Time Lord: Sir Sandford Fleming and the Creation of Standard Time

by Clark Blaise

  No, there followed no promise of sponsorship to Canada, a job, or a college scholarship for wee Robert Gordon. There is simple (“manly,” as Thoreau might have put it) recognition of a lad, much like himself, whose pride and genius for hard work, for responsibility, for individualism, recommended him to the future, another spiritual son of the patron saint of all self-made entrepreneurs, all young men of pluck, industry, native intelligence, and cultivated good luck, Benjamin Franklin.

  FOR THE FIRST TIME in his adult life he was back in Britain, and for the very first time in London. It’s hard to think of Fleming as a provincial, this man who would eventually hold the whole world in his gaze, linking it by time and by cable—but he was just that, and the effect on him must have been unsettling. London was the imperial capital, the center of the world. For twenty years, while England and the United States had been undergoing their very different political and industrial revolutions, Canada had been isolated, intellectually incubated, lacking dynamism, lacking a culture of its own. Fleming’s avid interest in London, at the age of thirty-six, is more like a schoolboy’s first encounter. He walked fifteen miles his first day, and kept up his journal to his children:

  It would be impossible for me to describe here the richness of the architecture of the buildings or all that is seen in passing through the streets of London; it is perfectly bewildering to attempt to notice everything and it would be endless writing to record all that comes before the eyes or the impressions found on the mind, everything is on a magnificent scale, distances, wealth, pomp, poverty and crime are all here developed to a greater extent than perhaps in any other portion of the world … we saw on all sides an ocean of buildings, disappearing in the smoky distance with scarcely anything for the eye to rest upon but chimney tops and church spires, to the east, the Town, and to the west [sic], St Paul’s Cathedral.

  And what must it have been like for a boy from the colonies, even a thirty-six-year-old boy, accustomed to the basics of Scotch-Canadian cookery, to be confronted by a High Victorian repast such as was served to him as a guest at the Civil Engineers Annual Dinner, on June 10, 1863? He thought enough of it to save the menu. From six-thirty till eleven-thirty, they ate and apparently ate some more. The menu reads like something from Tom Jones, and brings to mind old pictures of salmon catches, buffalo hunts, pigeon-snaring, and big-game safaris. This was London at its imperial height. One can imagine the mirrors and chandeliers, the hordes of waiters, the cigar smoke. They were addressed by Mr. Gladstone, chancellor of the exchequer, then by the Lord Mayor, then the Earl of Caithness, and, as Fleming put it, “a serene Highness of some description from the Continent.”

