Reminiscences of a Canadian Pioneer for the last Fifty Years: An Autobiography. Samuel Thompson
in Connemara seems paradoxical. These rough-coated, hard-worked, down-trodden Celts proved to be the liveliest, brightest, wittiest of mankind. They came in shoals to our ship, danced reels by the hour upon deck to a whistled accompaniment, with the most extravagant leaps and snapping of fingers. It was an amusing sight to see women driving huge pigs into the sea, held by a string tied to the hind leg, and there scraping and sluicing the unwieldy, squealing creatures until they came out as white as new cream. These Galway women are singularly handsome, with a decidedly Murillo cast of features, betokening plainly their Iberian ancestry. They might well have sat as models to the chief of Spanish painters.
In the suburbs of Galway are many acres of boggy land, which are cultivated as potato plots, highly enriched with salt sea-weed manure, and very productive. These farms—by which title they are dignified—were rented, we were told, at three to four pounds sterling per acre. Rents in the open country ranged from one pound upwards. Yet we bought cup potatoes at twopence per stone of sixteen lbs.; and for a leg of mutton paid sixpence English.
Enquiring the cause of these singular anomalies, we were assured on all hands, that the system of renting through middlemen was the bane of Ireland. A farm might be sub-let two or three times, each tenant paying an increased rental, and the landlord-in-chief, a Blake, a Lynch, or a Martin, realizing less rent than he would obtain in Scotland or England. We heard of no Protestant oppressors here; the gentry and nobility worshipped at the same altar with the humblest of their dependents, and certainly meant them well and treated them considerately.
We attended the English service in the ancient Gothic Abbey Church. The ministrations were of the strictest Puritan type; the sculptured escutcheons and tablets on the walls—the groined arches and bosses of the roof—were almost obliterated by thick coat upon coat of whitewash, laid on in an iconoclastic spirit which I have since seen equalled in the Dutch Cathedral of Rotterdam, and nowhere else. Another Sunday we visited a small Roman Catholic chapel at some distance. It was impossible to get inside the building, as the crowd of worshippers not only filled the sacred edifice, but spread themselves over a pretty extensive and well-filled churchyard, where they knelt throughout morning prayer, lasting a full hour or more.
The party-feuds of the town are quite free from sectarian feeling. The fishermen, who were dressed from head to foot in hoddengray, and the butchers, who clothed themselves entirely in sky-blue—coats, waistcoats, breeches, and stockings alike, with black hats and shoes—constituted the belligerent powers. Every Saturday night, or oftener, they would marshal their forces respectively on the wide fish-market place, by the sea-shore, or on the long wharf extending into deep water, and with their shillelaghs hold high tournament for the honour of their craft and the love of fair maidens. One night, while the Asia lay off the wharf, an unfortunate combatant fell senseless into the water and was drowned. But no inquiry followed, and no surprise was expressed at a circumstance so trivial.
By the way, it would be unpardonable to quit Connemara without recording its "potheen." Every homestead had its peat-stack, and every peat-stack might be the hiding-place of a keg of illicit native spirits. We were invited, and encouraged by example, to taste a glass; but a single mouthful almost choked us; and never again did we dare to put the fiery liquid to our lips.
Our recollections of Galway are of a mixed character—painful, because of the consciousness that the empire at large must be held responsible for the unequal distribution of nature's blessings amongst her people—pleasant, because of the uniform hospitality and courtesy shown to us by all classes and creeds of the townsfolk.
CHAPTER VI.
MORE SEA EXPERIENCES.
In the month of July we were ready for sea again. In the meantime Captain Ward had got together a new list of passengers, and we more than doubled our numbers by the addition of several Roman Catholic gentlemen of birth and education with their followers, and a party of Orangemen and their families, of a rather rough farming sort, escaping from religious feuds and hostile neighbours. A blooming widow Culleeney, of the former class, was added to the scanty female society on board; and for the first few hours after leaving port, we had fun and dancing on deck galore. But alas, sea-sickness put an end to our merriment all too soon. Our new recruits fled below, and scarcely showed their faces on deck for several days. Yet, in this apparently quiet interval, discord had found her way between decks.
We were listening one fine evening to the comical jokes and rich brogue of the most gentlemanly of the Irish Catholics above-mentioned, when suddenly a dozen men, women and children, armed with sticks and foaming at the mouth, rushed up the steerage hatchway, and without note of warning or apparent provocation, attacked the defenceless group standing near us with the blindness of insanity and the most frantic cries of rage. Fortunately there were several of the ship's officers and sailors on deck, who laid about them lustily with their fists, and speedily drove the attacking party below, where they were confined for some days, under a threat of severe punishment from the captain, who meant what he said. So this breeze passed over. What it was about, who was offended, and how, we never could discover; we set it down to the general principle, that the poor creatures were merely 'blue-mowlded for want of a bating.'
Moderately fair breezes, occasional dead calms, rude, baffling head-winds, attended us until we reached the Gulf of St. Lawrence. After sailing all day northward, and all night southerly, we found ourselves next morning actually retrograded some thirty or forty knots. But we were rewarded sometimes by strange sights and wondrous spectacles. Once a shoal of porpoises and grampuses crossed our course, frolicking and turning summersets in the air, and continuing to stream onwards for full two hours. Another time, when far north, we had the most magnificent display of aurora borealis. Night after night the sea became radiant with phosphorescent light. Icebergs attended us in thousands, compelling our captain to shorten sail frequently; once we passed near two of these ice-cliffs which exceeded five hundred feet in height, and again we were nearly overwhelmed by the sudden break-down of a huge mass as big as a cathedral. Near the Island of Anticosti we saw at least three hundred spouting whales at one view. I have crossed the Atlantic four times since, and have scarcely seen a single whale or shark. It seems that modern steamship travel has driven away the inhabitants of the deep to quieter seas, and robbed "life on the ocean wave" of much of its romance.
CHAPTER VII.
UP THE ST. LAWRENCE.
The St. Lawrence River was gained, and escaping with a few days' quarantine at Grosse Isle, we reached Quebec, there to be transferred to a fine steamer for Montreal. At Lachine we were provided with large barges, here called batteaux, which sufficed to accommodate the whole of the Asia's passengers going west, with their luggage. They were drawn by Canadian ponies, lively and perfectly hardy little animals, which, with their French-Canadian drivers, amused us exceedingly. While loading up, we were favoured with one of those accidental historical "bits"—as a painter would say—which occur so rarely in a lifetime. The then despot of the North-West, Sir George Simpson, was just starting for the seat of his government via the Ottawa River. With him were some half-dozen officers, civil and military, and the party was escorted by six or eight Nor'-West canoes—each thirty or forty feet long, and manned by some twenty-four Indians, in the full glory of war-paint, feathers, and most dazzling costumes. To see these stately boats, and their no less stately crews, gliding with measured stroke, in gallant procession, on their way to the vasty wilderness