An Atlantic Port

Half the fleet arrives empty.

Most vessels in this record declare no cargo at all. They come in ballast — weighted with sand and stone — and they come for timber. Preferential duties have made the St Lawrence Britain’s timber yard, and a ship that sails east loaded with squared pine has nothing to carry on the way west.

Nothing, that is, except people.

“Above all, it is by means of the lumber vessels going out in ballast, that a ‘CHEAP BRIDGE’ is made for the passage of Emigrants.” Nathaniel Gould, London timber importer, 1833

Gould was arguing for the timber tariffs, but he knew the trade: he and his partner William Price carried at least twenty-six thousand emigrants in their own returning ships.

The record ends at the quay.

The newspapers logged each vessel as it reached Quebec, and then stopped. But almost nobody stayed at the waterfront. They went up the St Lawrence to Montreal, and many carried on up a second river — the Kichi Zībī, the Ottawa — following the timber roads inland.

That country was not empty, and it had not been surrendered.

The valley was never empty, and it was never sold.

Settler colonialism requires settlers, and for two decades the returning timber fleet delivered them — a cheap bridge from the ports of Britain and Ireland to the head of an unceded river. The farms it seeded endure. So does the Algonquin nation’s claim.

“The Algonquin Nation was never a newcomer to its territory.” Greg Sarazin, Algonquins of Pikwakanagan First Nation, 1989

Canada, Ontario and the Algonquins of Ontario are today in the final stages of negotiating a modern treaty.