  FIRST SERVICE

  Green Peas Soup Ox Tail Soup Mock Turtle Soup

  Salmon Whitings Turbots

  Broiled Salmon au Sauce Piquant

  John Dory à la Hollandaise Red Mullets en Papillote

  Côtelettes de Saumon à l’Indienne

  Stewed Eels Trout Soles à la Normandie

  Whitebait

  SECOND SERVICE

  Entrées

  Friandeau de Veau à l’Oiselle Kari d’Homard au Riz

  Côtelettes d’Agneau aux Épinards

  Côtelettes Mouton aux Concômbres

  Ris de Veuu aux Tomates

  Poulet à la Marengo Suprême de Volaille

  Forequarters of Lamb Saddles of Mutton

  Roast Capons aux Champignons Boiled Pullets à la Finançière

  Bacon and Beans

  York Hams Côte de Boeuf à la Jardinière Ox Tongues

  Roast Chickens Veal Olive Pies Pigeon Pies Boiled Chickens

  Asparagus Cauliflowers Salads New Potatoes

  THIRD SERVICE

  Quails Leverets Guinea Fowls Ducklings Goslings

  French Beans Mushrooms Green Peas

  Prawns Lobster Salad

  Cabinet Puddings St Clair Puddings

  Gâteaux Jellies Creams Meringues

  Charlottes de Fraises Richmond Maids of Honour

  Pastry Tarts

  Omelettes aux Confitures Orange Fritters Nesselrode Puddings

  Wines and Liqueurs

  Sherry Madeira Hock Champagne Sparkling Hock & Moselle

  Old Port Château Lafitte

  Curaçao Maraschino Eau-de-vie Usquebaugh

  Dessert-Coffee

  His return voyage, on the Great Eastern, brought him to New York (from Liverpool) on July 1, 1863, a date that would mark the birth of Canadian Confederation in four more years. On July 4, the American passengers staged an impromptu celebration of their nation’s birthday. He was teased into carrying an American flag at the head of a deck parade, to which he agreed on the condition that an American would similarly honor the Union Jack. That accommodating American, the Irish-born William Dawson, later became the mayor of St. Paul, Minnesota, and a lifelong friend. Fleming was always sociable, helpful, and approachable; he was particularly adept at what these days is called “networking.”

  The return crossing had taken only eight days from Liverpool to the first North American landfall, Cape Race, Newfoundland—one-sixth the time of his original sailing in 1845. But as the ship headed south toward New York, heavy fog set in, as it often did off the Grand Banks and along the New England coastline, requiring careful navigation and adding an additional ten days to the journey before the arrival in New York Harbor.

  Fleming was elected ship’s historian for the voyage, a custom of the time to celebrate the passage in some witty and charming manner for publication in the local papers. He was still writing when the ship entered Long Island Sound; still writing when the pilot-crew came aboard spreading news of a Union victory at Vicksburg, and, as he put it, “that General Lee was having the worst of it in his invasion of the states north of the Potomac.” The passengers gathered on deck to congratulate the captain and to praise the ship. Mr Fleming, ever the engineer, ascertained that the ship had burned three hundred tons of coal and now stood three feet higher in the water than it had in Liverpool. Then he handed over his article, which was published in the New York Herald the next day under the headline NEW CANADIAN PASSAGE PROPOSED in the Marine Affairs column. In its way, it is as remarkable a piece of prophecy as Joseph Howe’s had been in 1851, predicting a trans-Canadian railroad with nothing but the Atlantic Ocean at his back.

  What Fleming proposed was closer in spirit to his two major future projects, standard time and worldwide cable, than to any of his accomplishments to date:

  Twenty years ago from five to seven weeks was considered a fair passage across the Atlantic, and although much has already been done through the instrumentality of science and iron and steam to destroy the terrors of an ocean voyage, it requires no effort to perceive that much more must be accomplished before the line of passenger traffic between Europe and America is perfected.

  We must have more Great Easterns and the time at sea must be reduced to the minimum number of days. Half the time we have spent on board this magnificent ship has been occupied in coasting and I cannot understand that the owners of the vessel can be any better disposed to keep us at sea than we are to remain on dry land. I do not here speak for myself but for the generality of travellers as I rather like a sea voyage when time admits, but it seems very clear that the ocean voyager will ultimately be confined to the shortest duration between land and land.

  The great bugbear has always been the length of the sea voyage and sea sickness which has hitherto accompanied it. Now length of the voyage would be diminished one half if a proper land communication existed between the eastern coast of Newfoundland and the railways of America. Seasickness barely finds a footing aboard the Great Eastern. I believe the doctor of the ship could report that there has been less sickness of any kind amongst the 1500 souls on board than generally exists in any town of the same population.

  Now distance between Ireland and Newfoundland is less than 1700 miles which at the rate of sixteen miles an hour would require four and a half days to run it. The Great Eastern runs it wit
hout any effort in five and three-quarter days and considering the improvement which can be made in speed, I feel sure that allowance of five days for the ocean voyage would be ample. With regard to connecting St John’s or some equally good harbour on the Atlantic coast of Newfoundland with the railway system of the interior a glance at the chart will show that the most direct course is to traverse Newfoundland by a railway 240 miles in length to the Gulph of St Lawrence, thence by steam ferry (about three times the length of the ferry between Holyhead and Dublin) to Gaspé, thence by an extension of the Grand Trunk Railway to the interior of the United States to New York and to Canada. To establish this route the construction of some four hundred miles of railway would be necessary and beside a sufficient number of ocean steamers like the Great Eastern, powerful steam ferry boats to cross the Gulph of St Lawrence at all seasons would be required.

