New Brunswick Water and Geography - International Institute

Geography and Water
Living in the twenty-first century, it is often difficult to realize just how much our ancestors lives were affected by the geography of where they settled. In 18th and much of 19th century New Brunswick, water, salt and fresh, was not only the easy way to travel, but played an important role in an economy based on fishing, lumbering, shipping and ship-building. Today it supports tourism with a wide range of attractions and water-based activities.

Wet Borders
New Brunswick is bordered on the north by the Province of Québec, and almost half of that border is the Restigouche River. To the east you find the Gulf of St. Lawrence and Northumberland Strait, separating it from “The Island” (Prince Edward Island to “Upper Canadians”). To the south, the Musquash River and a land border totalling some 35 miles separates New Brunswick from Nova Scotia and the Bay of Fundy provides the rest. The Saint Croix River runs into the mouth of Fundy and it forms part of the western border with the State of Maine as does the northernmost part of the Saint John River.

If you look at a map, however, it is obvious that Nova Scotia forms a very effective barrier to ships sailing between the Gulf of St. Lawrence or Northumberland Strait and the Bay of Fundy. Canals across the Chignecto Isthmus were proposed throughout the 19th century, and the Chignecto Ship Railway is a curious tale of unfinished dreams, but until the railways were built, the east coast settlements did not have much contact with those in the western part fronting on Fundy, except by long river routes through the central forests or later, over primitive roads.

Water Highways
Within the province there are three major rivers: the Mirimichi, the Petitcodiac, and the Saint John. These rivers were the early roads and highways. The creeks are the side roads. In New Brunswick, rivers are wide, creeks are smaller. When we moved to Toronto, my father laughed at Toronto’s Humber and Don Rivers, saying they were creeks, not proper rivers. The Mirimichi flows into the Gulf of St. Lawrence from the middle of the province and its many tributaries drain a large central forested area. The soil is not great for agriculture, providing subsistence farms at best. Early economic activity centred around the timber trade and the salmon fishery, and log booms and log drives were part of river life well into the 20th century.

The Petitcodiac is 7-shaped, and runs into the east end of the Bay of Fundy at Shepody Bay where the high tides cause the famous, and dangerous, tidal bore that rolls up the river and round “The Bend” at Moncton. The land in the river valley, and that of the adjoining Memramcook valley, is good and together with the rich marshlands of the Chignecto Isthmus made Westmorland and Albert Counties a major agricultural centre for the east of the province.

The Aboriginal inhabitants had a route up the Petitcodiac, with a portage to the Kennebecasis River that flows into the Saint John. The Saint John River is 399 miles in length and, once you get into it, is navigable:


 * “for vessels of 120 tons to Fredericton, 80 miles from the Bay of Fundy; small steamers ascend to Woodstock, 75 miles further up, and occasionally to the Grand falls. Above the falls it is navigable for small steamers to the mouth of the Madawaska … The Valley of the St. John is noted for its fertility as well as for its picturesque beauty.” 

Travel up the river to the Madawaska, then to Lake Temiscouata, at the far end of which “a portage of eighteen leagues” brings a traveler to the Saint Lawrence River at Rivière du Loup. This river-route to Québec was an important military highway, but dangerously close to the disputed border with the United States.

From the Nashwaak river which flows into the Saint John near Fredericton, it is an easy portage to the Mirimichi river system. However, between Fredericton and the Kennebecasis near the mouth of the river, any map will show how Belleisle Bay, Washademoke Lake and Grand Lake reach watery fingers to the east, opening large areas to settlement, but with no easy link to the eastern coast.

Two Coasts
The sheltered waters of Northumberland Strait are warm, and fog is rarely a problem, though squalls can blow up without warning. The land along the Gulf and Strait is low, with many creeks and small rivers, flowing into shallow bays with many shifting sand bars. These small but protected harbours are still used by inshore (lobster) fishermen, and during prohibition, were popular with local bootleggers (rum runners). Indeed, the “geography was ideal and the rum lords made New Brunswick the smugglers’ capital of North America.”

For larger shipping, there are harbours at Campbellton and Dalhousie on Chaleur Bay (Baie des Chaleurs), Bathurst on Nipisiguit Bay. The Mirimichi flows into a wide Bay and sailing ships could carry their cargos upriver to Chatham, or Newcastle, or Douglastown or wherever there was a dock. Rival communities grew up and only in the 1990s were they amalgamated into Mirimichi City.

Shediac Bay offers a large, sheltered harbour, so free of fog that for a couple of years it was the terminal for the early trans-Atlantic clipper flights. On this bay, Shediac and adjoining Pointe-du-Chêne, were where the ferry services from Prince Edward Island once docked, and the railway terminated at a large wharf. This coast had numerous sea links to Prince Edward Island, Eastern Nova Scotia and northern Cape Breton as well as Québec City in the summer when that port was open.

