Moosejaw Radio Part 3: Ottawa Baby, Ottawa!
Moosejaw Radio is a lighthearted, sometimes informative, blog about living and traveling in the 21st Century while navigating a progressively digital planet in real time. The author uses an informal voice to discuss the juxtapositions between contemporary geographies and the myriad histories which enrich them.
Writer James Kerns has worked as a restaurateur, bicycle messenger, sculpture, commercial fisherman, designer, builder, and consultant, who has traveled the globe by boat, bus, rail, plane, and bicycle. His passion for people and geography, and the cultures and histories which bind them, provide the foundations from which his stories are drawn.
CHATEAU LAURIER OTTAWA
Moosejaw Radio
Chapter 3: Ottawa Baby, Ottawa!
Washington, DC
Although our family had traveled to Canada many times before, we’d never visited its capital city, Ottawa. As citizens of a nation’s capital ourselves, we felt a kindred draw toward our home’s northern cousin, which happens to share a few salient characteristics. Known as a picturesque city with lovely architecture and great natural beauty, Ottawa is to its regional sister Toronto exactly what Washington, DC is to New York: prim, green, and provincial – like a well-tailored country club manager sitting next to Lenny Kravitz at the grammys.
Similarities Between Ottawa and DC:
- Cool Architecture
- Lots of Greenery
- Hockey Teams
- Rivers!
While we're at it, here's a quick graphic with entirely objective comparisons not at all based on the fact that Ottawa is sneaky SPECTACULAR and I had to give DC some points:
We booked two nights in the historic Chateau Laurier (pictured above), a beautiful gothic revival hotel perched above the river on Parliament Hill in downtown Ottawa. Considering the amount of real estate we'd be covering, we called the 560+ miles to Ottawa a one-day shot.
Braddock's Road
Taking I-270 West out of Washington, DC I invariably think of the doomed march British General Edward Braddock took to meet his death fighting against the French and their native allies at a site near what is now the city of Pittsburgh, PA. The dispute over control of the Ohio River Valley was a small subplot in the war known in Europe as The Seven Years War, but it was big news on the North American frontier. Braddock and his British regulars marched northwest from Alexandria, Virginia (future Washington, DC territory) accompanied by Virginia militia under the command of a young George Washington. At stake was control of the fur trade from the entire Ohio River Valley. The seeds of the conflict were sown more than a century before.
George Washington assumes command after General Braddock is mortally wounded at the Battle of The Monongahela July 9, 1755
Pennsylvania Paper & Supply Company, Scranton, PA (Below)
Our route diverged from Braddock's Road north of Hagerstown, MD, where we picked up I-81 North and made a beeline for Scranton, PA. Who makes a beeline for Scranton, you ask? Anyone going to Ottawa from Hagerstown for one thing, and anyone interested in taking in some iconic landmarks from the hit TV show, The Office as well. My people were strongly advocating for a late lunch at Cooper's Seafood House in Scranton, one of those aforementioned landmarks.
Cooper's Seafood House
I have a Rule of Declining Proximity with regards to seafood restaurants that is very simple: no water, no fish. In substance it's much like my Stick-to-your-Genre Restaurant Rule: don't order stirfry at a burger joint, and don't order a burger at a Chinese restaurant. Scranton does have a lake, it's called Lake Scranton in fact, but though you might catch fish in it, you're surely not going to take any seafood out of that lake. You can see where this is going – there is an obvious paradox presented while considering both of these rules simultaneously. It was looking like soup and salad for me at Cooper's.
VOC, EIC, HBC & The Origins of Western Corporate Globalism
In an era of empire-fueled land-grabbing and resource plundering, it is noteworthy that Henry Hudson, an Englishman, was in the employ of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) when he sailed up the Hudson River and "discovered" New York. Organized in the Netherlands as an ad hoc trade monopoly with quasi-governmental powers, the VOC and its sister entity the Dutch West India Company (WIC) operated as joint-stock companies and leveraged their power to amass huge global fortunes, a great deal of it through the buying and selling of human beings.
HBC Operations For The Masses
Not to be outdone, the English had created their own joint-stock adventures, including The Moscovy Company and the East India Company (EIC). The model worked so well that in 1670 King Charles II of England granted a royal charter to the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC), a North American counterpart to the EIC. In the charter HBC was granted rights to “sole trade and commerce” to an area the king named Prince Rupert’s Land in honor of a cousin. The area of Rupert's Land (almost 1.5 million square miles) comprised the entire drainage basin of Hudson’s Bay. To get an idea of how lucrative that charter was, step into any one of the 239 stores HBC still operates today in Canada and the US – a portfolio which, since 2013, also includes every Saks Fifth Avenue. Untethered from the dibilitating shackles of diplomacy, these joint-stock entities kick-started an era of multinational corporate avarice, and initiated a tragectory that saw England rise to a level of commercial dominance unrivaled since the apex of the Mongolian Empire.
NEXT: Moosejaw Radio PART IV: Crepes and Cigars and Spiders! Oh My! PREVIOUS