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ON

NORTH AMERICA

CHAPTER I.

Halifax in Nova Scotia.—Fresh complexions of the people.—Roman Catholic fête.-Roman Catholics in Halifax.-Precedence and title conceded to Bishops.-Coloured people in Nova Scotia.-Micmac Indians.-Maritime commerce of Nova Scotia, its certain extension. -Mackerel fishery.-Shoals of mackerel.-Export of salt fish.Scratched rocks, and agricultural character of the neighbourhood of Halifax.-Stony and unfertile surface of the coast line.-Young's Letters of Agricola.-Increase of population in Nova Scotia.-Proportion of the agricultural produce to the population.-Inner Bay of Halifax.-Railway from Halifax to Windsor.-Soils and forests of the Ardoise hills.-Drought of 1849.-Pacing horses of Canada.---How trained in Sardinia.-Gypsum quarries at Windsor.-River Avon.— Dyked alluvial lands of the Bay of Minas.-Varieties of land, and their money-values.-Sand plain of Aylesford.-Structure of the vale of Annapolis.-Town of Annapolis.-Ice-holes in the North Mountains. Ironworks of Bear river.-Healthiness of the country.— Handiness of the Nova Scotians.-Blue-nose provincialisms.

ON Saturday the 28th of July, at 3 P.M., I sailed from Liverpool in the steam-ship America. We took the northern course; lost sight of the west coast of Ireland on the afternoon of Sunday the 29th; about noon of the following Sunday came in sight of Newfoundland; and

VOL. I.

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ROCKY SHORES OF NOVA SCOTIA.

early on the morning of Tuesday the 7th of August, I landed at Halifax in Nova Scotia. We had thus a pleasant passage of nine days and fifteen hours; and as we had an agreeable party, we felt almost sorry our voyage had been so short.

The noble harbour of Halifax, in which all the navies of the world might securely float, is only one of the countless inlets and basins which the Atlantic coast of Nova Scotia, from Cape Canseau to the Bay of Fundy, everywhere presents. The jagged outline of this coast, as seen upon the map, reminds us of the equally indented Atlantic shores of Scandinavia; and the character of the coast, as he sails along it—the rocky surface, the scanty herbage, and the endless pine forests-recall to the traveller the appearance and natural productions of the same European country.

The coast of Nova Scotia is indeed very unpromising in an agricultural sense; and though of the surface of the province there are in reality three and a half millions of acres which present to the Norwegian, the Swede, or the Finlander, the rocky soils, scenery, and, generally speaking, the natural productions of his own country, yet both Nova Scotia and New Brunswick have in reality been unjustly depressed in European estimation by the character of their shores. The greater number of those who have hitherto returned to Europe from this part of North America, and who have regulated European opinion in regard to it, have seen only the coast line, or the interior of its rocky harbours; and these are certainly as naked and inhospitable as an inhabited country can well be. Those who have sailed along the Baltic shores of Sweden and Finland, or to Gothenburg by the estuary of the Gotha, or among the rocks and inlets of the western coast of Norway, will be able to realise, without visiting them, what the sailor sees on the shores of our American colonies.

FRESH COMPLEXIONS OF THE PEOPLE.

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But the interior parts of these provinces are not represented by these barren borders. Though they do contain large tracts of poor and difficult land, yet rich districts recur at intervals, which rival in natural fertility the most productive counties of Great Britain. The colonists complain, with reason, that the evil opinion entertained of them has diverted the tide of English settlers, English capital, and English enterprise, to more southern or western regions, not more favoured by nature than they are themselves.

A European stranger who, on landing in Halifax, looks for the sallow visage and care-worn expression which distinguish so many of the inhabitants of the northern States of the Union, will be pleased to see the fresh and blooming complexions of the females of all classes, and I may say of almost all ages. Youth flourishes longer here, and we scarcely observe, in stepping from England to Nova Scotia, that we have as yet reached a climate which bears heavier upon young looks and female beauty than our own.

