B18 
FOREST AND STREAM 
[June 25, 1898. 
Days on the St Lawrence,— IV. 
From unpublished manuscript of S. H. Hammond, author of 
"Wild Northern Scenes." By courtesy of Mr. Hammond Van 
Vechlen. 
Perhaps, my excellent friend, you have heard of 
"Lighthouse Point," and "Willson's Bay," and "The 
"Salmon Tiout Hole," and "Grenadier Island," and per- 
haps you have not. They are noted localities in the 
neighborhood of this beautiful little town. Cape Vin- 
cent is situated upon a pleasant slope fronting the St. 
Lawrence just below where that majestic river leaves 
Ontario, at the head of the Thousand Islands. Off to 
the left is the broad lake, while to the right the noble 
river winds away among the islands, losing itself behind 
wooded promontories, and green fields and rocky 
shores. Were it not for the presence of Ontario and the 
strong current sweeping forever by, the St. Lawrence 
itself would be regarded hy you and me as a beautiful 
lake, large and wide and deep, and pure enough for all 
the purposes of ornament or use. Three miles Avest of 
the village is a high rocky bluff (high for this region) 
reaching far out into the water, forming one of the points 
where the lake ends and the river begins. On this bluff 
stands the lighthouse in a beautiful grove of low trees, 
above which looms the tower containing the beacon. 
Looking west from the tower you see only a broad ex- 
panse of water, the horizon resting upon the water 
like sky and ocean. From the village to this point is a 
pleasant drive, and the villagers and visitors improve it 
often to look out from the lofty tower, enjoy the lake 
breeze, or picnic beneath the shade of the trees around. 
Off this point the water is underlaid by smooth rock 
for some Soft., the depth varying from 4 to 
lOft., and then drops suddenly down to a depth 
of from 20 to 30. The shore is walled in by a 
precipice of some 20ft. of perpendicular rock, above 
Avhich the ground is level, and you can walk to the 
brink and look straight down upon the lake. When the 
winds are still and the water calm, j^ou can see bass, 
pickerel, an occasional muscalunge, and sometimes a 
salmon trout, swimming lazily about in the water be-* 
neath you. With a strong line and rod you can amuse 
yourself of a still morning by lifting some of them bodily 
from their native el,ement high over your head, landing 
them on the green grass behind you. The bass are as 
plenty here, but not so large, as those in the neighbor- 
hood of Carlton Island. When the south or the west 
wind blows, and the waves come rolling in from the lake, 
they dash with mad fury and a fierce roar against this 
rocky barrier, throwing the spray far over the grass and 
among the trees above it. 
Following the lake to the west you enter a little 
cove, known as the "salmon trout hole." Around this 
cove is a pebblj^ beach, from which the bottom descends 
with a steep declivity to an unknown depth. It is said 
that at certain seasons of the year the salmon trout 
gather in great quantities in this locality, and tradition 
makes it the great fishing ground of the Indians long 
ago. How much truth there may be in the tradition I 
have no means of knowing. I have visited this "salmon 
trout hole" on several occasions, but found no trout. 
Bass I have found there, and very large ones, and it 
is one of the places for a sportsman to visit when tlie 
air is still or the wind is in the right direction. Further 
still and around a rocky point is Willson's Bay, in 
which, when the wind is from the north, is capital bass 
fishing. This bay contains perhaps 250 acres, shut out 
from the lake by bluff promotories, save a narrow strait 
on the west or southwest, and is always calm when the 
breeze comes down from the nortli. Further still is 
"Grenadier Island," several miles in circumference, all 
around which, and especially oft" the Outer points, is great 
bass fishing ground. A difficulty, however, is found in 
the fact that the lake is seldom calm enough to allow a 
little craft like a skiff or sailboat to ride at anchor with- 
out making a landsman feel somewhat doubtful of his 
own security, a sensation by no means promotive of 
pleasure while indulging in the amusement of bass fish- 
ing. 
We started this morning in a taut little sailboat for 
Grenadier Island. There was a gentle breeze from the 
north, so delightfully cool, so steady and unfitful, that 
we all (four of us besides the sailor wlio had charge 
of the boat) burst into a loud and impromptu hurrah as 
the sails filled and we glided quietly up the St. Lawrence. 
At Lighthouse Point we landed to take a view of the 
lake and country from the toAver. With a telescope we 
scanned the broad lake. Here and there a white sail 
dotted the surface, rocking gracefully to the roll of the 
waves. About the lighthouse, as I have already said, is 
a grove of near an acre consisting of low trees, be- 
neath which the grass is always green, the air fragrant, 
and the shade under the clustering foliage makes it an 
inviting retreat from the heat of a smnmer sun. 
