Ontario [antikvár]

During a lecture tour of America, Charles Dickens stopped off at Toronto, where he experienced a feeling which rapidly grew into repulsion: "The wild and rabid Toryism and the bigoted Puritanism of Toronto are, I speak seriously, appalling " He would never take back those words. He was never to set foot in Toronto again either. He would be very surprised if he could see how different Toronto is now, over a century later. The origin of the name "Toronto" is obscure: it is generally considered to be a Huron word but the experts disagree as to its translation. Does it mean "an appointed place" — the author of Great Expectations would certainly have sneered at that — or "a meeting-place"? There is a subtle difference between the two. Or does it mean "land of plenty", which would at least be a true definition nowadays? Toronto is one of the richest cities in the world, having weathered unharmed the monetary and economic storms which have shaken our planet and is also, as a conference of prominent American journalists concluded, the city which has shown the most ambition and enterprise in the last half-century. That may be why some of our most brilliant linguists have proposed a dual definition of "Toronto": the name may, in fact, mean both "meeting-place" and "land of plenty". They could hardly be more conciliatory. At least one thing is perfectly clear: the dull, self-sufficient, bigoted backwater visited by Dickens is now the hub of international business and finance. And yet it is true that no-one could have forecast such an economic boom twenty years ago. So it is easy to imagine what Toronto was like tWo centuries earlier when London was at the peak of its dynamism and splendour. And before that the Hurons used to assemble at what is now Toronto to cover themselves with war-paint before setting out on the warpath against their natural, as well as hereditary, enemies, the Iroquois. During the periods of peace they gathered there for great hunting expeditions. The first European to venture there was a Frenchman, Etienne Brulé; the French built a small fur-trading post called Fort Rouillé in 1720 which they blew up before retreafing to Fort Frontenac (Kingston) in 1759 when the British attacked.