SKETCHES OF TRAVEL

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXI, Issue 14, 2 April 1903, Page 2

SKETCHES OF TRAVEL

V.— THE LAND OF THE MAPLE-LEAF.

By the Editor

In making the round of the big ball on which we live and move, one cannot help noticing everywhere the existence of a tolerably vigorous national prejudice. Even the realisation of the dream of the federation of the world would not destroy it qjuite, any more than the accomplished fact of lesser federations has withered up provincial prejudice in the smaller spheres of Germany, Switzerland, and Australia. But the facts of history and of current events and opinion go to show that it is in slow and partial decay in the lands that lead the world to-day. It is a far ciy to the distant times when ' Seven wealthy towns did fight for Homer dead, Through which the living Homer begged his bread.' The Cosmopolitan Spirit has captured many an outpost since those misty days. To this hour every people — from those of Andorra and San Marino up to the Great I'owers — displays, on occasion, an emphatic unwillingness to allow national prestige or sentiment to suffer loss, even when those who would diminish it are in the right But we are to-day in mind, as we ate in time, far in advance of the times when Cavendish and other British chemists of the eighteenth centuiy threw up their study m disgust, just because a French scientist, Lavoisier, blew into smithereens the old and fallacious ' phlogiston ' theory of fire. And we are never likely to witness the repetition of such a fierce brickbat discussion as was waged between French and British scientists and their following of newspaper enthusiasts, when Adams and Le Verrier simultaneously came across the planet Neptune as they were sweeping Ihe midnight sky with their telescopes The discussion was fought out, not on the lines of fact, but of national sentiment, and the heat which characterised it was highly .suggestne of the row described by Bret Harte, 'that bioke up the society upon the Stanislovv.' It is the same national prepossesion that (according to Max O'Kell, who knows his Jacques Bonhomme to the manovv) prevents the Frenchman ever asking foreigners what they think of his native land He serenely takes it for granted that it is as evident to the outer barbarian as it is to himself that Fiance is the most beautiful country the Loid ever made. People in new lands are not, however, so proudly reticent as .Jacques Bonhonune Just, peihaps, because they have the enthusiasm of youth, they arc as Veibosely Pioud, and hungry of notice, of their countries' various attractions as your little foui-v ear-old maiden is of her new dress or the leggy schoolboy of his fust pair of ' grownup ' pantaloons. And this is why the stranger of more or less note from atar is bailed up or nm to eai th by reporters for 'impressions' of Sydney's 'hahb'r,' of New Zealand's hot and cold lal es, of America's Niagara and its pig-sticking woiks at Chicago, of Canada's mighty Rockies and its far and near Noith-west All this gives a point to the answer sryd to have been receded by an examirer to the question • ' What did Columbus do as soon a^ he touched American soil 9 ' The i epl.v ran thus ' lie gave an interviewer his impressions of the country ' Tnterv iewei s and reporters sprang aboard tho 'Moana' at Victoria, the captial of Bi ltish Columbia, on that