  Let us glance briefly at what would be accomplished by establishing such a line for traffic on the scale indicated. The journey from New York to London could be done in seven and a half days, and from Chicago to London in eight days while the ocean passage would be reduced to five days which performed by steamers like this one would throw every other line at least of passenger traffic entirely in the shade. When such a passenger route is established the ease, speed and comfort with which the voyage could be accomplished would have the effect not only of concentrating traffic to this the shortest passage between the two continents but also of greatly increasing the number of travellers. It would in fact become the great highway between the old and new worlds and it is not at all improbable that the speed and comfort of the voyage would increase the traffic to such an extent that in a very few years a daily line of Great Easterns would be called into registration and thus the ocean would virtually be bridged by a system of steam propelled floating hotels.

  Mr. Fleming had entered a new phase. He had delivered the Red River petition, and it had been respectfully received, but with the predictable recommendation that the Canadians should build their own railroad with London’s blessing and approval. He had been accepted by his British and American peers, and he had been graced with a vision of Canada’s future that could indeed make her a player on the North American scene. Of course, there was not yet a Canada. The contrast among the United States at war, Britain in its imperial full flower, and ragtag Upper and Lower Canada had never been more striking.

  IN THE FALL and winter of 1863–64 he held a commission to survey the lands to the east and south of Quebec City, the colonies of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, a feasibility study, we might say, for the building of the long-delayed Intercolonial Railroad from Quebec City to Halifax, should all go well. Such a railroad would link the ocean ports of Halifax and Saint John, New Brunswick, with the river ports of Quebec and Montreal, and the Grand Trunk Railway inland to Toronto and beyond.

  Border disputes between the United States and the British colonies had rendered earlier British maps useless. Most of the territory originally surveyed for British development, including all of northern Maine, was now under American control. Fleming believed that the United States had never intended to claim, nor had expected, to gain northern Maine, and even if it had, the maps that had supported its claims were in error. Had England stood her ground, presented sound surveying evidence, northern Maine would have remained in British hands and the passage between Quebec City and Saint John would have been comparatively direct. Because of London’s malfeasance, as he saw it, he was forced to loop a line north of Maine, adding hundreds of miles of track, and millions of dollars to the costs.

  Fleming rarely took Americans to task for exploiting London’s indolence wherever they could. It was the Colonial Office in London that had weighed the negligible costs to England of losing Maine against the possibly open-ended expense of defending it. Over the years, he became a strong supporter of Empire loyalty based on common history, culture, and instruments of government, but an even stronger advocate for the worldwide network of linked British states that came to be called the British Commonwealth.

  Ever the multitasker, as we’d say today, Fleming was not merely surveying the hills and forests of New Brunswick for a rail line. He combined those duties with the political cause of colonial unification, the creation of a greater Canada to combine Upper and Lower Canada with the maritime colonies, along with the annexation of the vast holdings of the Hudson’s Bay Company in the heart of the continent. With the United States remaining an active threat (as well as a temptation), he realized, along with others, that to save the many scattered parts of British North America it was first necessary to create a single entity, no matter how repugnant it might be to the various colonial premiers who would stand to lose their positions.

  Fleming’s professional mission as surveyor was combined with a political mission to the Charlottetown Conference, a meeting to discuss the issue of confederation, held in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, on September 1, 1864. On his return to Quebec, he brought along J. W. Wood, the conference’s recording secretary, a young Englishman whose surviving file of letters is a moving record of an almost mystical period in Canadian nation-building. Mr. Wood’s summer, which he spent in the forests, in wagons and on horseback, in canoes and on foot, in isolated villages and the gracious homes of its leading citizens in the company of Sandford Fleming, remained with him for the rest of his very long life.

  On one level, it is a record of Fleming’s effective networking, securing a political base for unification among the colonies’ leading citizens. On another level, what comes through even forty years later in Wood’s recollections is that those weeks in 1864 were a blessed summer in which he (Wood) leveraged his way, however modestly, into a significant chapter in British (never, to him, Canadian) history. He was present at the inception, if not quite the birth, of a nation. It’s hard not to imagine Wood and Fleming as figures in a vast landscape painting, two young men on horseback following a muddy trail through a dark forest, a salmon stream to one side, purple hills in the distance, smoke rising from the chimney of a nearby cottage.

