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THE MARINE RECORD. JuLy 26, 1900. THE ST. LAWRENCE ROUTE.* The first canals of Canada were constructed for military purposes, and by royal engineers. They were the direct result of the American Revolution. During this war there were about six thousand.troops in the Great Lake region who depended upon Montreal for supplies, no fewer than 670 boats being required to transport provisions in six months. These batteaux sailed in brigades of ten or a dozen to aid one another in surmounting the sluicing cataracts of the upper St. Lawrence, particularly the Long Sault, which required an entire day to ascend. This was an object lesson not lost upon the authorities, and improvements were be- gun at these rapids in 1779 by Capt. Twiss, R. E. The first canal was begun at Coteau du Lac, the first plan being to make the lock walls of timber, but they were subsequently made of masonry. It was begun in 1779 and completed by 25th October, 1780, with three locks and iron flood gates. The locks were forty feet long, six feet wide and less than thirty inches of water covered the sills. It would have been useless to make them deeper without undertaking a much greater length of canal. Mr. de Longueuil, who had built a mill a liitle above the Cascades, had thereby some- what improved navigation, but Capt. Twiss further improved the canal here, which was designed merely to overcome the current, and he was shrewd enough to make Mr. de Long- ueuil defray part of the expenses. In 1781 work was begun on canals at the Cascades and Cedars, and the Split Rock channel was deepened. Cornish miners were employed upon the various rock cuttings and blasting work, which was carried on in various dangerous places throughout the series of rapids, dangerous rocks being blown to atoms. The Cascades canal was at Cascades Point, where a shallow and rapid channel discharges from the St. Lawrence into the Ottawa, known as Les Faucilles, between the main river and Ile le Moyle. It wasa batteau canal with two locks, and about 200 yards long. The Split Rock canal was at a point where the current is greatly accelerated by the pro- jection into the stream of Point au Buisson, on the southern bank. ‘The remains of this lock are still to be seen. These canals were all batteau canals. The batteau had about the dimensions of the Venetian gondola, but there the resemblance ended. It was built of pine wood, about 5% feet beam, 35 feet long, was flat bottomed, pointed at both ends, and drew very little water. A batteau containing 25 persons, their baggage, and 25 barrels of flour, is said by a traveler of the time to have drawn only eight inches. But this must have been a very large batteau, as the average batteau load was 30 barrels of flour and the crew of four or five men. When these canals were constructed the annual traffic on the upper St. Lawrence to Carleton Island amounted to from 240 to 320 batteaux. On the completion of the Coteau du Lac Canal, Twiss imposed, with the cordial consent of the merchants, a toll of tén shillings currency per batteau, increased to twenty-five shillings when the series of canals was completed. Ten barrels of flour being reckoned as a ton, we find that the early canal tolls were $1.66 per ton. The present rate on the Beauharnois canal, which replaces these canals, is $0.15 per ton. The canals remained in this condition until 1800, after the formation of Upper Canada, which took place in 1793. The effect of the improvement in the rapids is well shown by the toll receipts, although we must not forget that Upper Canada was being rapidly populated by exiled United Em- pire loyalists. In 1781 some 263 batteaux, two canoes and one boat used the Coteau canal. The tolls for a time de- clined, probably because no ships were permitted upon the Great Lakes, except the king’s vessels, but subsequently in- creased and in 1799 were double what they had been in 1795. By 1800 the traffic was so great that improvements were de- manded, and although to detail these here is to trespass upon our third period, it may be well to do so and complete the history of canals at this point prior tothe Union. In 1800, Col. Gother Mann proposed to increase the capacity of these canals. The Coteau canal was to be widened to 9% feet in the lock gates, the lock itself to be widened four feet and the canal prism two feet. This would make the locks ten feet wide, and the dimensions are from the report of our - archivist, although Mr. Keefer in his admirable monograph on the canals of Canada states that they were enlarged to twelve feet. So also the two differ as to the length of the locks, which Mr. Keefer places at 110 feet and Dr. Brymner *Abridged by the author, Arthur Weir, B. Sc., from a lecture de- livered before the Applied Science students of McGill University, Mon- treal, January, 1899, and published