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Lorsque le document est trop grand pour ttre reproduit en un seul cliche, il est film6 d partir de Tangle sup6rieur gauche, de gauche d droite, et de haut en has, en prenant le nombre d'images ndcessaire. Les diagrammes suivants lllustrent la mithode. ata iiure. 3 2X 1 2 3 1 2 3 4 S 6 j^-v CANADA'S FIRST BOY BABY By Georob Johnson GREENLAND belongs to this Continent and no doubt the first white baby that ever opened its eyes in America was bom in the fiord to which Eric the Red gave the name of Gronelant. But we are not iu the habit of associating Greenland with the Continent in our ordinary talk. As the first nursery of white babies in this western hemisphere, we will put Greenland to one side — where she is geographically. We want to get some- what nearer home. "Who was the first baby ))orn of white parents along the shores of the Atlantic, my from Capo Breton to Boston, or to the Straits of Magellan, if 3 ou like ? The early settlers in Gnenland were adventurous men aad wom3n. The men .'f>re good 8hip-builders, good searaen^ bold and plucky. They put their consciences into their ivork as ship-builders. They constructed strong vessels and large one? 100, — larger than those Columbus obtained to sail westward over the " Sei* of Darkness," on his memorable voyag*? of 1492. In Norway Milton located that tallest pino Ilpwn on N'orwegian hills to be the mast Of gome groat admiral whifh to the " superior friends " spear was " but a wand." From these Norwegian hills the Groonland settb^rs selected the timber for the vessels with which they puKhed their way through the northern seas. Hence the largest vessel that Columbus had on his first voyage was only about the same size as some of the second class vessels of the Vikings, and not to bo compared in strength or size with the f>"3at " Dragons " of the Norsemen *. 1 — Tho ninglo-d'jckeil caravel which carrierl Colurabun to tho West Indies on his first voyage was aboiit 'J(! foet long by 20 foot breadth of beam. The other vessels with Cnliinibill were titill small* r— one of them being named tho Kina or liaby from its diminutive size in comparison wit)> the other two. Kroiide deKCrib< s a Viiting'H ship ho saw at Christiania that liaouniling, crushing or destruction which was invariably the punishment of the stranger who ventured to cross the forest belt of the Eaglish without souuding » horn to give notice to the villagera of his coming. -44- •s. K.-' ''^ ■* .?* ; ':;T''-*.-l,ii.-'-.:.r---C .f "'^iff.'i?^-'-'- ^'1% « CANADA'S FIRST BOY BABY Seeing that Lief had just left behind him the rocky forbidding shores of Labrador (as we now call it) and was coasting along a densely wooded region, it was the most natural thing in the world to contrast this land with the other by naming it the Forest Land. This must have been the eastern and southern coast of our wayward sister, Newfoundland, who won't join in our Canadian tea party, hut keeps aloof from our roof-tree. Dr. Fiske, however, thinks that it was the coast of Cape Breton without giving any reasons for his belief. On leaving Forest Land, Lief sailed westward and was for two days out of sight of land. When the " stift* northeastern " which blevr him along, subsided, he found himself near a shore, along which he coasted till he came to a place where a river, issuing from a lake, fell into the sea. The spot pleased him so much that he concluded to enter the lake (or bay) and winter there. He built booths on the shore, very like the lumber-shanties of more modern times. One day one of his party came into the camp talking in a surprised sort of a style. He was not a Norseman but had somehow found his way from Southern Europe, possibly from the Mediterranean, to Iceland and thence to Greenland. Being a Southron (as the Scotch say) he knew grapes when he saw tlem and declared to his companions that in his rambles ho had found bunches of that luscious fruit. Lief was bo impressed with the fact that he called the country Vinland ; the land of the Grape Vine, the Land of "Wine. Just where Vinland was situated we do not positively know. There has been as much speculation over its exact whereabouts as over that of the Garden of Eden. The general idea in that it was somewhere between Halifax and Boston. Dr. Storm (Studies on the Vinland voyages) thinks that Vinland was on the sonthern coast of Nova Scotia. Dr. Fiske thinks that the abundance of grapes as described by Lief points to a more southerly region and, therefore, mentions the shore between Cape Ann in Massachusetts and Point Judith in Rhode-Island, as the likelier region. Of course it ie quite natural that doctors should differ ; it has passed into a proverb that they do. Wherever Vinland was. Lief passed the winter there and returned to Greenland in the spring with a cargo of timber and received from his countrymen iho cognomination of the Lucky, " Lief the Lucky." The success of Lief s venture induced his brothers to start of " strange f a r ^-! 