Lachine

On the St. Lawrence, on the south of the island of Montreal, lies the very old district of Lachine. The name itself in French simply means “China”, and therein is a funny and instructive tale.

As is well known, by the end of the Middle Ages most Europeans were either ignorant of the American continents, or thought they were several inconvenient islands in the ocean between Europe and China. Exotic China, with its silks and spices, was the intended destination. The Viking sagas, to the extent they were known, were at most charming myths about skraelings and bears and codfish, nothing worth exploring. It was China, and the east, which were sought.

And so as Europeans poked about the coasts of North America, they were first of all surprised by its size, and second quite sure that there were plenty of ways around or through it on the way to China. The mighty St. Lawrence River was one of the most obvious candidates.

And why not? The St. Lawrence is huge by width and by volume, being the outflow of the entire Great Lakes. As Europeans sailed up the river, day after day after day, the river did not become appreciably narrower or of less volume, and the white man eagerly listened to stories of the great seas which lay at its source.

The great seas, of course, exist, and their total surface area is almost half that of the Black Sea. They represent a fifth by surface of the fresh water of the planet. So it would be entirely plausible to believe that one could navigate from the Atlantic to the Pacific, or at least to a halfway inland sea. Especially if, as humans are wont to do, you wish it to be so.

Today, in fact, because of the St. Lawrence Seaway, ocean going ships do in fact sail from the Atlantic literally into the center of the continent. But alas, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, there was a rude reality: a series of powerful, rocky, ship-destroying rapids just to the south of the island of Montreal. And that was before they encountered Niagara.

As the early settlers learned that the mighty rapids meant the end of the pipe dream of a passage to China, they bitterly named them “China”, or in French, “la Chine”. And to this day the district of Montreal next to the fierce rapids remains Lachine.

As it turned out, North America was not the impediment to the wealth the Europeans sought, it became the wealth, with the United States and Canada today representing about 40% of the wealth of the ten largest economies on the planet, lands of vast resources and boundless energy.

It’s a funny thing how we respond to impediments, stumbling blocks along the way to our dreams. We can treat them with frustration and despair, surrendering our hopes, crushing our future. Or we can settle in, accept what we have, exploit the resources around us, and build a new world.

As it turned out, Lachine was not the end of the dream, but simply a name on the way to Toronto and Detroit and Chicago, the vast reaches of the prairies and mineral wealth of the heartland of North America.

It’s all in how you look at obstacles.