In 1538 Simon de Champlain landed in Quebec City before it was Quebec City of course and in so doing became the first European visitor to Canada... that is if you ignore the Vikings. However it wasn't until 1608 that the first settlement was established... only a year before Bermuda's first settlement. The French had it first but that ended in 1759 as part of the Seven Years War which saw the British move in permanently. This city was the first seat of all government in Canada. Well the eastern part of Canada that is.
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| Meat pie and poutine. A fine staple! |
It is a lovely city. Well the old part is and that is the bit that we visited. We had a great time. It is a cool food city too. The local meat pie and poutine are a treat! The great and the good things that we found were in no particular order:
Chateau Frontenac
Plenty of places competed with this lovely hotel but to us if we wanted to visit, we just had to stay here. The back story is really insightful into the history of Canada too and bears repeating.
Dominion came in 1867 which brought virtual independence (although the Queen is still head of state) from the Mother country. Gone were the subsidies and monies that flowed from Britain. Canada had to stand on its own. This was one way.
One of the pre-conditions of dominion with British Columbia on the west coast (at this time there only 4 provinces -- Quebec, Ontario and Nova Scotia in the east and BC in the west) was the need to build a railway from east coast to west. Halifax to Vancouver. 4,000+ miles across prairie, mountains, etc. A number of railway companies came and went until Canadian Pacific showed up. Like now they had an American CEO and he was the guy that finally made it happen. However it was in one section, the most difficult, that it all very nearly came to a crashing halt. This was in the approaches to the Rocky Mountains. The trains were really swanky but as there were no tunnels through mountains back then, it was really difficult to manoeuvre the train around the mountains and through the various passes. Particularly the dining car which was the heaviest.
So the train would stop just before attempting this bit and decouple the dining car before making its way into the mountains. Back then this was a lengthy process and so the passengers would hop off the train and basically hang around or go for a walk. This was in a place called Banff Springs and it was here that the lightbulb went off for the CP CEO who said that this place (Banff) would be one great place to build a hotel so passengers could spend some time in comfort whilst waiting for the final bit of the journey to Vancouver.
That was the first hotel of the chain that would link the railway line end to end. The Chateau Frontenac was the second. Each hotel was built in the style of the locale and remain amazing monuments to this day.
Plains of Abraham
Moving over the obvious reasons why the French aren't as appreciative of this than the British (i.e. they lost here) the plains are just a great city park. Abraham was the bloke that used to keep his cattle here way back when and that in itself is just one great reason why it should be called that! Who wouldn't want a lovely park named after them? Central Park.... really!
City Walls
Quebec City is the only town in North America that is still completely walled. Now if that doesn't deserve a mention on its own, I don't know what does.
La Citadelle
Dating from the same time as the fortifications in Bermuda (Fort St. Catherine, Paget Island, Dockyard), the citadel was built 1820-50 as defence against US invasion. A real prospect as the city had been occupied before (like Montreal and like in Montreal the Americans left because the weather was too cold), the British built this huge defence adjoining the city walls on THE most strategic height in the city. We did a tour there after... wait for it... after watching the daily changing of the guard ceremony.
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| View from the Citadel and the city walls controlling the St. Lawrence waterway |
Lovely to see in itself, but this is the only regiment (Royal 22nd Regiment) and the only place that does this where all orders are given only in... French. I've seen this before in England and the ceremony is pretty similar with the soldiers all dressed in the same red uniforms and bearskins, but that was in English. So really nice to see this and I really do hope this is a tradition that endures. So many don't these days.
French
Quebec is far more French than Montreal. This didn't used to be the case but gradually the Anglos left for Montreal and Toronto particularly during the 1960-1970 period when the independence movement was at its height. Today less than 2% of the population's first language is English. Someone told me the number of people speaking Arabic as their first language is nearly 5%!
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| Charcuterie française |
Anyway we were able to practice our lamentable schooldays French but unlike France in the old days, we found that people were very happy to help you out in English!
Why Canada?
One of the most fascinating things was during a trip to the Montmorency Falls just outside the city. Picturesque and a nice place to hike, but it was so much more than this. In the old days people would go logging up river and drive the logs along the river to lumber mills at the foot of the falls.
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| La Chutte Montmorency |
But why would it be that Canada was so important for lumber at a time when let's face it, Canada was a place miles away, next to a noisy and antagonistic neighbour and which other than the maritimes didn't do very much for the mother country?
Well it was all about Napoleon Bonaparte as so much of French/British history is. Blame Boney or in this case thank Boney.
Britain had been at war pretty much continuously with France from 1792 through to 1815. First was the revolutionary period which was a bit of a shambles for everyone but once Boney had taken control of things, he created the process that governed how the war would be fought with Britain and it was called the Continental System. This closed all European ports to British ships and for a maritime nation reliant on overseas trade, this was a disaster.
If you look at it from the French side, this was fair enough for British contributions to the war were mainly naval except for the Iberian expeditions. They had blockaded the European ports first... a point that the US particularly disliked as that meant the Royal Navy would frequently stop, search and in many cases seize US ships bound for European ports and was a cause of the 1812-14 war. But from a British perspective, this was an outrage and a major problem for it meant that they could not obtain amongst other things lumber from Scandinavia to build ships.
Hence Canada and indeed Quebec for the new world at that point was almost entirely covered with rivers, lakes and .... trees. Lots of trees.
So thank you Boney.
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Don't you just love the why's?
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