■oft, warm April morning of last year, before her iron sides were yet fettered to the wharf. 1 managed to elude them. Others were less fortunate, but, on the whole, they acquitted themselves reasonably well when it was a question of imparting those blurred first impressions that (like incompletely etched half-tone engravings) were faintly imprinted upon our minds by the scene of Alpine splendor that lay before us, viewed through the torn and gauzy veil of a thin, gilded morning mist that was rising to meet and greet the sun. To the almondeyed son of the Far East, the foreigner from the West is ' the white devil.' To Dr. Johnson, he was — especially if a Frenchman — a mere fool. Yel the lumbering, elephantine old dictionary-maker gruffly admitted a benefit in travel among strange people : ' to regulate imagination by reality, and, instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.' Your tourist that has learned Ulysses' travel-lesson will saturate himself beforehand with the history, geography, etc., of the country he is about to visit ; he will keep his mind alert, hia ears open, and his eye-balls skinned; lus mind and tongue will be studded with interrogation marks ; and his stay in a strange land will have somewhat the charm of seeing in the flesh a valued friend whose portrait holds an honored place above his mantelpiece. The slipshod tourist's name is legion. He roams about, or rushes through, in a lazily unreflective spirit, trusting to some paltry guide-book or to chance trifles of uncertain and unconnected information picked up along the way. Such people's minds are rolling stones. In Newman's words, they ' find themselves now in Europe, now in Asia ; they are in the marts of commerce, or amid the islands of the South ; they gaze on Pompey's Pillar or on the Andes , and nothing which meets them carries them forward or backward to any idea beyond itself. Nothing has a drift or relation ; nothing has a history or a promise.' And so the ' Moana ' landed her diverse cargo of tourists that meant to see — to know the why and wherefore of things — and of those who were to wander through the broad spaces of the land in the spirit of Rabelais' witches, who, when they travelled, plucked out their eyes and hid them in their house-slippers. Despite our brief stay, there was much to catch the eye in Victoria. It is the capital of Canada's fairest and most westerly province : a charmingly-situated young city oi nearly 30,000 souls, sitting majestically on tho comparatively level south-eastern extremity of Vancouver Island, with its skirts sweeping around a deep, sheltered double harbour in tho waters of Burrard's Inlet. The island itself is long and narrow (278 miles by about 50), rugged, mountainous, and forms a gigantic breakwater to the mainland of British Columbia One naturally wonders why the capital of this rich and rising province of the Dominion should be planted on such an exposed and isolated spot, within a long cannon-shot of the Arnei ican shore. But a refeience to Victoiia's history solves tho riddle. It rose long before the days when, in 1885, the Canadian-Pacific railway gnawed, with iion tooth of pick and crunching djnamite, its way across the great mountain barrier of the Rockies to the wateis of the Pacific seas. Far back in the fifties, when Christchurch and Dunedin still wore young, it was a little dealing in the forest of the giant Douglas firs that reach their greatest height and girth upon this favored isle. It was then known as Fort Victoria, and was a stock,aded post of the Hudson Bay Company, which hold, till 1859, a monopoly of the vast fur-trade of British North America. Besides, the island has a fine climate, a rich soil, vast timber resources, and coal galoie 70 miles off by rail where the tall columns of smoke rise above the mines of Nanaimo, opposite tho mainland cities of New Westminster and Vancouver. Those rich deposits of coal wore accidentally disco%ered One day a Scottish settlor, Mr. Dunsmuir, stubbed his toe in the loot of a pine and clutched and tore the earth with clawed fingers to keep himself from Blithering down the steep incline and cracking his cros\n below, He unco\ered a rich streak of first-class coal The output of the mines is now over a million tons a year, and it is the coaling station for most of tho steamships that ply upon the waters of the Pacific. Hard by Victoria — only four miles of! — ■ protection is nfforded by Esquimalt, the naval station of the British Pacific squadron. It is built on a magnificent harbor, is strongly fortified, held by a garrison of regulars, and furnished with graving-docks, workshops, and all the paraphernalia of war. The bold, abrupt, and rugged shores of Vancouver Island are deeply indented by long, winding fiords and sheltered coves and harbors that recall tho beauties of the West Coast of the Middle Island of New Zealand. Altogether, the site of Victoria was not so unsuited ns one might think for the capital

