The Tourist's Maritime Provinces/Chapter 11
CHAPTER XI
ST. JOHN—HOPEWELL ROCKS—MONCTON
MIRAMICHI—BATHURST—CAMPBELLTON
DALHOUSIE
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A fourth of the ninety-mile journey from St. John to Moncton is beautified by successive scenes along the Kennebecasis Bay and River. Opposite Riverside the middle bay is obstructed by Long Island which shelters on the west the picturesque rowing course that has served many valiant oarsmen. A road leads away from the bay to the misted hills and blue waters of the Lomond chain of lochs where there are good hotels frequented by anglers and lovers of gentle vistas.
Rothesay is a most delectable suburb. Its views, its water-life and its summer society distinguish it among all the towns about St. John. Lakeside and Hampton are its nearest rivals on this route. All three turn their backs to the railway. Their comely features are better appreciated from a punt or a sail yacht on the bay.
Another resort much in favour for its fair situation is St. Martins, on the Bay of Fundy, 30 miles from Hampton by a branch whose time-table varies according to the day of the week. St. Martins boasts a conchoidal beach as symmetrical, if not so vivacious, as Spanish San Sebastian's, and though no king lives upon her harbour hills there is sport fit for kings in pond and brook. Moreover—here New Brunswick distinctly scores over Biscay—wild deer are so tame and plentiful that they join the cows browsing in the field, and feathered game hover within rifle shot of the hotel verandah.
Norton, 10 miles beyond Hampton and the head of Kennebecasis Bay, is the gate-way to another primitive game region pierced by a mining railroad that extends 45 miles to Chipman on Grand Lake. Sussex and Petitcodiac are the market towns of prosperous farming country. At Salisbury, 13 miles below Moncton, a daily train takes its leisurely way to Shepody Bay, Fundy's uppermost arm, passing in sight of the Petitcodiac River and its contiguous marshes, and arriving in something less than two hours at Hillsboro, 24 miles to the east. From that point the rails turn south to Alpha on Chignecto Bay, nearly opposite Sussex. Hillsboro's thoughts are centred on plaster, but the traveller who strays thither is bent upon reaching by an 8-mile road the tide-sculptured phantasies of Hopewell. A motor drive of 20 miles from Moncton is a less fatiguing means of arriving at the same end. The goal of both routes is Hopewell Cape which twice a day bears the onslaught of Fundy as it charges the bar of the Petitcodiac. A rampart of reddish cliffs two miles long and 40 to 80 feet high, rasped and distorted by the friction of the currents, twisted, arched, modelled by the diablerie of the waves, presents a gallery of rock forms unequalled in their wanton, oft-times sublime caprice. Along the base of the wall are caverns supported by columns wherein one fears to discover crones mumbling sorceries and brewing strange draughts. The Sphinx and The Little Giant are detached shapes cunningly etched by wind and water. A pillar 50 feet high is poised on a slender pediment as true in balance as though a master craftsman had installed it. Fundy was the craftsman. Fundy's handiwork created the magic of the Hopewell Rocks.
Two miles across the neck of Shepody from Hopewell Cape is the shore of the long peninsula that divides the brown waters of this bay from Cumberland Basin. Here at the mouth of the Petitcodiac are created the conditions immediately responsible for the breaking of the bore below Moncton. The tide of the Atlantic having been quickened and heightened by a progressively narrowing coast line all the way from Cape Sable, the maximum impetuosity is reached in the cramped channel of Chignecto Bay which in turn compresses to Shepody Bay, whose torrent is vented in the Indians' Pet-koat-kwee-ak, "the river that curves in a bow." About 15 miles above Hopewell Cape the river's straight sides draw together, then veer abruptly. The lower stratum of the inrush is checked, but the crest of the water forges on, forming a watery ridge that carries around the bend and sweeps past Moncton. The wave parapet is most impressive at high noon on a spring day when the moon is full. Under such conditions it reaches a height of five or six feet. But visitors who betake themselves to Bend View, where there is a little park off the main street of Moncton, below the Post Office, usually see a moving wall not more than two or three feet high, and sometimes disappointingly less. The bore exhausts itself below the railroad bridge. Quite as interesting as this natural curiosity is the rapidity with which a vale of slippery, sandy clay is transformed into a river of sea water. The return of the flood, whose escape has left red desolation in its wake, is announced by a far-away murmur that deepens to a roar as a line of white wheels 'round the curve at the head of the invading column. In an incredibly short time disheartened ships straighten on their keels, the water steals up to the plimpsails and erases the glaring ugliness of denuded banks. The rise and fall of the tide approximates 30 feet at Moncton, though spring tides may attain twice this height.