We spread our sails again and entered the little cove 
containing the "salmon trout hole," and trolled around 
and across it, but caught nothing. We circled Willson's 
Bay, taking a few beautiful bass on our cruise. Leaving 
this we stretched away for the head of Grenadier Island, 
off wliich we anchored at 11 o'clock. The bass here be- 
haved toward us with that courtesy which is due to 
strangers, and for a couple of hours we had exciting and 
beautiful sport among them. At i o'clock the heat and 
glare became oppressive, and we landed to dine under 
the shadows of the elms and beeches that lined the 
shore. We had laid in a store of creature comforts be- 
fore starting in the morning, and our fare was neither 
scanty nor partaken of with a dainty appetite. 
There is a Ijeauty as well as majestv about these 
lakes which I think the world (I mean the people of the 
world) do not sufficiently appreciate. In no other coun- 
try can such vast bodies of fresh water be found. They 
are great inland seas, rendering as such their aid to ad- 
vance the interests of the commerce of the world. Be- 
yond and around them are States, which, though even 
now , teeming with wealth, are yet in their infancy, and 
which iti the distant future will make these waters the 
highway of a limitless trade. They form, too, a boundary 
of empires, and may in the future, as they haA'e done in 
the past, bear a prominent part in the conflict of na- 
tions, by bearing upon their bosoms hostile navies to 
meet each other in the tug and carnage of battle._ There 
are hundreds of beautiful bays and quiet coves hid away 
around bluff promonotories and outreaching points. Into 
these it is pleasant to drift and enjoy the hush of their 
repose when the winds are still. I love to stroll along 
the beach, or row along the shore, when the waves are 
sleeping and calmness has smoothed the face of the 
waters, asking of the shapeless stones, the wave-worn 
rocks and fragments of trees that have drifted to the 
strand, the history of the long centuries Avhen these 
waters laved a wilderness shore, before civilization 
reared its temples, or planted its standards in this new 
world; to ask whence came the red man, and who his 
ancestors were; whether they, like the white man of these 
modern ages, came floating over the ocean to drive out 
a people older and less powerful than themselves; or 
whether the same creative fiat that called .them into 
being placed them here to bide the advent of civilization 
and Christianity, and then to disappear with their gen- 
erations from the world forever? What if no voice re- 
spond, and these rocks and silent shores make no an- 
swer? What if no light comes flashing out of the dark- 
ness of the past, and the eternity that stretches in ever- 
lasting vista behind us yields up none of its secrets? 
Still these are primeval things, and who does not love to 
commune with such? 
After mid-day the wind died away and the whole sur- 
face of the lake became calm and moveless and polished 
as the face of a mirror. No breeze swept across its 
placid bosom. Here and there a great fish would throw 
his unwieldy form awkwardly from the water, falling 
back with a splash, and sending a circle of wavelets 
around to dance about for a minute, and then subside 
into stillness again. There was something enchanting 
in this repose, this calmness of the air and water. And 
herein, my excellent friend, is the great charm of the 
country in the burning days of mid-summer; and herein, 
too, is one of the peculiar charms of the margins of these 
Great Lakes. It is not when the winds sweep wildly 
over the waste of waters, and the billows heave and roll 
to the shore, breaking into spray as they come surging 
with a bound and a roar against the rocks, that I admire 
these waters most. There is coolness in the breeze that 
sweeps thus over the lakes; there is life, activity, fresh- 
ness, power and all that, but the charm of quiet, the lux- 
ury of repose are wanting. There is a blustering rude- 
ness, call it a boisterous hilarity, if you please, about 
these noisy demonstrations that I do not like. You 
have enough of life, activity, enough 01 rudeness, enough 
even of boisterotts hilarity in the city, in your teeming 
marts of life, where the competition, the strife and 
rivalry of business incident to the greed of gain keep 
things in motion, throwing everybody against each other 
in one everlasting jostle. What we need and what we 
seek here is repose, calmness, quietude, when the sun 
is high in the heavens, and his flaming touch blazing 
down from a cloudless sky. True, the shade and foliage 
of the old trees, the low chirrup of the birds among the 
branches, the voices of the grasshopper and the cricket 
add their influence to the contentment that steals over 
us here. These, however, are mere adjuncts, helps only 
in promoting the luxury of passiA'^e enjoyment. The 
great feature, the fundamental fact, is the calmness, re- 
pose and quiet that pervade the earth, the air and the 
water out here in the country. 
