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YALE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY

FROM THE COLLECTION MADE BY
CHARLES SHELDON B.A. 1890
OF BOOKS ON NATURAL HISTORY
EXPLORATION • HUNTING & FISHING

GIFT OF FRANCIS P. GARVAN
B.A. 1897

THE HEART OF GASPE

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
NEW YORK . BOSTON ¦ CHICAGO • DALLAS
ATLANTA SAN FRANCISCO
MACMILLAN & CO., Limited
LONDON . BOMBAY • CALCUTTA
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TORONTO

THE HEART OF GASPE
SKETCHES IN THE GULF OF
ST. LAWRENCE

BY
JOHN MASON CLARKE

WITH MANY ILLUSTRATIONS

Nm fork
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1913
All rights reserved

Copyright, 1013,
By the MACMILLAN COMPANY
Set up and electrotyped. Published July, 1913.

913

INTRODUCTION
It is my hope that the kindly people of the
Gaspe Coast, to whom these sketches come and
who will be first to detect their inadequacy, may
not be indisposed at this attempt to picture some
aspects of their country. Where settlements are
so venerable it may seem a somewhat intrusive
enthusiasm that regards this ancient coast a theme
for special discourse, but I have approached Gaspe
less with a tourist's eye than with a mind absorbed
by some of its scientific problems. The effort to
solve the latter has awakened a lively appreciation
of its other attractions and a geologist's interest
in the rocks of the country has served to sharpen
my apperceptions of the rest. To other readers I
may say that there may be some excuse for these
untechnical sketches in the fact that really very
little has been written of this inviting country,
save in the way of statistical reports or unpoetical
inducements to colonization.

vi INTRODUCTION
In the presence of the venerable settlements of
Gasp6, the scion of modern towns must feel a
proper deference, the decent outcome of respect
for a long, if uneventful, past. Life has gone
slowly on this ancient coast, not with the leaps
and bounds of newer invasions, and in a world so
solely abandoned to the purpose to arrive, the
conservative is unusual enough to be fascinating;
it is like the anchor which enables the ship to ride
out the onrush of the waves; the steamer's sail
which serves to steady its progress; it is the rotund
and comfortable mother fortifying and transmit
ting all that is best m the past of the race. So
much of the old mode survives, there is still a
flavor of the ancient regime.
If amongst my readers there are any unfamiUar
with this coast let me give a proper location for
these observations.
Gasp6 is that vast peninsula of Eastern Quebec
which lies between the broad mouth of the St.
Lawrence river and the Bay of Chaleur, facing
the waters of the Gulf of St. Lawrence. It is the
Gasp6 Peninsula, more trippingly termed in the

INTRODUCTION vii
French, Gaspesie and sometimes in the English,
Gaspesia, charmingly corrupted by the habitant to
Gaspesy. Properly, Gasp6 is Gasp6 Coimty,
which, with Bonaventure County at the south,
divides most of the great peninsula. It is Gasp6
County which here concerns us most, which carries
the most striking contrasts of coast and moun
tain, where the timbered wilderness still prevails
except along a narrow belt of shore; it is far from
the world's thoroughfares even though this day,
after years of suspended hopes, a railroad has in
vaded its solitudes, bringing its inviting sceneries
nearer. Gasp6 County in size might be a king's reahn.
It is larger than the State of Massachusetts or
the Kingdom of Saxony, but it may never carry a
greatly larger population than is now represented
in the scattered villages along its coasts. It is no
regret to the lover of its genuine attractions that
official invitations to colonization seem to have
borne but little fruit, or that the tourist has not
yet brushed the bloom off it.
Geographically, it is a great headland projecting

viii INTRODUCTION
into the Gulf, deeply indented for a length of
sixteen miles by Gaspe Bay, which divides it
unfairly, leaving only the slender peninsula of
Little Gasp6, or the Forillon, between it and the
St. Lawrence river. Its front is broadly incut
by the Malbay, but from there southward to the
Bay of Chaleur, its southern boundary, the coast
is undivided. Gasp6 Coimty, even though now enriched by a
railroad, has for its chief land thoroughfare the
highway winding along the shore between the
mountains and the water, or over and along the
mountain slopes. From this are short branches
leading to back concessions or up the large rivers,
but even the coast road is not very old and men
now venerable have told me of their part in the
building of it.
I do not know how many thousand people are
living and trying to live in the great county, but
not many. Census reports are always accessible,
but they make no record of the fact that though
all told there are barely enough to make a small
city yet these are unfailingly kind, courteous and

INTRODUCTION ix
hospitable. The population seems to increase, in
spite of all govermental inducements, only by the
time-honored method. Large famihes prevail and
flourish on the scanty livings which sea and soil
afford to the often much bestead struggler for
existence. The fish, the lumber and the chilly
farms are the sources from which happiness and
contentment are here derived.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction ....
The Scenery of the Gulp Coast, I
The Scenery of the Gulf Coast, II
The Scenery of the Gulf Coast, III
The Shore of the Great River .
The Perc^ Mountains
The Rocks and the People .
Bonaventure Island .
The Eahly Settlements
French Seigniories and English Patents .
General Wolfe in Gasp:S ....
The Wreck of the Jacques Cartier .
Historical Sketch of the Cod-fisheries op Gaspe
The Forillon and the Fate of John Simonds
The Magdalen Islands
The Place Names 
Glossary of Place Names

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Percfe Rock. Foreshortened view
Map of Gasp6

F

rontispiece FACINQ PAOE
. 1

View of Grande GrSve .

. 8

View of Indian Cove

. 8

Arch in Perc6 Rock

. 28

Perce Rock. Copy of old print

. 30
Perc6 Rock from the north .
. 37
Gaspe Basin ...
. 41
Cap-des-Rosiers
. 52
Fox River
. 58
Mt. Ste Anne
. 68
Perce Mountains
. 68
View of Perce Village from the south
. 75
Bonaventure Island . . . .
. 94
Spread of fish at Perc6 .
. 98
Trou-aux-Margots, Bonaventure Island .
. 98
The Golden Jugs of Bonaventure Island
. 104
Old print of General Wolfe's house at Peninsula
. 148
Cartier Cliffs 
. 163
Cartier Medallion ... . .
. 163
View of Splitting Tables
. 174
A Catch of Cod 
. 174
Spread of Fish on the C. R. C. beach at Perc6
. 184
The Chart of Magdalen Islands .
. 209
The Demoiselles of Entry Island
, .
. 216
xiv

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

TACaJQ FAGB

An Island Home, with demoiselle topography . . 218
An Outside Cellar, Entry Island  218
View of Amherst Island • ... 222
View of Grosse Isle  222
View of Grosse Isle  226
View of Alright Island ... ... 226
The Great Bird Rock . . ... 254
The Ledges of the Ile-aux-Margots .... 254
Gannets Nesting on the Bird Rock .... 256
Brihmich Murres and Kittiwakes on the Bird Rock
Ledges  256

THE HEART OF GASPE

MAP OP THE EASTERN SHORE OP GASPfe

THE HEART OF GASPE
THE SCENERY OF THE GULF COAST
I
The Ocean's Work; at Perce; on the Forillon-^— Destruction of
the Forillon — The Forillon Sinking — The American Bank
— Scenery of the Forillon — Mt. St. Alban — The King's
Road — Origin of the word Forillon — Hognedo or Honguedo
— View from the Forillon — Shiphead — Origin of the word
Gaspe — The End of the Appalachian System — Date of the
Forillon — Ldttle Gaspe
Through whatever eyes it be viewed, the hap
piest equipment for the true appreciation of
scenery is a combination of the geologist and the
artist. There must be something of each in every
real devotee of nature. To the artist's eye, deli
cacy of coloring, refinements of light and shade,
exactitude of perspective and boldness of contrast,
all quickly apprehended, arouse an intellectual
enthusiasm so long as the picture lasts. I am
audaciously disposed to put the geologist's appre-

2 THE HEART OF GASPfi
ciation of scenery on a different and higher plane.
His eye is not blinded, though it may be less keen
to the passing contrasts in the unceasing play of
refraction and reflection, but these transitory
embellishments of the scene dawn upon him gradu
ally, because, seeing first the topographic forms
and seeking their causes, his appreciation begins
only when these causes have fully revealed them
selves. This will not be at the first glance at
an unfamiliar landscape, but more often than
not comes only after long and laborious re
search. At Perc6, the most dramatic spot on the Gasp6
coast, where brush and pen both falter, where
jagged cliffs, insulated rock, somber headlands
and grassy slopes encircle the consecrated moun
tain of Ste Anne, and almost every shade of the
spectrum bends its rays to the eye, an artist
strolled in five and twenty years ago, schooled
and practised. During all these years, the ever
changing colors over the changeless forms so im
bued his being that no other can hope to appreciate
as he the panorama there displayed, or to sound

SCENERY OF THE GULF COAST 3
the depths of his spiritual delight in it.* But to
the geologist the brilUant cliffs do not assault the
sky in vain. The great Pierced Rock is not merely
a glorious mass of soft reds and yellows and greens,
nor Ste Anne only an uplifted blood-red altar
mantled with deathless verdure of spruce and fir.
They are all these and more, for apart from their
aesthetic beauties and beneath their briUiant ex
teriors are the secrets of their origin and the keys
which imlock many a serious problem in the mak
ing of the earth.
The scenery of Gasp6, rather than its history,
first invites us, as it is the more insinuating, the
more venerable and to the traveler the more
immediate. Gaspesian scenery lends itself most
readily to either scientific or sentimental treat
ment. I may be detected in indulging in the latter,
but I trust not at the expense of fidelity to the
former. * This is a reference to Mr. Frederick James whose greatly
lamented death has occiu'red since this page was written.
With attributes of artistic genius were combined in Mr. James
an attractive personality, broad culture and large human
sympathy.

4 THE HEART OF GASPfi
The scenery of Gasp6 County has a natural
basis of diversity. The eye recognizes the pro-
foimd differences at once, even though unconscious
of their causes. The whole country is underlain
by a series of great troughs and folds of the rocks
running almost parallel to each other and to the
shores of Gaspe Bay, and these rock folds project
at the shore line in the majestic and ragged cliffs
which form the striking and brilliant features of
the coast. Whitehead, the torn cliffs of Perce, the
threatening reefs of St. Peter, the bold walls of
Shiphead, Bon Ami and St. Alban. Beneath these
folds, and forming the foundation on which they
rest, are the vertical and distorted strata of much
more ancient date, that make the low cliffs of
Cap-des-Rosiers and extend thence eastward in
majestic walls all along the shore of the lower St.
Lawrence. Lying almost flat on top of the crests
of all the folds south of Gasp6 Bay, and near the
coast, is an enormous mantle of brilliant red
conglomerate and sandstone, rising from the base
to the highest summits of Perc6 Mountain.
Speaking then with precision, these heights of

SCENERY OF THE GULF COAST 5
Gaspe divide themselves into the true mountains,
wherein the rock strata have been folded, and the
great dissected plateau of Perc6 Mountain, where
there has been no crumpling of the strata. Singu
larly enough, this plateau is highest of all these
heights as they now stand on the sea front. In the
remoter inland south of the St. Lawrence, lie the
greater mountains of the Shickshocks.
The outline of the Gaspe coast expresses only
the present phase of its history. The eternal
ocean, unceasingly pounding at its edges, has
gnawed it into its present form. This great mill
of the gods has slowly ground back to its primal
mud an enormous body of rock which, not so
long ago as time is reckoned in geology, was a
part of the land. One will go far indeed to find
such magnificent demonstrations of the devouring
power of the sea. At Perc6 it has cut away Bona
venture Island from along the flanks of Mt. Ste
Anne and the shores of the South Bay, by a chan
nel three miles wide, from which remnants of
the old rock still project above the water; it has
cut away the Pierced Rock from the headlands

6 THE HEART OF GASPfi
of Mt. JoH and Cape Canon, with which it once
formed a now lost mountain; it has eaten away
another and greater mountain above the North
Beach, leaving to the present only the ragged
Murailles, which formed its southern flanks.
If one would read in more exact expression the
ocean's work about these sea cliffs, let the eye fol
low the thirty fathom fine on our hydrographic
chart of Little Gasp6 peninsula — ^the Forillon.
This little spine of land that runs from Grande
Grive to Cape Gasp6 rises seven hundred feet along
the sea cliffs and falls sheer to the St. Lawrence on
the northern side. Yet on the north at the foot of
this inaccessible escarpment the sea-bottom falls
away very gradually, and it is full five miles from
the present coast-Une before it reaches a depth
of one hundred and eighty feet. All this volume
of rock, represented by the width of five miles
bounding the coast and a height far greater than a
thousand feet, has the ocean gnawed away from
Cape Gasp6 in comparatively recent time.
But along the shore of Gasp6 Bay, from Grande
Gr^ve and Indian Cove to the Cape this thirty

SCENERY OF THE GULF COAST 7
fathom line shows that off this coast the fall is
abjectly downward from six and sixteen fathoms
to thirty-eight, forty and fifty-two fathoms close
to the present shore. Here the phenomena are
the counterpart of those on the other shore. So the
ocean is eating back on both sides of the little
peninsula, but on the north at a tremendous ad
vantage, pounding away against the edges of the
rocks under the fierce impact of the northeast
storms. There is little doubt this land is sinking.
Here and there along the flanks of the peninsula
can be seen a trace of ancient sea beaches and
from Indian Cove to Cape Gasp4 is a fine wave
cut rock terrace high over the present water
level; records of a former upward movement of
the land. The late A. W. Dolbel, agent of the
extensive and venerable fishing estabhshments of
the Wilham Fruing Company, who was stationed
on the Gasp6 coast for nearly fifty years, has told
me that twice in his experience it was necessary
to move further up the beach at the Grande
Gr6ve, the seaward panel of the drying racks
for the herring nets, because of the encroach-

8 THE HEART OF GASPfi
ments of the sea. The beaches at Le Huquet's,
St. George's and Indian Coves, all along the south
shore, have grown narrower than in the earher
days of the settlement as the southern margin
of the Forillon goes down.
Let us look again at the map and follow the
lines of forty and fifty fathoms. Fifty fathoms
is less than half the height of the rocks rising
straight above the water at Shiphead, and yet
should the water fall away these three hundred
feet the land would run out into the Gulf, follow
ing the direction of the mountain range, until it
included all the rocky shoals called the "American
Bank," once a part of the same range of mountains.
Even an elevation of the sea bottom for one
hundred feet would turn the American bank into
a rocky island of no small dimensions. Such it
once was. Now wasted by the waters, the home
of the cod, it leaves only to the imagination the
scenes of life played out on the grassy slopes dur
ing the ages before its destiny was accomphshed.
Like the Lyonesse, it may have had its Armorel in
the unrecorded and unsubmerged days of its past.