of the rich and pushing province that British Columbia has rapidly grown to be. From the smooth, unwrinkled waters of Victoria harbor A Splendid Panorama stands in view. Westward, along the watery track down which we had crept in the silent watches of the night were the Straits of Fuca, the gateway of the Pacific. Beyond it— and only 10 days off—lies Yokohama ; 'tis also the great, open water-way to the Flowery Land. Southwest and south is the ocean track to Honolulu, Australia, New Zealand, and the long shores and cities <gf the western American seaboard ; and away up the curving lino towards the Arctic circle, the wondrous fiords of Ma ska, the trailing archipelagoes that cling for shelter to the precipitous cliffs and rugged mountains of the British Columbian shore and the cold and dreary way that leads to the frozen gold-basins of Yukon and Klondike. A few years ago the waters that circle away towards the Arctic were deserted. Now they are dotted with almost every kind of craft that sails upon the sea. Northward from Victoria, the eye follows the rising crests of tall, fir-clad heights that blope away to an elevation of some 8000 feet in the rugged and highly-mineralised interior. Southward, across the waters, lies, in full view, the American shore. It is only 3 6 miles away. And high abovo its beach rise the serene white summits of the Olympian mountains, and, farther east , the curious, needle-like cones of the Southern Cascade ranges, to me somewhat reminiscent of the bare, weird, finger-like elections of the granite hills of Montserrat in Spain. And abo\e them all, like a tall, white Egmont, soars the 31,000-feet summit of Mount Baker. It was, indeed, a noble panorama. Victoria itself is a place to charm the tourist's fancy. It is a well-built, electric-lighted, progressive city of many factories, of great warehouses, of busy wharves, and bustling streets through which handsome electric street-curs glide. A notable park on Beacon Hill affords a splendid view over the waters and hills and far away. In its cosmopolitan streets, East and West mcct — the stolid Chinaman, the dapper little Japanese, jolly Jack tars from the iron-clads in Esquimalt, little knots of miners getting together their outfits to face the rigors of Yukon, Cassiar, and Klondike. Victoria — in fact, British Columbia — points with pride to the two great buildings that adorn the capital. One is the Post Office, which takes rank among the finest buildings of the kind in the whole Dominion. The other is The Architectural Gem of the western province. It is commonly referred to as ' the Parliament,' but is officially and more comprehensively known as ' the Government Buildings.' Of the nine brovinvial legislative buildings in British North America, none can compare with that of Victoria, B.C. ; and, though smaller in size, it perhaps surpasses in chasteness and beauty of design the noble pile of the Dominion Parliament buildings in Ottawa. Among the seven legislatures of Australasia, there is not one comparable to that of British Columbia. It has, in fact, been described as one of the handsomest edifices of its kind on the whole American continent. It stands on a large, well-planted closefahaven lawn that dips into an arm of the harbor. It is a groat palatial building of grey stone, surmounted by a tall central dome, suggestive of that of St. Paul's, London, with a score of smaller cupolas ' setting ' around it like the lesser lights of a constellation. Underneath the splendid dome is a great circular central hall, which serves as an ante-room to the legislative chambers. The Government printers and museums share with the law-makers the occupancy of the building. It is splondid with noble flights of steps, great staircases, broad and handsome corridors, gates of polished brass, and handsome emblematic windows of fine stained glass. Its floors, its furnishings, its carved wainscots and ceilings are an exhibition of the choicest timber resources of the province : of its various pines, its yellow cypress (bettor known as yellow cedar), its oak and elm and aspen and exquisitely marked and varied maples. British Columbia is a far-spreading province. Y«ou might drop three New Zealands into it and leave room and verge enough for G.reat Britain as well. The museum in the Government Buildings — in four tiers or floors — has been aptly described as a microcosm of that province of generous spaces — of its minerals, its plant and animal life. British Columbia is the

Paradise of the Sporting Man It is more accessible and less dangerous and costly than the fast-narrowing big game belt of Central Africa, and gifted with a finer climate, where the tsetses cease from troubling and the malarial mosquitos are at rest/.