Toward evening a bean breeze, such as a landsman 
while on the water loves, spratig up, a breeze that wafts 
him quietly along, untroubled by breaking waves and 
unscared by the rush of waters. For myself I do not 
profess to be a fast man. I am opposed to fast horses, 
to fast running on railways, and especially to fast sailing. 
Six or eight miles the hour, by horse poAver, is speed 
enough for me. I detest a two-forty gait. When the 
cars go beyond thirty miles an hour (I like about 
twenty best — a man can get over a great many miles in 
a lifetime even at that rate) you may leave me at the 
first station till the "slow train" comes along. But, I 
repeat, I have a special dislike to fast sailing, originating 
perhaps in a natural alacrity at sinking, a strong 
downward proclivity, Avhen loose in the water. I am, 1 
presume, no more afraid of death irt the abstract than 
other men, but I have a decided penchant for dying in 
my bed, in a natural and Christianlike way. I do not 
like to be food for fishes. Your Avorm is the legitimate 
heir to these bodies of ours, and I am not disposed to 
rob him of his birthright. Besides, to be nibbed at by 
chubs and shiners, gnaAved at by catfish and sheeps- 
heads, tugged at by plebeian suckers, and have slimy, 
snaky eels crawling and wriggling in and out of one's 
skull through the eyeholes. Pshaw! the thought is 
horrifying! As a natural sequence, I prefer dry land to 
a billowy sea in a gale, and always go ashore when the 
winds get a trifle angry. 1 have great respect for the 
waves when they put on their "Avhite caps"" and always 
get as far out of their Avay as I can. I hold Dibdin, if 
he Avas the author of the folloAving verse, to be a goose, 
especially in regard to his preferences expressed in the 
two last lines: 
"Oh, for a soft and gentle breeze, 
I heard a fair one sigh; 
But give to me tlie snoring blast. 
The white waves dashing high." 
And then too, what he can find to be jolly over in the 
description of things as given in a subsequent verse 
passes my comprehension: 
"There's tem\)est in yon hov'ned moon, 
There's lightning in yon cloud; 
And hark, the music, mariner! 
The wind is piping loud! 
The wind is piping loud, my boys! 
Tlie lightning flashes free; 
The hollow oak our palace is. 
And merry men are we!" 
If any sensihle man can be "merry" under such cir- 
cumstances, there is no law that I knoAV of against it. 
Let him enjoy himself. He can indulge his humor with- 
out any opposition or interruption from me. If I coifld 
be warranted against its being bloAvn down or struck by 
lightning, as a matter of choice, I think I should in a 
like case prefer a holloAV tree on the land to the staunch- 
est of Dibdin's "Hollow Oaks" on the Avater. But 
de gustibns non, and so forth. 
About 6 o'clock we spread our sails to the breeze and 
directed ' our little craft toward home. Two hours of 
delightful sailing landed us at the railroad dock, and so 
closed one of the pleasantest and successful days of the 
season. 
Sport in Samoa. 
The islands of the South Sea have never been heralded 
as a sportsman's paradise,- no matter how much they 
have been»lauded on other counts, greatly overrated it 
must be confessed by those who are acquainted with 
them. Some will tell you that the only thing to do with 
a gun in Samoa is to ship it away as promptly as pos- 
sible or else spend a large share of all available time in 
keeping the Aveapon in order. This too is an exagger- 
ated statement, although a gUn in the humid salt air 
of Samoa entails careful attention to ward off the raA'- 
ages of rust from lock and barrel; and even the other 
member of the honored triplet, the stock, may not en- 
tirely escape, for there are boring insects which are ca- 
pable of reducing it to a mere shell. 
Yet Avith all the disadvantages a gun can have some 
value in Samoa. The game is abundant, though of few 
varieties. There are indeed but four things worth shoot- 
ing — the pigeon, the wild duck, the Avild boar, and bush 
cattle. 
The pigeon is far the best bird Samoa has to offer 
to the gun. There are several of the columbidse in- 
digenous to the islands, and at all seasons of the year 
the jungle paths are vocal with their cooing. Most of 
this, however, is due to a pale blue dove known to the 
Samoans as manutagi, "the bird Avhich cries;" it is 
found everywhere from the woods at the shore line to 
the summits of the inland mountains, which rise as high 
as 5,oooft. It has no food value,, being very small and 
of thin flesh, Avithout any particular flavor; it is very 
commonly kept as a household pet by the Samoans, who 
are fond of listening to its cooing about their houses. 