From Shediac, overland roads led to “The Bend,” Dorchester and Sackville, ports with access to Shepody Bay at the end of the cold and foggy Bay of Fundy. Here again we find several rival towns where ships could load or unload cargo, and where ships were built.

On the Fundy coast, Saint John has a fine harbour, but unlike the Mirimichi ports or those around Shepody Bay, the Reversing Falls at Saint John limited wind-powered vessel from moving easily up into the river.

To the west are many smaller bays and harbours, but to the east there are cliffs and rocks between St. Martins (Quaco) and Hillsborough. Some of the highest tides in the world make the Fundy shore dangerous for small craft. People along this coast have links to Nova Scotia (Truro, Windsor, Digby, etc.) and down the coast of New England. Charlotte County, in particular, has many connections to the State of Maine, across the St. Croix River and around Passamaquoddy Bay.

Tides
For inlanders who have never lived beside the ocean, the importance of tides may not be obvious. Ocean tides are caused by the moon, not the sun, and they come in and go out twice a day, but at a different time each day. They are highest at the spring and fall equinoxes, and at full moons. Tidetables are published in every newspaper, but tidetables are location specific. The Bay of Fundy and Northumberland Strait have quite different tide schedules.

As children growing up at a summer cottage on Shediac Bay, tides governed what we did and when. “Tide’s in!” meant we could swim in front of the cottage a few feet out from the cliff. “Tide’s way out!” meant wide stretches of sand bars where we could race, build castles or dig for clams. We did not realize that in going to live at “the shore” in the summer, eating our fill of lobsters and digging for clams, our family was following a pattern that had been established by Aboriginal tribes long before the first Europeans arrived.

When the tide was on the turn, neither in nor out, we could play Mounties and rum-runners back in the woods, or go off to the “bite-oh.” That is how we pronounced it, but it was a corruption of the Acadian word aboiteau. At the end of our beach, between two farms, a brook ran down to the ocean, and where it made its course through the sand bars, the Acadian farmers had built a large sluice (aboiteau) sinking posts into the ground on either bank, using planks to wall in both sides and forcing the fresh water to run in a straight channel to the sea. A ladder up, a plank across, and another ladder down let us cross the brook’s mouth without getting wet. Once there had been a hinged flap, sort of like a cat-door, that would let the fresh water flow through to the sea, but when the tide came in, the incoming water would close the gate and prevent the salt water from flowing into the brook, and so into the pond where the farmer cut ice in the winter. Again, we did not realize we were playing on history. This was a technique Acadians had brought from Europe and adapted to the low marshlands around the Bay of Fundy, to use and control the tides.

Tides also matter to sailors, and many Maritimers were, and still are, sailors. In the days of wooden ships, shipbuilders watched for the equinoxes and the high tides that filled the creeks and let them safely launch their vessels. But tides cause curious effects.

At Moncton, the Petitcodiac River goes from low to high tide in the few minutes it takes a tourist attraction, the Tidal Bore, to move up the river. That little brown wave did not impress me as a child; what did was the way the narrow stream of water with the wide red mud flats on each side, flats where vessels nestled in the clay, well below the wooden wharves, suddenly became a wide sweep of river, with ships and boats floating level with their docks. Ships could sail up and down the river again, but only for a few hours.

At the mouth of the St. John River, the Reversing Falls effectively keep out boats except for two limited periods a day. Where the “falls” are situated, the river is only 350 feet wide with limestone banks nearly 100 feet high, a sort of natural aboiteau. The bed of the river is sharp, rocky ledges, and at low tide, water from the river flows downward, over these in a turbulent “falls,” but as the tide rises and in the harbour tides can reach thirty feet it meets the river’s flow, overcomes it, and salt water rushes upriver, reversing the “falls” and becoming a tourist attraction. The mid-point between high and low tide is the only time a vessel can move safely through the Reversing Falls and so in or out of the river.

Marshlands
In northern Europe, in the late Middle Ages, what we now might call hydraulic engineers were brought from the Low Countries to north-western France to show the residents how to dyke, drain and otherwise control the tidal estuaries north of La Rochelle. Some early settlers in Acadia came from this region of France and they adapted the techniques of dykes (digue), ditches, and sluices (aboiteau) to the marshlands they found around the Bay of Fundy.

Marsh hay remained an important crop in Chignecto well into the 20th century, so every farmer wanted some marshland, even if it was not adjacent to his other holdings. Thus, you will find in early land records that the patterns of sometimes scattered land holding are not the same as in Québec or Ontario.