. A typical illustration is to be found in the different views the French and British colonists took of whaling. The British on Nantucket Island first learned from the Indians, next hired a teacher, in the person of Ichabod Paddock, a famous whaling master from Cape Cod, and then themselves went after whale with wonderful success. The French in Canada, like the British on Nantucket Island, had both whales and whaling experts at their very doors. The Basques kept a station at Tadoussac, and whales were seen at Quebec. But, instead of hiring Basques to teach them, {59} the French in Canada petitioned the king for a subsidy with which to hire the Basques to do the whaling for them. Of course the difference between the two forms of government counts for a good deal--and it is not at all likely that any paternal French ruler, on either side of the Atlantic, ever wished to encourage a sea-roving spirit in Canada. But the difference in natural and acquired aptitude counts for more.

The first Canadian shipbuilding was the result of dire necessity. Pont-Gravé put together a couple of very small vessels in 1606 at Port Royal so that he might cruise about till he met some French craft homeward bound. Shipbuilding as an industry arose long after this. The _Galiote_, a brigantine of sorts, was built by the Sovereign Council and launched at Quebec in 1663. But it was the intendant Talon who began the work in proper fashion. In 1665, immediately after his arrival, he sent men 'timber-cruising' in every likely direction. Their reports were most encouraging. Suitable timber was plentiful along the waterways, and the cost was no more than that of cutting and rafting it down to the dockyards. Talon reported home to Colbert. But official correspondence was too slow. At his {60} own cost he at once built a vessel of a hundred and twenty tons. She was on the most approved lines, and thus served as a model for others. A French Canadian built an imitation of her the following year. Talon vainly tried to persuade this enterprising man to form a company and build a ship of four hundred tons for the trade with the West Indies. Three smaller vessels, however, successfully made the round trip from Quebec to the West Indies, on to France, and back again, in 1670. In 1671 Colbert laid aside for Talon a relatively large sum for official shipbuilding and for the export of Canadian wood to France. The next year Talon had a five-hundred-tonner on the stocks, while preparations were being made for an eight-hundred-tonner, which would have been a 'mammoth' merchant vessel in contemporary France. Before he left Canada he had the satisfaction of reporting that three hundred and fifty hands, out of a total population of only seven thousand souls, were engaged in the shipyards.[2] But there were very few at sea.

The first vessel to sail the Great Lakes was built by La Salle seventy years after their discovery by Champlain. This was _Le Griffon_, {61} which, from Father Hennepin's description, seems to have been a kind of brig. She was of fifty or sixty tons and apparently carried a real jib. She was launched at the mouth of Cayuga Creek in the Niagara peninsula in 1679. Her career was interesting, but short and disastrous. She sailed west across Lake Erie, on through Lakes St Clair and Huron, and reached Green Bay on Lake Michigan, where she took in a cargo of fur. On her return voyage she was lost with all hands.

In the eighteenth century shipbuilding in Quebec continued to flourish. The yards at the mouth of the St Charles had been enlarged, and even then there was so much naval construction in hand that private merchant vessels could not be built as fast as they were wanted. In 1743 some French merchants proposed building five or six vessels for the West India trade, besides twenty-five or thirty more for local trade among the West Indian islands. A new shipyard and a dry-dock were hurriedly built; and there was keen competition for ship-carpenters. In 1753 _L'Algonkin_, a frigate of seventy-two guns, was successfully launched. The shipwrights experimented freely with Canadian woods, of which the white oak proved the best. But the Canadian-built vessels for {62} transatlantic trade never seem to have equalled in number those that came from France.

The restrictions on colonial trade were rigidly enforced; no manufacture of goods was allowed in the colonies, and no direct trade except with France and French possessions. Canada imported manufactured goods and exported furs, timber, fish, and grain. The deep-water tonnage required for Canada was not over ten or twelve thousand, distributed among perhaps forty vessels on the European route and twenty more that only visited the French West Indies. A complete round trip usually meant a cargo of manufactures from France to Canada, a cargo of timber, fish, and grain from Canada to the West Indies, and a third cargo--of sugar, molasses, and rum--from the West Indies home to France. Quite half the vessels, however, returned direct to France with a Canadian cargo. Louisbourg was a universal port of call, the centre of a partly contraband coasting trade with the British Americans, and a considerable importing point for food-stuffs from Quebec.

French commerce on the sea had, however, a mighty rival. The encroaching British were working their way into every open water in America. The French gallantly disputed their advance in Hudson Bay and won several {63} actions, of which the best victory was Iberville's in 1697, with his single ship, the _Pélican_, against three opponents. In Labrador and Newfoundland the British ousted all rivals from territorial waters, except from the French Shore. The 'Bluenose' Nova Scotians crept on from port to port. The Yankees were as supreme at home as the other British were in Hudson Bay, though on occasion both were daringly challenged. All the French had was the line of the St Lawrence; and that was increasingly threatened, both at its mouth and along the Great Lakes.