The river before the city of Bordeaux, France, 60 miles from the sea, has a bore similar to that of the Petitcodiac whose approach is announced to idlers on the Place des Quinconces by the loud tolling of a bell.
Moncton is a comparatively new city of 14,000 inhabitants whose homes, churches, school buildings and street improvements reflect a rising prosperity. Industrially it is progressing when other Canadian towns are standing still. Its manufactures vary from barrels to wire fencing, from biscuits to caps. The Intercolonial car shops employing 2000 men, occupy an extensive area on the outskirts. The executive offices of the system are in the centre of the town, surrounded by attractive residences. Particularly charming are the flower gardens of the General Manager of the Government Railways, whose house is close to the station, and nearly opposite the grounds of the Brunswick Hotel.
An inexhaustible supply of natural gas is obtained from wells across the river,—or across the river-bed as one must say at certain times of the day,—9 miles from the city. The first wells were sunk in 1859. The New Brunswick Petroleum Company has a lease until the year 2107 of 10,000 square miles in Albert County. Of the seventeen wells operated, ten are "gushers." The gas obtained is said to be the purest and to have the highest heat power known. It is produced at the rate of some millions of cubic feet a day. The cars of the efficient Moncton street service are run by natural gas power.
As a converging point for New Brunswick rail lines Moncton is next in importance to St. John. It lies half way between Halifax and the Quebec border. The Intercolonial road to St. John starts from here. The branch to Shediac and Point du Chene (18 miles) via Painsee Junction gives communication between Moncton and the Prince Edward Island steamer landing. Another branch 32 miles long connects this busy centre with Buctouche, a cool village on Northumberland Strait whose name to epicures is synonymous with good oysters.
East of Moncton on the main Intercolonial route to Nova Scotia are the towns of Memramcook, Dorchester and Sackville (38 m.). Between the last-named station and Amherst[1] the train traverses the sea-made and dyke-reclaimed Marshlands of the Tantramar, through which the provincial boundary-line passes. Sackville is the seat of Mt. Allison University which comprises colleges for both sexes. An important group of buildings is situated in the centre of the town. One of the very few public collections of paintings in the Provinces is exhibited in the Art Institute.
The Government has recently taken over the New Brunswick and P. E. Island Railway which runs between Sackville and Cape Tormentine (37 m.). At the latter point the Island mails are despatched in the winter when the Strait is so jammed as to be navigable only by the unique rowing-sledges that manœuvre water or hummocky ice with equal facility. Cape Tormentine will be the terminal for the Car Ferry to be instituted by the Government between the New Brunswick shore and Cape Traverse, Prince Edward Island, 9 miles distant.
At Memramcook, 16 miles from Moncton, the College of St. Joseph was established more than forty years ago by the sainted missionary, Père Lefebvre, who ministered to both the Acadians and the Indians. The Micmacs still speak endearingly of him as "Pèle Lefeble." His church would have honoured him with titles and monuments. He was the Junipero Serra of the Provinces. Like the great Franciscan he deprecated homage and acclamation. When he was asked what memorial should mark his tomb, he answered poetically, "Sow the grass over my grave, and if flowers grow there, do not pluck them."