exclusively in The Canadian En- gineer. : at 120 feet, the first probably allowing for the opening of the gates. Col. Mann proposed to replace Mill rapid and Cascades canals by one canal across a neck of land from the St. Lawrence to the Ottawa about goo yards above the Cas- cades, and 300 yards wide. His suggestions were accepted and work was commenced, the work being completed by 1805.. Old documents enable us to estimate the depth of the enlarged canals at 3% feet, and Mr. Keefer places them at four feet. Rock cutting was here encountered, the first of importance since the ill-fated French Lachine canal. The Durham boat was introduced after the war of 1512, and compared with its predecessors it was a leviathan. How the habitant must have swelled with pride tosee a ship as- cend the St. Lawrence with ten times the capacity of the early batteau. The Durham boat was flat-bottomed, with keel and centerboard, rounded in the bow and decked at bow and stern with a wide gunwale running its entire length for purposes of poling. Its capacity was 350 barrels of flour, or 35 tons, To accommodate these vessels it was necessary to further enlarge the canals in 1817, to 12 feet between the gates. By that time: nearly 900 batteaux passed the canals annually, and in.1833 some 863 batteaux and 612 Durham boats carried the trade of the Upper St. Lawrence. In the early days the western country had to be fed from the east. Where now waves the golden wheat of Manitoba the traders were exposed to starvation if the supply boats did not arrive at the grand portage in due season. The first shipment of wheat from Chicago did not take place until 1838. This must be borne in mind in connection with what I now pro- pose to review, the struggle for supremacy on the Great Lakes between the navy and the fleets of commerce. Before describing this struggle, however, it will be desirable to re- view briefly the history of the great fur-trading days, in order to show the volume of commerce that depended upon the result. In 1802 the Montreal Northwest Fur Company had 117 trading posts, 20 partners, 161 clerks and interpreters, 877 common employes, in addition to 100 free hunters and 540 canoe men on the Ottawa. The London sales of 1801 were £371,139 stg. and they paid £22,000 stg. induties. In 1780, according to Charles Grant, the trade from Montreal was from go to 100 canoes, and the furs brought down were esti- mated at £200,000, or $8 per capita of the population. Each canoe load cost £300 stg. in England. The freight charges across the Atlantic were fifty per cent. To transport it from Montreal to Machillimackinac cost fifty per cent. more on the original price, so that each canoe load was valued at over £7.0, much over $3,500 as compared with the present day; no inconsiderable treasure to trust to the rush of im- petuous rapids day after day for weeks at a time. The work of the voyageur was highly specialized. His skill has not entirely passed from amongst us, but itis not now an integral portion of the trade of the day. He engaged as “devant” or in the bow, or gouverneuil, that is as steers- man, or, if not quite so skilled as the others, as milieu or in the midships seats. The pole was quite as much in vogue as the paddle, and any one using it had to keep the bow true against the current, or the boat would be swept round and capsized, perhaps where no man could fall and live. In connection with cost of transportation I may say that the Hudson’s Bay route was 25 per cent cheaper to the in- terior in those early days, that is it was 75 per cent. of the original price. Some three hundred men were employed west of the carrying place, men who exposed themselves to hostile Indians, to rapids and starvation so keen that can- nibalism was not unknown among them. They straggled from the peaks of the Rockies, from the shores of the Sas- katchewan and from the far north, even from the Mackenzie River, back to the carrying place between toth June and toth July each year, laden with rich furs, but with scarcely a mouthfull of food, and if the supply canoes were delayed the results were terrible to think of. It was this that made the conflict for supremacy upon the lakes so bitter, and which ultimately led to the triumph of the merchants. In 1755 the British built two sloops at Oswego on Lake Ontario, naming them after lake and site respectively, and in thesame year General Shirley placed a sloop and schooner each of ninety tons, on the same lake, in addition to a num- ber of whale boats and galleys, which we might call batteaux. After the Conquest merchants began to establish themselves to tap the rich fur routes, and Oswego was for some years the most important fur trading post on the continent. The Lake Superior copper mines attracted the attention of English capitalists and in 1770-71 a sloop of 4o tons was built at Point aux Pins and sailed