Dominion's trade and government relations
with the whole class of men who 'have their business in great waters';
and, finally, of that guardian Navy, without whose freely given care the
'water history' of Canada could never have been made at all.

{16}

CHAPTER II

CANOES

What the camel is to desert tribes, what the horse is to the Arab, what
the ship is to the colonizing Briton, what all modern means of
locomotion are to the civilized world to-day, that, and more than that,
the canoe was to the Indian who lived beside the innumerable waterways
of Canada. The Indian went fishing, hunting, campaigning, and
sometimes even whaling, in his bark canoe. Jacques Cartier found
Indians fishing in the Gulf of St Lawrence and sleeping under their
upturned canoes, as many a white and Indian has slept since that
long-past summer of 1534. Every succeeding explorer made use of the
Indian canoe, up to the time of Mackenzie,[1] who paddled north to the
Arctic in 1789, along the mighty river which bears his name; and who,
four years {17} later, closed the age of great discoveries by crossing
the Great Divide to the westward-flowing Fraser and reaching the
Pacific by way of its tributary, the Blackwater, an Indian trail
overland, and the Bella Coola. Mackenzie had found the canoe route;
and when he painted the following record on a fiord rock he was
bringing centuries of arduous endeavour to a befitting close:
'Alexander Mackenzie, from Canada, by land, the 22nd of July, 1793.'
This crowning achievement with paddle and canoe seems very far away
from the reader of the twentieth century. Yet Francois Beaulieu, one
of Mackenzie's voyageurs, only died in 1872, and was well known to many
old North-Westers who are still alive.

The Indian birch-bark canoe is pre-eminently characteristic of Canada.
But it is not the most primitive type of small craft; and it was often
superseded for various purposes by the more advanced types introduced
by the whites. There are three distinct types of small craft all the
world over. Like everything else, they have followed the invariable
order of evolution, from the simple to the complex. First came the
simple log, which served the earliest man to cross some little stretch
of water by the aid of pole or paddle. Next came {18} the union of
several logs, which formed the clumsy but more stable raft. Then some
prehistoric genius found that the more a log was hollowed out the
better it would