PRIMITIVE “MYSTERY” CANALS SUBMERGED UNDER THE OTTAWA RIVER
Source: Ottawa Rewind, September 12, 2023
by: Andrew King
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Unexplained engineers built primitive canals along the Ottawa River that are now underwater…
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AN ANCIENT HIGHWAY
The Ottawa River has been a conduit for travel and trade for thousands of years, from ancient vessels carrying raw copper mined in Lake Superior to the massive lumber rafts of the late 19th century, it has been something of a super highway for centuries. Ancient clay pots have been found in Luskville caves, with forged copper weapons from 6,000 years ago found on Ottawa River islands that show a vast ancient trade network with distant regions that seem unbelievable. Exotic materials originating from as far away as the tip of Labrador and a 2,000 year old knife found near Ottawa was was made from a type of stone only found in Ohio, USA. The Ottawa River provides water access to a variety of areas through the Rideau river, the St. Lawrence, the Great Lakes and beyond. Likewise, visitors from any those places and beyond could have visited the Ottawa area.
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That’s what makes the discovery of a series of primitive canals that are now submerged beneath the waves of the Ottawa River so intriguing.
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Prior to the current navigable Ottawa River system that opened in 1963, there were a series of rapids that made continual boat travel on the Ottawa River impossible. Portaging was necessary. When the Carillon Dam was completed east of Ottawa in 1963 it raised the water level by between 9-62 feet allowing ships to travel freely between Ottawa and Montreal. This flooded out the rapids of Long-Sault on the Ottawa River, but also any previous shorelines, including a series of what were called “primitive canals” whose builders remain a mystery.
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EIGHT CANALS WITH HUGE BOULDERS MOVED
In his 1984 book “The Ottawa River Canal System” Normand Lafreniere writes about a series of primitive canals that were once on the original shoreline of the Ottawa River near what is now Hawkesbury, Ontario. A series of British military canals were built along the Ottawa River in the 1830s but these other canals pre-date those to some unknown period and builder.
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Lafreniere notes that their construction is “extremely primitive, not to say archaic, for that period” and the builders of these canals used techniques that included moving boulders weighing in some cases nearly 1 ton. These massive stone boulders also contained unusual drill holes.
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“They were in fact little more than trenches formed by the removal of some of the numerous large boulders found along the north bank of the Ottawa River in the vicinity of the Long Sault. These rocks must have been serious hazards to navigation as many of them were removed to allow the passage of canoes and other craft. Altogether eight “canals” formed in this way were observed…”
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It remains unknown who constructed these canals, and they were all lost in time when the river water rose in 1963 completely submerging all evidence of them. Lafreniere remarks in his report that it is not likely they were built by the native indigenous travellers as they would not have had the drilling tools necessary to drill 10 inch holes into solid rock that were found on the 1 ton boulders. Another speculation made is that they were constructed by the various fur trader expeditions that used the Ottawa River as their lucrative trade freeway, but no known mention in any literature of both the French fur traders or Hudson’s Bay Company makes mention of these canals.
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So who would have made the labour intensive effort to construct 8 canal trenches along the Ottawa River? A historian by the name of Cyrus Thomas believes they were made by a local settlers to facilitate navigation of their boats to bring goods to market from their respective mills along the river, but no proof has been brought forward to confirm this theory.
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Opposite Carillon, on the south shore of the Ottawa River a report was made in 1818 by a Captain Mann that describes a “bank of stones has been thrown up on the south shore, which forms a canal, into which batteaux are admitted by a lock; but as the bank does not retain the water, and the lock is not sufficiently deep, this work is, during the autumn, rather an obstruction than an assistance to the navigation.”
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Was it possible these existing primitive canals described were built hundreds of years prior to their discovery in the 1800s, and if so who would have built them? Lafreniere states that “Although several hypotheses have been formulated regarding the date of their construction, the possible builders, and even the purpose they served, these primitive “canals” remain an enigma that only extensive research can attempt to solve.”
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CANAL SPECULATION
A mystery…but to expand the horizons of who might the engineers of these intriguing canals could be we can extend the timeline back to when the Ottawa River was being used as a thoroughfare for the shipping of ancient copper from Lake Superior. It is still unclear who mined an estimated 500,000 tons of copper that is missing from the Keweenaw Peninsula & Isle Royale. The copper was removed from pit mines which ranged from 5 to 30 feet deep with more than 4,000 on Isle Royale alone.
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The mining and transport of this extremely pure copper spanned a period of more than 4,500 years, but no evidence of any ancient habitation on Isle Royale has been found. During the Bronze Age, copper was a vital ingredient in the forging of bronze objects in Europe, but that would have meant the ancient Great Lakes copper made its way across the Atlantic. Perhaps the ancient miners that were using the Ottawa River to bring their precious copper cargo to the St. Lawrence and abroad made the mysterious canals.
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But the drill holes pose an intriguing piece of the mystery, as ancient copper tools would not have been able to drill into solid rocks as copper is too soft a metal. At around the year 3000 BC, the ancient Egyptians invented and used a core drill. The ancient Romans developed even more advanced technologies, such as the pump drill.
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By the Viking Age, it’s believed that spoon augers had become the most commonly used type of drill. By the 19th century, drilling into rocks for dropping dynamite in the holes for blasting the rocks into smaller pieces was common, but why were these canal stones not blasted?
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In 1535 explorer Jacques Cartier made his way further inland down the St. Lawrence where he meets Chief Stadacona, in what is now Quebec City. Stadacona told Cartier he looks like the other white men that have already passed here who live in a place to the west, men that resemble Cartier and his crew; white skinned, blonde men that wear woolen clothing, that use metal objects like swords and possess gold and silver. This place they live is called Saguenay and it was said to lie north west of Montreal if you followed the Ottawa River northwards.
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Maps of the time clearly show Saguenay marked on them, evidence of a fantastical story told by the Amerindians 500 years after the Norse Vikings had apparently left the continent.
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Upon further research, it is confirmed that the Norse Vikings did indeed build trench canals throughout the lands they explored, including throughout Scotland and Denmark. These shallow trenches were sometimes lined with stones, or in the case of the Kanhave canal, built by Vikings in 726 AD, lined with wood.
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In Scotland, it was discovered in 2000 by a local archaeologist a timber from a Norse-style clinker-built ship carbon dated to AD 1100. In May 2009 an archaeological study sponsored by Historic Scotland identified a stone-built “canal” that allowed for boats to exit at high tide. Historic Environment Scotland lists the site as a “rare medieval harbour complex, with docks, boat noosts, & canal proving the Norse explorers were also canal builders.
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With the primitive canals now lying underwater, any further investigation is likely impossible so the builders of them will remain a mystery. Perhaps they were simply dug out by local settlers who wanted to increase transport of their milled goods, or a preliminary British military operation. With much of history constantly evolving, it may even someday be proven that there were far more ancient engineers at work along the shores of the mighty Ottawa River.
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From an original post on Ottawa Rewind by Andrew King, September 2023. For more information and additional images, please visit the full story on OttawaRewind(dot)com.