GRANDE GR^VB. A FISHING STATION ON THE FORILLON SHORE
OF GASPi! BAY
(Takea by W. Hyman)

THE SLOPES OP THE FORILLON AT L ANSE-AU-SAUVAGE, NEAR THE
END OP THE PENINSULA

SCENERY OF THE GULF COAST 9
So the little peninsula of the Forillon, survivor
of a grander past, now barely a half mile across
at the portage above the Grande GrSve, is not
only going down, but being devoured as it goes.
But it is too soon to sing its requiem. Majestic
stands its rib of mountains, the still mighty flank
of a once mightier range. On its southward
slopes are planted some of the serenest and most
contented homes I have known; its farms, often
pitched at disheartening angles to the water, yield
their increase, while the crest of spruce and fir
adds softness and beauty to every contour. One
may here start at the waters of Gasp6 Bay and,
climbing upward, a short half hour will bring him
to the cliffs of Bon Ami, seven hundred feet
straight over the waters of the St. Lawrence.
Off at his left, above the curve of Rosier Cove,
towers bare St. Alban, twelve hundred feet, the
highest point reached by these rocks in their up
ward inclination. If he will take the King's
Road, which traverses the peninsula from Grande
Greve to Cape Rosier, it will lead him at first
gently through a way embowered in evergreens

10 THE HEART OF GASPfi
and bring him with starthng abruptness almost
to the height of the Bon Ami cliffs. Lying on his
belly on the grass of the roadside, he may test his
nerve by protruding his head far enough over the
to edge see the waves break at the base of the con
cave cliff hundreds of feet below him. Mighty
St. Alban rises again at his left, a gray bare rock
wall on its sea front, embrasured in a sloping talus
of its own fragments and resting on the projecting
point of rock called "the Quay" at the edge of
the water. St. Alban seems the very genius of
the place, a stern, weather-beaten god, skirted in
his kirtle of fallen rocks, with foot planted for
ward on the strand, bidding a vain defiance to
the waves. I rather suspect that King Knut
who is popularly known to have been guilty of
some such impotent defiance to the onrushing
waves, may have to take his place as a like im
posing sea cliff among the geological myths, to
gether with Lot's wife, Niobe, and the Chimsera.
The King's Road, which reaches the summit
of the cliffs, from this point becomes quite im
possible, pitching down at an indescribable angle,

SCENERY OF THE GULF COAST 11
but it comes out at last, beyond the line of vision,
to the broad flat triangle of Cap-des-Rosiers and
to a wholly different series of rocks which produce
quite distinct scenic effects.
Some of the earliest of the French explorers,
perhaps Champlain, termed this narrow peninsula,
this spine of land which we have been describing,
the Forillon.* In some early maps and in the
Jesuit Relations, the name, often spelled Fourillon,
is attached only to the cape now called by the
English, Shiphead. Out at the end of Shiphead
until 1851 stood an obelisk of rock which the sea
had separated from the cliff. To this the name
Forillon was vicariously applied, the name of the
whole being taken for the part. The obelisk was
also and stiU is to the French and Guernseymen,
La Vieille, the Old Woman, which, says the
Abb6 Ferland, with its tufted cap of verdure,
* Describing the hUls and headland on the south shore of
Gasp6 Bay, Nicholas Denys in his "Description" (1672)
says: "Cette pointe se nomme le Forillon, il y a une petite
Isle devant on les pecheurs de Gasp4 viennent faire leur de-
grad pour trouver la molue " (p. 234). This use of the name
is quite at variance with that of earher writers who applied
it only to the northern peninsula.

12 THE HEART OF GASPfi
resembles some of the Canadian grandmothers.
Admiral Bayfield put it down on his charts as
the Flowerpot, and so it stands to-day on English
maps. Be this as it may, the obeUsk is gone.
La Vieille has long since fallen, and nothing
remains but the Flowerpot, and we very much
need for constant use a term for this Gaspe spine
of land. So I shall call it the Forillon, believing
that in so doing we return to its original use.
On Lescarbot's map of 1612 the little peninsula
bears the name Hognedo, and it would seem that
he himself was responsible for its application to
the place. When Cartier returned to this coast,
in 1535, on his second voyage, bringing back with
him the two Indian boys whom he had carried
away from Gaspe the year before, as his ship
hove in sight of the lofty headland the lads,
it is said, greeted the home ground with de
lighted cries of "Honguedo! Honguedo!" Later
writers have construed this word either as the
tribal name of the people, or their equivalent to
home. From the broad fist of Rosiers Cape and Cove

SCENERY OF THE GULF COAST 13
this thin peninsula runs out into the sea like an
index finger, as it might say to the traveler

. Mark well her bulwarks.
From the homes pitched high on the slopes of
the Forillon the eye sweeps over a magnificent
stretch of bay and sea and distant mountains,
and never tires at the infinitude of variety in the
scene. The Forillon itself and the hills of Little
Gasp6 are so foreshortened as to be almost lost.
The observer seems to view the panorama spread
before him as do the gulls wending their way from
their roost on the Bon Ami cliffs to their feeding
grounds in the barachois at Douglastown. The
whole stretch of Gaspe Bay lies before the eye
from the hillside galleries. Far away at the west
are the rounded sandstone mountains of Gasp6
Basin, besmudged by the smoke clouds from the
lumber mills that surround it. Here the panorama
begins, and under the circling eye pass in due
succession the low cliffs of Douglastown with
its sandbars, its tickle and barachois lying low
to the waterline, the long gray rock face of Chien-

14 THE HEART OF GASPfi
Blanc, the reddish timbered hills of Bois-Brul6,
and the crimson sea-wall of sandstone running
on eastward to Point St. Peter, the end of the
south shore save for the little lighthouse-crowned
Plateau Island at its tip. Above these lower
heights of the foreground rise at the east the
graceful curves of majestic Perc6 Mountain,
twenty-four miles away as the cormorant flies,
crowned at the summit with the shrine of Ste
Anne. The good saint often draws her mantle
of fog about her, but on a fair day from the Forillon
her cross is an undisguised test of imweakened
vision. Looking from the higher slopes of the
Forillon, the Perc6 Rock slips above the horizon,
and from Shiphead light at the tip of the Cape
one sees Bonaventure Island stretched out for
its fuU length. Beyond them all the great expanse
of gulf waters.
To the portrayal of the sublime and awe-
inspiring in nature, the vehement which impinges
on the vision and beats its way through the portals
of the brain, our language, well-handled, lends
itself with adequacy, but to paint in words these

SCENERY OF THE GULF COAST 15
gentler aspects and her more insinuating moods
when she addresses herself to the heart and per
meates the being of the observer with a deUcious
sensuousness, here, I think, our common vehicle
falters. The views from the Forillon are not at
all as I have described them, the gentler embellish
ments, their brilliancy of color and freshness of
life are lacking. Here on the rising slopes of the
little farms fighting then- way upward against
the spruce and fir, on an August day are carpets
of coral-red pigeon berries set in emerald nests,
great clusters of heavy gold-tipped tansy and
golden rod fill the fence corners, the fallow fields
are blue with climbing vetch or gleam with rugs
of crimson Monarda. Banks of white immortelles
are at every hand, while daisy and tall dandelion
add color to the scheme. From such a bower the
eye looks down the long slope to the water, dotted
with the flats and barges of the fishermen, and
across the water to the distant mountains. With
every passing cloud the scene is changed. Shadows
come and go upon the distant summits, deepening
their azure with an approaching storm, blackening

16 THE HEART OF GASPfi
as the storm impends and blotting them out as
it bursts. The oncoming autumn effects little
change in the aspect of the evergreen woodlands,
but there are still patches of hardwood trees where
autumnal tints are painted in extravagant bril
liancy. We were speaking of the pernicious activity
of the sea in the destruction of the Forillon.
Aided by the northwest storms and frosts, the
waters will continue to waste its mountains, pare
down St. Peter, undermine Plateau Island, de
molish the walls of Perce, dismember the Pierced
Rock and efface Bonaventure. The American
Bank is the handwriting on the wall, its fate is
the forecast for all the coast.
For the Forillon, however, the end that is to
be concerns us less than the end that is, and the
end of the Forillon is the end of the world, the
Finistere, for this coast at least.* The double row
of sloping rock ridges which make the Forillon,
terminates in a two-lobed point. The southern
* Father Pacifique, an eminent present authority on the
Micmac language, says that Gasp6 is a Micmac word that
means jlnis&re, the land's end.

SCENERY OF THE GULF COAST 17
and higher is Shiphead, well named, for as one
stands on the lighthouse and looks down on the
drum-mast and the outline of the cliff edge the
resemblance to the foredeck and prow of a ship
is most striking, and from outside the profile is
even more effective. It is six hundred and ninety
feet straight down from the grassy edges of the
cliff to the water.
The northern lobe of the headland is Cape
Gasp6, once called the Old Man by those who
would find a companion for La Vieille. These
ends of parallel declivities are separated by a low
coul6, a hanging valley whose end lies far above
the sea. In this coule formerly the hght and
fog-bell stood and the ruins of this older structure
have afforded many an interesting fossil.
The road thither from the Grande Gr^ve is a
series of ups and downs, but the last grand ascent
brings one to a point of view from which no other
spot on the coast so profoundly impresses the
observer with the destructive agency of the sea,
as he notes the ragged sheer limestone walls
stretching away toward Cape Bon Ami and Cape-

18 THE HEART OF GASPfi
des-Rosiers Cove, the barest remnant of what has
once been a mighty mountain range, reaching
toward Anticosti Island. As one stands on the
summit of this weather-beaten promontory let
him remember that he is at the very outermost
supramarine tip of the great Appalachian Moun
tain system and on the remnant of one of its
folds which here gave birth to the St. Lawrence
river. It is well to note from the map the singular
curvature of the axis of this mountain fold, which
carries into full effect the great S-form of the
entire mountain system along the coast of North
America. The making of these moimtains did
not take place all at once, at any one time in the
history of the continent. Here in Gasp6 some of
these mountain ridges date back to the close of
Silurian time, but the rock beds of the Forillon
were crumpled up into moimtains toward the
close of the Devonian and thrust far over the
twisted earlier folds that now make the low rock
shelves of Cape-des-Rosiers while farther south
at Perc6 the later rocks lie almost flat above them.

SCENERY OF THE GULF COAST 19
At Little Gaspe there is an accession to the
moimtain structure, and here we get the first
glimpse of the great overlying sandstone masses
which cover a vast area in Gasp6 County. Here
one may see, near the corner of the beach as
the road turns toward the little English church,
these sandstones lying on the sloping limestones,
and from here on up the Bay to Peninsula and
onward the sandstone masses make the first
ridge of the series, the two limestone ridges falling
into the background. These ridges run far up
the St. Lawrence river and far back into the tim
bered wilderness making the northern folds of the
Gasp6 Appalachians.

II

The Cliffs of Perce — Perce Rock — Changes in Perce Rock —
Descriptions by Champlain; LeTac; Denys; Le Clercq —
Captain Smith's Engraving — Ferland — Le Boutillier —
The Future of the Rock — Fossils of the Rock; their Abun
dance — The Murailles — Mt. Joli and Cape Canon — Rela
tions of the Limestone Cliffs.
The ribs of the Forillon are stupendous, remark
able in uniformity of development and amazingly
rich in their profusion of the life forms that peopled
the ancient seas in which they were laid down,
but the limestones of Perce surpass them in bold
and startling picturesqueness. If the traveler
approaches this wonderful spot by boat from the
south, in the westering sun, guided by the cross-
crowned summit of Mt. Ste Anne, hugging the
shore cliffs of Cape d'Espoir and Cape Blanc, he
sees nothing of the spectacle which is in store
for him; but as his boat beats round the head
of Cape Blanc the stupendous Pierced Rock
bursts upon his amazed view, towering in majesty
20

SCENERY OF THE GULF COAST 21
and clothed in garb of many colors, while the torn
limestones of the Murailles, stretching away to
the north, turn to him their verdure clad slopes.
Let him come upon the Perce harbor from the
north and as he rounds Point St. Peter and
steams across the Malbay, the Perce Rock fixes his
eye in ever growing majesty. At his right are
the higher and painted cliffs of the Murailles,
piercing the sky in ragged lines. If the sun is his
friend and lies to the east behind him, the vision
grows to its climax as his boat swings to under
the beam of the great Rock. But perhaps none
of these approaches by water is excelled for
effectiveness by that which greets the traveler
on the way leading over the high Perc6 Mountain
from the Barachois of Malbay. Here as, through
truly alpine scenery, one reaches the height of
grade, the isolated rock strikes the eye head on,
like a gigantic finer rounding the point of Mt. JoU
and saUing into the port of the North Beach.
Perc6 Rock may be prosaically described as an
isolated mass of limestone in strata that are almost
vertical, dipping a Uttle to the south, about

22 THE HEART OF GASPfi
fifteen hundred feet long and two hundred and
eighty-eight feet high at its peak or inner point.
At its greatest width it is about three hundred
feet through, its diameter varying greatly along
the projections and recesses of its sides. At the
seaward end stands a smaller mass entirely isolated
and cut away from the parent rock, and the rear
of the great rock itself is perforated by an arched
tunnel about sixty feet high. The summit, which
is now wholly inaccessible, has a gently undulating
surface and shows all the features of a small
section of a mountain side. The rock is separated
from the shore and the low headland of gray
limestone beginning with Mt. Joli and continuing
to Cape Canon, by about one hundred yards of
sandbar which is covered at high tide.
The singular beauty of this amazing scenic
feature is partly due to its unusual symmetry but
more to its briUiancy of color. Perc6 Rock is no
such gray pile as one may find among the striking
sea-ruins of the northern oceans, on the shores of
Caithness at Thurso and Scrabster in Scotland,
in Hoy and about Stromness in the Orkneys, and

SCENERY OF THE GULF COAST 23
even the brighter shades in the rock piles of the
Magdalen Islands farther out in the Gulf do not
make a comparison adequate. Its walls are
bathed in tints of purple-red, bright yellow and
gray-blue, the natural shades of the limestone,
and these are diversified by great streaks of white
calcite which vein the mass. On its top the green
carpet of grass spreads downward as the slope
permits, while over the jagged anfractuosities
near the summit, a deep orange-red lichen has
added its color to the scheme. The top of the
cliff is the home of countless gulls and cormorants
ever moving about hke a halo of fog scuds and
screaming sempiternally in the same shrill notes
that echoed on the sea cliffs of the lost mountain
in the ages past.
Seeking for some clew to the rate at which the
sea has been devouring Perc6 Rock, I have looked
for other evidence than can be found in the cliff
itself. It is not strange that so marked a feature of the
coast should have made a profound impression
on the earliest explorers, and here and there are

24 THE HEART OF GASPfi
references to it in the writings of some of them
who had found the Isle Percee a haven for wood
and water, and occasionally a note in the relations
of the RecoUet and Jesuit fathers. In Champlain's
Des Sauvages of 1603, I find this account of it,
but there is nothing in it that does not fit the
conditions of to-day. "The Isle of Percee," he
says, "is a very high rock sheer on both sides; in it
is an arch through which shallops and boats can
pass at high water. At ebb tide one can walk
from the mainland to the island, it being only
four or five hundred steps."
The great explorer and founder of Canada was
not then seeing the rock as it stands to-day. This
is evident on reading the later accounts. The
single arch he describes may be that now repre
sented by the passage seaward between the rock
and the obelisk, but it is clear that the single
arch of to-day was not then in existence.
In 1672 Nicolas Denys, seigneur of Perc6,
" Gouveneur Lieutenant General pour le Roy, et
Proprietaire de toutes les Terres et Isles qui sont
depuis le Cap de Campseaux, jusques au Cap des

SCENERY OF THE GULF COAST 25
Roziers," wrote:* "The Isle is a great rock which
may be fifty to sixty fathoms in sheer height
straight up from the foot of the two sides and has a
width of three or four fathoms; at low water one
can go from the mainland by foot aU round it;
it may have a length of three hundred and fifty
or four hundred fathoms; it has been much longer,
reaching even to the Island of Bonne-a venture; but
the sea has devoured it at the foot so that it has
fallen, and I have seen it when it had only one
passage in the form of an arcade, through which a
barge can pass at full sail. It is this which has
given it the name of the Isle Percle. There have
two others formed since, which are not so large
but are growing all the time. It has the appear
ance that these passages weaken its foundation
and will be the cause of its eventual destruction
after which the sailors will no longer be able to
work here. All of them that come here to fish
* Description geographique et historique de Costes de
I'Amerique septentrionale. Avec I'histoire natureUe du Pais.
Professor Ganong has recently translated this work for the
Champlain Society and added thereto valuable annotations
and biographical sketches.

