This Might Be A Cause Of War With, England, But It Is Not The Most
Serious Grievance Here.
The possession by the British of the island
of Campobello is an insufferable menace and impertinence.
I write
with the full knowledge of what war is. We ought to instantly
dislodge the British from Campobello. It entirely shuts up and
commands our harbor, one of our chief Eastern harbors and war
stations, where we keep a flag and cannon and some soldiers, and
where the customs officers look out for smuggling. There is no way
to get into our own harbor, except in favorable conditions of the
tide, without begging the courtesy of a passage through British
waters. Why is England permitted to stretch along down our coast in
this straggling and inquisitive manner? She might almost as well own
Long Island. It was impossible to prevent our cheeks mantling with
shame as we thought of this, and saw ourselves, free American
citizens, land-locked by alien soil in our own harbor.
We ought to have war, if war is necessary to possess Campobello and
Deer Islands; or else we ought to give the British Eastport. I am
not sure but the latter would be the better course.
With this war spirit in our hearts, we sailed away into the British
waters of the Bay of Fundy, but keeping all the morning so close to
the New Brunswick shore that we could see there was nothing on it;
that is, nothing that would make one wish to land. And yet the best
part of going to sea is keeping close to the shore, however tame it
may be, if the weather is pleasant. A pretty bay now and then, a
rocky cove with scant foliage, a lighthouse, a rude cabin, a level
land, monotonous and without noble forests, - this was New Brunswick
as we coasted along it under the most favorable circumstances. But
we were advancing into the Bay of Fundy; and my comrade, who had been
brought up on its high tides in the district school, was on the
lookout for this phenomenon. The very name of Fundy is stimulating
to the imagination, amid the geographical wastes of youth, and the
young fancy reaches out to its tides with an enthusiasm that is given
only to Fingal's Cave and other pictorial wonders of the text-book.
I am sure the district schools would become what they are not now, if
the geographers would make the other parts of the globe as attractive
as the sonorous Bay of Fundy. The recitation about that is always an
easy one; there is a lusty pleasure in the mere shouting out of the
name, as if the speaking it were an innocent sort of swearing. From
the Bay of Fundy the rivers run uphill half the time, and the tides
are from forty to ninety feet high. For myself, I confess that, in
my imagination, I used to see the tides of this bay go stalking into
the land like gigantic waterspouts; or, when I was better instructed,
I could see them advancing on the coast like a solid wall of masonry
eighty feet high.
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