North of Moncton the shore is almost entirely peopled by French fishermen whose villages, if served at all by railways, lie on branch lines. From Kent Junction, 50 miles on the way from Moncton to the Quebec frontier, a road goes to Richibucto and St. Louis. The latter is the New Brunswick St. Anne de Beaupré. The Acadians have faith in its sacred well for the healing of physical affliction.
The Kent County fisheries are immensely productive, the waters of the Strait and the Gulf of St. Lawrence yielding oysters, clams, lobsters, and millions of pounds of mackerel and smelt. On either side of the Intercolonial main line, between Kent Junction and Chatham Junction are tracts teeming with trout streams. Toward the centre of the province are the big game forests traversed by the railway between Fredericton, Chatham and Loggieville.[2]
Chatham, 11 miles from the Junction, is on the shores of Miramichi Bay, which widens from the mouth of the assembled Miramichi Rivers into the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Six thousand square miles of the huge, thinly populated square, whose four corners are Chatham Junction, McGivney Juncton, St. Leonards and Campbellton, are drained toward the sea by the Southwest, the Little Southwest and the Northwest Miramichi, which together form the second most important river system in this well watered province. Chatham is the most active shipping-port on this easterly coast, and together with Newcastle is an outfitting point for sportsmen going into the Miramichi preserve, whether it be for bass, trout, grilse or salmon, caribou, moose, deer, wolves, foxes or bear, 
THE MEETING OF THE RESTIGOUCHE AND MATAPEDIA RIVERS, AT THE QUEBEC FRONTIER
or for a birch-bark canoe journey away into the wilderness. The head waters of Miramichi tributaries are within comparatively easy portages of the St. John and the Tobique Rivers on the other side of the province. In 1825 scores of lives and 3,000,000 acres of Miramichi Valley forest were destroyed in an appalling conflagration which, nearly a century later, the inhabitants awesomely refer to as the Great Fire.
There are 52,000 French in the Catholic diocese of which Chatham is the ecclesiastical capital. Journeys by launch or steamer to Bay du Vin and Burnt Church, and up the Gloucester Coast to Tabusintac, Pokemouche and Shippegan afford passing impressions of grey little hamlets that from season to season are whipped by the raging gulf winds. Often must these pecheurs repeat with their Breton brothers:
Lord, ere we go, to thee we trust our all,
Thy sea is mighty, and our boats so small!
A railway skirts this coast from Tracadie to Shippegan and Caraquet and goes thence to Bathurst on the main line.
The name Burnt Church calls to mind the reprisals unjustly committed against Acadian settlers who inhabited the north side of Miramichi Bay a century and a half ago. The commander of the vessel which was bearing Wolfe's body to England sent members of his crew ashore at the mouth of the river for fresh water. When they did not return and their bodies were found savagely mutilated, the French were accused of the deed. The captain forthwith slew the inhabitants, destroyed fortifications and burned the church opposite Bay du Vin, only to discover when the tragedy was complete that the Indians, perhaps the very ancestors of those who still live hereabouts, were the authors of the crime.
At Escuminac Point, east of Bay du Vin and about 35 miles from Chatham, Cartier first sighted this shore in June, 1534, and landed somewhere near.
The river forms a pleasant highway by which to proceed from Chatham to Newcastle. From both the water and the land side the seven towers of the radio telegraph station at Newcastle make a formidable display. Danish capital financed the construction of the plant and of its companions on the coast of Ireland and California. Messages have been sent overland from this port in Eastern New Brunswick to San Francisco, 3250 miles away. Aërograms from Ireland, received at the rate of 150 words a minute, are relayed by wire to Montreal, which is the company's main distributing point for press and commercial messages. The central receiving tower is built of steel and is 500 feet high.
Newcastle, seat of Northumberland County, rivals Chatham in the importance of its lumber and fish industry. More than 125,000,000 feet of sawed timber goes out of these ports in a year. The two northwest townships of the County of Northumberland have an area of a million and a half acres, of which only a thirtieth part is inhabited, the remainder being an almost trackless forest interlaced by lake and river. Here the moose is suzerain and man the intruder.