  History does not provide official records of the Charlottetown deliberations. It comes as a supririse, then, to learn—through Wood’s letters—just how fanciful, or perhaps merely enthusiastic, some of the ideas were. The most persuasive orator of the confederation cause, Fleming’s close friend, D’Arcy McGee, proposed the unification of the various colonies of British North America under a prince of the English royal house and a daughter (if there be one) of the royal family of France. Fleming, according to Woods, endorsed the idea whole-heartedly:

  [The proposal] would have the happiest influence upon the destinies of the North American Provinces. It would be received by the French portion of the people as a high compliment to themselves. It would bury, by amalgamation with their present feelings of allegiance to England, any still lingering memories of the land from which they have sprung.… At least it would appeal in a powerful manner to those sentiments which are so accessible to the French temperament and would increase immensely that feeling of common interest and common country which is so desirable to foster and develop.

  Although no degree of mutual ignorance between the two founding peoples of Canada should be surprising, the idea that French-Canadians, by then a hundred years removed from French authority, remnants of a pre-Revolutionary French culture, Catholic heretics (Jansenists) raised on a dogma that characterized post-Revolutionary France as the devil’s own breeding ground, would tolerate a pretender from the French royal house exists only on the furthest shore of probability.

  Wood soon returned to England, and “the current of his destinies,” as he called it, took him to India for the next forty years, building the Bombay, Baroda & Western. In the two years leading up to confederation, he had an opportunity to reflect on the impossibility, even the futility, of the Canadian project. Every now and then he expressed seditious thoughts, begging his old friend not to hold it against him. In 1866, from Bombay, Wood wrote:

  Althoug
h I usually do not feel sure that it is of very great importance either to England or the world at large whether the great country now forming our territories in North America is thoroughly opened up in the British interest, or not, so long as it is opened up for the benefit of mankind, I, looking on as an outsider, (and I fear you will say an unsympathising one, though it is not so) can imagine a much worse fate befalling our North American Provinces than absorption into the United States, and I am inclined to think that this will come sooner or later. The U.S. will in time want the whole country, at least they will, after a while, become full-blooded again and agitate this and other questions, and though of course, while bound in honor to do so, England would fight the battle with the colonies in case of war, I cannot, I confess, see that such a risk is worth running either for the colonies or for England.… And, looking to the development of the unopened country, it seems to me comparatively a matter of indifference in the interest of humanity whether it is done by people called Englishmen or by people called American.

  Wood faithfully reflects the English, not Canadian, view. The least confrontation, the least complication, the better. Canada was Britain’s to give away, if necessary, not to nurture into independence.

  If Canadians did not destroy their own prospects of confederation by petty jealousies or dynastic fantasies, the United States could be counted on to erect every barrier legally available, short of invasion, to derail it. But American pressures, economic and diplomatic, in many ways proved counterproductive to the aim, considered an inevitability, of annexation. It forced confederation and hastened the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway.

  When Secretary Seward purchased Alaska from Russia in 1867, it was in great part to discourage Canadian unification and to limit the extension of a British coastline on the Pacific. Alaska, a much-ridiculed purchase (“Seward’s Folly,” “Seward’s Icebox”), was not an end in itself but a strategic building block in the eventual Americanization of the entire North American landmass. (It might be said that the only thing that inhibited overt American action was an unchallenged belief in its inevitability, as shown in a Chicago Tribune editorial as late as September 5, 1884: “It is not necessary to discuss it in this country or to seek to force or even hurry annexation. All the elements—commercial, financial, social and political—are gravitating Canada towards the American Union, to which she naturally and geographically belongs.”) Seward’s powerful colleague, as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Senator Charles Sumner, termed the Alaskan acquisition “a visible step in the occupation of the whole North American continent.” At the time of his exit from government, in 1869, Seward was negotiating with Denmark for the purchase of the Virgin Islands (which were finally bought in 1917, at some coercion) and Greenland.