Westward with the Prince of WalesNewton, W. Douglas (Wilfrid Douglas)
History
Westward with the Prince of Wales
Newton, W. Douglas (Wilfrid Douglas)
Canada -- Description and travel; Windsor, Edward, Duke of, 1894-1972
The official landing at King's Wharf was full of characteristic colour
also. It was in a wide, open space right under the grey rock upon
which the Citadel is reared. In this square, tapestried with flags,
and in a little canvas pavilion of bright red and white, the Prince met
the leading sons of Quebec, the French-Canadian and the
English-Canadian; the Bishop of the English cathedral in gaiters and
apron, the Bishops of the Catholics in corded hats, scarlet gloves and
long cassocks. Sailors and soldiers, women in bright and smart gowns
gave the reception a glow and vivacity that had a quality true to
Quebec.
From this short ceremony the Prince drove through the quaint streets to
the Citadel. In the lower town under the rock his way led through a
quarter that might well stage a Stanley Weyman romance. It is a
quarter where, between high-shouldered, straight-faced houses, run the
narrowest of streets, some of them, like Sous le Cap, so cramped that
it is merely practical to use windows as the supports for
clothes-lines, and to hang the alleys with banners of drying washing.
In these cramped streets named with the names of saints, are sudden
little squares, streets that are mere staircases up to the cliff-top,
and others that deserve the name of one of them, The Mountain. In
these narrow canyons, through which the single-decked electric trams
thunder like mammoths who have lost their way, are most of the
commercial houses and nearly all the mud of the city.
At the end of this olden quarter, merging from the very air of
antiquity in the streets, Quebec, with a characteristic Canadian
gesture, adopts modernity. That is the vivid thing about the city. It
is not merely historical: it is up-to-date. It is not merely the past,
but it is the future also. At the end of the old, cramped streets
stands Quebec's future--its docks.
These great dockyards at the very toe of the cape are the latest things
of their kind. They have been built to take the traffic of tomorrow as
well as today. Greater ships than those yet built can lie in safe
water alongside the huge new concrete quays. Great ships can go into
dry dock here, or across the water in the shipyards of Levis. They
even build or put together ships of large tonnage, and while we were
there, there were ships in half sections; by themselves too big to be
floated down from the lakes through the locks, they had come down from
the building slips in floatable halves to be riveted together in Quebec.
A web of railways serves these great harbour basins, and the latest
mechanical loading gear can whip cargo out of ships or into them at
record speed and with infinite ease. Huge elevators--one concrete
monster that had been reared in a Canadian hustle of seven days--can
stream grain by the million tons into holds, while troops, passengers
and the whole mechanics of human transport can be handled with the
greatest facility.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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