26 THE HEART OF GASPfi
cast anchor on the lee of this island, at a length
of two cables off; one has here three or four fathoms
of water, further off is a constantly increasing
depth." Father Sixte LeTac, who had visited the coast
probably on his way to and from his mission in
Newfoundland in 1689, spoke of the Rock as
having but a single arch.
Faucher St. Maurice, in his charming and
cleverly padded sketches of a short trip along this
coast (1877), records having seen in the possession
of Admiral Inglefield on board H. M. S. Bellerophon
a copy of an engraving made in 1760 which repre
sented the rock with three arches through it.
It has been my good fortune to obtain a copy of
this old copper plate. Its date was the year after
the fall of Quebec, and curiosity was doubtless
keen enough in England over so remarkable a
feature of her new conquest to justify the execu
tion of this expensive plate. It was "drawn by
Captain Her'y Smyth on the Spot," and the same
pride that led the skippers of the 1700's to have
their ships painted on Sunderland and Liverpool

SCENERY OF THE GULF COAST 27
jugs, led him to put his frigate in the foreground of
the picture. The Rock is here viewed from the
north with Mt. Joli at the right and Bonaventure
at the left. Its arches are two in number, not
three; and though the rear arch has now fallen it is
noteworthy that the chief projections on the side
of the Rock and the outline of its prow are essen
tially the same to-day as they were one hundred
and fifty years ago. The distant view beyond the
Rock shows the busy fishing fleet off the lower
beach. Rare as this picture is, I have inserted
here in its place a copy of a still rarer print which
was evidently adapted from Smyth's drawing and
presents the same aspect.
Father LeClercq, who was stationed at Perc6
for twelve years from 1675 and again for a number
of years after, interrupting his mission by a
voyage to France, gave this description of the
Rock, upon the accuracy of which we may rely,
for it had been for all this time the most con
spicuous object within his vision: "It," he says,
referring to Gaspd Bay, "is only Seven Leagues
from the Isle Percee which is not, as some imagine.

28 THE HEART OF GASPfi
an island capable of lodging inhabitants; because
it is only a rough Rock steep on all sides, of an
extraordinary height and a surprising abruptness.
It is so pierced by three or four distinct passage
ways that the barges pass full manned and at full
sail through the largest of these openings. It is
from this fact that it derives the name of I'lsle
Percee, although it is really only a peninsula or a
Presqu'isle, of which one can easily make the
circuit afoot when the sea is low; and resembles an
island only at high water. It is separated from
terra firma by only two or three acres [arpent =
one hundred and eighty feet] of ground. It would
seem as if it had formerly been joined thereto and
that it had been cut off by the storms and tempests
of the ocean."*
The discrepancy in these accounts may arise
from some disagreement between the dates of
observation and of pubhcation, but they can be
reconciled to this conclusion, that the arches dur
ing the period of Denys's observation had grown
from one to three or four and probably one of
* Nouvelle Relation de la Gaspfisie, 1691, pp. 4, 5.

oo
«

SCENERY OF THE GULF COAST 29
these had soon thereafter fallen in. Reliance
apparently cannot be placed on LeTac's account.
I find no other descriptive account of the Rock
throughout the whole of the eighteenth century
and up to the time when the Abbe Ferland wrote
of his missionary visitation along this coast in
1836. Ferland's stay at Perce was brief, not more
than two or three days' duration, and much of the
material of his entertaining narrative was derived
from other than original sources. Of the Rock he
says: "The Isle Percee appears to have been formerly
joined to Mt. Joli; it is separated therefrom only
by a straight channel which is dry at low water.
The length of the plateau is about eight acres
and its width is reckoned at only from sixty to
eighty feet. In its entire extent the rock is only a
continuous cliff, the average height of which
is two hundred and ninety feet. . . . The
waves . . . have already cut out two arches
remarkable for regularity. . . . The open pas
sages in the rock are about twenty-five feet wide,
twenty feet in height and thirty in length. Through

30 THE HEART OF GASPfi
the principal arch the barges can pass at all times
either under sail or by oars; through the other
they can only float when the sea is high. The
debris of the rock scattered all along bears witness
that the sea is continuing its encroachments. Some
day, perhaps, the arches will gradually fall in and
the Isle Percee will form three immense columns
which will rival in volume the pyramids of Egypt."
Sir William Logan was at Perc6 in 1843 on his
first field work as director of the Canadian Geo
logical Survey. While at the village he put up with
a Mr. Moriarty and in the fragments of his journal
which have been published by the late Professor
Harrington * he says that his host formerly cut
hay on the top of the Rock, but had abandoned
his farming there some six years before, as a
foolhardy fellow by the name of Pierre L'Egle
took it into his head to dance on a projecting piece
of rock which gave way and he was dashed to
death on the beach. It seems indeed to have been
common practice in the early days when clearings
were small to take the hay from the summit of the
* Life of Sir Wilham Logan, Montreal, 1883.

\ t

-^Vf*^*"-

PERcfe ROCK FROM THE NORTH, SHOWING TWO ARCHES
From a London print dated 1S12; drawn by S. Owen and engraved by G. Cooke

SCENERY OF THE GULF COAST 31
Rock and to gather the sea birds' eggs. To-day
the angles of the Rock are so changed that to
climb it seems beyond human darmg.
On the 17th of June, 1845, the outer arch in the
Rock fell. My informant, Mr. Phillip Le Boutil
lier, an engaging and vigorous man of more than
eighty years and a companion of Logan in the for
ties, says that as he was on that day turning the key
in the door of the Le Boutillier Co.'s store, he was
startled by an earspUtting and thunderous crash
and turning toward the Rock saw that amid
clouds of dust and spray and the terrified screams
of the birds, the outer and greater vault had
fallen. And thus it stands to-day with but one of
the three or four arches on which the eyes of Denys
and LeClercq so often looked, and with a new one
creeping at right angles to the rest, lengthwise
through the base of the seaward obelisk. Here we
behold, as under the eye, the ruin which the sea
has wrought on this single isolated rock in the last
two hundred and fifty years. I find on carefully
comparing my measurements with the dimensions
which can be derived from the Crown Land maps

32 THE HEART OF GASPE
of Perce, the original draft of which is not far from
fifty years old, that there is no apparent change of
proportions in this interval except in a lessening
diameter at certain points.
It is not often that a geologist gets hold of a
proposition so concrete and uncomplicated as
that which an isolated mass like Perce Rock pre
sents. A simple combination of two causes has
contributed to the destruction of this mass, the
sea and the frost. The destruction has gone on
by leaps and bounds in the falling of arches
carrying down thousands of tons of rock at a
time, though the times were at distant intervals.
But the steady work of the less violent agents
never ceases. From Nicolas Denys's statement in
1672, that on his first trip to Perc6 there was
only one arch in the Rock, as Champlain saw it
in 1603, but when he returned some years later
he observed two others, and that subsequently
in his day one of the latter broke down, it is evi
dent that the progress of destruction then went
on at a rapid pace compared with its advance
during the last century. But these arches have

SCENERY OF THE GULF COAST 33
all been at the thin outer edge of the cUff which
easily became honeycombed. This thinner part
of the Rock is now nearly gone and the waters
have a more serious problem before them. A
thing of singular beauty indeed the long rock
with its three or four arches, in the days of the
1600's, must have been. To-day its proportions
are more stable, for the single perforation hes
under one of the highest parts. Its rearward
obeUsk is giving way and is perforated at its base,
but the splendid mass itself is not perceptibly
thinning to destruction. Let us look a little
to its future.
Perce Rock is six hundred feet from Mt. JoU
along the sandbar over which one still walks at
low tide. There is a beach on both sides for a
part of the distance at low tide but it is an un
certain thing, disappearing at high water except
in retreats on the north shore, and at no time can
one make the circuit of the rock by foot. It is
two hundred and eighty-eight feet high at the
prow, two hundred and fifteen feet high at the
arch and one hundred and fifty-four feet high at

34 THE HEART OF GASPfi
its outer end; it is fourteen hundred and twenty
feet long, fifteen hundred and sixty-five feet from
prow to outer end of the obelisk; it is about
three hundred feet wide in its widest parts. The
part of the Rock exposed above the water weighs
about four million tons.
From the broken vertical strata of its cliffs,
fragments fall easily and the winter's storms
and frosts bring down large masses. Yet its
blocks are wedged in tight, and in roving back
and forth at the foot of the cliff day after day,
I have not observed the actual fall of a single
large piece. However, the base of the cliff is
covered with large masses and the shores of Mt.
Joli made up of the fragments washed from the
Rock. The most striking pile of fallen blocks
now lies on the north side at one of the projecting
angles and is composed of ten to twenty pieces
weighing from five to ten tons each. They are
the accumulations of no one seems to know how
many years. I have found no one ready to venture
a suggestion as to how much of this rock falls
annually. Certainly more comes down in some

SCENERY OF THE GULF COAST 35
years than others, and the fall of an arch would
break all averages. This latter factor, however,
is now practically eliminated. After careful ob
servation I should regard three hundred tons a
year a fair average, five hundred tons a year large,
one thousand tons most exceptional. With the first
approximation it will take sea and weather up
ward of thirteen thousand years to accomplish the
ruin of the cliff; with the second, eight thousand,
with the third, four thousand. Unborn generations
of Gaspesians will gaze upon the undimmed
luster of this magnificent cUff.
I offer the foregoing prophecy as an oblation
to the Genie de I'Isle Percee. She has had her
own troubles and I would not add to them.
"Many myths have grown up about this rock,"
says one writer naively, after telling a marvelous
tale of the unceasing battles between the feathered
dwellers on its summit, cormorants against gulls,
whenever one of either kind, big with temerity,
ventures over the rigidly drawn and closely
guarded boimdaries of the other's domain, spfitting
the heavens with their militant outcry.

36 THE HEART OF GASPfi
The strata of Perce Rock teem with fossils.
There are the strange denizens of the ancient
sea in which these strata were laid down as sedi
ments, brachiopods of many species, bivalves, lim
pets and whelks and trilobites. The most striking
of them all are the trilobites, ancient precursors of
the lobsters of the coves. Here are to be found the
remains of one of the largest of these creatures
known, the Dalmanites Perceensis, which was
sometimes two feet long; and another, D. Biardi,
with a trident on his nose. One could not work
over a ton of this rock without finding at least
a score of these crustaceans. Let us suppose there
is one in each of the four million tons. There is
also a singularly graceful brachiopod known as
Chonetes Canadensis. It would be hard to dissect
an average ton of the Rock without turning out
these by hundreds. Let us say one hundred; then
Perce Rock contains at least four million trilobites
and four hundred million specimens of Chonetes
Canadensis. Other species in their order, there
are many of them, and these are but samples.
But my figures are absurdly small. Let them

PERCf; ROCK. VIEWED FROM THE NORTH

SCENERY OF THE GULF COAST 37
serve to convey some notion of the enormous
profusion of life represented in this little section
of the ancient ocean bed and give an added
feature of interest to this attractive spot.
If one needed proof that the sea has always
been the alma nutrix of life, here it is, not to be
surpassed in the daily scenes which have been
enacted along the Gaspl coast for more than two
hundred and fifty years in the codfishing. Millions
of cod are yearly taken from these waters, but
like the widow's cruse of oil, they fail not. If
all these milUons of all these years were added
together they would not equal in number the
remains of the animals now lying embedded in
the Perc6 Rock.
It is the extraordinary destruction of the lime
stone cliffs that gives to Perce much of its pictur
esqueness. Aside from the Pierced Rock we have
evidence of this in the serrated cliffs of the Mu
railles which rise from the water to six hundred feet
in concave fronts, the almost vanished remnant of
a majestic mountain which partly spanned the

38 THE HEART OF GASPfi
Malbay. The Murailles begin with low Cape
Barr^ at the end of the North Beach and the rocks
rise higher and higher to the climax in double
pointed Red Peak, beyond which lies the lofty
fault-scarp of the Grande Coupe. They, too,
like the Perc6 Rock, are brilliantly tinted and both
are geologically the same, though in the sea-
wracked topography they seem to have belonged
to different mountains.
To the series of limestone cliffs here, belong the
gray Mt. Joli and Cape Canon, whose escarpments
divide the North and South beaches. They too
stand with strata erect, parallel with those of
Perc6 Rock from which the sunken outer reefs
of Mt. JoU are not more than fifty feet away in
the Une of their courses. These are but low and
somber headlands, handmaidens of Perc6 Rock
which shines more brilUantly by their presence.

