Canada is the child of the sea.  Her infancy was cradled by her waterways; and the life-blood of her youth was drawn from oceans, lakes, and rivers.  No other land of equal area has ever been so intimately bound up with the changing fortunes of all its different waters, coast and inland, salt and fresh.

The St Lawrence basin by itself is a thing to marvel at, for its mere stupendous size alone.  Its mouth and estuary are both so vast that their salt waters far exceed those of all other river systems put together.  Its tide runs farther in from the Atlantic than any other tide from this or any other ocean.  And its ‘Great Lakes’ are appropriately known by their proud name because they contain more fresh water than all the world beside.  Size for size, this one river system is so pre-eminently first in the sum of these three attributes that there is no competing second to be found elsewhere. It forms a class of its own.  And well it may, even for its minor attributes, when the island of Newfoundland at its mouth exceeds the area of Ireland; when the rest of its mouth could contain Great Britain; when an arm of the true deep sea runs from Cabot Strait five hundred miles inland to where the Saguenay river soundings go down beyond an average of a hundred fathoms; and when, three hundred miles farther inland still, on an island in an archipelago at the mouth of the Ottawa, another tributary stream, there stands the city of Montreal, one of the greatest seaports in the world.

But mere size is not the first consideration.  The Laurentian waters are much more important for their significance in every stage of national development.  They were the highway to the heart of America long before the white man came.  They remained the same great highway from Cartier to Confederation a period of more than three hundred years.  It is only half a century since any serious competition by road and rail began.  Even now, in spite of this competition, they are one of the greatest of all highways.  Nor does their significance stop here.  Nature laid out the St Lawrence basin so that it not only led into the heart of the continent, but connected with every other system from the Atlantic to the Pacific and from the Tropics to the Polar sea.  Little by little the pioneers found out that they could paddle and portage the same canoe, by inland routes, many thousands of miles to all four points of the compass:  eastward to the Atlantic between the Bay of Fundy and New York; westward till, by extraordinary efforts, they passed up the giant Saskatchewan and through the mighty ranges that look on the Pacific; southward to the Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico; northward to Hudson Bay, or down the Mackenzie to the Arctic ocean.

As settlement went on and Canada developed westwards along this unrivalled waterway man tried to complete for his civilized wants what nature had so well provided for his savage needs.  There is a rise of six hundred feet between Lake St Peter and Lake Superior.  So canals were begun early in the nineteenth century and gradually built farther and farther west, at a total cost of $125,000,000, till, by the end of the century, with the opening of the Canadian ‘Soo,’ the last artificial link was finished and direct navigation was established between the western end of Lake Superior at Duluth and the eastern end of the St Lawrence system at Belle Isle, a distance of no less than 2340 miles.

But even the mighty St Lawrence, with the far-reaching network of its connecting systems, is not the whole of Canada’s waters.  The eastern coast of Nova Scotia is washed by the Atlantic, and the whole length of British Columbia by the Pacific.  Then, there are harbours, fiords, lakes, and navigable rivers not directly connected with either of these coasts or with the wonderfully ramified St Lawrence.  So, taking every factor of size and significance into consideration, it seems almost impossible to exaggerate the magnitude of the influence which waterways have always exerted, and are still exerting, on the destinies of Canada.

Canada touches only one country by land.  She is separated from every other foreign country and joined to every other part of the British Empire by the sea alone.  Her land frontier is long and has given cause for much dispute in times of crisis.  But her water frontiers her river, lake, and ocean frontiers have exercised diplomacy and threatened complications with almost constant persistence from the first.  There were conflicting rights, claims, and jurisdictions about the waters long before the Dominion was ever thought of.  Discovery, exploration, pioneering, trade, and fisheries, all originated questions which, involving mercantile sea-power, ultimately turned on naval sea-power and were settled by the sword.  Each rival was forced to hold his own at sea or give up the contest.  Even in time of peace there was incessant friction along the many troublous frontiers of the sea.  From the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 down to the final award at The Hague, nearly two centuries later, the diplomatic war went steadily on.  It is true that the fishing grounds of Newfoundland were the chief object of contention.  But Canada and Newfoundland are so closely connected by geographical, imperial, and maritime bonds that no just account of craft and waterways can be given if any attempt is made to separate such complementary parts of British North America.  They will therefore be treated as one throughout the present book.

