End of the Deep Water

For 400 years, the majestic Saguenay River defaulted on its promise. Jacques Cartier was fooled by the Indians' tales of a great kingdom in its valley, and of another empire beyond that, rich in silver & gold, diamonds & rubies. Explorers soon found that this icy, inky tributary of the St. Lawrence was no Northwest Passage: it was navigable for only 80 miles. Above the Indian village of Chicoutimi, "the end of the deep water," the river ran white and turbulent--and, it seemed, useless--from Lake St. John.

But it was in those 30 miles of falls and rapids that the true riches of the Saguenay lay. Here, the real kingdom of the Saguenay was to arise, an enclave of modern industrialism in ancient Quebec. For in those 30 miles was a drop of 300 feet from the level of Lake St. John to tidewater, and a flow of 50,000 cubic feet a second. From that, hydroelectric engineers generate i^ million kilowatts--enough to make 1,000 tons of aluminum* a day.

Last week, with the ice gone at last from the flat water downstream, ships of many nations furrowed the glacier-carved Saguenay. Inbound, most of them carried cargoes of orange-colored bauxite (aluminum ore) from British Guiana. A few were laden to the Plimsoll mark with cryolite from Greenland, fluorspar from Newfoundland, pitch and coke from the U.S. At Port Alfred on Ha! Ha! Bay,? fine ores were loaded into railroad cars for a 20-mile journey beyond the deep water. The freighters were reloaded with aluminum, in ingots or billets, for the industry of Canada and foreign lands.

Land of Tourists. By this month's end, cruise ships of Canada Steamship Lines will enter the Saguenay, their rails lined with the first of the season's 250,000 tourists, mostly from the U.S. Off the frowning, forbidding, 2,000-foot cliff of Cape Eternity, the ships will slow down. Their jazz orchestras will grind out Ave Maria and searchlights will play on a statue of the Virgin placed high on Cape Trinity by an habitant grateful for his recovery after a fall through the Saguenay's ice. Then the whistles will sound, while passengers marvel at the long-drawn echoes between Capes Trinity and Eternity--what Christopher Morley called "Yowling a klaxon at Eternity."

Most of the ships go to Bagotville. A few passengers will see the sturdy French-Canadian workmen on the docks of Port Alfred, sweating in the sun, Virgin's medals on their hairy chests. A few will get to the end of the deep water and to Chicoutimi, now a cathedral city of 30,000, with cinemas, an airline office, soda counters and neon signs. But few will get more than a glimpse of the twinkling lights of Arvida, seven miles away.

In the new kingdom of the Saguenay, aluminum is king and Arvida is its capital. Named for Arthur Vining Davis, 80-year-old founder of Aluminum Company of Canada Ltd. ("Alcan"),* Arvida has two aspects. As a company town it is one of the best laid out and best run on the continent. Its schools (for adults as well as children) and recreation facilities are topnotch.

Land of Earners. Arvida's other aspect is industrial. The great aluminum plant (the world's largest individual producer) is a mile long, half a mile wide. There habitants who have forsaken the logging camps and rock-strewn farms work in vast Dantesque chambers among massive vats and electrolytic furnaces. The metal they turn out goes into pots & pans, airplanes, building materials, cigarette holders, poker chips, electric conduits. Soon, Alcan will build an aluminum bridge across the Saguenay.

None of the materials used in making aluminum is found in the Saguenay valley. But the water racing out of Lake St. John provides the most vital of all resources needed in the industry: electric power. The urgent river has been thrice dammed to drive generators which produce 1,740,000 h.p., day in & day out.

In ways which Explorer Cartier never conceived, the Saguenay is yielding great riches: $21 1/2 million profit after paying $11 1/2 million in taxes in 1947.

* Sir Humphry Davy (1778-1829) named it aluminum. British scientists changed it to aluminium to harmonize with sodium, lithium, etc. Britain still uses the extra i, the U.S. drops it. Canada uses both. /- The name is said to come from haha, a French word for a boundary to a garden or park. * Davis got his start in Oberlin, Ohio in 1886, peddling kitchenware made of the little-known light metal which his friend Charles Martin Hall had learned to make cheaply. Hall, who died in 1914, left $9,000,000 (one-third of his estate) to Oberlin College, which consequently has a well-endowed faculty.

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