At Bathurst, 122 miles northwest of Moncton, Joseph Cunard once had a shipyard on the estuary of the Nepisiguit River. Nicolas Denys, a still earlier inhabitant of neighbouring shores, spelled this Indian name for "rough water," Nepigiguit. Somewhere on the border of Nepisiguit Bay he is thought to be buried. We have his own record that he had a habitation "sur le bord de ce basin." Probably it was to Ferguson's Point that he retired in 1672 "aprés l'incendie de mon Fort de St. Pierre en l'Isle du Cap Breton." His house was guarded by a palisade with four bastions and he had "a spacious garden."
Summer attractions are not wanting within the confines of so well-situated a town as Bathurst, but the traveller who breaks his journey here will do so with the main intention of seeing the Falls of the Nepisiguit. A mining road from a junction ten minutes' ride south of Bathurst carries one to the Pabineau Rapids and up to the cataract. The distance of 20 miles may also be covered by motor-car. "The roaring, destroying giant" of the Malecites, one of the five great salmon courses of New Brunswick, follows a rock-fretted channel to the ledge of a precipice where it casts the full breadth of its stream down a granite stair 30 to 40 feet wide, then crashes with tremendous effect into a ravine deep shadowed by upright cliffs. From a hill above the falls one gets an unobstructed view of the master leap and the tumultuous aftermath.
Four times a week passenger trains leave Bathurst by the Gulf Shore Railway for Caraquet, the harbour of Shippegan and Tracadie Mills (80 m.). Norman, Acadian and Jersey French compose the population of Caraquet (50 m.) which is distinguished as being the largest and oldest French settlement in New Brunswick, and one of the chief fishing centres of all the province. Here, off the tall cliffs of Chaleur Bay, are the most northerly oyster grounds on the Atlantic side of the continent. This thoroughly characteristic fishing-port was the site of a Robin entrepôt as early as 1837. That the mackerel fisheries are profitable may be judged from the experience of one fisherman who took 7000 of the largest possible size—"so big their tails had to be turned up in packing"—from a string of 35 nets in a single night.
Near Caraquet in Le Bocage, a grove of beech and birch, is a hallowed chapel to St, Anne. From this woodland shrine there is a wonderful view of the Gaspé Mountains on the north shore of Bay Chaleur. Caraquet has other visions less material. On nights preceding heavy wind and storm the horizon is blazoned with the shape of a flaming boat. This is the Fire Ship. Every one has seen it at some time, to many it has appeared more than once. And all whose eyes behold are fearful of the morrow. On the night of June fifth, 1914, the blazing vessel ignited the heavens. There are plenty to tell you so. And on the sixth day of that month was there not a lashing hurricane so terrible that the fleets of all this coast paid crushing tribute in lives and ships?
Under the left pinion of Chaleur's winged outline the railroad keeps on toward the Quebec border with the bay almost constantly in view. The station at Jacquet River receives its quota of anglers. At Charlo more vacationists alight, attracted by the Charlo woods and the romantic Charlo River. The branch train is waiting at Dalhousie Junction for passengers who have elected Dalhousie as their goal. If they have come by the Ocean Limited from the south it will be after dark when the rambling wooden hostelry is reached which fronts the sea a mile or two from town. Thus the revelation of the view from the hotel windows is reserved until morning. With the coming of daylight the stranger is confronted by the notched sky-line of the Gaspé shore above the Bay de la Chaleur, a vista unsurpassed in the Provinces. The Gaspé Mountains lift their spires over 3000 feet toward the dome whose radiance is but rarely misted by fog. The winds of the gulf moderate in the bay to refreshing zephyrs. The water is warmer than at resorts much further south. Before the Inch Arran's doors are four little islands where guests row out to picnic or to pay cautious visits to lively lobster-pots. Those geologically inclined seek the arched rock and other remarkable formations on the beach below the hotel. Scientists frequently come here to examine the peculiar cellular rock fabric, and strange agates and fossils. The Indians called this shore, "a place of bright stones." There are knolls back from the water where one looks off to the range that companions the Restigouche, and down to Dalhousie at the river's outlet.