But, even apart from Newfoundland, the Canadian interests concerned rather with the water than the land make a most remarkable total.  They include questions of international waterways and water-power, salt and fresh water fishing, sealing, whaling, inland navigation, naval armaments on the Great Lakes, canals, drainage, and many more.  The British ambassador who left Washington in 1913 declared officially that most of his attention had been devoted to Canadian affairs; and most of these Canadian affairs were connected with the water.  Nor was there anything new in this, or in its implication that Canadian waters brought Canada into touch with international questions, whether she wished it or not.  The French shore of Newfoundland; the Alabama claims; the San Juan boundary; the whole purport of the Treaty of Washington in 1871; the Trent affair of ten years earlier; the Panama Canal tolls of to-day; the War of 1812; the war which others called the Seven Years’ War, but which contemporary England called the ‘Maritime War’; all the invasions of Canada, all the trade with the Indians, all Spanish, French, Dutch, British, and American complications everything, in fact, which helped to shape Canadian destinies were inevitably connected with the sea; and, more often than not, were considered and settled mainly as a part of what those prescient pioneers of oversea dominion, the great Elizabethan statesmen, always used to call ‘the sea affair.’

Canada, like other countries, may be looked at from many points of view; but there is none that does not somehow include her oceans, lakes, or rivers.  Her waterways, of course, are only one factor in her history.  But they are a constant factor, everywhere at work, though sometimes little recognized, and making their influence felt throughout the length and breadth of the land.  If any one would see what the water really means to Canada, let him compare her history with Russia’s.  Russia and Canada are both northern countries and both continental, with many similarities in natural resources.  But their extremely different forms of government are not so unlike each other as are their differing relations with the sea.  The unlikeness of the two peoples accounts for a good deal; but this only emphasizes the maritime character of Canada.  Russia is essentially an empire of the land.  Canada is the greatest link between the oceans which unite the Empire of the Sea.

Take any aspect of sea-power, naval or mercantile, and British interest in it is at once apparent.  Take the mere statistics of tonnage tonnage built, tonnage afloat, tonnage armed.  The British Navy has over a third of the world’s effective naval tonnage; the British Empire has nearly half of the whole world’s mercantile marine; and the United Kingdom alone builds more than three-fifths of the world’s new tonnage every year.  When all the other elements of sea-power are taken into consideration the people who are directly dependent on the sea, the values constantly afloat, the credits involved, the enormous advantages enjoyed, and the clinching fact that British naval defeat means disaster and disaster means ruin when all this is brought into the reckoning, it is safe to say that the combined maritime interests of the British Empire practically equal those of all the rest of the world put together.  When it is also remembered that Canada, itself a land of waterways, contains a third of the total area of the Empire, and lies between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, the significance of these facts is placed beyond a doubt.

Take a very different illustration the speech of Canada to-day and the significance is still the same.  We have so many sea terms in our ordinary English speech that we almost forget that they are sea terms at all till we compare them with corresponding idioms in other languages.  Then we realize that only the Dutch, the Finns, and the Scandinavians can approach the English-speaking peoples in the common use of sea terms.  Other foreigners employ different phrasing altogether.  Their landsmen never ‘clear the decks for action,’ are never ’brought up with a round turn,’ or even ‘taken aback,’ as if by the wind on the wrong side.  They never have ‘three sheets in the wind,’ even when they do get ’half seas over.’  They don’t ‘throw a man overboard,’ even when the man is one of those unfortunates who is apt to get ‘on his beam ends.’  The facetious ‘don’t speak to the man at the wheel’ and the cautious ’you’d better not sail so close to the wind’ have no exact equivalents for the Slav or Latin man in the street.

These, and many more, are common expressions which Anglo-Canadians share with the stay-at-home type of Englishman.  But the special point is that, like the American, the Canadian is still more nautical than the Englishman in his everyday use of sea terms.  ‘So long!’ in the sense of good-bye is a seaport valediction commoner in Canada than in England.  Canadians go ‘timber-cruising’ when they are looking for merchantable trees; they used to understand what ‘prairie schooners’ were out West; and even now they always ‘board’ a train wherever it may be.  But even more remarkable are the sea terms universally current among the French Canadians, who come from the seafaring branch of a race of landsmen.  Under the French regime the army officers used to say they felt as if they were on board a man-of-war as long as they stayed in Canada.  The modern Parisian may think the same to-day when he is told how to steer his way about the country roads by the points of the compass.  The word lanterne is unknown, for the nautical fanal invariably takes its place.  The winter roads are marked out by ‘buoys’ (balises), and if you miss the ‘channel’ between them you may ‘founder’ (caler) and then become a ‘derelict’ (completely degrade).  You must embarquer into a carriage and débarquer out of it.  A cart is radou’ee, as if repaired in a dockyard.  Even a well-dressed woman is said to be bi’n gré-yee, that is, she is ‘fit to go foreign.’  Horses are not tied but moored (amarres); enemies are reconciled by being re-moored (ramarres); and the Quebec winter is supposed to begin with a ‘broadside’ of snow on November 25 (la bordee de la Sainte-Catherine).

