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 {14} 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 {15} shipbuilding industry with which she did
so much in the days of mast and sail and wooden hulls?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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