ders were still sending in supplies from Montreal and
bringing back peltry from Fort William in flotillas of great bark
canoes. For shorter voyages the canoe gave place to the larger and
clumsier bateau, the characteristic eighteenth-century conveyance.
After the War of 1812 {15} the increasingly heavy downward freight of
grain and potash led to the introduction from the United States of the
still larger Durham boats. Along the coast and on the Great Lakes the
sailing schooner long filled a notable place. Finally the steamboat
came. In 1809, only one year after the _Clermont_ had begun its
regular trips on the Hudson, and before any steamboat plied in British
home waters, John Molson of Montreal with John Bruce and John
Jackson--luckily for Canada not all three baptized 'Algernon'--built at
Montreal the 40-ton steamer _Accommodation_. Seven years later Upper
Canada's first steamboat was launched, the 740-ton _Frontenac_, built
at the then thriving village of Ernestown. The fleet of river and lake
steamers multiplied rapidly. The speed and certainty and
comfort--relative, at least--of the steamboat at once gave a forceful
impetus to settlement and to travel, and for some sections ended the
pioneer period.

Meanwhile, the waterways were being improved. Little was needed or
done in the great network of New Brunswick's rivers or in Nova Scotia's
shorter streams, but on the St Lawrence system, with a fall of nearly
six hundred feet from Lake Erie to tide-water at {16} Three Rivers,
canal construction was imperative. As early as 1779 canals were built
round the rapids between Lake St Louis and Lake St Francis, on the St
Lawrence, with a depth of only a foot and a half of water on the sills.
Far westward, at Sault Ste Marie, the energetic North-West Company
built, about 1800, a canal half a mile long. In the early twenties,
after the failure of a private company, the province of Lower Canada
constructed a boat canal between Montreal and Lachine, and a less
successful beginning was made on a canal round the Chambly rapids on
the Richelieu. In Upper Canada the British government built the Rideau
Canal, chiefly for military purposes. The Welland Canal was begun by a
private company in 1824, opened for small boats five years later, and
taken over by the province in 1840, after a record notable alike for
energy and perseverance and for jobbery and inefficiency. After the
Union of 1841, when population, revenue, and cre