Ill
Scenery of Gaspe Basin and Bay — Its Rocks in Nature and Art
We have spoken thus far particularly only
of the scenery which belongs to the limestone
mountains and their ragged coast lines. There
is a very close dependence between the appearance
of a mountain in the landscape and the texture
of the rock that composes it, so that after all we
are thrown back to a consideration of these moun
tains according to their kind.
On top of the Umestone strata Ues an enormous
series of sandstones, folded and broken; no one
knows their thickness. This trememdous mantle
of rocks spreads inland from Little Gaspl on the
ForUlon, from Point St. Peter and Malbay, covers
aU the country about Gaspe Basin and constitutes
the rough ranges of the northern interior. Sir
WilUam Logan estimated these rocks to be about
seven thousand feet thick, but though this may
39

40 THE HEART OF GASPfi
be an overstatement yet there is thickness enough
to make very majestic elevations if the whole
or greater part were exposed at any one point.
The Ulterior of Gaspe County is a heavily wooded,
tenantless domain, stiU a place of traUs and por
tages, as Uttle reduced to the pursuits and demands
of civilization as the interior of Patagonia. But
mountains of the same tjrpe as those further inland,
though of gentler expression, are those which
circle the Gaspe Basin. Here, withdrawn from
the fierce play of the Gulf storms, the softer and
rounder outlines prevail. The Nor'west and
Sou'west Arms of the Bay, continuing into the
Dartmouth and York rivers, run back along
ancient depressions or troughs in the folded rocks.
Gaspe village is at the axilla of these arms. If
the traveler will let his rambles lead him around
the crest of Cape O'Hara and down the raised sea
beach below St. Albert's Church he may observe
the sandstone foundations of Gasp^ Mountain
sloping at a steep angle toward the north and he
may follow them for a long distance up the Dart
mouth river, to the volcanic dike at L'Anse-aux-

GASPi BASIN VIEWED FROM THE YORK SIDE OF THE SOU'WEST ARM) (JASPfc BAY IN THE RIGHT DISTANCE

SCENERY OF THE GULF COAST 41
Cousins and beyond, always at this inclination.
Across the Nor'west Arm above Peninsula he will
find them sloping south, the two slopes meeting
in a trough at the bottom of the Bay. Let him
follow the shore southward from the inner docks
among the Robin fishing stores and on toward
Gasp6 South, or along the road on the other
side of the York, and he may note that the
rocks soon dip in just the reverse direction to
that at the Dartmouth, pitching downward to
the south. The crest of the great fold of the strata
passes through Gaspe Mountain not far away
from Baker's hotel. As the hills rise behind this
deUghtful Uttle village "where," says Ferland,
"Uve the aristocrats of Gasp6," the bending of the
strata brings the Umestones, which lie buried
beneath the sandstones, to the surface at the
highest summits. One may follow the old portage
trail from the clearing back of Baker's up through
the woods over the first mountain but only the
sandstones will appear. If he will take a more
strenuous walk and cUmb the second mountain,
separated from the first by the portage road

42 THE HEART OF GASPfi
running from L'Anse-aux-Cousins to Gasp6 South,
there at the tops he will find the limestones broken
through the strata which lie over them. It may
be well to reflect on what this phenomenon sig
nifies. If, say five thousand feet of sandstones
with two thousand feet of limestones beneath
them have been folded up into mountains, then
the limestones can be exposed from under their
mantle only in one or both of two ways. Either
the rock masses have been cracked and broken
and by sUpping apart have exposed the lower
beds, or the entire overlying mass on the crest
of the fold has been worn away. I think it likely
that the two causes have conspired in giving the
hills their present form, but it is evident that there
has been a removal of tremendous volumes of rock,
partly by the slow process of natural decay and
partly by the agency of ice and water. The
hills of Gaspe Basin and the higher summits
of the interior would together constitute a great
plateau were it not for the distant folds which
traverse it like that which crosses Gasp6 Basin.
The scenery of the Basin is a restful contrast to

SCENERY OF THE GULF COAST 43
that outside. Had the wasting forces which have
worn off the summits of the hills gone farther down
about the limestones they would have left more
ragged crests behind them, but the softer sand
stones have made only gentle curves. There is
but Uttle room on the shores of the beautiful
Basin between the water and mountain, but from
L'Anse-aux-Cousins around to Gasp6 South the
slopes have been brought under cultivation and
the spruce and fir driven upward. There are not
many sights so inviting as the outlook from the
height of these clearings down the Bay, around
through the narrow passage where the great bars of
Sandy Beach and the Peninsula nearly strangle
the waterway, down along the hills of the Forillon
to Cape Gasp6; and in the other direction the eye
foUows the shore line from Cape Ramsay along
the course of the Basin, which is bounded by a
rising summit of Uke hUls. The Basin is a harbor
of such dimensions and absolute security that
it is fuU of craft of many kinds; the schooners of
the fishing establishments, the cruisers of the
cable inspection and fisheries service, the packet-

44 THE HEART OF GASPfi
boats to Anticosti and the Labrador, now and
then a pleasure yacht; when the sea is heavy
outside, the fishing barges come scurrying in by
scores; the dismal tug, which did the ferry to
Peninsula, and the old flats and scows of the ferry
to York, are now replaced by gasolene craft while
every week come the Quebec steamers, and twice
a week the steam galleon that plies back and forth
into Chaleur Bay.
From Gasp6 eastward through Haldimand and
Douglastown the same sandstones extend, making
low rocky shores, but changing in color from gray
shades into red, and forming the red banks of
the south shores of the Bay to Point St. Peter.
Here they face the Gulf and, though still low, the
waters have played havoc with them. These rocks
are sometimes very coarse, and the play of the
waves readily works them out into caverns and
grottoes. At Point St. Peter the waters have cut
off little Plateau Island and honeycombed it with
holes like the subterranean workings of a giant
mole. The sublimity and grandeur of a rock formation

SCENERY OF THE GULF COAST 45
can be displayed only in cliff or crag or mountain
peak; its beauty is often veiled untU it plays its
part in the reaUzation of some grand creation of
the artist or some poem of the architect. The
great buildings of the world are the exaltation
and the dignification of its rocks. Art alone has
known how to elicit from them the quaUties which
in combination contribute to the finer intellectual
enjoyment. The finest specimen in the world of
the Old Red Sandstone of Scotland, the formation
that Hugh MiUer loved to describe, is Skibo
Castle, and the most striking example of the
Gaspe sandstones, which are of the same geological
formation, is the new church of St. Michel at
Perce. The soft red brown of the body stone,
reUeved by the spots made by the shale pebbles in
them, lends a dignity to the fine lines of the majes
tic and beautiful building; while a too somber
effect is reUeved by sUls and lintels of a green
freestone. The finished edifice is a glorification of
Nature's crude product.

THE SHORE OF THE GREAT RIVER
Length of Gaspe coast — North shore — Its Appalachian moun
tains — Grande Greve to Cap-des-Rosiers — End of St.
Lawrence river — Bon Ami cliffs — Wrecks at Cap-des-
Rosiers — Geology of the cliffs — Anse Louise — Jersey Cove —
Griffon Cove — Fox River — Early jishmasters on this coast —
Strike of fishermen in 1909 — Chlorydorme — Anse-a-Valleau
— Fame Point — Grande Vallee
So long is the Gasp6 coast that no boat can
circle it in the light of a single day. The traveler
is quite sure of being doomed to pass some of its
attractions in the night, whichever way his course
may lead; and, as things fall out, he will more
than likely be sleeping as his vessel passes up and
down the waters of the great river, the St. Law
rence, hugging close to the south shore where
nestle little fishing villages among the endroits
into the forbidding ranges of sheer black cliffs.
Somewhat for this reason and more because of the
very rough aspect of the country, the stiU primi
tive simplicity of its life which guarantees no sure
comforts to the traveler, the river shore holds its
46

SHORE OF THE GREAT RIVER 47
primal attractions, the least known, the least
invaded and by nature in many ways the most
imposing in its scenery of any part of the great
peninsula, saving always Perc6.
Its mountains are the ridges of the Appala
chians which run nearly parallel to the shore. It is
they that have guided the flow of this most ancient
river. The throes of mother earth that produced
the one made the other; but their sheer walls are
testimony that they have yielded to the impact
of storm waves driven across these tempestuous
waters from the nor'east, and while the shore has
changed Uttle in the memory of man, yet the
actual edge of the river near the tip of the Uttle
peninsula is fully five miles out, drawing closer
and closer to the shore as one goes farther up.
Beneath the near waters Ues a buried rock plat
form which the waves have carved out, a rem
nant of the majestic mountains which once raised
their crests where the fisherman now drops his
hook. The traveler is not likely to enter this part of
Gasp6 by descending the shore from the point

48 THE HEART OF GASPfi
where he must now leave the railroad, Matane,
far back in Rimouski County. He may do this
and find a road all the way, possible, picturesque,
with many skyward angles, leading through
wide-scattered fishing hamlets and coming down
now and again to the valleys of the greater streams,
points where he must turn far inland to make his
portages. Some of the sturdier traveling men
encircle the coast in this way, still making Matane
a point of departure or destination and skirting
the whole shore line to the head of Chaleur Bay
on wheels. But he who seeks more to come in
touch with the genius of this remote coast will
take another direction and he may penetrate into
the heart of these rolling spruce-topped dark
shale mountains by any one of three roads. Cross
ing from Gasp6 Basin to Peninsula he may drive
by the "new road" which starts in a little way
up the "Nor'west Arm" and traverses the moun
tains by a pretty stiff pass, coming out at the
viUage of Fox River, or he may take the older
portage road eastward of Peninsula and cross by
the Grande Cav6e brook which discharges at

SHORE OF THE GREAT RIVER 49
Griffon Cove some six miles east of Fox River.
The third way is for the man who really wishes to
see the region and cares little how he goes or when
he arrives; he will drive from Peninsula along the
Forillon to Grande Greve and there across the single
moimtain ridge, the only one that now remains out
on that distant point of all the complex of ranges,
by the King's road, whose beauties and difficulties
we have elsewhere described. To this traveler will
come, one after another, the brilliantly painted
scenes in the cyclorama of Gaspe Bay, and then as
he turns his back upon them to reach the "decline
and fall off" from the summit of the King's road at
Grande Greve he is brought suddenly face against
the broad St. Lawrence waters and the long low-
lying menacing black rocks of Cap-des-Rosiers and
its cove settlement. Fifteen minutes is time enough
to bring him from the waters of Gasp6 Bay to
those of the St. Lawrence river.
I have thought to find a comparison in the
shape of this narrow seagirt peninsula to the
form of a man's closed fist with index finger
extended, the finger being the half ridge of moun-

50 THE HEART OF GASPfi
tains that runs from Grande Greve down and out
to the cape and fight at Shiphead — the Forillon, —
so to complete the figure let us extend the Uttle
finger of this hand and that may in a way simu
late the projecting rock-tongue of Cap-des-Rosiers
surmounted by its majestic lighthouse. When
once one is safely down the mountain road and
has returned thanks for his good deUverance,
heartened by the assurance that he may if he
will go back some other way, the view behind
him is one of stern impressiveness and grandeur.
This he will not get at its best without climbing
the winding stairs of the immaculate lighthouse
and from its top taking in the whole cycle of the
stupendous cliffs, stretching from far to the west
out to the very land's end at the east. Nature
evidently did not intend that the river side of this
peninsula should have any commerce by land
with the bay shore and so put this sheer sharp
ridge of rocks right between the two and thus
far man has not made much of a success of con
quering the barrier.
By the navigator the St. Lawrence river is

SHORE OF THE GREAT RIVER 51
assumed to end at Cap-des-Rosiers. Mount St.
Alban where it faces the cape stands 1800 feet
above the water; its blank gray walls reach far
westward drawing more and more away from the
river shore, whUe eastward its cliffs are cut off by
the curve of the cove. There the lower range
behind it comes into the foreground and its cliffs
rise straight from the water edge in a Une four miles
long to the end of the land — Bon Ami cliffs, the
sympathetic Guernseymen have called them after
one of their own number, a misnomer in intent for
the beachless shore affords no landing place for
boats and when the wind blows from any quarter
they are a veritable abatis of rocks. The cliffs
are somber, they are aU gray, and the brilliancy
of coloring which makes the mountains of Perc6
so enthralling is lacking, but their dark tints are
in keeping with the history of this river coast so
far as its records have kept themselves. When
one fully reaUzes how this angry bastion of rocks
with its echeloned capes reinforced by the low
lying point of Rosiers faces the prevailing storm
winds sweeping m from off the straits of BeUeisle

52 THE HEART OF GASPfi
and how the cliffs are only the mountain remnants
which the storms have spared, then comes a
mental picture of what these rocks must have
done to the shipping in the old days before any
lights were placed here. Cap-des-Rosiers was the
most fearsome and destructive place on all the
mainland coast of the Gulf and has taken toll of
craft and sailors since the earliest days of naviga
tion on these waters. Of these rough days stories
are many but records are few. I have told else
where of one which has left an extraordinary
interest behind, the stern shield of some lost
craft, bearing the carved face of Jacques Cartier;
another is recorded in the buried cannon which
lie in the bottom mud at Cape Bon Ami, one of
which the Fruing boys have just succeeded in
raising. Still another is recorded on the monument
at Cap-des-Rosiers erected not long ago to the
memory of a shipload of Irish emigrants dashed
to death on these black capes.*
* The inscription on the monument is: Sacred to the mem
ory of Irish Immigrants from Sligo wrecked here on April 28,
1847. Ship Carricks. 87 are buried here. Erected by pa
rishioners of St. Patrick's parish, Montreal.

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SHORE OF THE GREAT RIVER 53
Some of the settlements on this south shore are
very ancient and probably among the earliest is
that snuggled in between the lighthouse and the
cliffs of St. Alban — along the fine beach of Cap-
des-Rosiers cove. Fishermen from Gasp6 Bay
and Perce got in here and settled, probably as far
back as the 1600's, and their cottages dot this
shore. They are all within easy reach of good
offshore fishing and so few or none of the men go
to the distant American Bank some 15 miles
away and as a result the cod are brought to the
splitting table fresh and firm of flesh. *
* In aU northern Gasp6 there is Httle banks fishing and to
this fact is very largely due the superior quality of well cured
fish from these northern stations, Perc6, Bonaventure and
stands from there up the "south shore." In the offshore
fishing the catch is soon ashore and dressed while quite fresh,
but when the men lie off for distant grounds and are gone
days or all the week at a time, the fish suffer more or less from
sweating. The Green bank or American bank (as it is called
on the Admiralty maps, though loyal Canadians are seldom
caught using this name which comes down from the days
when the Gloucestermen abounded) lies about ten miles off
Cape Gasp6 and Shiphead, but it seems to be less frequented
than formerly. It is a rocky shoal, the last lost tip of the
Appalachian mountain ranges. The banks farther south,
Orphans bank, Miscou and others, are reached by the men
of Cape Cove and Grand River and once within the Bay

54 THE HEART OF GASPfi
It may chance that the traveler, after absorbing
the marvelous scenery of this spot from the top of
the lighthouse, should wonder what all these rock
cliffs mean to the geologist. A few words may
help. The low cliffs of black slate on which the
lighthouse stands and which make aU the shore
cliffs and reefs from here as far westward as Gasp6
County goes, stand up in almost vertical rock
beds, their strata often distorted and twisted,
showing every evidence of tremendous disturbance.
These are all very ancient rocks laid down on the
sea bottom in early Silurian and Cambrian ages
and they prove their date by the fossils which are
found in them. The higher cliffs of St. Alban
Mountain and the Bon Ami capes are of very
much later age. When the lower beds had been
laid down in the Silurian ocean, then dried out
into rocks, turned up into mountains and their
Chaleur the greater part of the catch brought to the stations
at Paspebiac is from these distant grounds. Not all the fish
of large size are from the banks either. Mr. Charles Biard
of Perc6, who prepares a most superior quality of skinless and
boneless cod and requires a fine large fat and firm flesh, takes
all his supply from offshore waters, not venturing to use the
banks cod on account of the possibility of its deterioration.