Here, for instance, in the museum is a splendid stuffed specimen of the moose, otherwise called the elk. He stands over six feet high at the shoulders ; his broad, palmated antlers are armed with long, sharp, finger-like prongs, and curve upwards and around like an inverted bowl the long solemn-looking head that is fixed on the end of his short and stumpy neck. He runs solitary in the low grounds, and the marshy spots in the great forest land that stretches right across the upper forehead of the Dominion. Here is the lordly caribou, the reindeer of Canada ; there the Rocky Mountain sheep, with nandsome light-brown head and immense curved horns, from which he received his popular name, the big-horn. He bears a close fleece of silky wool, about an inch and a half long, and as line as that of the merino but concealed by a flossy over-skirt of long, brownish hair. There are likewise several varieties of doer, sundry wohes, and a splendid grizzly bear that fell to a lucky sportsman's rifle some years ago in the thick forests not fa,r from the spot where his stuffed presentment now catches the tourist's eye. 'drizzly ' is at home to visitois in the Canadian and American Rockies. He is the combined Sandow and Te Kooti of the big plantigrade family : a sturdy, powerful, ferocious, muscular brute, that stands credited with a capacity to carry off the carcase of a buffalo. He is almost as tenacious of life as a microbe, and there is (it is so written) an authenticated case of one of the tribe having swum half a mile and lived twenty minutes after having had ten bullets pumped into his body, of which four drilled as many holes through his lungs, while two perforated his heart. As described to me by an aging enthusiast, stalking the g,nzzly is royal sport — unless, perhaps, Bruin takes it into his head to turn hunter If we are to believe ' Mr. Dooley's ' description of men's methods of ' sailing into ' each other, the grizzly bear of the Rockies seems to be very human in his way of fighting : the description fits him as if it were made to measure. Every grizzly will fight, and every grizzly will run Some will fight before they run., but they'll run ; and some will run before they'll fight, but they'll fight. The grizzly is a great lumbering brute, as vmgainlylooking as a traction engine. But when he ' lights out' after the sportsman, he careers over the surface of the earth lik,e a whirlwind and seldom stops the fierce chase until he captures and crushes his man or hunts him up a tree, or until a well-aimed bullet lays tho shaggy monster low. Vancouver Island produces elk and bear. There arc on the mainland, in addition, the bighorn, the wild goat, wolves of various kind, and blacktail deer ; while the rivers and the 1 coastal waters ate 'stiff wid fish' and covered with web-footed fowl of many species, including great numbers and \anoties of duck. Clouds of white, long-beaked, solemn-looking pelicans — natnes of British Columbia — may also be seen ho\ering on the wing aboAe the blue ripples, and plunging from time to time with a heavy splash among Hie shoals of their finny prey The museum contains interesting stuffed specimens ot the birds and fishes of British Columbia There is also a ■valuable collection of Indian relics some fine totem-poles, long tobacco pipes, stone tomahawks and axes, quaint pots and pans, and giotesqu" masks used in tho rough ceremonial dances of the led-skmned tribesmen long befoi c the da>s when tho Oblate missionaries initiated thorn into the solemn and instri.ctne mystei ics of tho Passion Play. It was a mellow, genial, and sunny spring day when we went ashore at Victoria The warm Pacific Clulf Stream steals up tho shores of British Columbia, lies caressingly along them with the soft touch of a lad\ 's toque, nml imparts its gentle and caress ng heat to the pebbly shore and the surrounding air. And so its climate is almost as mild as that of southern England Its comparatively gentle but .somewhat weeping winter poos out with March. Summer follows hard on the heels of spring, with warm days and cool nights and sin h a boom in the giowth of plant life as is rse\or known among us, e\ en in the southern province of Now Zealand. The Rev. Stopford A. Brooke hit off in happy poetic phrase the kel of the dawn of spring on the Pacific coast of British Columbia :—: — ' A htt'e sun, a l'ttlo iain, A soit wind blowing from the V*e-.t, And woods and fields are groin again. And warmth within the mo>.n* am s bienst So simple is the earth wo tread, So quick with lo\o and life her frame, Ten thousand >cars haA c dawned and (led, And still her magic us the same ' Long years ago— it was in my ea>-ly schoolboy days — in the midst of a mild mid-winter, a soft wooing wind

