The Sun.
London, England, 1860-09-18 00:00:00

neared the new and very upstart village now called
the capital of Canada of course the sky became
black and overcast, and the rain came down with

the usual drenching vehemence familiar to Royal
landings in this tour.
Just as this set in, the procession of lumber men
in their canoes, paddling down the Ottawa to meet
the steamer, came in sight. A more striking or
more characteristic procession in honour of the
_ _

Prince has not been seen since he landed in Ame-

rica. At first it seemed like a dim crowd of red
colour on the water, but as it drew nearer and
nearer the quick regular chants of the Canadian
boatmen could be heard, and the long sharp out-
lines of the canoes, with their quaint ornamented
prows, just turning up above the surface of the
water, over which they came gliding like arrows,
without noise or ripple, were seen. All these little
skiffs were of light birch bark, beautifully painted,
and each carried from six to 15 men, in the scarlet
tunics which on State occasions is the lumberer's
grandest uniform. Their song had nothing in it of
the long melodious air which in England is popu-
larly supposed to be peculiar to these Canadian
voyageurs. The half-caste Canadians only sing in
their canoes when beating the long, light, thin,
rickety cradles in which they journey for thousands
of miles up against a stream, or coming full speed
down it through rocks and over rapids which would
make a man giddy to look at. Their song, there •
fore, is only meant to accompany the quick beat of
their paddies—a strange rhyme, which the man in
the bow gives out, and to which the rest of the
crew respond with one or two short words of hoarse
chorus, as they strike their paddles straight down
over the sides into the current. But all music
sounds well on the water, and the quick, rough
strains of this song came modulated by the distance
into perfect melody, and the effect of the whole—
the mass of scarlet canoes dancing lightly down the
river, the bold, picturesque headlands on which
Ottawa is intended to be built, the grand heavy
falls of the river in the background boiling up into
a cloud of smoky spray, as if the river was on fire,
all made together one of the strangest, wildest, and
most beautiful scenes that the Prince has yet seen.
Lumberers care little for rain, or frost, or snow,
or, indeed, any other form in which nature may show
her inclemency, so the downpour of Friday night
made no matter of difference to them as they paddled
down to the Prince's steamer, shouting and waving
their paddles with half-frantic gestures. They
seemed delighted, not only at the honour of being
chosen to receive the Prince's steamer, but at the
opportunity it gave them of showing their strength
and skill as they whirled round their canoes in
the water, and, breaking out again into their
wild, quick song, kept pace with the Phcenix
with as much ease as if sho had been a sand-
' barge. It would be difficult in any country to
have seen a finer, more athletic, and, I may
add, a browner body of young men than these
same 1,200 lumberers. Their boats seemed to shoot
along without an effort, and, among some 120, colli-
sion seemed inevitable, but just as one heavy canoe,
impelled by 14 powerful brawny fellows, seemed on
the point of running down another, a quick turn of
the long paddle in the stern altered its course in an
instant, and, without stopping their hurried song,
they all kept gliding on together, so light, so quick,
so easy in their movements, that it more resembled
flying in its gentle rapidity than any other motion
I have yet seen. Why do none of our London row-
ing clubs try a canoe on the Thames, the water of
which above bridge is better suited to such light
craft than many rivers here, where they are much
used ? To see a marl carry down a canoe weighing
some 501 b. to the water's edge, launch it, let half-a-
dozen people into it, and than force it over the water
at the rate of 10 knots an hour would be " a caution"
to some of our outrigger amateurs. In large canoes,
capable of containing 25, or even 30, men, the
Indians thinks nothing of venturing on Lake Huron
in a gale, though the sea there is sometimes as dan-
gerous in its way as in the North Atlantic.
The Lumberers, who in this city welcomed the
Prince in their procession of canoes, are a race of
men peculiar to Canada, and who make this intended
capital (as being about one of the wildest spots in
the country) their head-quarters. As their name
implies, they are the working men for carrying on
the great timber trade in which nearly three-fourths
of all Canada and the provinces are engaged. In
the depth of the winter their work in the backwoods
begins. They then start forth to fell the huge white
and red pines, which are drawn out of the snow by
oxen and piled near the frozen rivers till the return
of spring gives them an opportunity of floating
them down in immense rafts and masses, which fill
all the surface of the streams, in May, for miles
and miles. Of course, in these expeditions, which
last for months and months together, the men
lead a hardy, backwoods sort of life, which so
nearly approaches that of the Indian that, ex-
cept in the drunkenness and physical infirmity of
