1 ,000 Miles from the Sea

One morning last week two ships weighed anchor at Three Rivers, where they had been fogbound, and raced up the St. Lawrence River. A few hours later, flying Canadian Pacific's red & white checkered flag, the black-hulled, 10,000-ton cargo liner S.S. Beaverburn steamed into Montreal harbor and tied up at Shed 8. Her skipper, John Bissett Smith, had brought in the first ocean-going ship of the season, and thus officially opened Montreal harbor for 1947 business. For some 125 years, the master of the spring's first overseas ship has been given a gold-headed cane. Skipper Smith got his.

"Too many Montrealers are likely to forget that they too are a maritime people no less than those whose homes gird the salt seas," said the Montreal Gazette last week. A thousand miles from the sea, Montreal is at the end of Canada's ocean navigation, and at the portal of 1,200 miles of inland waters. From December to April the port is ice-locked. Yet it handles a third of Canada's commerce, exports more grain than any other port on the North American continent. It is closer to Liverpool than any U.S. seaport, is the nearest ocean port of any size to central Canada and to the U.S. Midwest. "If it were not for the barrier of ice," wrote Stephen Leacock, "Montreal might easily be the greatest port in all the world." In 7 1/2 ice-free months Montrealers do their best.

Dockers & Docks. Last year, in the harbor's transit sheds (over 2,000,000 square feet) and grain elevators (15-million-bushel capacity), Montrealers handled nearly a billion tons of cargo. More than 6,000 ships (some 1,600 of them oceangoing) passed through the port's 100 miles of dredged (32 1/2 feet minimum) channel and tied up at its ten miles of berths. A third of the city's 1,000,000-plus population makes a living from the port.

In the grey and grimy harbor district, which looks like any Clydeside port, the dingy shops of ship's chandlers, fish & oyster packers and sailmakers line the narrow streets; old-country signs such as "Gourock Rope and Canvas, Ltd." dot ancient, weatherbeaten buildings. Marking the inner harbor entrance at the foot of Victoria Pier, a yellow-bricked sailors' memorial towers above the waterfront. Half a block away is the old Neptune Tavern (known from Singapore to the Cape of Good Hope for its "strong ale and pea soup"); nearby are other noted grog shops such as Joe Beef's and Liverpool House. Just around the corner there is a sailor's club where last season an average of 300 sailors a night were quartered.

Now, with the docking of the Beaver-burn and the ships that followed her, the waterfront echoes once more to longshoremen's shouts, the clatter & clank of cargo winches unloading woolens, steel, chemicals, motorcycles, automobiles, china and plate glass from across the sea. The ships take back Canadian goods. Last week one ship loaded on 1,071 cases of Canadian whiskey for Britain. "That's for us poor blokes," sighed a bosun. "They're sending the Scotch over here."

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