Balmy hours slip by amid the long grasses or the range light point. Across the water a cargo schooner flying Norway's flag glides to port along the Gaspé shore. Indian nomads plash by at your feet, canoes heaped with rods, buckets and knotted bundles. The women's bronze faces gleam where the sun strikes cheek-bone and forehead. The men wear broad hats, but their squaws' black hair is bared to the ruffling wind. They paddle silently, ignoring the white man's salutation. Suddenly, something quivering high against the blue holds their gaze and yours. An osprey! With eyes telescopic he sees from a great height what is passing in the water. He cannot swim, but when he has gauged well the position, he drops unerringly, is immersed, the prey is grasped in his spiky talons, and rising heavily the fish-hawk makes off with his silvery burden.
The sailing osprey high is seen to soar
With broad winnowing wings, and circling slow
Marks each loose straggler in the deep below,
Sweeps down like lightning, plunges with a roar,
And bears his struggling victim to the shore.
Dalhousie, at the mouth of the Restigouche, is only 6 miles from Maguacha Point on the Gaspé shore. Further west on the triangular estuary of the same river is Campbellton. One of the final contests between the French and the English which definitely "quenched the glory and destroyed the western dominion of France" took place in this vicinity in July, 1760.
Campbellton, ringed by a barricade of hills, is at the junction of the Intercolonial line and the International Railway to St. Leonards. Every Wednesday and Saturday morning a small, not overly comfortable steamer leaves this port for Dalhousie and towns on the Gaspé coast. The voyage to Gaspé Basin consumes a day and a night. A steam ferry connects Campbellton with Cross Point, 13 miles from Metapedia on the Quebec Oriental Railway.
The Restigouche is navigable for 180 miles and has a harbour 18 miles long. Its devious track through the wilderness is bordered by stately heights and shadowed by cliffs and dense forests. Only a tenth of the area of Restigouche County has been taken up by settlers. A little way above Matapedia the Upsalquitch swells the flood of the Restigouche, which here forms the frontier line between New Brunswick and Quebec. At Matapedia Village the full-flowing stream rounds into the Matapedia River at the base of tree-clad steeps which rise in majestic perspective from every shore.[3]
Having crossed into Quebec our journeyings during the next chapter will carry us along the Bay Chaleur and the Gulf of St. Lawrence to the eastern extremity of the Gaspé Peninsula, now a part of Quebec but formerly numbered among the Maritime Provinces.
Matapedia—New Carlisle, 98 miles by the Quebec Oriental Railway. New Carlisle—Gaspé Basin, 104 miles by the Atlantic Quebec and Western Railway. A through passenger train leaves Matapedia every week-day at 10:20 a. m. Atlantic Standard Time, and arrives at Gaspe Basin 20:25 (8:25 p. m.). As the railway dining station at New Carlisle is not reached until after 3 o'clock and the present very astute management has barred food shops and vendors from the vicinity of way stations and from the cars, travellers will do well to provide themselves with a cold repast to be eaten en route.
Eventually this coast line is expected to be taken over by the Government, when the service throughout will doubtless be improved. Whatever the present inconveniences of slow and crowded trains, the beauties of Percé and Gaspé and the scenes en route more than compensate. Half-fare tickets are issued to "nuns, priests, children and Indians." A considerable saving on whole-fare tickets is effected by purchasing a return ticket, Matapedia—Gaspé Basin—Matapedia. Travellers may, however, find it agreeable to vary the journey by going one way by steamer from or to Campbellton.
The Quebec Steamship Company maintains two steamers which touch at Halifax, Pictou, Charlottetown, Summerside, Percé and Gaspé on the way to Quebec and Montreal. See under "Steamers from the United States" and "Steamers from Canadian Ports," Chapter I. Leaving New York on Saturday, Gaspé is reached on the following Wednesday.