Another pigeon is good eating, but is rare and very 
shy; it is of particular interest to the ornithologist as 
being the only living congener of the dodo, a fact Avhich 
is announced in its scientific name of Diduncuhcs strigi- 
rostris. The Samoans knoAV it as manumea, "the red 
bird," from the brilliant color of its bill, legs and feet. 
It attains almost the size of a hen, is a sluggish flyer, 
and is found almost always with its mate in the tops of 
*the tallest trees in deep gorges high up near the summits 
of the mountains. 
But the pigeon above all others is that which the Sa- 
moans call "lupe." Of the size of a spring chicken, it 
has a dark plumage of a rich metallic green, set off by 
several brilliant red feathers at the pinions. Its note 
is not at all dove-like, but sounds like the long roll of a 
muffled rattle, a sound very easily imitated by rolling 
the tongue in a strong exhalation of unvocalized breath, 
and commonly emploj'ed in tolling the bird. Although 
the birds abound, they are very rarely seen or heard by 
day except as the keen eye can discover them on the 
small branches at the tops of the trees, so closely snugged 
up against the leeward sides of the trunks as to appear 
to be knots or clusters of dead leaves. The time to 
get them is to be out in the bush when the day is about 
to break, and to use every moment of the brief twilight. 
I have keen recollections of pigeon shooting on the 
A'ery backbone of the island of Upolu. The chief Suatele 
has a house there, the only house to be found between 
the villages of the north shore about Apia and those 
of the south coast about Safata, the only house except 
the dangerous huts of the runaway black boys from the 
German plantations, who are known to have a camp 
somewhere in the mountains, and who are feared as 
cannibals generally are. After a sleep on the mats, and 
with thick covering — for even in the tropics the night 
air grows keen past midnight at 3,000ft. — the Samoans 
aAvaken us in what seems the dead of night. From 
every direction the forest rings with the note of the bird 
AA'hich sings just before day, the ma'oma'o, Avhose note 
is as melodiously sweet as the English nightingale, and 
a far more finished song. But the long roll of the 
pigeon is heard as well, and gives promise that the gun 
will find its game. As soon as the night takes on the 
first faint glow the pigeons are seen circling in great 
flocks overhead and out of range. Their OAAm note, imi- 
tated from the dark depths of the jungle, will bring them 
flapping down to get their share of the berries on which 
they feed, and Avhich they seem to prefer when the dew 
of night is on them. Right and left leave a hole in the 
flock, and then comes an immediate chance at them 
again, for at the shock of the discharge the flock almost 
invariably settles on the nearest trees, and the time of 
shooting- is all too short for one to despise a pot shot. 
Even that is not an utter certainty; the man Avho stands 
at the foot of a tree and draws a sure aim on the pigeon 
which he has seen to light on an upper branch need 
feel no surprise when he shoots with deadly and scat- 
tering effect a clump of dead leaves. Move on a little 
further under the dripping trees, carefiflly force the way 
through drenched herbs head high, walking in ground 
as sodden as a morass, and another flock may be tolled 
into AdeAV. The pigeon is a savory bird, and its fame 
has been spread to distant parts. Scarcely a single trip 
of the monthly mail steamers but carries a consignment 
of the birds in its cold storage to some epicure in Auck- 
land or Sydney, Honolulu or San Francisco. Minister 
Sewall, who was my first predecessor to hold the post 
of Consul-General at yVpia, has not forgotten the dainty 
game, and his monthly pigeon suppers at Waikiki are 
quite a feature of the gastronomic side of the Hawaiian 
capital. 
The pigeons were hunted long before the coming of 
guns. In their old savage days Samoan towns went into 
the jungle in a body to catch pigeons. Only one or 
tAvo old men yo-t remember hoAV it Avas done, and their 
accounts are hazy as to details. But it necessitated the 
building of great stone terraces; these are still to be 
found in many places, as though btiilt to last for all 
time. Each terrace was the hunting place; it had smaller 
terraces for the assistants scattered in diverging lines 
on the sides of the valley. Tame pigeons Avere used as 
decoys, and Avhole flocks were lured up the valley and 
to the great platform, where they Avere caught in scoop, 
nets as they swept by. , * 
The duck is very rare in Samba, prbbaDly because there 
are very few reedy estuaries such as it most affects in 