The day of my landing at Halifax was a fête-day among the Roman Catholic schools. Twelve hundred children, in holiday dresses, were marching in long procession by nine in the morning, with flags and banners and music, along the main street of the city, and thence under a triumphal arch of flowers and an avenue of green pine-trees, planted for the occasion, to a steamboat which was in waiting to convey them across the bay to M'Nab's Island, where the amusements of the day were provided. As music and dancing and refreshments were among the entertainments, this fête attracted a large assemblage of all parties, whom rigid religious views did not restrain from countenancing a public display of the Roman Catholic body. As a stranger, I was grateful to the provincial secretary, Mr Howe, for an invitation to accompany him and his family in the afternoon to the

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UNRESTRAINED AND EQUAL INTERCOURSE.

scene of festivity. We crossed the bay in a steamboat crowded almost to suffocation; and it was here, and among the thousands whom I saw on the island, that I was enabled to judge of the adaptation of the northern climate to the complexions of our island population.

In Europe, it is in countries which, like Great Britain, Ireland, and Holland, are surrounded by an atmosphere rarely arid or dry, either from excessive cold or from excessive heat, but which, more or less loaded with moisture, always softens and expands the minute vessels of the skin, that health and freshness of complexion in both sexes is most conspicuously perceived and most permanent. To the fogs and rains, therefore, which so frequently visit this and other parts of the North American coast, lying within the influence of the Gulf Stream, the healthy looks of the people are probably in some measure to be ascribed.

I was early struck, on this my first day's residence in North America, with the less constrained and more equal intercourse which appeared to prevail between what we should call the different classes of society. The servant and the mistress, the mechanic and the barrister, with little distinction of dress or behaviour, discoursed on a perfect equality, and persons filling the highest political offices were jostled about as unceremoniously, and were as familiarly hailed, as the humblest of the crowd. The secret is, that every one feels what I understood when my friend said to me, "That girl may marry, and be better off than her mistress to-morrow; and the lowest of these men may rise to the highest civil office in the province." As the ermine of the bench, and the mitre of the archiepiscopal seat, secure to the humblest member of two of our learned professions in England a portion of that respect with which we look upon a future Lord Chancellor or a possible Archbishop, so so I suppose the sense of equal opportunities being open to all entitles each man in these provinces to a more equal consideration.

ROMAN CATHOLIC BODY,

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The Roman Catholic body in Halifax is strong and growing, chiefly through the yearly accessions of emigrant Irish and their descendants, who here appear to thrive, and are said to be well-behaved. The Presbyterians used to be, and probably still are, the most numerous of the religious sects in Halifax, and next to them the Episcopalians of the Church of England. The Roman Catholics have of late years increased, and they have obtained an advantage over the non-Episcopal sects in the title of " My Lord," lately conceded to their bishop by order of the Home Government, and in virtue of which he takes rank with the Church of England bishop, and precedence of all the dissenting clergy.

That this is a great grievance in the eyes of the Presbyterians and others, in the two colonies of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, I was scarcely a day in Halifax till I had learned. Until recently, the bishop of the "Church of England in the colonies" was the only person addressed as "My Lord,”—a solitary and invidious title among a people composed, for the most part, of what we call dissenters in England, and in a country where so little distinction of ranks prevails. It became less singular when the same title was conceded to the Roman Catholic bishops, and, of course, a greater number of persons became interested in keeping up this distinction. But the hostile feeling was in consequence only made stronger in the breasts of the majority of the people.

Such distinctions in a colony, it appears to me, ought to be conceded, not for an imperial, but for a provincial reason—not because a certain religious body is powerful in Europe, but in consideration of the feelings and wishes of a large body of the colonists themselves. Now, if this latter reason had been influential, there are other sects to whom some equal distinction ought to have been conceded. The Presbyterians and Baptists are both stronger bodies than either the English Episcopal or the Roman

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