Page:New Brunswick Magazine Issue 1.djvu/105
corner, as an advertisement of a panorama of the burning of the Royal Tar. The lines ran:—
Her boiler grot too hot;
She'll never see St. John again,
Because she's gone to pot.
How, in the face of such a calamity, such a rhyme could ever have found popular acceptance is not clear at this day, but a popular quotation it was for many years after the event, as some who are still comparatively young men can attest. Possibly it took with the crowd because of the jingle, but certainly not because it was an appropriate commemoration of one of the saddest of tragedies.
THE SITE OF FORT LATOUR
Although I would have preferred not to write a controversial paper for The New Brunswick Magazine at so early a period in its history, the article by Prof. W. F. Ganong, entitled "Where Stood Fort LaTour?" seems to leave me no choice but to reply to it, for silence on my part, at this time, might be taken to imply assent to his theories. I was the first New Brunswick writer, I believe, to prove, by publishing the mortgage of LaTour's fort, that it was at the mouth of the River St. John and not at Jemseg where former writers had placed it, and I early came to the conclusion that it was situated on the west side of the harbor of St. John, behind Navy Island. Dr. Ganong agrees with me that Fort LaTour was "behind" Navy Island, but he appears to think that this description applies to Portland Point, a locality better known to most of the residents of this City by the name of Rankin's Wharf. As the decision of this question of site is thus largely reduced to the proper interpretation