About ten miles south of Chicoutimi there recedes from the west bank of the Saguenay, to the distance of ten miles, a beautiful expanse of water called Grand Bay. The original name of this bay was “Ha, Ha,” descriptive of the surprise which the French experienced when they first entered into it, supposing that it was the Saguenay, until their shallop grounded on the north-western shore. At the head thereof is another settlement, similar to Chicoutimi. Between these two places the Saguenay is rather shallow, (when compared with the remainder of its course,) and varies in width from two and a half to three miles. The tides of the ocean are observable as far north as Chicoutimi, and this entire section of the river is navigable for ships of the largest class.
That portion of the Saguenay extending from Grand Bay to the St. Lawrence, a distance of sixty miles, is greatly distinguished for its wild and picturesque scenery. I know not that I can better pourtray to my reader’s mind the peculiarity of this river than by the following method: imagine for a moment an extensive country of rocky and thinly-clad mountains, suddenly separated by some convulsion of Nature so as to form an almost bottomless chasm, varying from one to two miles in width; and then imagine this chasm suddenly half-filled with water, and that the moss of centuries has softened the rugged walls on either side, and you will have a pretty accurate idea of the Saguenay.
The shores of this river are composed principally of granite, and every bend presents you with an imposing bluff, the majority of which are eight hundred feet high, and many of them upwards of fifteen hundred. And, generally speaking, these towering bulwarks are not content to loom perpendicularly into the air, but they must needs bend over as if to look at their own savage features reflected in the deep. Ay, and that word deep tells but the simple truth; for the flood that rolls beneath is black and cold as the bottomless pit. To speak without a figure, and from actual measurement, I can state that many portions of the Saguenay are one thousand feet deep, and the shallowest spots not much less than one hundred. In many places, too, the water is as deep as five feet from the rocky barriers as it is in the centre of the stream. The feelings which filled my breast, and the thoughts which oppressed my brain, as I paddled by these places in my canoe, were allied to those which almost overwhelmed me when I first looked upward from below the Fall, to the mighty flood of Niagara. Awful beyond expression, I can assure you, is the sensation which one experiences in sailing along the Saguenay, to raise his eyes heavenward and behold hanging directly over his head a mass of granite, apparently ready to totter and fall, and weighing perhaps a million tons. Terrible and sublime, beyond the imagery of the most daring poet, are these cliffs; and, while they proclaim the omnipotent power of God, they at the same time whisper into the ear of man that he is but as the moth which flutters in the noontide air. And yet, is it not enough to fill the heart of man with holy pride and unbounded love, to remember that the soul within him will but have commenced its existence when all the mountains of the world shall have been consumed as a scroll?