to Ontenagon. There was no difficulty in opening up the fur trade, : of the lakes was concernéd, until the outbreak of the United States revolution, almost immediately after which all pri- vate trade on the lakes was prohibited, and merchants’ goods were permitted to be transported only on the king’s ships. One may grumble, but should not unduly complain at the hardships which war imposes upon trade, merchants of Canada, while very much put out by the new regulation, bore it with some equanimity until peace was restored, but while the number of ships of the navy was reduced to two ships on each lake after the war, the author- ities refused to accord the merchants their former rights of free navigation. Then the storm broke. ‘The merchants did all in their power to make the authorities see reason. — They even offered to have their vessels commanded by a naval officer and pay his salary. Haldimand, on the other hand, thought it sufficient to place a third war vessel on Lake Ontario and Lake Erie. It willsave time to quote Haldiman’s own words in connection with the matter: ‘The navigation of the Great Lakes by the King’s vessels only,’’ he said, ‘is an object so nearly connected with the entire preservation of the fur trade, that I have withstood various applications for building and navigating private vessels and boats upon the lakes; the rivers and outlets from them to the American States are so numerous that no pre- cautions which could be taken in that case, would be effectual in preventing a great part of the furs from going directly into the American States. * * * I would there- fore recommend by all means that a sufficient number of King’s vessels be kept up on the Jakes, and all other craft whatever prohibited not only for foregoing reasons, but in all events to preserve a superiority upon the waters of that country.” : That sufficient of the King’s ships were not kept up on the lakes is indicated by the fact that in 1784 the goods in- tended for the interior trade were so long delayed at Kings- ton and Niagara that they could not be sent forward, while on the 16th July, 1785, there was little, if anything, short of 100 batteaux loads of goods to cross Lake Erie, besides thirty or forty loads at Kingston. Some of these goods have been awaiting transport for twelve months, Benjamin Frobisher put the case of the merchants in a nut- shell when he wrote, sending a memorial: ‘‘All the company (N. W. Fur Co.) wishes for is on any terms to be- left to the management of its own business.’’ The merchants of Detroit (then under the British flag) declared that they were paying £3,700 stg. interest upon the goods detained at Carleton Island, and that the action of the government would involve them in ruin. It required five years in those days to begin and complete a transaction in furs in Canada. The goods were ordered from England in one year, they came out the following year, went west the third year, the furs for which they were bartered reached Montreal in the fourth year and were sold in London in the fifth year, dur- ing all of which period interest was accumulating. An extra year’s delay meant a great deal to the merchants, many of whom went into debt for their goods. By 1785 a relaxation in the regulation was made by St. Leger at Detroit, and merchant vessels were once more spreading their sails on the lakes in 1791. The York, one of the pioneers of the now gigantic fleet, was launched at the mouth of the Niagara in 1792. One of the historic vessels of the lake trade was the Beaver, built in Detroit in 1784. She was built for the navigation of Lake} Superior, by the North-West Fur Co., but could not be got up the Sault Ste. Marie. As the company declared that she was built at inconceivable cost ($7,374), and altogether looked upon her as a phenomenon, you may like to learn her dimensions. She was 34 feet long in the keel, 13 feet beam and 4 feet deep in the hold. On Lake Superior to-day are vessels exceeding 300 feet in keel length, 42 feet in the beam, and drawing 16 feet; I am speaking of the Pope, which has carried 126,000 bushels of corn, weighing 3,527 tons. In 1797, by the way, was launched the first United States vessel on Lake Erie, the Washington, which was after one season bought by a Canadian, taken on wheels—you can imagine her size—around the Niagara Falls, and sailed for Kingston from Queenston in 1798 as the Lady Washington. ror THE Washington correspondent of the Philadelphia Rec- ord says: ‘‘Some time during the present summer a new airship will be launched from the Army’s new Signal Corps post at Fort Myer. It is the invention of Lieut. Von Siegs- feld, a Prussian, from whom it was lately purchased through our military attache at Berlin. It is an airship embodying principles distinctly new to the American school of war aeronauts, in which it is expected to effect a revolution.”’ and the -