came up from the sunny south. It brought the green Christmas which, in 'Ireland, is said to presage a fat churchyard. On a sheltered, sunny fence-side a wild primrose opened its smiling yellow eyes of blossom on New Year's day. The welcome little blooms were not due till the time 'when young spring first questioned winter's sway.' We nursed and petted and sheltered the little flowers till a fatal pestilence of frost came one bitter night and nipped them before the month was out. According to the Marquis of Lome, British Columbia occasionally does even better than did our sheltered sunny nook on that far-off New Year's day. For he tellt, us. thdt daisies and roses and laurestinus have opened their blooms in Canada's fair western province as early as the anniversary of ' The happy morn, Wherein the Son of Heaven's eternal King, Of wedded Maid and Virgin Mother born, Our great redemption from above did bring.' In the open field and forest of British Columbia I tound the cowslip and white clover, and in the gardens of Victoria almost every ornamental and flowering shrub and fruit-tree that are common to the British Islands and the southern portion of New Zealand. Everywhere, in the gardens and the purple-shadowed forests and along the railway lines tho flowering currant was dressed in its pink spring drapery of showy bloom. British Columbia is its native land, and from there it was first introduced into Great Britain in 1826. Lines of Maple were planted along the streets, and the little busy bee was improving the shining hour amidst its plain but richly-honeyed bloom. The sugar-maple yields its sap from February to April. It flows into a trough through an elder or sumach tube, from a shallow auger-hole in its smooth and handsome bole. It is then boiled and treated in the same way as the juice of the sugar-cane. There are larvae that remain tindeveloped, and never reach the dignity of honest moths. And it was a surprise to me to learn that maple-sugar never* develops, like beet and cane juice, Into the white crystals that have become a necessity of our breakfast tables It never gets beyond the condition of a brewn, pasty mass, somewhat resembling gingerbread. It is employed solely as confectionery, and is usoless for the morning teacup. Its sweet nut-brown juice is also turned into the molasses (called maple-syrup) which is deemed as indispensable an accompaniment to the favorite Canadian and American delicacy, buckwheat cakes, as, among us, mint-sauce is for roast joint of lamb. To Canada, the maple-leaf and the beaver are what the wattle-blossom, the emu, and the kangaroo are to Australia, and the f ern-leaf and the kiwi to New Zealand — the cmsecrated National Emnleui:; Ireland has the shamrock, and France, in th.> Uouibon days, had tho triple-flowered lily — both symbols of the Trinity All, or nearly all. other lands ha\e emblems that aie suggestne of stiife and wounds • tooth and daw and prickly thoi n "Wales has its leek , but it is the leek which (as legend saith) was worn as a distinguishing mark by the ancient Briton army in a victoiy won by it o\er tho Saxon invader Scotland has its rampant scarlet lion, and tbo national thistle with wat rung motto that none will escape without wounds who hurtles against its chevaux-de-fi ise of little fixed bayonets. Other lands bear upon their national 'scutcheons birds ot prey or rampant or couchant lions, tigers, leopards, and such-liko great cats, and the heralds ha\o boon to gieat jams to make them far more ferocious-looking than they are in nature All of which emphasises the sa> ing that man is by nature a quart oiling and fighting animal Ai tennis Ward, alter ha\ing been butteieci by a heavy-fisted pugilist into a 'cow-pastor' and flung into a mud-puddle, concluded that 'dtin' was- n't his Foi t ' But the records of our football fields and the story of the South Alrican warp,ro\o that wo take to it as naturally as a teal takes to water In the United States, footballers go into the field of death or gloiy carrying as much aunor as Roland or the Black Knight After all our 'progress,' The lighting Aveiage of the world probably remains, centuiy for century, at least as high as Vmt it, was. e\en in the most troubled period of the middle ages Mulhall places at 4,170,000 the number of men that were tut nod into dead meat in the wars that were fought fi out 1791} to IHB7 which is probably the highest record lor a similar period in all the world's histoiy I'oi merly. Man-slaying in war was done by retail knocks on non-clad heads — a slow process in good sooth—and men sat down for seven or

ten years to besiege a single city. But we of the wonderful centuries have changed all that. We do our throat-slitting as Chicago does its pig-sticking, by machinery. War is, therefore, a more expeditious game — it is not, as it was so late as the seventeenth century, a serial struggle dragging its slow tale of thrust and parry along for thirty years. This gives us more breathing time between the rounds ; and we devote it partly to preparation for the next bout, partly to the raising of shorthorn cattle and the cultivation of champion potatoes and dwarf peas and giant pumpkins and the invention of speedier methods for manufacturing 'pure wool' shoddy and driving hobnails into the soles of balmorals and adulterating sugar and tea. In olden days, the Jewish farmer guided the sharpened stick called a plough with one hand and held a naked sword in the other. Nowadays — in wheat-growing Canada and America at least — big steel four-furrow ploughs are dragged in a row through the red earth with a traction engine. The ploughman's hand no longer carries a sword : he holds it on the throttle-valve. But in the green fort on the coast down below, tpn thousand men are protecting him with warships and murderous secret submarine mines and guns that throw half a ton of iron fifteen miles. It is hard to see where the essential difference lies between the days of, say, Jeroboam and of President McKinley. The bigger our ploughs and pumpkins and printing machines and spinning-jennys and sugar-vats and tramp-steamers, the greater the fleet and the more numerous the men and the deadlier the weapons we must have to protect them from forcible seizure by our dear next-door neighbors. There has been progress, and a good deal of it. But the trouble is, that it has not by any means moved all along the line. The nations have more trigonometry, but less trust in each other, than ever. There is the look of the hunted tiger on the face of every one of them. They must all, on peril of their lives, keep their claws sharp and their eye-teeth filed. And, like the pictured big cats upon their 'scutcheons, they are, every one of them, either couchant (ready to spjing) or rampant — in full and furious fight. They dare not settle quietly and comfortable down for forty winks — unless- they can do so with one eye open. Such is the burden of the tale that Canada's maple-leaf whispers to the passing breeze.