t 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?

No exhaustive Canadian 'water history' can possibly be attempted here.
That would require a series of its own. But at least a first attempt
will now be made to give some general idea of what such a history would
contain in fuller detail: of the kayaks and canoes the Eskimos and
Indians used before the white man came, and use to-day, in the
ever-receding wilds; of the various small craft moved by oar and sail
that slowly displaced the craft moved only by the paddle; of the sailing
vessels proper, and how they plied along Canadian waterways, and out
beyond, on all the Seven Seas; of the steamers, which, in their earlier
pioneering days, shed so much forgotten lustre on Canadian enterprise; of
those 'Cod-lands of North America' and other teeming fisheries which the
far-seeing Lord Bacon rightly thought 'richer treasures than the mines of
Mexico and of Peru'; of the