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The Methye Portage is about twelve miles in extent, and over this space the canoes and all their cargoes are carried, both in going to and from the Athabasca department. It is part of the range of mountains which separates the waters flowing south from those flowing north.
We have seen perhaps a dozen such to-day, stopping at the farm landings as well as at the crude and infrequent hamlets, mere notches of settlement in the wooded lines of shore, doing a small business in chance cargoes and in passengers who flag them from the bank. A sultry atmosphere has been with us through the day.
On repeated occasions prizes taken by Dutch cruisers from the Spaniards, and making their way with small prize crews to the ports of the republic, were overhauled, visited, and seized by the English admiral, who brought the vessels into the harbours of his own country, liberated the crews, and handed ships and cargoes over to the Spanish ambassador.
This inconvenient transfer of cargoes was remedied by the next Egyptian sovereign, who bestowed much care on the water connection between the two seas. At the point where the canal joined the Heroopolite Gulf to the Red Sea, Ptolemy founded the town of Arsinoë, a little to the north of the modern Suez.
The chief incident in Annapolis I shall mention in another chapter. When it became known with us that several cargoes were on their way to the colonies, excitement and indignation gained a pitch not reached since the Stamp Act. Business came to a standstill, plantations lay idle, and gentry and farmers flocked to Annapolis, and held meetings and made resolutions anew.
The States-General were dissatisfied, all the Netherlanders were dissatisfied and not entirely without reason that the English, with whom the republic was on terms not only of friendship but of alliance, should burn their ships on the high seas, plunder their merchants, and torture their sea-captains in order to extort information as to the most precious portions of their cargoes.
Great as these adventitious advantages are, they have been further increased by British energy and enterprise. By means of ship-canals, formed to avoid the obstructions to navigation caused by the rapids of the St. Lawrence, Niagara, and the Sault Sainte Marie, small vessels can load at Liverpool and discharge their cargoes on the most distant shores of Lake Superior.
The sidewalks were now swept by women, and squads of Senegalese sharpshooters were unloading the cargoes, shivering with cold in the sunny winter days, and bent double as though dying under the rain or the breeze of the Mistral. They were working with red caps pulled down over their ears, and at the slightest suspension of their labor would hasten to put their hands in the pockets of their coats.
In return for this merchandise they obtain camphor, birds' nests, rattans, bêche de mer, pearls, and pearl-shells, coco, tortoise-shell, and wax; but there is no great quantity of these articles to be obtained, perhaps not more than two or three cargoes during the season.
So things continued for a thousand years, while the ships went up the river with wind and tide, and down the river with wind and tide, and were moored below the Bridge, and discharged their cargoes into lighters, which landed them on the quays of London Port, between the Tower and the Bridge.
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