SHORE OF THE GREAT RIVER 55
tops worn away by the rain and weather, they
were sunk again beneath the sea and on this
rough and jagged sea floor the muds and sands
which now make the high rock walls of the moun
tain range were deposited, — tiU they in their
turn, still holding all the marvelous forms of life
which played out their days in the ancient sea,
were Ufted up to their present position. With
them came up again the older black slates to
where they now Ue. The high cliffs belong to the
Devonian system and between the rocks above
and those beneath there is a great gap in the
record, for there faUs all the upper part of the
Silurian system whose deposits could not be
formed in this place because then the lower
Silurian rocks were dry land and so out of reach
of the sea. That's the story in a nutsheU. The
traveler down the Gasp4 side of the Forillon has
only Devonian rocks in his mountain slopes; when
he crosses the portage and comes to the river all
his rocks are Cambro-Silurian and he is there
traversing a much more ancient world.

56 THE HEART OF GASPfi
But let US turn from these hard thoughts and
with backs to the majestic cliffs, the fishing cove
and the light, face westward up the coast road.
With the multiplying mountain ranges on his left
and the waters of the river on his right the traveler
may drive some fifteen miles from Cap-des-
Rosiers and still be in the parish of St. Alban,
with its little population of less than a thousand
people hugging close to the shores. From here
little more than the first concession is in any way
suited to the slender agricultural needs of settle
ments which are wholly given over to the fishing.
The road runs first by the pretty embrasures of
L'Anse-d-Louise and Jersey Cove, one the memory
of a French vessel wrecked long ago and the other
speaking of the early Channel Islanders who
scattered here and there up this shore. Then it
reaches L'Anse-au-gris-fond, the bay with a gray
bottom, — Griffon Cove, as Bayfield translated it
on his charts of the coast, — a pretty hamlet, strong
with the smell of cod and long the seat of active
fishing agencies. More than a half century ago
John Le Boutillier, one of the early competitors

SHORE OF THE GREAT RIVER 57
of Charles Robin of the Gasp^ coast, and a name
still greatly respected in the county, estabUshed a
fishing station here and others have followed tUl a
right thrifty settlement has grown up in the
parish. By the time the visitor has reached this
spot he wiU have learned that he is in a French
country and that English is an almost unknown
tongue. The farther on he goes the richer becomes
the flavor of New France and the anden regime.
From here onward passing the Uttle bay of
L'Anse Fugere, the road soon comes down to
the metropoUs of this south shore. Fox River,
Rivi6re-aux-Renards, the canonical parish of Saint-
Martin. Here is great fishing, controUed by the
venerable firms of C. R. C. (Charles Robin Co.),
Wm. Fruing Co., and WilUam Hyman & Son, all
dating far back. When Thomas Pye of Gaspe
Basin pubUshed his Canadian Scenery: District
of Gaspe in 1866 and in so doing gave the fiurst
pictures ever printed of Fox River and Grande
Gr^ve, there were, he says, five mercantile houses
at this port, Wm. Fruing & Co., Wm. Hyman,
John de St. Croix, John LeConteur and Blouin

58 THE HEART OF GASPfi
Bros. The C. R. C. came in later and to-day they,
with the Fruing and Hyman companies, divide
the business of the place. The cove is dotted fuU
of fishing boats, gathered in clusters before the
three stations. Across the mouth of Fox river
runs the great sand bar joining the east and west
side of the valley— the C. R. C. and the Hyman
stations with the Fruing station — cluttered up
with cookhouses, storehouses, the drying stages
and their refuse, while the little outlet of the river
at the west is crossed by a simple footbridge of
planks on wooden horses. The bounding hills are
not high and the valley has been cut so broad that
the traveler with horse must make a long detour
inland and back to reach the further side of the
bay; so the village really consists of two parts
while the sand bar and the plank bridge wide
enough only for one abreast, form the esplanade
which binds together the social centers of the
settlement. There is an air of prosperity in the place. The
low hills are largely under cultivation even though
the population is almost wholly given over to

SHORE OF THE GREAT RIVER 59
the fishing. The homes of the fish merchants,
Mr. Horatio Hjrman, Mr. Carrel of the Fruing
Company, are most inviting. I have tasted their
hospitality and rejoice still in pleasant reminis
cences of a gracious hostess, savory cooking,
unrestrained welcome to a stranger for whom the
best was deemed none too good. Fox River is a
place of many interesting features, weU worth a
reconnoissance if the traveler can have any good
luck in finding quarters. The river is a feeble
stream but it has cut a large valley and its em
bouchure is so deep as to make a pretty sure
shelter for small boats. The rock reefs that run
out from the bounding capes east and west narrow
the cove but render it more secure in nor'east and
sou'west storms which blow in here with tremen
dous violence. Being so important a station on
this coast, two roads lead to it, that by which we
have come and which joined the portage from
Peninsula at Griffon Cove, and the new road
straight across the mountains from the Nor'west
Arm of Gasp6 Basin which is stupendously rough
but only 12 miles as the cormorant flies, while

60 THE HEART OF GASPfi
we have now on our way from Cap-des-Rosiers
already traveled sixteen miles.
Fifty years ago the King's road which now goes
through west to Rimouski ended at Fox River and
the settlement though almost whoUy French is not
a very ancient one, at least it wiU hardly date
back a century, which is young compared with
Cap-des-Rosiers and Ste-Anne-des-Monts. So
the Renards have not shared in the very early
history of the coast, but they have been taking
their share in the introduction of some modern
procedures, for it was here that in 1909 occurred
the first "strike" in the history of the fishing
business in all Gasp6. In this extraordinay out
burst, which would have been inconceivable imder
the drastic rule of the early fishing estabhshments,
the men, convinced that the merchants had cut
the price of fish too low and roused by certain
wild spirits from further up the river, roughly
mobbed themselves together to the number of
some five hundred, broke out into an actual riot of
protest, attacking the managers of the fishing
stores, threatening fire and bloodshed on the com-

SHORE OF THE GREAT RIVER 61
panics and indeed so serious an aspect did the affair
assume that the government at once dispatched its
cruisers Canada and Christine to the place where
a strong force of marines landed and took above
twenty prisoners. We may believe the men bitterly
repented their action as they faced the horrors of
confinement in the Perce gaol.* The unsophisti
cated fisherman had heard of strikes from reading
* It could not have been to the Percd gaol that Le Moine
in his "Jonathan Oldbuck" refers in telling of a conversation
between a government commissioner detailed to examine into
the discipline of the Gasp6 prisons and a jailor. The commis
sioner found the jailor on the steps of the Palace of Justice
seated in a big easy chair and smoking a very large pipe.
"Mr. Commissioner," said the jailor and host, "I am happy
to make your acquaintance. You are sent by Government it
is said to straighten up matters generally. Won't you step in
and see how we manage here? My turnkey is out on the banks
catching his winter supply of cod. The jail is well patronized.
I have eighteen prisoners to look after, all in capital health."
"Well," said the Commissioner, "let us see them."
"Are you in a hurry?" replied the genial jailor. "Could
you not call after sunset and I will have them all in attend
ance and in apple pie order."
"Well not easily; in fact I must see the jail and its inmates
right off to make up my report."
"Sorry your honor should have so little leisure. The fact
is when the weather is fine, I turn out my captives at 8 A. M.
sharp. They take a lounge aroimd the country, do up my
garden, catch a few fresh trout for my dinner and at sundown
all return safe to their quarters. I treat them well and they

62 THE HEART OF GASPfi
his "Soleil" or "UEvenement" and thought here
lay his remedy, but the unorganized throng was
arrayed against a business which, next to the Hud
son Bay Fur Co., was the oldest and once the most
conservative and perfectly organized business on
this hemisphere. To it a remonstrance of this kind
from its workmen was the rankest modernism and
such an outbreak is not Ukely soon to be repeated.
Gems of humanity sparkle in the least expected spots.
It would not beseem me to mention here the entirely
delightful and uplifting personalities it has been my ex
cellent good fortune to meet in these villages of Gasp6.
They have given me much. I owe them much beyond
my power to repay. But this story I may put down.
A few years ago there was an epidemic of diphtheria
in Fox River and its ravages aided by the unsanitary
conditions among the fisher families were terrific. To
escape the menace of this disease Mr. Horatio Hyman
sent his son William (bearer of a venerable and re
spected name) to his brother's home at Grande Grfeve.
It was there I met this yoimg man and there he joiaed
Vidth me in long walks as I tramped the countryside on
geological quest, and in longer talks in the woods, on
the moimtains, of an evening on the beaches and the

do not mind being deprived of their evening amusements. I
wanted to change this practice but the county member inter
fered as he had a friend to look after. Wait till evening;
they are looking for my two cows now which have strayed
away into the woods."

SHORE OF THE GREAT RIVER 63
galleries. He was then 19 years of age with an intel
lectual keenness of an extraordinary quality and a
thirst for knowledge that seemed imquenchable. In
his home at Fox River, far removed from libraries, he
had saturated his strangely mature mind -with the
philosophies of Spencer and Huxley, the works of
Darwin, the standards of English and French classics
and had acquired a far reaching knowledge of Semitic
history and the philosophy of Jewish theism. His most
eager taste and the bent of his mind were in the direc
tion of science. I have been thrown in contact with
many young men in search of an education but I am
entirely free to say that I have never known a youth
of such intellectual promise. It would seem as if the
world were in sore need of just the man of that promise.
But the promise was not to be kept. The brilliant boy,
touched with a spark that shone as genius, entered
McGill the next year and in the midst of his course was
stricken with death. I lament to-day and always shall
the loss of that promise to humanity.
The way grows long from Fox River on. The
road still hugs the shore for eight miles further,
passing capes and coves projected before the eye
at various angles as one rises and faUs on the un
dulating road. There is no place to stop; the
traveler must satisfy himseff with the scenery,
brief runs into the rocks or gullies, perhaps with
wishes for a longer stay, — there is nothing to eat
this side of Chlorydorme and not much there.

64 THE HEART OF GASPfi
The road leaves the river with its attractive coves
just beyond Anse-d-Valleau for the mountain
cliffs now come down with their steep curves and
sheer faces to the water front, and the traveler's
view now changes to the heavily spruce-covered
valleys between the mountains, with some pretty
serious climbs to negotiate. When one gets so far
along as this, it is worth while to turn aside a few
miles beyond Anse-d-VaUeau and climbing up
and down the zigzag passes toward the river
come down to Fame Point with its fine signal and
wireless stations ranged along the crest of a high
bluff, a sight famiUar enough to those who travel
this coast by water. The hungry voyageur is
quite Ukely to understand why the French called
this place Pointe-d-faim, — that name wiU have a
meaning to him, — the EngUsh distortion has none.
But this detour from the King's road is a serious
one and if the course Ues straight away it wiU be
stiU through the valley behind the mountain
waU until it again approaches the coast at Grand
Etang, crossmg this beautiful seigniory between
the fine lake and the cove on the shore.

SHORE OF THE GREAT RIVER 65
At Chlorydorme, 26 miles up from Fox river,
we are again at an important station for the fishing,
where twin capes project from between the twin
rivers of Grand and Petit Chlorydorme and the
mountains rise high and green in the background.
Capes and rivers, mountains and coves give
this attractive spot all the characteristics of St.
Lawrence scenery. The name has a strangely
Greek look, but Chlorydorme is the ancient seign
iory of Cloridon and the name echoes a home spot
in old France dear to the heart of the grantee.
Now the road leaves at the right Cape Crow (Cape
Corbeau), Canoe Cove (Anse-d-canot), Frigate
Point (Anse Fregate), White Pine river (R. dEpin-
ette blanche) and at last, forty miles from Fox River
reaches Grande VaUee in the seigniory of Grande-
VaU^e-des-Monts, beautiful in its situation, lying
between lofty ranges of the Shickshocks, its high
rock terraces with their sloping strata and the
wave swept rock platforms at the shore, the deep
reentrant of the sharp waUed vaUey making a
warm invitation to stop lest one might go farther
and fare worse.

THE PERCE MOUNTAINS
Distant skyline — Profile of Sainte Anne — Singular beauty of
the mountain passes — Grande Coupe — Amphitheater —
White Mountain — Early cross on Mt. Ste Anne — Mic-
macs or Souriquois at Perce — Vision on Mt. Ste Anne —
Breakdown of the mountain folds
The most far reaching skyline on the whole
Gasp6 coast is that of the cluster of mountain
heights which lie back of Perc^. It catches the
traveler's eye in passing through the outer reaches
of Chaleur Bay; in crossing the Northumberland
Strait from Prince Edward Island, or, from the
north, in rounding the Cape of the ForiUon. Only
the end of this mountain cluster faces the Percl
harbor with its sheer red front and its flat rolling
top — the sacred mount of Ste Anne.
It may be a bit of fancy on my part, but looking
toward this mountain cluster from the distant
Northumberland Strait, the skyline of the moun
tain cluster is that of a reclining woman, her head
resting at the shrine of Ste Anne and the outline
66

THE PERCfi MOUNTAINS 67
of her figure stretching out into the westward
curves of the other summits. It is a singular moun
tain pile, squeezed in behind Perc6 and filling the
back-ground from L'Anse-au-Beaufils at the south
to Corner-of-the-Beach at the north. It does not
reach far back into the hinterland, but it does
make a barricade that for long years shut Perce
out from communication with the other coast
settlements except by water. The traveler in
search of the picturesque will find it in these
mountains, for the scenery is extraordinary if
indeed it is not unique.
Through the mountains run two roads; the old
road, at the south, takes the easier grades, but
curves under a beetfing amphitheater of red cUffs
which is startling in its sublimity; the "short
cut" starts at the north and at the first height of
grade skirts beneath the "Grande Coupe," another
majestic vertical cliff which faces the Malbay
through a deep coul6 bastioned by sentinel peaks;
then on its further course the road rising^ and
falling, gives glimpses now and again of the
waters of the bay between the spruce-clad slopes.

68 THE HEART OF GASPfi
One may venture to call the effect Alpine in its
impressiveness, but the scenery is not of Alpine
mold. Its beauty and sublimity come not from
folded crag and ragged scaur but from the great
vertical rock faces which bound Ste Anne on three
sides and from which have been broken away
the low-lying red rocks of the shores and of
Bonaventure Island. These walls, east, north
and south, are fault-faces, and thus Mt. Ste
Anne has been made, an isolated table bounded
in three directions by inaccessible cUffs.
Sainte-Anne was the Table-d-rolante of Cham
plain and Denys, and even of Ferland; for it
does roll away toward the northeast, making way
for an easy ascent. Denys says: "elle est platte
et de forme caree, ce qui lui a donne ce nom";
but some indifferent person afterward wrote the
name Table-a-RoUand, and thus it has been often
printed. It is long since the mountain was turned
over to the guardianship of Ste-Anne, and as
far back as 1675 Father Enjalran, landing at
Perc6, found its summit plateau crowned with a
cross. Over its northward and gentler slope.

