An Atlantic Canada Steampunk Fantasy

The Chignecto Ship Railway
H.G.C. Ketchum
Boston: Damrell & Upham, [1893]

The current Canadian edition of Reader's Digest features a piece I wrote about some of this country's great unrealized projects. Toronto's Vimy Circle, the Chateau Prince Rupert and Jean Drapeau's 325-metre-tall concrete celery stalk figure, as do Thomas Mawson's plans to recast cow town Calgary in the City Beautiful style, but the Chignecto Ship Railway ranks as my favourite.

The dream of New Brunswick engineer H.G.C. Ketchum, the whole venture seems like the work of a madman today, yet it received government backing, millions of dollars in investment from British businessmen and was once held up as a model that would be emulated the world over.

In Ketchum's dream, ocean-going ships would be raised from the Bay of Fundy, transported along a 27-kilometre double-tracked railway, then gently lowered into the Northumberland Strait.

And vice versa.

The pitch for what was to have been the world's first ship railway is all here in this booklet Ketchum wrote for the 1893 World's Columbian Water Commerce Congress. A desperate document, it was produced at a time when the project was in great jeopardy. You see, the most incredible aspect of this impossible dream is that the money ran out within weeks of completion.

It wouldn't be right to retell the whole sad, tragic story here – buy the magazine – but I spoil nothing in saying that the effort failed. The Chignecto Ship Railway died – and with it the whole idea of ship railways. Ketchum knew one could not live without the other, writing:

The safe transit of a ship in cargo across the Isthmus of Chignecto will be the signal for many other ship railway schemes to begin construction. The Tehuantepec, the Panama, the Cape Cod, the Ontario and Michigan isthmuses will be vanquished by this means; and various obstructions can be overcome and short cuts made in different parts of the world.

That passage is one of the most interesting in The Chignecto Ship Railway. The booklet is the work of an engineer doing his darndest to attract investors: bland prose is peppered with facts, figures and dollar signs. Visual aids would've helped.

Ketchum might have done well in turning to fellow New Brunswicker Charles G.D. Roberts. who had written about the project with great enthusiasm in the August 1890 edition of Cosmopolitan. The next year, Roberts painted a lovely scene in his Canadian Guide-Book:

When it is completed a line of steamers will run between St John and Charlottetown and the traveler will have the novel experience of watching from his vessel's decks a lovely landscape of meadows and orchards unroll below him as he moves slowly across the isthmus. The sensation will be unique, as this is the world's only ship railway.

I'd have paid good money to take that cruise.

Object and Access: A nondescript booklet, The Chignecto Ship Railway should not be confused with Ketchum's The Chignecto Ship Railway: Will It Pay? (1887), The Chignecto Ship Railway: The Substitute for the Baie Verte Canal (1892), Ship Transportation and the Chignecto Ship Railway (1892) and a handful of other similarly titled publications issued in support of the project. The others have been picked over by print on demand vultures, but only our old friends at Bibliolife have spotted this one. "We believe this work is culturally important and have elected to bring the book back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide", they tell us. Bibliolife will happily sell you a copy of this 12-page public domain booklet for $15.50 (postage & handling not included).

Or you could just read it gratis here.

Bonus:

A scale model of Jean Drapeau's 325-metre concrete celery stalk
(otherwise known as the Monument Paris-Montréal).

America's Canada and Ours

Canada
Richard Ford
New York: Ecco, 2012

Canada
Richard Ford
Toronto: HarperCollins Canada, 2012

Giving lie to that old saw that books with green covers don't sell.

When Poets Ruled; Or, Never Mind the Novelists

For my poet friends, these observations from Canada 1962:

A striking feature of Canadian letters in recent years has been the consistently high level of Canadian poetry. Although the poet's audience was often not large, he was at least assured of publication in one of the many literary magazines of the country where his work would receive discriminating critical attention. Too often, however, such limited circulation was the most that could be expected. More recently a growing interest among a wider reading public has made possible the publication of a number of volumes of poetry, some of which have achieved minor commercial successes.

A comprehensive picture of Canadian poetry was made available to readers during 1961 by the appearance of the Oxford Book of Canadian Verse. Several other important collections also appeared during the year, including Leonard Cohen's The Spice Box of Earth, River Among Rocks by Ralph Gustafson, The Devil's Picture Book by Daryl Hine and Irving Layton's collection of stories and poems, The Swinging Flesh. The Governor General's Award for poetry in English for 1960 went to Margaret Avison for Winter Sun and Other Poems, her first published collection. Poetry in French Canada is no less important and vital as was amply illustrated in the Oxford Book. Among the most widely known of the younger poets are Alan Grandbois, Rina Lasnier and Anne Hébert. The latter received the Governor General's Award for French Poetry for her book Poèmes. 

Canadian fiction is perhaps somewhat less vigorous.