Preface

To the odd colonial, stirred by the sight of sail, the first puffing, shuddering paddlewheelers might have seemed "the ugliest species of craft that ever diversified a marine landscape." 1 So they might seem today to all but steamboat buffs.Ugly or not, to most Canadians of the early nineteenth century, they were welcome allies in the struggle with the elements and with the hardships, economic and social, of isolation.Besides their appeal simply as something ingenious and new, they promised evergreater reliability and speed in transport and communications at a time when transport and communications were nearly synonymous: before the telegraph, telephone, or radio, any message addressed to a distant recipient had to be taken by land or water to its destination.This is one sort of connection covered by the title of this work.The word "connections" was deliberately chosen for its ambiguity: it refers, of course, to the connections between different boats along a watercourse, but also to the connections between a succession of boats over time, between steamers and stages, between villages and cities served by the boats, between the owners and the makers of boats, between these people and the communities and times they lived in and the businesses and institutions they helped to establish, between the Canadas and the northeastern United States, and so on.In fact, the title is an open invitation to readers so inclined to make their own connections and associations.The aim of this book is a simple one: to trace the beginnings of steam navigation on the upper St Lawrence and lower Ottawa rivers.It is not an analysis of that traffic; nor is it a thesis or treatise on transport economics, shipbuilding, steam technology, early canals, or colonial trade.It is a narrative account, arranged chronologically and spanning slightly more than a quarter-century -from 1816, three years before the first steamer appeared on Lake St Louis, where the two rivers meet west of Montreal, to 1843, two years after steam vessels began to run in a triangular "circuit"x Preface from Montreal, up the Ottawa River and Rideau Canal to Lake Ontario, and down again by the St Lawrence.Anyone acquainted with the origins of inland steam navigation in Canada may wonder about that reference to 1816 in connection with Lake St Louis -why not speak of it as the year of the building of the first Canadian steamboat on Lake Ontario, or as two years before regular steamer service began at the head of the St Lawrence between Prescott and Kingston, or as five years before the appearance, however fleeting, of the first steamboat on the Ottawa?That, of course, is a question of perspective, focus, and emphasis -bias, some hard-nosed reader might say, to which one might reply that there is no history without a vantage point.This account is written from a Montreal perspective, which means, among other things, that the first steamers to run above Prescott are viewed more as extensions of Lake Ontario navigation and touched on only briefly.But the view is definitely to the west, not eastward along the St Lawrence toward Quebec, where the very first Canadian steamboats plied.That is another story, as is steam on the Great Lakes.Our concern is with the area between Montreal, a hub of transportation, and the lakes.But why this area in particular, and why steamboats?To be blunt, this book had its origins in baffled curiosity, not in any fascination with marine history, love of old boats, or interest in colonial entrepreneurship.It began as a search for information about one steamer, the Henry Brougham, captured and sunk by rebels at Beauharnois on Lake St Louis in the Lower Canadian rebellion of November 1838.Most accounts of the rising mention this episode but provide few, if any, details about the Brougham, its crew and passengers, who were held captive, its owners, its purpose, or its ultimate fate.Neither do published works offer much help in situating this boat in the chronology of steam above Montreal.In my search for answers to these questions, it became clear that the Brougham was part of a chapter in the history of Canadian transportation that was perhaps known in its broad outlines but was nowhere set out in clear and accurate detail.Willy-nilly, what had started out as an investigation of an episode of local history, worth perhaps an article in a historical journal, broadened in scope to become this book.But where should it begin?No one disputes the fact that the first Canadian steamer was launched at Montreal in 1809 (though within living memory of the event, two Montreal newspapers stated the year to have been 1811).2 That boat, the Accommodation, ran between Montreal and Quebec.As concerns the first steamer to ply immediately above Montreal and the Lachine Rapids, however, historians and other writers, generally focusing on the Ottawa, have proffered a variety of names and dates.It is as though the answer were not ascertainable in fact, but to be

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