No wonder Canadian French and English speech is full of sea terms.  Even when the Canadians themselves forget, as they are very apt to do, the indispensable naval side of sea-power, they can account for most kinds of nauticality by their economic history, which all depended, directly or indirectly, down to the smallest detail, on the mercantile marine especially if we give the name of mercantile marine its justifiable extension so as to cover all the craft that ply on inland waterways as well as those that cross the sea.  It is calculated at the present day that it is as easy to move a hundred tons by water as ten tons by rail or one ton by road; and this rule, in spite of many local exceptions, is fairly correct in practice, especially as distances increase.  Now, Canada is a country of great distances; and by land she once was in nearly every part, and she still is in a few parts, a country of obstructive wilds.  What, then, must have been the advantage of water carriage over land carriage when there was neither road nor rail?  As even pack-horses were not available in the early days, and good roads were few and only established by very slow degrees, it is well within the mark to say that the sum-total of advantage in favour of water over land carriage, up to a time which old men can remember, must have been at least a thousand to one.

It would be natural to suppose that some knowledge of the sea was widely diffused among the British peoples in general and Canadians in particular.  But this is far from being the case.  Though there is three times as much sea as land in the world, it is safe to say that there is three hundred times as much knowledge of the land as there is of the sea.  The ways of the sea are strange to most people in every country, excepting Norway and Newfoundland.  Seamen have always been somewhat of a class apart, though they are less so now.  Ignorance of everything to do with the water is exceedingly common, even in England and Canada.  The British mercantile marine is one of the biggest commercial enterprises of all time.  It is of very great importance to Canada.  It is absolutely vital to England.  Yet it is less understood among the general public than any other kind of business that is of national concern.  Some people even think that the mercantile marine differs from every other kind of business in being under the special care of the government.  They are probably misled by the term ‘Merchant Service,’ which, when spelt with capital letters, has a very official look and reminds them of the two great fighting ‘services,’ the Army and the Navy.  In reality the merchant service is no more a government service than any other kind of trade is.

Ignorance about the Navy is commoner still.  Canadian history is full of sea-power, but Canadian histories are not.  It was only in 1909, a hundred and fifty years after the Battle of the Plains, that the first attempt was made to introduce the actual naval evidence into the story of the Conquest by publishing a selection from the more than thirty thousand daily entries made in the logs of the men-of-war engaged in the three campaigns of Louisbourg, Quebec, and Montreal.  Yet there were twice as many sailors under Saunders as there were soldiers under Wolfe, and the fleet that carried them was the greatest single fleet which, up to that time, had ever appeared in any waters.  How many people, even among Canadians born and bred, know that there have already been two local Canadian navies of different kinds and two Canadian branches of Imperial navies oversea; that in 1697 a naval battle was fought in the waters of Hudson Bay, opposite Port Nelson; that seigneurial grants during the French regime made reservations of man-of-war oak for the service of the crown; that while Bougainville, the famous French circumnavigator, was trying to keep Wolfe out of Quebec, Captain Cook, the famous British circumnavigator, was trying to help him in; that there was steamer transport in the War of 1812; that the first steam man-of-war to fire a shot in action was launched on the St Lawrence four years before the first railway in Canada was working; that just before Confederation more than half the citizens of the ancient capital were directly dependent on ship-building and nearly all the rest on shipping; and that the Canadian fisheries of the present day are the most important in the world?  As a matter of fact, there are very few Canadians or other students of Canadian history who fully realize what Canada owes to the sea.  How many know that her ‘sea affairs’ may have begun a thousand years ago, if the Norsemen came by way of Greenland; that she has a long and varied naval history, with plenty of local privateering by the way; that the biggest sailing vessel to make a Scottish port in the heyday of the clippers was Canadian-built all through; that Canada built another famous vessel for a ruling prince in India; that most Arctic exploration has been done in what are properly her waters; that she was the pioneer in ocean navigation entirely under steam; and that she is now beginning to revive, with steam and steel, the shipbuilding industry with which she did so much in the days of mast and sail and wooden hulls?

No exhaustive Canadian ‘water history’ can possibly be attempted here.  That would require a series of its own.  But at least a first attempt will now be made to give some general idea of what such a history would contain in fuller detail:  of the kayaks and canoes the Eskimos and Indians used before the white man came, and use to-day, in the ever-receding wilds; of the various small craft moved by oar and sail that slowly displaced the craft moved only by the paddle; of the sailing vessels proper, and how they plied along Canadian waterways, and out beyond, on all the Seven Seas; of the steamers, which, in their earlier pioneering days, shed so much forgotten lustre on Canadian enterprise; of those ‘Cod-lands of North America’ and other teeming fisheries which the far-seeing Lord Bacon rightly thought ’richer treasures than the mines of Mexico and of Peru’; of the Dominion’s trade and government relations with the whole class of men who ‘have their business in great waters’; and, finally, of that guardian Navy, without whose freely given care the ‘water history’ of Canada could never have been made at all.