PEBCfi. THE FAULT FACE OF MT. STE ANNE OVERLOOKING THE "PARK,"
WITH A SPREAD OF FISH AT THE C R. C. STATION

PERCfe. A VIEW IN THE MOUNTAINS BEHIND PERcA VILLAGE

THE PERCfi MOUNTAINS 69
pious ardor has cut out through spruce and fir
a broad and grassy way to the shrine on its top.
Sainte-Anne, with all the mountain that lies
behind her between the two roads, is of the red
conglomerate rock which we call the "Bonaventure
formation," its nearly horizontal layers lying on
the edges of the vertical strata that constitute
the shore cliffs. The whole of this red mountain
is encircled on the landward side by a higher
range — White Mountain— made of the vertical
Umestones of the shores, and which swing from
Cap Blanc into greater heights than Ste Anne
herself, meeting the sea again near Corner-of-the-
Beach. In the long ago days of LeClercq's mission to
the Gaspesian Indians, the Micmac they called
themselves, the Souriquois of the French, there
roamed these shores and fastnesses some five
hundred redskins, as the RecoUet father counted
them. This was their northern country, to them
the northern last end of their domain. Their
lands stretched away to the south along all the
gulf shores of Acadia and in their fancy their

70 THE HEART OF GASPfi
hunting grounds were of the shape of a man,
head and arms toward the south, and feet at the
north. Hence, Gasp6 — the end of their posses
sions. The Souriquois were ever few in Gaspe, and are
to-day almost gone from the great peninsula;
and yet in the more populous parts of their ancient
domain they are more in number than in the days
of Cartier and Champlain. More than four
thousand are now enumerated in the 58 reserva
tions which extend all the way from Cape Breton
to Bonaventure County. Father LeClercq, late
in the 1600's, after six years of labor among
the Micmacs of Gaspe, felt so depressed over the
outcome of his labors for their conversion that
he besought his superior for permission to leave
this field. With the utmost reluctance the natives
gave up the little that they seem to have had of
their natural religion. And yet, as far back as
1610, all the Micmacs at the south, to whom the
sovereignty of the Grand Chief Membertou
extended, had accepted the Frenchman's Chris
tianity and been baptized into the faith.

THE PERCfi MOUNTAINS 71
The Vision on Mt. Ste Anne
Ongwe, Chief of the Gaspesian Souriquois,
had returned with his people from the winter
encampment about the far headwaters of the
St. John. Half buried beneath the snow, their
skin-covered cabins had comfortably withstood
the season's downfaU, and the hunt had brought
forth abundance of food and clothing for all the
small flock. An early breakdown of the snows
was probable, a few bright days had softened them,
loosed the ice-setting of the streams, and so with
their peltries the chief had led them back over the
trail to the shore much earlier than it was his wont
to abandon winter quarters. It lacked but Uttle
of the Equinox, to these worshipers of the Sun
the most solemn feast of the year. It was seldom
that this day of ceremonial found Ongwe and his
people so near the coast and at the foot of the
Perc6 Mountain. The trail had been long and
heavy, for the raquettes sank deep into the soft
ening, sloppy snow. But there was no spoken
expression of weariness, a serene contentment

72 THE HEART OF GASPfi
lay in the vivacious eyes which looked out from
under the stolid brow of the Sagamo.
It was the feast of the Sun, and long before that
orb had flushed the eastern sky with the faintest
suggestion of his approach, while the stars stiU
shone with the white fire of burning steel and the
shimmering sheets of the aurora lit up the ce
lestial vault, the chieftain aroused his people
from their shortened slumber. Sire, seer and lad,
maid, matron and babe on back, led by Ongwe,
leaving their encampment under the shelter of
the sea-wall, trailed slowly through the unbroken
snow of the spruce woods up the long northern
slope of the great mountain. The diflSicult passage
was made in silence save for the crackUng of the
twigs and the sharp creak of the frost. Half
way up, the gentler slope was passed and the
steep plateau towered over them. Turning east
ward the chieftain saw the sun-star, herald of
the coming god, blazing his course above the
horizon and a low word of urgent command re
newed their upward progress. The last hard slopes
were finally passed and the gentle floor of the

THE PERCfi MOUNTAINS 73
summit was reached as the reddening east be
tokened the coming of the equinoctial sun.
Standing at the crest and on the edge of the
sharp cliff, his people behind him, the Sagamo
stood attent. The increasing glow in the east
outlined the distant Bonaventure Island and
silhouetted the Perc6 Rock. Over the gUstening
water, beyond the frozen channel, the soft reful
gence deepened into a golden orange. The fires
burned, the red cUffs of the mountain caught the
warmer rays and the shadowy outline of the sea
cliffs at the south became fixed. An arc of gold
breached the horizon. As it reached the eye of the
chieftain, he threw from him his cloak of castor,
his deerskin shirt and clout, loosed from his feet
the mooseskin moccasins. Naked as he was born,
and rigid as if dead, he stood in the presence of the
Lord of Day. While the sun traversed the skyline,
and tiU its lowest arc rebounded from the lingering
clasp of the sea, he stood as if carved from the
mountain. When it had cleared itself and the
day had begun, the chieftain Ufted up his arms
extended wide apart in adoration, and cried aloud,

74 THE HEART OF GASPfi
Ho! Ho! Ho!* After him the little multitude
behind thus saluted the god of light and warmth
and life, herald of a new summer. With uplifted
arms, he poured forth his suppUcation to the
divine arc for his people and himself, bowing him
self low as he prayed for the safe-keeping of their
wives and children, for triumph over their enemies,
for success in the hunt and fishing, for the pres
ervation of their life and a long posterity.
The eyes of the chieftain now yielding before
the darts of the Sun god, he drew his discarded
garments about him and then gazed in silence over
the wondrous scene spread out before him. The
day had risen clear as ice, and the first of the sun's
rays drove before them a gauze of fog which
lifting, tinged with carmine the thin blue Une of
the distant Forillon, its wavy summits, its bluff
headland and towering obeUsk. In the nearer
distance, across the northern bay. Point St. Peter
and its island took on the dark strength of the full

* Father LeClercq, who found a few of the sim worshipers
left among the Gaspesian Indians, says that this was the
simple salutation to the rising sun-

PERC6, THE SHIRE-TOWN OF GASPfe COUNTY
View from the south, showing the Rock, the shore cliffs of Mt. Joli and Cap-au-canon, the village and at
the left, the Murailles

THE PERCfi MOUNTAINS 75
day whUe the shimmering light of waters danced
gleefuUy against the ice floes. Straight down
between his feet lay the triangle of Perc6 headed by
Mont Joli, flanked at the left by Cape Barr6 and
at the right by Cape Canon; the battue piled high
with broken ice and at its end the crested cUff of
the Pierced Rock. Bonaventure guarded the open
waters, robed in her snow and verdure. His gaze
swept to the south, over the head of Cape Blanc,
along the distant coves of Beaufils to Cape d'Espoir,
and on beyond in the dimmest distance the eye
could catch the faintly penciled outUne of Miscou
and Shippegan, forty imles away. The wondrous
beauty and primitive grandeur of the scene bathed
in the effulgence of the new sun awoke a response
in kind from the breast of this child of the soil.
He turned his face inland toward the flat-topped
mountains which sweep to their higher sumnaits
in the wilderness behind and roU up one beyond
another until their curves are merged into the sky,
but started with a throb and half suppressed bound
as his eyes confronted, on a projecting plateau tUl
now concealed in the half Ught by a thin spruce

76 THE HEART OF GASPfi
thicket, — a cross, towering high above the under
growth. Ah, yes! the cross; it was the good
missioner's symbol of Ufe, as the sun was his.
Had not he and his people helped to bear it up the
mountain and to plant it there? It was their
white brother's wish and ought he not— he threw
a quick glance upon his followers. Their eyes, too,
were fixed upon the cross, some with indifference,
but here and there an arm dropping from forehead
to breast had silently and almost surreptitiously
repeated the symbol — the sign manual of the new
religion. Turning from it, Ongwe let his gaze
again linger over the brilliant tapestry of sea and
shore and covering his eyes with his hand raised
his face once more to the dazzling sun, seeming to
bathe himself in its warmth and glory, then took
his way down the trail with no more concern for
the white man's cross.
:(e :|e :{: :fc 3ic
The land of Perc6 is changing its level. I am
under obUgations to many of the older residents
for information which leads to the inference that
it is rising at the north and falling at the south.

THE PERCfi MOUNTAINS 77
Fifty or sixty years ago the water had come so
high upon the beaches that it became necessary
to abandon the drying stages nearest the shoreline
and the pickets of these old stages have been
found again in digging away for new in these later
years, imtil now the shoremen say they could
rebuild without danger on the site of the old stages.
Traschy 's reef off Cape Barre, the reefs of Mt. Joli
and the Quay or reefs of the Robin beach are aU, in
the judgment of the venerable residents, further
above the water than a half century ago. The
battue from J\It. JoU to the Rock was formerly
easily passed at high water, even by barges, but
now only on the rarest occasions. Logan's journal
speaks of being able to reach the Rock by the bar
from ]\It. JoU only at the ebb of some spring tide.
The coast thus was on its way down in the more
than a half century back, then stopped and since
has come the other way. The period of this
oscUlation has been of too brief duration to permit
the formation of beaches during the depression, so
that there are no raised terraces which indicate
the present elevation. On the other hand, the

78 THE HEART OF GASPfi
beaches toward Cape Blanc have been cut to
pieces within about the same period and the waves
are rapidly shearing back the rock walls, so here at
least the coast is falling.
*****
There is no place on all the Atlantic seaboard
where geological revolutions have been so extraor
dinary as at Perc6. It is as though, to put the
whole long story into brevier, a great arch or fold of
the rocks, — a majestic ridge of the ancient Appala
chian mountains reaching high above the summits
of to-day, had broken and collapsed, leaving its
fragments where now project the shore cliffs and
the ridge that surrounds Ste Anne. Over the
ragged edges of this sunken fold, the sea afterward
laid down the coarse red pudding stones of Ste
Anne and Bonaventure, and they in their turn
were lifted quietly out of the water to their present
heights.

THE ROCKS AND THE PEOPLE
Geology and Settlement — The Mines; their history — Petroleum;
its promises and disappointments — The Submarine Moun
tains and the Fishing
One seeks in the geology of a country a key to its
settlements. Original entry into a new country
may be largely by accident, and is often a com
plete misfit between the capacity of the settler
and the possibiUties of the region, but in time the
growth and business of the population come into
direct dependence upon its geology. They assume
an equiUbrium and in the expression or main
tenance of this balance lies the success of the
individual. Geology is a hard master. If the
settler does not adjust himself to it, or if by reason
of an inadequate training he can not, geology will
starve him out.
The controlling impulse in all the early voyages
to the New World was two-fold, to find a western
passage to India and the discovery of gold. Gold
79

80 THE HEART OF GASPfi
was among the earliest quests upon the Gasp6
coast, and though it was never found, yet the next
best thing, silver, was, mixed with lead. Amongst
the earliest records of Gaspe is the discovery of
silver-bearing lead at Little Gaspe on the Forillon,
and an organized effort was made from France to
exploit it. Even the Jesuit missionaries seem to
have got into it and I fear were "trimmed," for
the "Relations" record with some pathos the
fact that in 1663 Father Balloquet returned from
Gasp6 not having found his mine "good." And
even in spite of this report, the Intendant Talon
and the Compagnie des Indes Occidentales in
1665, sent Frangois Doublet with 40 miners
down to these little veins, and the ancient tailings
of their work can be seen to-day covered by the
refuse of later ventures, all of which have had
the same outcome. The venerable Mr. Price, of
Little Gasp^, has told me that till lately he had had
in his possession the primitive tools used by the
French in their mining operations here two hun
dred and fifty years ago. These lead-bearing
veins, cutting straight across the mountains along

THE ROCKS AND THE PEOPLE 81
lines of slight displacement of the rock masses, are
of frequent occurrence along the little peninsula,
and there are "mines" at Grande Greve and St.
George's Cove. It is evidently of the Little Gaspe
mine that Denys speaks with so much emphasis
and detail: "One league further up the river
[Gaspe Bay] is a cove where one can land. On
the high ground is the place where it has been
hoped to find a lead mine, and Messieurs de la
Compagnie have paid the cost on the representa
tions of persons who had brought some fragments
that were veritably good, but they are only from
some Uttle veins that run over the rock and which
the force of the sun has purified, for the whole
mine is only antimony and that not very abundant.
I have known of it for more than twenty years.*
If it had been good I should not have let it be idle.
I have found plenty of persons who were ready to
undertake on shares what I have seen, but I was
never willing, knowing well that I should deceive
them and that is something I am incapable of
doing unless I were myself deceived without
* That would be at least as early as 1652.

82 THE HEART OF GASPfi
knowing it." Most noble seigneur! Les Messieurs
de la Compagnie were let in for a cosy sum about
two hundred and fifty years ago, and in these
later years are again these "mines" being "pro
moted." Between these dates no one knows how
many times these old veins have been rediscovered.
Had nature been less wise Gasp6 might have
been a great oil field, with to-day its distant reaches
dotted with derricks and a row of palaces of cap
tains of industry extending back from Gasp6 Basin
to the Mississippi.* If the hopes of fifty years were
realized and oleaginous money had been pumped
out of the earth, Gaspe would ere this have lost its
bloom. The story of the hunt for petroleum in this
region is, I believe, that of the most tenacious and
costly pursuit of an ignis fatuus known in the
history of oil development. Indeed for a half
century the golden goal has seemed ever at hand,
and to-day never so far away.
Oil was found by the early geologists and known
before their coming, oozing from the sandstones
* A little stream about thirty-five miles back from the Basin
where the oU operations have been most actively carried on.

THE ROCKS AND THE PEOPLE 83
on the south shore of Gaspe Bay, particularly
near Tar Point and Point St. Peter, where one
of the rock folds emerges at the water's edge.
In 1863 Logan pubUshed his final geological re
port on this country, and this was foUowed by
a special report on the petroleum by Hunt in 1865.
In Pye's Gaspe views pubUshed in 1866, was one
of the oil derricks in the spruce forest at Sandy
Beach accompanied by a glowing accoimt of the
prospective development of the several petroleum
companies even then on the ground, they and the
whole project supported by names of scientific
distinction. This was near the period of rapid
development of the petroleum production in Penn
sylvania, and though the anticlinal theory of oil
accumulation had not been formulated so early,
yet private enterprise began the drilling for oU
along the inland extension of these anticlines into
the region about the upper reaches of the York
river. From then until a few years ago companies
have been organized to obtain this product and
companies sjmdicated; new companies represent
ing other capital appeared and were syndicated.

