CANADIAN MUSEUM OF CIVILIZATIONS

For our first outing in Ottawa we selected a visit to the Museum of Civilizations in the Gatineau, Quebec side of the Ottawa river. Here is a map showing where Ottawa is.
While riding the excellent bus system from the campground to Ottawa, a nice Canadian lady saw these two obvious tourists and started asking us where we were going. It turns out she was also going to the museum. Here she is talking to Teri in front of the museum.

This is the entrance to the spectacular building for the museum. It almost looks like the face of a crouching dragon or Maya deity. People enter at the mouth.The lobby was full of people. Here is the box office with a canoe of the type used by the early French explorers of the St. Lawrence and the Great lakes like Marquette.

Here is Nicolas with Teri. Nicolas was our private guide to the Canadian exhibit that we are covering in this post. He is a French-Canadian. He speaks English, French, and enough Spanish to live in Cuba for nearly half a year. In the early 90's he was a Canadian exchange student to Cuba, and was assigned to live with a Cuban family in Sagua la Grande. That is a town in the middle of the island almost directly south of Miami. He made a lot of good Cuban friends. He says he has Cuban friends in almost every province. He has traveled to Cuba four times after that to visit friends and to be best man at a wedding.

This is the dome ceiling painting by a Canadian first-nation (that is how indians are called here in Canada) artist.

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Around A.D. 1000, the medieval Norse (Vikings) established the first European settlement, on the northern coast of Newfoundland, but they only stayed for a brief period.
At the end of the ninth century, a gradual migration began across the North Atlantic. Several hundred families left the Norwegian coast aboard knorrs -- rugged cargo vessels three times larger than the coasters then used in the North Sea -- to settle in Iceland. A century later, Eric the Red led their descendants to Greenland and a few of them followed his son, Leif the Lucky, as far as North America.

The first exhibit in the Canada Hall depicts a Norse family unloading tools and supplies from a small boat, known as a faering, upon their arrival in Newfoundland.

A handful of Norse artifacts scattered across the islands of the High Arctic and the remains of a settlement at L'Anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland, shows that the Norse were present in North America 500 years before Christopher Columbus arrived in 1492.

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Less than 50 years after Columbus arrived in the Americas, Basques became the first American oilmen by sailing the 2000 mile, four week crossing, of the open North Atlantic to the coast of Labrador and Newfoundland.

The Basques from northern Spain and southwestern France were the most active whalers in the early 1500's. They established a dozen whaling stations on the southern coast of Labrador, along the Strait of Belle Isle at the tip of the arrow in the map above.Here is a reproduction of the interior of one of the Basque ships. The barrels were filled with whale oil worth $5000 each in today's dollars. The annual expeditions were incredibly risky, not only because of the long open ocean crossings and the close-quarter whale hunt in flimsy chalupas, but also because of vitamin C deficiency that would kill sailors regularly. Here is Joanes Echaniz, a Basque sailor, dictating his last will and testament.

Upon their arrival in the spring, the crews repaired the whaling stations that had been damaged by winter storms. The search for whales began by watching from shore. The Atlantic right whales and bowhead whales were slow-moving and easy to see on the ocean's surface. These whales were prefered because they floated when killed, which greatly facilitated the task of towing them back to shore.

Notice the large copper vats on the fire pits and the huge chunks of whale blubber waiting to be rendered.

The largest of the Basque whaling stations was situated at Red Bay, where, in 1978, underwater archaeologists discovered three sunken sixteenth-century Basque galleons.

This actor was playing the role of a Basque whaler at a whaling station where they rendered the fat from large slices of whale blubber.

Here is more about the Basque whaling sites in the Labrador and Newfoundland:

http://www.labradorstraits.net/home/19

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In the Atlantic region, French settlements were centred mainly in the salt-marsh lowlands around the Bay of Fundy, known as Acadia. The Bay of Fundy has some of the highest tides in the world.

Settlers originally came to work at the fur-trade but they later turned to farming. For a brief period, Acadia was lost to the English, but by the 1630s, it was established as a French colony to counterbalance the British presence in New England. Many of the French colonists came from western France, a region that is environmentally similar to Acadia.

The model below shows their application of dike making, a technique that had been used successfully to reclaim salt marshes in Holland and France, was equally effective in Acadia.

They dug channels in the rich marsh and a dyke close to shore. The channels drained under the dyke to the bay through culverts containing a valve each. Initially the soil in the marsh was too wet and salty to cultivate, but they desalted and drained the area by taking advantage of the tides. At the end of each low tide they closed the valve to prevent salt water from entering the drainage channels. At the same time, fresh water filled the channel until the tide went back down to near low tide. At that point they opened the valve to expel the fresh water carrying soil saltiness out to sea. They also dried grasses grown on the saltier parts of the soil to feed to milking cows. Because the cows had a higher salt diet, they drank more water and produced more milk.

The French community operated this system on a cooperative basis and the land was owned and farmed by the community. When the English expelled the Acadians to the bayous of Louisiana they had a private property philosophy and did not know how to operate the system. These lands reverted back to salt marshes at that point.

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One of the most original and fun parts of this museum is the actors in historic costumes and speech. This actress was kidding with us and was doing a great job. She told us she was preparing spruce beer. This beer was the American Indian secret learned by the Europeans to avoid scurvy. Until they learned how to brew it they died in large numbers from this vitamin C deficiency disease.

The eighteenth-century inn located at one end of the Place de la Nouvelle-France was a popular meeting place for travelers and local men. Its modest size meant that guests could take a mattress and a blanket and sleep on the floor in front of the hearth. Food was cooked over the fireplace, and the selection of alcoholic beverages included wine, cider, eau de vie, rum, and locally brewed spruce beer.

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As French pelt hunters were integrated into Cree and Ojibwa communities in the Upper Great Lakes region between 1700 and 1860, the population became increasingly racially mixed. A similar situation developed to the north, around Hudson Bay, as children were born from relationships between Irish or Scottish traders and Cree women. In the late eighteenth century, these people were moved into the western and northern interior of the country, giving rise to the Metis nation. They adopted elements from both sides of their heritage to become a distinct culture.

They wore bison leather garments, but with western clothing form; played the violin, and hunted with rifles on horseback instead of driving bison off cliffs or into enclosures. They utilized every part of the animal. Below is a wagon built without iron fixtures. All parts were fastened using bison tendon.

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This is the drawing room of a merchant's house in Southern Ontario in 1885. The custom of the elites in those days was to refer to themselves as upper middle class, although in reality they were far and away the wealthy elite. The entertaining of guests at afternoon teas and dinner parties was of vital importance to a family's image. This was done in the drawing room and formal dining rooms.

Upper-middle-class households typically had two servants, who cooked the meals, waited on table and performed most household chores, including endless polishing of silver.

If you look carefully in front of the desk you see a gas hose to the gas lamp above the desk. This was the study of the house.

This is the exterior of the house. The exhibit is so realistic that you do not notice the artificial sky, and to you it appears as a regular street dimly lit wit gas lamps at dusk.