3f •^:v . T 1- v;Of t . \n ^i^>" t. ^' CANADA'S FIRST BOY BABY 7 countries for to see." Thorwald found Vinland and Lief a booths, and spent a couple of winters there. Thorstein, another brother, took Lief s sturdy ship, in 1006, and tried to reach Vinland but encountered severe weather ; died, was buried at sea ; and Gudrig, his widow, returned sorrowfully to Greenland. Sometime during the summer of 1006, Thorfinn Karlsefni arrived in the Greenland settlement from Iceland, foil in love with the charming widow Gudrig, and married her. She was as adventurous as she was beautiful and persuaded her husband to undertake the founding of a settlement in Vinland. Possibly she was tired of the climate of Greenland and objected to the long dreary winters. It might be that she wanted to keep her handsome husband from flirtations with the other belles of Brattahlid. Whatever the promoting cause she succeeded in winning him over to the idea, and in the course of the next summer the Greenland settlement of Brattahlid witnessed the departure of four ships with 100 men, several women and a goodly supply of cattle. They reached Vinland without misadventure, and to Thornlinn and Gudrig, soon ufter, a son was born and named Snorro, in honour of the Captain of one of the vessels. The boy Snorro, with his parents, lived in Vinland till he was a sturdy, flaxen-haired, blue eyed youngster of three summere. The colony was then broken up because of the hostility of the Indians and the remnant returned to Greenland. This Snorro became the progenitor of a long line of eminent mnn. Any Canadian who visits Lucerne in Switzerland will be all the more enthusiastic over the colossal lion carved out of the living rock there to be seen, if he recalls the fact that Thorwaldsen ^, the great sculptor whose work it is, was a descendant of Snorro, the first boy baby born of European parents in what is now Canada. In these circumstances it becomes an interesting query. Where was Vinland? Is Vinland a myth laud like the islands of Atlantis? I have already stated that an impartial student, Dr. Storm, thinks it was somewhere on the south of Nova Scotia, but that Dr. Fiske thii-.ks it was somewhere along the coast of either Massachusetts or Rhode Island. Dr. Fiske tries 3— The Thorwoldson Museum in Copenhagen contains a large number of his statuary. m.:^ Si.*;.-.vi :>; 8 CANADA'S FIRST BOY BABY hard to be impartial, but evidently his desire to deprive Nova Scotia and to give his own couutiy the honour of possessing Vinlaud has got the better of his historical judgment. It must be remembered, in explanation of the uncertainty, that the Norse sagas were not written by the men who had the experiences. They are not narratives in the sense in which Armstrong's North West Passage is a narrative — a narration by a man connected with the Expedition. They are not narratives as Sherard Osborne's Discovery of the North West Passage is — a narration by a man well acquainted with Arctic exploration but not himself a participant in the particular expedition about which he writes. These sagas are the statements which were current in Norse households and which varied more or less from the original accounts, as any story told for generations would vary in the telling by father to son and by successive generations. In the course of time it would become impossible to distinguish between myth and history. Yet the Vinland story seems to have made a deep impression upon the Norse families. It recurs again and again. Rafn, in 1837, enumerated eigh- teen manuscripts which contained mention of Vinland. There was beyond doubt a Vinland. There are four or five facts which must be taken into account in any effort to locate Vinland. 