lO ^TRANSACTIONS 1899- OO 



What the Holy I^and was to Europe in the time of the Cru- 

 sades — a field for the adventurous, a training school for the 

 soldiers of Christianity — that this corner of Canada has been to 

 the Mother-land. Among it's thousand isles and straits, the sea- 

 men of the United Kingdom have received training to develop 

 caution, dash, intrepidity, individualit)^ coolness in time of 

 danger, determination undismayed by defeat and all those master- 

 ful qualities which are the hall-mark of the British national 

 character. 



The greater portion of this region is included in that part of 

 Canada where the lines of longitude converge so that a degree of 

 latitude is from 21 to 10 miles in length instead of the 60 miles 

 on the equator or the 44 miles on the latitude of Toronto. 



This region is a region of islands. They have been won for 



"The flag that has braved a thousand years 

 The battle and the breeze," 



by a series of sea-fights with storm and tempest, ice-bergs, and 

 ice-floes, carried on during many years under most unusual and 

 trying conditions, by seamen, "the bravest of the brave." 



Canada is essentially a hero-land. There was much of the 

 stuff of which heroes are made in the men who sailed up the St. 

 Lawrence River and won the region of its Great lyakes for the 

 coming generations during the period in our liistor}' when the 

 policies of concentration and of expansion first strove with each 

 other, like Jacob and Esau in their mother's womb — the first to 

 confine population to the lower St. Eawrence, and the other to 

 spread over the interior the posts of war and of trade*. The 

 story of the struggles of French and English with the savages of 

 the forest is diamond-pointed all over with deeds of heroism. The 

 long-drawn-out contest of the French with the Five Nations — 

 those Boers of the past centuries ; the march of Frontenac into 

 their country ; the momentous fight of Dollard and his 16 con- 

 secrated companions with the Iroquois ; the repulse of Pontiac by 

 Gladwyn when that great warrior, chief of the Ottawas, besieged 

 Detroit ; the fiery career of Sieur d' Iberville, — these and scores of 



*See Parkman's "Half Century of Conflict. 



