The long journey from Quebec was accomplished by water, for although a road had been cut in 1799 from the Bay of Quinte, near Kingston, to York, and although in 1803 there was a passable highway from Quebec to Sandwich, a distance of eight hundred miles, yet transport by water was much easier. No steamboat had as yet been launched on the St. Lawrence and even the large Durham boat was unknown, but the _bateau_, about eighteen or twenty feet long and six feet wide, was in general use. It was capable of carrying about three tons. In ascending the St. Lawrence there were many rapids to pass and portages were long and difficult. To avoid these, Governor Haldimand, in 1784, had designed and built small canals, the first on the American continent, and the forerunners of those magnificent canals which have done so much for the development of Canada. When the river was passed, schooners from Kingston conveyed freight and passengers by Lake Ontario to York and Niagara. [Sidenote: United Empire Loyalists] In Upper Canada there were at this time, 1803, {49} about forty thousand new settlers, for, in addition to the United Empire Loyalists, reckoned in 1791 at ten thousand, there had been an emigration from the north of Scotland and Ireland and also from the United States, the latter being chiefly of Dutch farmers and Quakers from Pennsylvania. The number of regular troops in Lower Canada was a little over two thousand, in Upper Canada about six hundred, scattered at various posts along the frontier. The settlements in the Lower Province were on the banks of the St. Lawrence and its tributary streams. In Upper Canada there were small hamlets on the shores of Lake Ontario, of which Kingston, York and Niagara were the principal, and military training-posts at great distances apart on Lakes Erie and Huron. Trappers, hunters and wandering tribes of Indians roamed through the vast forests that lay beyond. So scanty was the population of Upper Canada, and so unknown its capabilities, that there had been many protests against the division of the country into Upper and Lower Provinces. The English residents of Lower Canada wished rather for the total repeal of the Quebec Act of 1774 and the retention of the old boundaries, and sent Adam Lymburner, a merchant of Quebec, to represent them in 1791, before a committee of the House of Commons. In his argument he said there was no reason for the division of the province, as Niagara must be the limit of Upper Canada. The country {50} beyond, he represented, could not be of importance for settlement as the falls of Niagara would be an insurmountable barrier to the transportation of the produce of the land. Burke, in parliament, speaking against the passage of the act, had declaimed against settlement in "the bleak and barren regions of Canada." [Sidenote: Lieutenant-Governor Hunter]