the latter, there is but little difference as to the
mode of life between the two. Their adventures
up in the mountains with bears and wolves, or,
worse still, in struggling with hunger and with cold,
would fill whole volumes ; but in spite of its labour
the life has a charm of recklessness about it
which seems to be perfectly fascinating, and which
leads the spirited young labourers of Canada to
join it, as, with us, all the scrapegraces and dare-
devils of a poor family are sure to go into the navy.
By hurling the pine logs over cliffs and dragging
them down ravines the lumberers before the thaw
sets in manage to collect along the banks of the
various tributaries of the Ottawa and St. Lawrence
some millions of cubic feet of timber, and when the
ice-bound streams are free once more their more
arduous and dangerous labour commences. Loosely
joined together in huge, rough, uncouth rafts, the
logs are set adrift, and, with a few poles and mis-
shapen oars to guide them, the lumberer goes in
charge down currents and rapids of deep rivers,
swollen and flowing iereely with the waters from
the meltir°e snow. It is all very well as long as
these rafts hold together, but hurried and tumbled
over rapids they often break up, and woe betide the
unhappy lumberers who are on them when the
great logs come rolling in fierce confusion one over
the other, and go smashing down the rapids from
rock to rock till they are all cast adrift in splinters.
When such accidents occur, as they do frequently,
it sometimes happens that the logs get so wedged
and bound together on the brow of some stony rapid
that they remain immoveable, and all the miles of
rafts which are following behind are stopped at,
once. It then becomes necessary to cut the ob-
structing logs away with axes. Only the bravest,
coolest, and most experienced of the lumberers can
attempt this most dangerous of all their tasks, for
when once the logs which bar the passage are half
cut through the might of the press behind breaks
them like straws, and some 10,000 trunks of trees
come plunging down with a rush and confusion
that but too often renders all the coolness and
activity of the lumbermen who are trying to escape
the avalanche of no avail. In such wild expedi-
tions and dangerous feats these lumberers pass
their early lives, gaining sufficient, if they are pru-
dent or saving, after a few years' labour, to com-
mence trading en their own account from Ottawa
—the great centre of the lumber trade of Canada.
Of the manner in which the timber reaches
Ottawa, and how it is then run down the celebrated
timber shoots along the falls, I shall have more to say
by-and-by, when I come to the exploits of his Royal
Highness in this new capital, As a conclusion to
the outline of the lumbermen's history, it is only
necessary to say filet very few are English. Three-
fourths are French Canadians, or what are styled
as each, though having a certain proportion of half,l
caste Indians among them, whose flat features,
coarse hair, and white skins, at once betray their
hybrid origin. It is singular that the half-caste
Indian girls arc often remarkable for their beauty,
while with the men the mixture of the white blood
seems only to result in additional and more
inveterate ugliness.
The Prince landed at Ottowa a little before dusk.
There was a Royal salute and there would have
been a procession but for the rain, which, as has
been told, was heavy enough to have almost cleaned
the streets of this so-called city, than which I can-
not possibly imagine harder work for water, no
matter how profusely applied. His Royal Highness
and suite were lodged at the Victoria Hotel, which
and the Roman Catholic Cathedral at present form
the only two buildings worthy of the name in
Ottawa. All other and less distinguished visitors
shifted as well as they could, which was ill
enough. Most of the hotels at Ottawa have a strong
reformatory element running through them all,
which manifests itself by rules to have doors
bolted and lights out by 11 p.m., which requires
every one to be up by half-past seven o'clock or
go without his breakfast, and which otherwise
suggests almost the rigours of a prison discipline
with all the discomforts of a bad hotel. Matters
in these respects were not much mended by the
arrival of an immense train from Montreal, laden
solely with colonial dignitaries and others of suffi-
cient influence and station to be expected to follow
the Prince, and all of whom were disembarked in
the mud and fell easy victims to swamps and
morasses in their search after cabs and lodgings.
There was a general debacle among the luggage
that night, and only those who, quite irrespective
of ownership, were wise enough to take whatever
trunks came first to hand got anything at all.
Peopla are sanguine enough to believe that at
some remote period (probably when Ottawa is
built) the trunks which have been lost in this tour
will turn up somewhere. I have tried this kind of
consolation on several of my own friends, who
have been thus bereaved by the railways and left
to face a three months' tour with only an odd
pair of gloves and a pockethandkerchief.
As a rule, however, such sympathy having be-
come rather common of late, has lost the very little