Saint John, New Brunswick – Reversing Rapids & A Martello Tower

Thursday, July 4 – Day 16

We took a somewhat leisurely drive into Saint John to see a couple of things today.  Janet and I, both can remember as kids learning about the Reversing Falls in Social Studies class.  The city has since revised the name to Reversing Rapids because they really aren’t a waterfall at all.  We got up early to be there for 09:00 AM which was one of the high tides for the day.  They have set up a roomy parking/viewing area which is easy to access from the main road.  We arrived at about 09:10 and could see that the flow was clearly going upstream which is contrary to a normal rivers flow.  Janet and I were both somewhat disappointed but we were told by someone at the visitors centre that to truly appreciate this phenomenon you should try to see it at both high and low tide, so we decided to come back around  3:00 pm when the tide was going out.

 

There was lots of time to kill so we found our way to the Carlton-Martello Tower.  Now I thought that this was the name of the tower and that is partly true.  Carlton is the name of the height of land that the tower sits on.  Martello is the name of the person who originally designed this type of fortification in the early 1800’s.  The British Navy had apparently laid siege to one of these towers in Corsica.  After days and days of canon fire the tower was hardly affected.  After this war the British adopted the design and built about 200 of these forts around the world because they were both highly effective and really inexpensive to build. (The large concrete structure was added during the second world war when the tower was used as an observation post.)  They are inherently strong due to their structure.   At the base the walls are about 8’ thick and the roof is supported by a central pillar which forms an arched ceiling in the interior.  The inside is surprisingly spacious. 

At the outbreak of the war of 1812, British Engineers were dispatched to build a defensive structure in New Brunswick to repel any land invasion from the west.  Unfortunately the tower was not completed until 1815, when the war was over. Fortunately it did not see any action so it did not suffer any artillery fire which had become more accurate, due to the development of “rifling” of the cannon barrel.  This allowed a consistent hit in single location which eventually would cause a collapse of  the structure.  This Martello tower is one of the best preserved of its kind in the world.

We went uptown once again to gawk at the buildings and to see the old cemetery adjacent to King’s Square.  The cemetery dates back to the late 1780’s and many of the headstones are no longer discernible.  The oldest headstone that we saw was from 1798.  Lots of young people in this place.  Pioneer life really must have taken its toll.

Speaking of young people.  There seems to be lots of them uptown.  We were some of the older ones.  Maybe all these hills chase the older people into the suburbs?  Another thing – we never got pan-handled once in all the time we spent there.  We did see this guy though!  (Check his left shoulder- that’s a 3’ long iguana-at least he picks up after him.