1. Thorlinn's vessels, after they left Markland, were two days out of sight of land driving before a stiff" North-easter." That would be just what would happen to a sailing vessel to-day if it sailed from Newfoundland westward. It would be out of sight of land while crossing Cabot Strait connecting the Gulf of St. Lawrence with the Atlantic Ocean. The " North- easter " would carry the vessel past Cape Breton and naturally the first land to sight would be the west end of Nova Scotia that projects south out into the ocean ; the end that the steamers seek to-day on their way to New York from Liverpool. The longer distance to Boston could not have b«fm covered by the Norseman's vessel in the two days. It takes a steamer twenty-four hours to go from Halifax to Boston, and it is as long a trip from Halifax to Newfoundland as from Halifax to Boston. It was probably this d'atance argument that led Dr. Fiske to place Markland in Cape Breton, igUDring the HH ■mmi CANADA'S FIRST BOY BABI d fact that the distance between Cape Breton and Cape Cod could not well be covered in two days without seeing land ir the meantime. After sighting land at Cape Sable (as we assume) Thorfinn followed the coast and soon came to a bay which he named Straumiiord, the swirling eddies and varying currents there encountered by him, suggesting the very appropriate name. Now it is a singular coincidence that Champlain, going over the same route from Cape Sable, penetrated a bay to which he gave the same name in French as Thorfinn had given in Scandinavian to a bay which he also pene- trated. Thornfinn called his bay Straumfiord * and Champlain called his Bale des Courants, for exactly the same reasons, the presence of swirling eddies and varying currents— the singularly disturbed state of the water being caused by the meeting of the high Bay of Fundy tides and the ordinary Atlantic tides. 2. Thorfinn coasted along the shore of the land he sighted for a time till he came to a river which flowed out of a lake so easy of access that it was the simplest bit of seamanship to take his vessel into the lake and anchoi there. Now no where along the coast of Massachusetts is there such a river and such a lake or bay. There is, however just such a bay in Nova Scotia. It is the far-famed Annapolis basin. After sighting land at Cape Sable, Thorfinn by following the coast would come to what is known as Digby Gut, a passage that may very well be described as a short river leading into a bay or lake. It is narrow and the land is high on cither side, like the rivers the Norsemen were familiar with. It is easily entered. The great lake can be seen from its mouth, and would invite the weary sailors as a haven of rest. In some cases Vinland is referred to as an island and in others as a region. Apparently the original vivd voce accounts which were told to their wondering brethren by the returned survivors were somewhat misty in this particular. This very mistiness tends to corroborate the idea that Vinland and Nova Scotia are the same. The latter is almost an island and some of 4— Alphonse Gagnon (Lea Scandinaves en Amirique, Prooeedinga of the Royal Soc'ety of Canada, 1899) quoting the Saga says : " Thorfinn p6n6tra enguite dans una bale qu'il nomma Stiaumtiord (Bale dea Couranta)." v-;?v ■fr". J'^f; 10 CANADA'S FIRST BOY BABY the Norsemen who had sailed along its Atlantic Front and well into the Bay of Pundy and had seen that this bay penetrated inland as far as the eye could see would naturally speak of it as an island, while others wonld give it the more indefinite description of a " region." Possibly those of Thorfinn'a company who climbed the precipitous side of the narrow river (now called the " Gut " or Gate) saw from the top the waters of the Bay of Pundy on the north and the waters of the Basin on the south while beneath them swirled the short connecting river by which they had passed from Bay to Basin, and thus seeing water on three sides concluded that the particular spot called Vinland was an island and had so spoken of it on their return to their ancestral home. 3. They found the bay and river full of halibut, ducks, salmon and fish of all kinds ; Annapolis basin being salt water, there was then, as now, in them an abundance of halibut and other salt water fishes. There is not on the coast to my knowledge any other salt water bay or lake connected with the ocean by a short river with high precipitous sides, and be it remembered Thorfinn's bay or lake was salt water. 