A letter from the Ottawa River, by Charles Ainsley
An original letter written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.
In this letter, written in 1858, a young Englishman who has taken a post as a clerk with a fur-trading company describes his journey by canoe along the Ottawa River in Canada.
My dear Mother, I am arrived safe at the post, and I hasten to tell you so before you hear any rumour to the contrary, for I find that news in this country travels by canoe and grows larger at every portage. We travelled along the river in a great birch-bark canoe thirty-six feet long, with eight men to paddle her and myself, a box of tea and two bales of blankets to be carried by them. I had supposed that I should be of some use. I was not.
The men are mostly French Canadians, with two Mohawk men from a village near Montreal who steer, one in the bow and one in the stern. They paddle from four in the morning until dark, forty or fifty strokes to the minute, and they sing as they go, one man calling a line and the rest answering, so that the paddles keep time with the song. I tried to count the strokes in a single day and gave up before breakfast. They stop every hour or so for a pipe, and they measure distance not in miles but in pipes: ‘three pipes to the next falls’.
Where the river is too wild for any boat we go ashore and carry everything round. This is called a portage. Two men lift the canoe upon their shoulders and trot away with it into the forest like a beetle with a boat for a back. The others take loads of ninety pounds each, sometimes two, slung from a strap across the forehead, and go at a jog over rocks and fallen trees where I could scarcely walk with my hands in my pockets. On the second day I offered to carry the tea. The bowman, a grave man named Joseph, looked at me for some time and then gave me the kettle.
Some rapids they do not carry round but run. I shall not forget the first. The steersmen stood up, the singing stopped, and we went down a slope of white water so fast that the rocks on either side became a grey smear. Joseph read the river ahead as you would read a page, calling a single word now and then, and the canoe slid past a boulder close enough for me to have touched it. Then we were in the still water below and the men were laughing and lighting their pipes as if they had crossed a street. My knees did not stop shaking for an hour.
I have learned more in twelve days than in three years at Mr Fothergill’s school, chiefly how little I know. Tell Edward that he may keep his cricket. I mean to be able to carry a load across a portage before the summer is out, even if it is only the kettle. Your loving son, Charles
“The writer presents the canoe men, rather than himself, as the heroes of the journey.”
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120 exam-style questions on Eduqas GCSE English Language 2.1.1 Two unseen non-fiction texts, 19th and 21st century. Each one has a worked solution and a mark scheme showing where the marks go.