Nice view titled Indian Scene on the St. Lawrence, from steel engraving with fine detail and clear impression, approx. page size 27 x 21 cm, approx. image size 19 x 12.5 cm. From: N. P. Willis, Canadian Scenery Illustrated, publisher George Virtue, London.

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Saint Lawrence River and Seaway

hydrographic system of east-central North America. It connects the North River (source of the St. Louis River, in the U.S. state of Minnesota, which flows into Lake Superior) with Cabot Strait, leading into the Atlantic Ocean in the extreme east of Canada, crossing the interior of the North American continent for some 2,500 miles (4,000 kilometres). It is of vital geographic, hydrologic, and economic importance to the United States and Canada.

The St. Lawrence system can be divided into three broad sectors. Upstream lies the Great Lakes region, with narrow riverlike sections linking the broad expanses of the lakes themselves. In the centre, from the eastern outflow of Lake Ontario, near the Canadian town of Kingston, to the Île d'Orléans, just downstream from the city of Quebec, the system passes through a more normal watercourse. From the Île d'Orléans to the Cabot Strait, between Newfoundland and Nova Scotia, the system broadens out again, first as the St. Lawrence estuary, and then, passing Anticosti Island, as the oval-shaped marine region known as the Gulf of St. Lawrence. The discussion here is confined primarily to the latter two sectors. For a treatment of the Great Lakes sector, see Great Lakes.

The St. Lawrence is a mighty and unique hydrographic system. Bedded in an ancient geologic depression, it drains the heart of a continent. It is at once an international, an intra-Quebec, and a multiprovincial system. An axis of regional population, it is also a waterway linking Canada and the United States to western Europe and a large part of the rest of the world. The frontages of the several regions of the St. Lawrence River are not equally developed and do not maintain the same types of relationship with their hinterlands and with the outside world. Throughout its length, nevertheless, the St. Lawrence retains a great natural beauty.

The St. Lawrence Seaway, a massive navigational project undertaken jointly by Canada and the United States and completed in 1959, opened North America's industrial and agricultural heartlands to deep-draft ocean vessels. It forged the final link in a waterway some 2,340 miles long from Duluth, Minnesota (at the westernmost point of Lake Superior) to the Atlantic by clearing a throughway in a 186-mile stretch of the St. Lawrence River between Montreal and Lake Ontario. Although the official seaway consists of only this stretch and the Welland Canal (connecting Lakes Ontario and Erie), the entire Great Lakes–St. Lawrence system, with 9,500 miles of navigable waterways, has come to be known as the St. Lawrence Seaway.

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William Henry Bartlett

William Henry Bartlett (March 26, 1809 – September 13, 1854) was a British artist, best known for his numerous drawings rendered into steel engravings.

Bartlett was born in Kentish Town, London in 1809. He was apprenticed to John Britton (1771–1857), and became one of the foremost illustrators of topography of his generation. He travelled throughout Britain, and in the mid and late 1840s he travelled extensively in the Balkans and the Middle East. He made four visits to North America between 1836 and 1852.

In 1835, Bartlett first visited the United States to draw the buildings, towns and scenery of the northeastern states. The finely detailed steel engravings Bartlett produced were published uncolored with a text by Nathaniel Parker Willis as American Scenery; or Land, Lake, and River: Illustrations of Transatlantic Nature. American Scenery was published by George Virtue in London in 30 monthly installments from 1837 to 1839. Bound editions of the work were published from 1840 onward. In 1838 Bartlett was in the Canadas producing sketches for Willis' Canadian scenery illustrated, published in 1842. Following a trip to the Middle East, he published Walks about the city and environs of Jerusalem in 1840.

Bartlett made sepia wash drawings the exact size to be engraved. His engraved views were widely copied by artists, but no signed oil painting by his hand is known. Engravings based on Bartlett's views were later used in his posthumous History of the United States of North America, continued by Bernard Bolingbroke Woodward and published around 1856.

Bartlett’s primary concern was to render "lively impressions of actual sights", as he wrote in the preface to The Nile Boat (London, 1849). Many views contain some ruin or element of the past including many scenes of churches, abbeys, cathedrals and castles, and Nathaniel Parker Willis described Bartlett's talent thus: "Bartlett could select his point of view so as to bring prominently into his sketch the castle or the cathedral, which history or antiquity had allowed".

Bartlett returning from his last trip to the Near East suddenly took ill and died of fever on board the French steamer Egyptus off the coast of Malta in 1854. His widow Susanna lived for almost 50 years after his death, and died in London on 25 October 1902, aged 91.

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