4. The Valley of the Annapolis, protected by the North Mountain range from the cold north and north-east winds and sheltered by the South Moun- tain range, has been from the earliest period famous as the " hot house " of North Atlantic coast. It has now, as it had 900 years ago, great strips of treeless land, on which corn grows and ripens. Any other part of the coast from Cape Breton to Cape Cod would be covered, in Thorfinn's time, with dense forest, just as it was when Champlain 600 years later sailed along the whole coast to Cape Cod and found no place to his liking, finally concluding that the Annapolis basin (Port Royal, they named it) was the ideal spot \ It has always been a grape-growing region. Haliburton mentions the grapes which were found growing on the banks of the St. John River, thirty or forty miles to the north of the Annapolis basin, and in less sheltered places, as exciting the wonder even of the French. 5 — Champlain refera to the Port Royal country as " the most commodious and pleasant place that we have yet Been." There is a great similarity between the account of Thor- finn's " find " and De Monts'. Haliburton says De Monts " discovered a narrow Strait into which they entered and soon found themselves in a spacious basin environed with hilU from which descended streams of fresh water. It was bordered with beautiful meadows and filled vrith delicate fish." ■ ^.f "' : '7 -J* „.-!f^' ., {% m CANADA'S FIRST BOY BABT 11 n- } H. The lands on which Thorfinn found the " self-sown Avheat," described as Sjalf SAna hveitiaker, were the meadows on which Poutrincourt sowed winter wheat and found to his surprise that it grew under the snow. The cereal described by Thorfinn was, however, more than likely the Indian corn ^ ; for Poutrincourt states that the Indians in his time on one occasion carried off their children and their corn, and hid themselves on his approach. Haliburton quotes Poutrincourt to the effect that in 1608, the Indians gathered seven barrels of corn one of which they kept for the colonists from France. 5. Thorfinn describes the Indians of Vinland as swarthy and ferocious, mth big black eyes and broad cheeks. This is a good description of the Micmac Indians of Nova Scotia. Dr. Fiske admits tha'i. it is not a description of the Indians of Massachusetts Bay, whose eyes are small and beady. Marc Les- carbot, describing the Micmacs of the Annapolis Basin, says their eyes were neither blue nor green, but for the most part, black as their hair — " et nSant- moins ne sont pas petits mats grandeur bien agriable" (and moreover they are not small, but of a large size and fine). Here is a characterization that sug- gests a different tribe from those of the iNew England and N"ew Brunswick coastc. The Abb^ Maureault statcsj that the Abenakis occupied Maine, New Hampshire and New Brunswick, " even to the borders of Nova Scotia" ; and it is a notable fact that these all spoke the same language, but that the Micmacs did not speak that language, having their own. These big-eyed Micmacs, who regarded the other Indians as enemies, were evidently the descendants of those encountered by Thorfinn, Snorro's father, and their peculiarity of large eyes was described 600 years after Snorro's birth by a very careful observer, exactly as Thorfinn had described them at the birth of the boy. 6. The Vinland of Thorfinn is distinguished by " low lands, a ness or promontory facing north, with a bay or sound to the west of it opening to the north ; an island in the bay to the northward or eastward and a place whore a river flows out of lake into the sea." These were the general characteristics 6 — Nova Scotia would not be considered to be in the Corn belt of this continent any more than New England. Yet the Census of 1851 gives the corn crop of 1850 at 37,475 bushels and 26,726 bushels of the total were raised in the Annapolis Valley. Of the total of 69,950 pounds of grapes raised in Nova Scotia in 1890 according to the census, 27t800 pounds were brought to maturity in the Annapolis Valley. 18 THE ACADIAN8 IN liOUISIANA i afl ^iven in the Saga \ The Annapolis Basin fulfills all these topographical peculiarities. These facts emphasize Dr. Storm's conclusion that Vinland was in Nova Scotia and suggest strongly that the particular part of Nova Scotia was the Annapolis Basiu. It seems then that on good grounds we can claim Snorro not only as the first white boy baby born on this continent, but as the first born on our half of the continent. He was a good boy, grew up a good man and his descendants are scattered throughout northern Europe, and some of his blood may have come with the Icelanders who settled in our North West in 1875. No doubt he was all the better man for his experience of the Canadian Province of Nova Scotia. We ought to have Vinland and Snorro among our place-names. '4 ■, -f ' ; ' i c h - «,