84 THE HEART OF GASPfi
Many wells have been driven, some of them to
the great depth of over three thousand feet; re
fineries have been erected at enormous expense;
all apparatus for drilling and refining had to be
brought in by water from the States or Europe
and hauled over rough roads through the wilder
ness for twenty to thirty-five miles. All the labor
and all the expense has been ever in the hope of
finding oil. The refineries were built to refine
the oil it was hoped to find, not oil that had been
found, and new wells were sunk, not to find more
oil, but only in the hope of finding some oil. The
successive managers of the companies have Uved
in enviable magnificence at the Basin in the same
hope of discovery. Nothing has seemed to me,
a passing observer, so out of harmony with the
spirit of the country as this display of prosperity
with only a bubble behind it. Yet it has, I believe,
all been fully justified. The sandstone into which
the weUs have gone are saturated with petroleum,
and there must indeed be an enormous total
amount of this material in the strata. But nature
seems to have made no proper provision for its

THE ROCKS AND THE PEOPLE 85
accumulation. Practice on the theory of storage
in pools parallel to the anticlines, which has been
so fruitful in other Appalachian oil fields, has
here been without result. The folds are there
and their troughs into which the oil might settle
by gravity, but somehow it has got away. All
external conditions for extensive production are
absolutely favorable and attractive. The total
product of all these years is the occasional brief
gush, the Uttle that has accumulated in the bottom
of the weUs and been pumped out. I have been
in no position to form an explanation of the real
cause of this condition, but it is my suspicion that
through cracks and joints in the bottom of the
troughs the oU which might have accumulated
therein has gone on further down and out of the
reach of the driU. Gasp6 as an oil field is deranged
though very seductive.
So Gasp6 can not make a home for miners of
any kind, for there are no mineral deposits of any
present moment in it. Gasp6 Basin, being a mag
nificent harbor, became a busy little port of pas
sage. Its gentle eastern and southern slopes have

86 THE HEART OF GASPfi
made some smaU farming possible, while its rivers
have been the nurses of a lumber trade.
But it is the submarine geology of Gasp6 that
fixed the business of its people from the dawn of
its civiUzed history. Its seas are washing the de
voured continents, and their shallow rocky bot
toms are the home of the cod. It is not in the
deeper waters that the search for cod goes on.
The fishermen of the Forillon do not spend much
time in the waters of the Bay, where the shore
falls away abruptly to considerable depths, but
they betake themselves around Shiphead and to
the foot of the Bon Ami cliffs, where a broad
sunken platform of rock is the resort of the fish;
the Bonaventure Island men rarely go far from
their own shores and while the fishermen of St.
Peter, Malbay and Perce may get as far as the
American Bank, the cod from off the long shore
stretches of vanished rocks are the best, smaller
indeed, but quickest caught and soonest cured.
The ocean through countless ages hammered
down the mountains of this Gaspesian world and
brought their heads beneath its waves. Had not

THE ROCKS AND THE PEOPLE 87
the rocky coast been thus exposed to the ceaseless
play of the northeast storms, no suitable habitat
would have been made for the cod. Few spots in
the world are so proUfic in these fish as this region
of drowned mountains, this submerged tip of the
great Appalachian mountain system. The ancient
unceasing warfare between sea and mountain has
cut out for Gasp6 its occupation for all time. Its
history and its civilization, its stories of fortunes
acquired, or oftener of meager livings wrested
and wrung from the sea, aU have their origin, like
the picturesqueness of its scenery, in the geology
of the coimtry. "Que voulez-vous!" exclaims the
Abb6 Ferland. "It is the land of the cod. By
your eyes and by your nose, by your tongue and
your gorge, and by your ears as well, you are soon
convinced that in the Gaspesian Peninsula the cod
forms the basis of aUment and amusement, of
business and conversation, of regrets and hopes,
of fortune and of Ufe, and I venture to say, of
society itself."

BONAVENTURE ISLAND
The charm of the island — The Child of Ste Anne — Early his
tory — The Janvrins — Captain Duval, privateer — Remark
able bird roosts — Relics of the past — Mauser hou^e — The
golden jugs of Bonaventure
Bonne Aventure, it was to the fishermen of the
1600's. I found it so too. For them the island
sheltered the wind driven headlands of Perce
where it lies off a league or so, and in their day
there was fishing so extraordinary as to excite
the notice of the missioners passing back and forth
from the establishments at Quebec and Tadoussac
to their stations on Newfoundland. For me, a
sympathetic interloper, Bonaventure has been
more an emotion than an island. Much of the
charm of an island lies in its unconscious atmos
phere of supremacy and autonomy. Its sea-girt
boundaries make for independence, if it is un-
trammeled by ties of commercial fraternity, cables,
signal towers, boat lines; if out of the current of
88

BONAVENTURE ISLAND 89
traffic it makes for the dignity and sovereignty of
solitude. From the top of Mt. Ste Anne at Perce, which
looks down over Bonaventure, commanding its
whole length, the island is an oval green velvet
rug with a fringe of red where the ruddy rocks
project along the edges beyond the verdure. Ste
Anne commands the island in truth, for Bonaven
ture was really once a part of her and in days long
gone, broke away from her bluff front and lies now,
the remnant which the seas have left, while Ste Anne
shows to every passer the great scar of the island's
birth. Save that the tide rushes hard through the
sea channel that separates them, she still keeps her
grip on her offspring. Off on the island front which
faces the Gulf the cliffs rise sheer to four and five
hundred feet while the water at their base is bold
to fifty fathoms. Thomas Pye, in 1866, describ
ing his picture of the island, said, "It appears as
though it had been uphove from the bottom of the
Guff," and the Gasp6 artist was near the truth, for
so it has, and it stands much as Ste Anne herself,
bold front to the east, sloping down to the west.

90 THE HEART OF GASPfi
When the fog rushes down and changes aU the
greens of the island to blue grays, even then
through the fringes there are still red flashes from
its cUffs back to those of its mother mountain.
Then its Uttle life is more than ever veiled from
the rest of the world.
When the Janvrins came to Bonaventure to es
tablish the first "sedentary" fishing there, branch
ing out from their earher station at Grande GrSve
of about 1798, they took possession of the one
beach on aU the place where such operations could
be carried on. It is a very little beach indeed for
the operations of a large estabUshment as this
has grown to be during the century past, but
Bonaventure is not an island of beaches. Here
and there from the middle of the west shore to
its south end are Uttle patches of sand, none much
larger than the Lazy beach near the south point,
but at the fishing beach where the estabUshment
for long years now has done business under the
name of Le BouthilUer Brothers, the ground is
shaved off gradually from the higher level, and so
the fishhouses, flakes and stores work back up the

BONAVENTURE ISLAND 91
rocky slopes. In those days of the Janvrins every
man's hand was against France, the seas were free
and its cargoes belonged to him who could take and
hold them. Here the Janvrins with privateers'
commissions fitted out more than one craft under
their letters of marque and here among the great
blocks of faUen rock heaped up into a rough shore
line full of caverns and dark retreats, any priva
teer might weU have stored his secrets. Indeed it
is not for me to say, with the legends of the coast
ringing in my ears, that these sea caverns have
not held their stores of plate and louis and Uquors.
The old tales of these sequestered doings which
still hover through the Perc6 atmosphere have a
delirious though rather intangible fascination.
You piece the frayed threads together, gathering
some from this mouth, others from the venerable
gossips, and weave them together into a plausible
romance only to have some one who knows or the
bearer of the names you have made familiar with
denounce the whole tale as a fabrication. StiU
it is hard to escape the notion that in all the smoke
of these mysteries there is not some fire, and the

92 THE HEART OF GASPfi
pretty mysteries make good stories and are their
own reward. At any rate one truly real history
of privateering days survives and is so often told
wrong that it is well to keep it alive as it was told
by Thomas Pye nearly fifty years ago. It is the
story of Captain Peter John Duval. Duval com
manded the Vulture, a small, 100-ton lugger-
rigged craft with four guns and a crew of twenty-
seven men. Pye thought she was owned by the
Janvrins who fitted out privateers both here and
in the island of Jersey, but I think it doubtful.
I have on the mantel before me the old Captain's
cutlass, its gold-plated brass mountings and its
beautifully damascened and inlaid blade carrying
the royal arms and the monogram of George III
heavily worked into the hUt, — a fine blade which
must have come directly with his commission from
the king. The Vulture, was the terror of the
French coast from San Malo to the Pyrenees and
true to her name, hovered Uke a bird of prey along
the shores, taking vessel after vessel. So severely
did the Port of Bayonne suffer from her depreda
tions that the merchants of the place organized a

BONAVENTURE ISLAND 93
joint stock company with the purpose of putting
an end to their tormentor. A brig of 180 tons
was purchased, with 16 guns and a crew of 80
men, and thus disguised as a merchantman with
her gun ports covered, slipped out into the dark
of the night and into the track of the waiting Vul
ture. A chase followed, the little lugger over
hauled the brig, ran alongside and demanded sur
render, when at once the disguise was thrown off,
the ports were opened and Captain Duval found
himself overtopped by a wholly superior enemy.
Nevertheless running close under the French
man's bows he got his little ship below her firing
line and then poured into her all the grape shot
he had aboard, cutting her to pieces and kilfing
half her crew. In despair the brig broke away
for harbor with the intrepid captain in pursuit
but faUing night robbed him of his prey. This
story came to Thomas Pye from Sheriff Vibert of
Perc6 who had known Captain Duval and his first
officer. After his hardy life on the seas was over Duval
came to Bonaventure, purchased a large part of

94 THE HEART OF GASPfi
the island and there he ended his days. To-day
the grave of this sturdy privateer Ues on Cap-au-
Canon, just across the channel.
There may be to-day ten families of human be
ings living along the wavering road that runs from
the Le BouthilUer station to the south end of the
island; perhaps in aU thirty or forty people are
domiciled there — of course we do not count the
fishermen from Shippegan and Caraquet there for
the season's work. In all, the inhabitants are far
fewer than in the earliest and later days when the
island could maintain a church.
But on the high cliffs of the north and east,
alined on the horizontal sandstone ledges in ranks
one above the other, are the legitimate and an
cient aristocracy of the place — the gannets, murres,
kittiwakes and puffins which nest on these cliffs
by thousands. The red rock walls are fairly white
with the brilUant silver gannets while their su
periority in number and the majesty of their size
give a color tone to the whole colony, the grayer
kittiwakes, the occasional murre and the diminu
tive pufl&ns hid away in the rock crevices adding

BONAVENTURE ISLAND 95
only to the census of the settlement rather than
to its impressiveness. This is really a wonderful
bird roost, equaled nowhere in the number of gan
nets even on the Bird Rocks out in the Gulf.
There the association of species is the same
and I am not at aU sure that the entire bird popu
lation of that well known resort may not be equaled
on this island. If the Bonaventure roost has at
tracted less the attention of bird students, it may
be that its inaccessibiUty has protected it from
the inroads of the Audubon Society members, for
the steep cUffs can not be scaled from below ex
cept for a Uttle way and by the most venture
some, nor reached from the summit unless one is
willing to be let down over the cUffs by a rope;
so that even the most enthusiastic bird "lover"
could hardly get a good shot at these beautiful
and harmless waterfowl or succeed except at great
hazard in carrying off enough eggs to seriously
deplete the potential population. Thus protected
from attack both above and below, and rather
too remote to mvite the visitor who is quite
likely to hear Uttle of this amazing spot from the

96 THE HEART OF GASPE
people ashore, the settlement is in a way to keep
its ancient races which have made this the home
of their productive days for untold centuries.
Singularly enough and for reasons best known
to themselves, the birds divide into two distinct
settlements, the smaller near the north as one
approaches from the west, but each community
comprises aU the different species which enter
into the composition of the population. The
greater and more marvelous display of bird Ufe
is further around to the east where the rock walls
are drifted white with plumage and are vibrant
with screamage. I fancy that these two settle
ments must have been long ago one and con
tinuous, till some fall of rock carried away the
projecting ledges between, and sheared down the
cliff face so that nesting room was hard to find.
The bare space looks rough enough to-day to ac
commodate the nesters, but if such a disturbance
of arrangements occurred long ago we may re
member that the force of acquired habit is
strong and, once adjusted to their nesting stations,
the citizens of the colonies, big with intent, re-

BONAVENTURE ISLAND 97
turn each year to their famiUar and long used
ledges. No "lover" has yet given us an explanation of
the pecuUar associations of the waterfowl on this
coast. Over on the summit of Perc6 Rock, four
miles away, only the herring gull and the cor
morant breed or have bred within the history of
man. I doubt if the most temerarious gannet
would dare so much as to aUght on the Rock in
the face of its feathered citizenry of other per
suasions. The birds of this He Perc6 are no friends
to the fishermen whether of cod or salmon, and
yet the people of the Perc6 coast would be bereft
indeed should this part of their population vanish.
Their coming hi the spring is the signal of the
return of Ufe in the boats and on the flakes and
when they go late in autumn, winter is on its way
down and if the faU fishing is not then over, the
men certainly wish it were. The gabble of the
birds at early morning and their crooning over
their young during the night are sounds that the
dweUers ashore have always heard and have
learned to love. So that the presence of the birds

98 THE HEART OF GASPfi
and their companionship has been a compensa
tion and indulgence for all the sins of commission
for which they come in for hearty rounds of harm
less abuse.
Over on the rocks at Cape Bon Ami beyond the
Shiphead Ught and back of Grande Gr^ve, is an
other nesting place of these guUs and cormorants,
but the population here is smaU, even though
absolutely removed from the disturbing presence
of men. Isolation favors the citizens but the feed
ing grounds are a long way off, up the St. John at
Douglastown, or up the York and Dartmouth at
Gasp§, flights of ten or fifteen miles. AU the birds
in those rivers roost on the Bon Ami cUffs and
it is a pretty sight toward nightfaU to see them
wending their way homeward, the gulls singly or
in straggling pairs, the cormorants in V-shaped
ranks, straight over the Grande Gr^ve hills in
an' unerring line, guided by a sense bequeathed
to them by ancestors which have roosted on these
ragged cliffs smce the days of Adam. Inheritance
of habit enduring the changes in the cUffs which
the pounding of the sea through the ages has

PERCi. SPREAD OF PISH ON THE OLD FLAKES BUILT OF BEECH
PICKETS AND COVERED WITH SPRUCE TWIGS

BON.W UNTURE ISLAND. LE TROU-AUX-MARGOTS, OR GANNET LEDGES
PART OF ONE LEDGE SHOWING OVER 400 BIRDS
This is the best picture that has been made of these inaccessible cliffs
Taken by F. M. Chapman

BONAVENTURE ISLAND 99
brought about, is the reason why the birds stiU
cling to these primeval homes.
One can come to the bird roosts on Bonaven
ture by climbmg from the western beach along a
dubious traU through the spruce, gathering, if he
wiU, pepinos and blueberries in the Uttle clearings,
perhaps strawberries on the diminutive pastures,
and he wiU eventuaUy reach some outlook where
his eyes can enfilade the rows of birds as they sit
in tiers on their rock ledges watching the eternal
play of the waves spread out on the wateiy stage
before them.
Only a Uttle part of the island is given over to
human interests, to the few families scattered
along the western shore. All the rest is the repub
lic of the birds and the spruce. Yet even this
Uttle isolated spot has left its record in history,
aside from the romantic traditions which hover
over the days of the Janvrin freebooters.
In the time of Father LeClercq on the Perc6
coast there were so many French fishermen en
gaged at Bonaventure during the season that a
church and a hospice were built on the island.

