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Thus, Martin Frobisher ventured into the Western Hemisphere off Baffin Island in the 1570s. Pierre Espirit Radisson, who traded north of Lake Superior a century later, wrote: We weare Cesars, being nobody to contradict us. We went away free from any burden, whilst those poore miserable thought themselves happy to carry our Equipage, for the hope that they had we should give them a brasse ring or an awle or an needle. The "poore miserable" were the native people. " Simon Fraser, who voyaged on the river that would one day bear his name, wrote in 1808: It being absolutely impossible to carry the canoes by land, yet sooner than to abandon them, all hands without hesitation embarked, as it were a corps perdu upon the mercy of the Stygian tide.

Pratt's popularity and reputation derive from a series of narrative poems, a few of which have epic dimension. The Titanic (1935) portrays in relentless detail all the ironies evident in the circumstances surrounding the death of that "unsinkable" ship. There, too, one finds Pratt's profound fascination with the seas, with nature, with humility overwhelmed by its arrogance. At the end: Five minutes more, the angle had increased From eighty on to ninety when the rows Of deck and port-hole lights went out, flashed back A brilliant second and again went black.

The quiet towns of Elgin and Mariposa or Brantford and Orillia, along with hundreds of other hamlets, villages, towns, and cities, would shortly lose over sixty thousand men in battle in the Old World. Between the Wars Like all the nations who went to the Great War, Canada emerged transformed. Counted among the victors, acclaimed for the prowess of its military forces that, Page 18 coming from a country with a modest experience of militarism prior to 1914, proved to be exceptional, Canada had confirmed its place among the nations of the world.