A Yankee in Canada, with Anti-slavery and reform papers.Thoreau, Henry David
History
A Yankee in Canada, with Anti-slavery and reform papers.
Thoreau, Henry David
Brown, John, 1800-1859; Québec (Province) -- Description and travel; Slavery -- United States
equal distance. If he had described a fleet of such ships at anchor in a
city’s port so far inland, we should have got a very different idea of
the Orinoco. Perhaps Charlevoix describes the St. Lawrence truly as the
most _navigable_ river in the world. Between Montreal and Quebec it
averages about two miles wide. The tide is felt as far up as Three
Rivers, four hundred and thirty-two miles, which is as far as from
Boston to Washington. As far up as Cap aux Oyes, sixty or seventy miles
below Quebec, Kalm found a great part of the plants near the shore to be
marine, as glass-wort (_Salicornia_), seaside pease (_Pisum maritimum_),
sea-milkwort (_Glaux_), beach-grass (_Psamma arenarium_), seaside
plantain (_Plantago maritima_), the sea-rocket (_Bunias cakile_), &c.
The geographer Guyot observes that the Maranon is three thousand miles
long, and gathers its waters from a surface of a million and a half
square miles; that the Mississippi is also three thousand miles long,
but its basin covers only from eight to nine hundred thousand square
miles; that the St. Lawrence is eighteen hundred miles long, and its
basin covers more than a million square miles (Darby says five hundred
thousand); and speaking of the lakes, he adds, “These vast fresh-water
seas, together with the St. Lawrence, cover a surface of nearly one
hundred thousand square miles, and it has been calculated that they
contain about one half of all the fresh water on the surface of our
planet.” But all these calculations are necessarily very rude and
inaccurate. Its tributaries, the Ottawa, St. Maurice, and Saguenay, are
great rivers themselves. The latter is said to be more than one thousand
(?) feet deep at its mouth, while its cliffs rise perpendicularly an
equal distance above its surface. Pilots say there are no soundings till
one hundred and fifty miles up the St. Lawrence. The greatest sounding
in the river, given on Bayfield’s chart of the gulf and river, is two
hundred and twenty-eight fathoms. McTaggart, an engineer, observes that
“the Ottawa is larger than all the rivers in Great Britain, were they
running in one.” The traveller Grey writes: “A dozen Danubes, Rhines,
Taguses, and Thameses would be nothing to twenty miles of fresh water in
breadth (as where he happened to be), from ten to forty fathoms in
depth.” And again: “There is not perhaps in the whole extent of this
immense continent so fine an approach to it as by the river St.
Lawrence. In the Southern States you have, in general, a level country
for many miles inland; here you are introduced at once into a majestic
scenery, where everything is on a grand scale,—mountains, woods, lakes,
rivers, precipices, waterfalls.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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