The British had in their service a powerful trading corporation. The Hudson's Bay Company was flourishing even in the seventeenth century. In one sense it was purely maritime, as its posts were all on the Bay shore, while the French traded chiefly in the hinterlands. The Company's fleet, usually three or four ships, sailed regularly from Gravesend or Portsmouth about June 1, rounded the Orkneys and made for Hudson Bay. The return cargo of furs arrived home in October. This annual voyage continues to the present day.[3]

{64}

As Hudson Bay was the place for fur, so Newfoundland, and all the waters round it, was the place for fish. 'Dogs, fogs, bogs, and codfish,' was the old half-jeering description of its products. Standing in the gateway of Canada, Newfoundland was always a menace to New France. Thirty years before Champlain founded Quebec a traveller notes that, among the fishing fleets off Newfoundland, 'the English rule all there.' In other quarters, too, there was a menace to France. The British colonies were always feeling their way along the coast as well as along the Great Lakes. In spite of ordinances on both sides, forbidding trade between colonies of different powers, little trading craft, mostly British, would creep in with some enticing contraband, generally by way of Lake Champlain.

The first attempt in the English colonies to trade with Canada by way of the open sea was made in 1658, when Captain John Perel sailed from New York for Quebec in the French barque _St Jean_, and was wrecked on Anticosti, with the total loss of a cargo of sugar and tobacco. The sloop _Mary_ managed to reach Quebec in 1701 with a miscellaneous cargo, containing, among many other items, '166 cheses, 20+81+101 Rols of tobacko, {65} 2 hogheds of botls marckt SR, 70 bunches of arthen waire pots, 8 barels of beaire, 19 caskes of schotte.' Her return cargo included '14 barels of brandy, 4 hogsds of Claret, 2 bondles of syle skins, etc.' She was wrecked before she reached home, but most of her cargo was saved. Her owner, Samuel Vetch, the son of a 'Godly Minister and Glorifier of God in the Grass Market' in Edinburgh, was a great local character in New York. Four years after this voyage he was sent to Quebec to arrange a truce between New France and New England. But his return was as unlucky as that of his sloop _Mary_, for he was arrested and fined £200 on a charge of having traded with his own country's official enemies.

The fashion in ships changed very slowly. As we have seen, what may be called the ancient period of sailing ships closed about the time Jacques Cartier appeared in Canada. When the fore-and-aft-trimmed sails were invented in 1539, the modern age began. This has three distinctive eras of its own. The first lasted for about a century after the time of Jacques Cartier; and its chief work was to free itself of ancient and mediaeval limitations.

The second, or central, modern era lasted twice {66} as long, from the middle of the seventeenth century to the middle of the nineteenth. It thus covered one century under the Fleurs-de-lis in Canada and another under the Union Jack. It also exactly corresponded with the long era of the famous British navigation laws, of which more will presently be heard. During this period sails were improved in size, cut, and setting. The changes can be described only in technical language. Jibs became universal, adding greatly to handiness in general and the power of tacking in particular. Four sails were used on a mast--main, top, topgallant, and royal. Naval architecture was greatly improved, especially by the French. But this improvement did not extend to giving the hull anything like its most suitable shape. The Vikings were still unbeaten in this respect. Even the best foreign three-deckers were rather lumbering craft.

The third era began with the introduction of the clippers about 1840, and will not end till deep-sea sailing craft cease to be a factor in the world's work altogether. It was in this present era, when steamers were gaining their now unquestioned victory, and not during previous eras, when steam was completely unknown, that sailing craft reached their highest development. Sails {67} increased to eight on the mainmast of a full-rigged ship, and they were better cut and set than ever before. Yachts and merchantmen cannot be fairly compared in the matter of their sails. But it is worth noting that the old 'white-winged days' never had any sort of canvas worth comparing with a British yachting 'Lapthorn' or a Yankee yachting 'Sawyer' of our own time. Hulls, too, have improved far beyond those of the old three-decker age, beyond even the best of the Vikings'.

Such broad divisions into eras of shipbuilding are, of course, only to be taken as marking world-wide nautical advances in the largest possible sense. One epoch often overlaps another and begins or ends at different times in different countries. A strangely interesting survival of an earlier age is still to be seen along the Labrador, in the little Welsh and Devonshire brigs, brigantines, and topsail schooners which freight fish east away to Europe. These vessels make an annual round: in March to Spain for salt; by June along the Labrador; in September to the Mediterranean with their fish; and in December home again for Christmas. They are excellently handled wherever they go; and no wonder, as every man aboard of them is a sailor born and bred.

[1] The nautical history of New France is all parts and no whole; brilliant ideas and thwarted execution; government stimulus and government repression; deeds of daring by adventurers afloat and deeds of various kinds by officials ashore: everything unstable and changeable; nothing continuous and strong. It cannot, therefore, make a coherent narrative, only a collection of half-told tales.

[2] See in this Series _The Great Intendant_, chapters iv and ix.

[3] For the narrative of the Hudson's Bay Company the reader is referred to _The Adventurers of England on Hudson Bay_, in this Series.

{68}