100 THE HEART OF GASPfi
This was the church of St. Claire and was blas
phemed and burned by the same "accursed Bas-
tonnais," who destroyed St. Peter's at Perc6 in
1690. That was in the days before the sedentary
fishing, but Bonaventure has seen a larger human
population than it possesses to-day, for in the days
of the Janvrins and later there was again a church
on the island, now long gone. The old storehouses
of the fishing company which has passed down the
years with changes of proprietors but with few
of modes or indeed of buildings, contain strange
relics of the past; piles of ancient fishing gear,
venerable cod hooks, kedge anchors of odd shape,
taUy sticks for the fishermen who couldn't count,
innumerable iron lanterns, ancient pistols and
in the store itself among the old stock, brass can
dlesticks, an occasional poke bonnet and titbits
of clothing of a former day.
Alongside the fishing station, when I first knew
the island, stood its most ancient house, then the
home of PhiUp Mauger. I suppose it must have
dated from the days of the Janvrins at least, for
it had been built by Philip Manger's grandfather.

BONAVENTURE ISLAND 101
a sailor out from Jersey, and Philip was at least
sixty when I knew him. It was a long, low house
of one story, its straight ridge pole dividing its
roof unequally so that the narrow part sloped
forward and its hinder part stretched back in a
broad sweep almost to the ground. I had come
over to the island to see its rocks and its birds, but
attracted by the hoary antiquity of this house I
had found myself suddenly possessed of a thirst
which was excuse enough to implore relief at its
latched but lockless door.
One must take his chances on the water along
this coast, — one must always take some risks in
this Ufe — but poison would be delicious when
offered with such gentle hospitality as was the
perfectly wholesome water when I entered the
vast hall, which served the purpose of living room
and kitchen. The bare beams, rich in the brown
of many smoky years, stood all exposed about the
waUs, at one side and the other were doors leading
I knew not whither, but with impertinent curiosity,
wanted to know.
"Please come in," was my quiet welcome — an

102 THE HEART OF GASPfi
ill assorted stranger with hammer in hand and
an odd looking bag on his back was something
worth inquiring into, and with complacency drop
ping my gear I entered the parlor. Mrs. Mauger
had responded to my knock and Mr. Mauger
soon came in to see, and there we sat for a little
while, I anticipating their natural curiosity by
frankly telling them my business on the coast, and
then without offense quietly turning the conversa
tion to a more interesting topic, themselves, their
home and their history. I recall this incident
with the more pleasure now that both Mr. and
Mrs. Mauger are gone and much of the old house,
probably the oldest on all the coast, has been
torn away. On the mantel over the fire-place
stood a row of Staffordshire figures, among some
sea shells from distant lands and a few photo
graphs of the "boys" who had gone out from this
place into the world. Hanging on the waU above
were two "sailor's roUs," dough-pin shaped affairs
of white glass, decorated vsdth sailors' mottoes and
suspended from their ends or handles. I have
never seen them elsewhere, but they were dear

BONAVENTURE ISLAND 103
to the sailor's heart and had been brought from
some EngUsh port by the founder of the family.
On the walls were a few pictures framed in shells,
a shelf in the corner carried a luster jug, and in
the corner was a cupboard, but darkened with
soUd doors. And so as we sat the conversation
quietly turned itseU to the objects about the room,
their history and the possibility of there being,
perhaps, other such things in the house. Yes,
there were some old dishes out from England that
had belonged to grandfather, if you would care to
see; they are in the cupboard; but it is hoped you
wiU excuse the appearance of the cupboard for
things are not in very good order and — the cup
board doors open on tiers of glass and china ar
ranged in the orderly neatness and cleanliness of
the King's Own on parade. Old Davenport 8-
sided plates were there and Liverpool plates with
great black ships on them. As I fondled a tall
pink Sunderland pepper box and as I look upon it
now, there is Mrs. Manger's gentle voice — " Please
keep it, won't you? " A few pieces of luster were
scattered on the shelves among the other things of

104 THE HEART OF GASPfi
more modern date. Those cupboard doors were
slow in closing but as though the good housewife
had exposed her gods too long to profane view
they suddenly went together. But there was an
other pair of doors at the bottom of the cupboard
and from behind them, opening reluctantly, came,
in response to Mr. Manger's inquiry, "grand
father's jug," a huge pitcher, of nearly two gaUons
hold, garnished marvelously about the throat and
long fine spout with purple gold and its great beUy
belted with broad banded loops of golden pink
enclosing flower encircled snatches of rime and a
green wreathed picture of the iron bridge over the
Wear at Sunderland, and this majestic jug had
neither chip nor craze on all its capacious body.
Full to the brim with simples wrapped carefuUy
in papers, these unwonted contents were soon
poured out on the floor so that the stranger, now
well at home, could the better survey the propor
tions of this golden jug. I had never seen its
equal, and after some experience with such things
have still to see it. My exclamations of apprecia
tion were unspoken. Calmly and intensely its

BONAVENTURE ISLAND 105
majestic form and brilUant though hideous attrac
tions were surveyed. Calmly and deliberately the
simples were gathered together and replaced and
without expressed emotion the ancient piece was
put back again in its corner of the cupboard.
The visit was now over. With sincere expres
sions of good will on both sides I withdrew, and
now this fine old reUc of early hospitaUty on the
island looks down from its shelf as I write this
simple tale.
Just across the narrow road Uved another
Sunderland jug — so Mr. Mauger told me — a man
Uved with it to be sure, but that mattered Uttle
for the moment, tUl presently I found myself
again the recipient of the hospitable courtesy of
Mrs. Ned Buntline, her venerable father-in-law
and soon of her hustling cordial husband. I after
ward learned to know Ned Buntline as a man
without fear, of boundless energy and daring, and
I have crossed the three-mile channel to the Island
with him rowing lone handed a fiat with four pas
sengers in a stiff, hard tide, pUoted with an ar
tistic skill and vigor that seemed to give him as

106 THE HEART OF GASPfi
much joy in his work as it did courage to his rather
beflustered supercargo. Yes, there was a Sunder
land jug in the house which the father had brought
from the other side and would have willingly sur
rendered but Ned prized it and I would not ob
trude my rude arguments upon his sentiment.
So the Buntline jug had to be left behind and
now both father and son have crossed the great
channel, the pretty young wife has left the coast
and the old jug rests very appropriately among
the treasures of Cap-au-Canon, just across on the
mainland. And then there are two more of these
objects of art from among the reliquiae of the
fishing station, brilUant in their golden pink dress
and capacious in proportions, fitting companions
of the Mauger jug as they stand side by side, whis
pering, I fancy, to each other tales of the romantic
days of the island.
Bonaventure holds treasures of science, — in its
birds, its plants of forest and field, and its great
red rocks filled with the debris of rock beds stUl
more ancient. A geologist wiU find here attractions
of rather extraordinary kind as he knocks out

BONAVENTURE ISLAND 107
of the strata pebbles and great bowlders contain
ing the fossils of vastly greater age than the rocks
themselves. Indeed these great red pudding stones
are largely composed of fragments washed from
the ancient rock cliffs of Gaspe and rounded off
by the waves of the same eternal sea that still
pounds at its doors.
Though I have wandered back and forth on the
road along which the few houses are ranged run
ning down to the south point, inoffensively stop
ping in here and there to pass a word or catch a
glimpse of cupboard and mantel, exchange good
wishes freely or a Uttle silver for an old product of
the EngUsh potteries, Bonaventure, with all its
ancient association with the missions and the fish
ing, its traditions of privateering, its geological
problems and its feathered repubUc, remains to
my memory, by grace of its most imexpected prod
uct, the Isle of the Golden Jugs.

THE EARLY SETTLEMENTS
The French Fishermen — Jehan Denys — Cartier; stops at Perce;
lands in Gaspi Bay — Champlain — The Recollets — Sir
William Alexander — Kirk and De Roquemont — The
Jesuits — Nicholas Denys — Return of the Recollets — Father
LeClercq — St. Peter's Church at Perce — St. Claire's at
Bonaventure Island — Fathers Didace, Joseph Denys and
Jumeau at Perce — Burning of the Churclies by the Eng
lish — Father Jumeau' s Letter — Location of both churches —
Hovenden Walker and Jack Hill at Gaspe — Beauharnois — ¦
Governor Cox and American loyalists
There is but scanty record of the beginnings of
the settlements. The larger affairs of exploration
and colonization touched these coasts only in pass
ing, and they leave much to the imagination for
what may have happened. It is quite certain,
however, that before the days of Cartier the coast
had been reached by explorers. They knew of the
Golfo Quadrato, the square gulf that lay back of
the Terra Nova, though it took long for the charts
to separate Newfoundland from the mainland and
to locate the great water arms above and below,
which lead back around into the Gulf. We know
108

THE EARLY SETTLEMENTS 109
of the map said to have been made by Jehan Denys,
a very famiUar surname in the history of Gasp6,
in 1506, which gives the outline of the coast from
Miscou to the St. Lawrence with comparative
accuracy, and fringes it with an array of place
names which are certainly of very much later
date. It is such a map, says Winsor, as would
have been quite possible for an intrepid and zeal
ous explorer of that day to have made, but its out
Une is so great an advance over any of con
temporary date as to bring even this part of it
under suspicion. It is said that when Cartier first
entered the Gulf, in 1534, he encountered a Nor
man fisher, and it was not long after his voyages
that the fishing was regularly estabUshed on the
coast, both by the Normans and the Biscayans.
Portuguese explorers were along here, too, earUer
than Cartier, but it remained for this lucky French
man to give a new domain to his king. That hot
day m July, 1534, when he roasted in the Bay
Chaleur and recorded the fact in its name, is the
earliest definite date that has come down to us of
the entry of the white man into Gaspesian waters.

110 THE HEART OF GASPfi
More momentous far was that day later in the
same month when he erected a cross on the beach
at the head of Gaspe Bay, and took possession of
the country in the name of the king.
Coasting along the open headlands and below
the Bay Chaleur he anchored for awhUe in the
channel off the Perc6 Rock, and then sailed on
to the opening of Gasp6 Bay, the Bale du Penouil
of French writers of later date. We reteU his
story in the words of Hakluyt, for the Preacher's
English is more picturesque than Lescarbot's
French, from which it is derived.
"BEing certified that there was no passage
through the said Bay,* we hoised saile, and went
from S. Martines Creeke vpon Sunday, being the
12. of July, to goe and discouer further beyond
the said Bay, and went along the sea coast East
ward about eighteene leagues, till we came to the
Cape of Prato,t where we found the tide very
great, but shallow ground, and the Sea stormie,
so that we were constrained to draw toward shore,
between the said Cape and an ILand | lying East-
* Bay of Chaleur.
t Perc6 Rock.
t Bonaventm'e.

THE EARLY SETTLEMENTS 111
ward, about a league from the said Cape, where
we cast anker for that night. The next morning
we hoised saUe to trend the said coast about,
which lyeth North Northeast. But there arose
such stormie and raging winds against vs, that we
were constrained to come to the place againe, from
whence we were come: there did we stay all that
day tU the next that we hoised vp saUe, and came
to the middest of a riuer * fine or size leagues from
the Cape of Prato Northward, and being ouver-
thwart the said Riuer, there arose againe a con
trary winde, with great fogges and stormes. So
that we were constrained vpon Tuesday, being
the fourteenth of the Moneth, to enter into the
riuer, and there did we stay till the sixteenth of
the moneth looking for faire weather to come out
of it: on which day being Thursday, the winde be
came so raging that one of our ships lost an anker,
and we were constrained to goe vp higher into
the riuer seuen or eight leagues, into a good har-
borough and ground that we with our boates
found out, and through the euiU weather, tempest,
and darkenesse that was, wee stayed in the saide
harborough till the fine and twentieth of the
moneth, not being able to put out : in the meane
time wee sawe a great multitude of wilde men
that were fishing for mackerels, whereof there is
great store. Their boates were about 40, and the
persons, what with men, women, and children, two
* Gasp6 Bay.

112 THE HEART OF GASPfi
hundred, which after they had hanted our com
pany a while, they came very famiUarly with
their boats to the sides of our ships. We gaue
them kniues, combes, beads of glasse, and other
trifles of small value, for which they made many
signes of gladnesse, lifting their hands vp to heauen
dancing and singing in their boates. These men
may very well and truely be called Wilde, be
cause there is no poorer people in the world. For
I thinke all that they had together, besides their
boates and nets, was not worth flue souce. They
goe altogether naked sauing their priuities, which
are couered with a little skinne, and certaine olde
skinnes that they cast vpon them. Neither in
nature nor in language doe they any whit agree
with them which we found first: their heads be
altogether sauen, except one bush of haire which
they suffer to grow vpon the top of their crowne
as long as a horse taile, and then with certaine
leather strings binde it in a knot vpon their heads.
They haue no other dwelling but their boates,
which they turne vpside downe, and vnder them
they lay themselves aU along vpon the bare ground.
They eate their flesh almost raw, saue onely that
they heat it a Uttle vpon imbers of coales, so doe
they their fish. Vpon Magdalens day we with
our boates went to the bancks of the riuer, and
freely went on shore among them, whereat they
made many signs, and all their men in two or
three companies began to sing and dance, seem-

THE EARLY SETTLEMENTS 113
ing to be very glad of our coming. They had
caused aU the young women to flee into the wood,
two or three excepted, that stayed with them, to
ech of which we gaue a combe, and a Uttle bell
made of tinne, for which they were very glad,
thanking our Captaine, rubbing his armes and
breasts with their hands. When the men saw vs
giue something vnto those that had stayed, it
caused al the rest to come out of the wood, to the
end that they should haue as much as the others:
These women are about twenty, who altogether
in a knot feU vpon our Captaine, touching and
rubbing him with their hands, according to their
manner of cherishing and making much of one, who
gaue to each of them a little Tinne Bell. . . .
" VPon the 25 of the moneth, wee caused a faire
high Crosse to be made of the height of thirty
foote, which was made in the presence of many
of them, vpon the point of the entrance of the sayd
hauen, in the middest whereof we hanged vp a
Shield with three Floure de Luces on it, and in
the top was earned in the wood with Anticke,
letters this posie. Vine le Roy de France. Then
before them all we set it vpon the sayd point.
They with great heed beheld both the making and
setting it of vp. So soone as it was vp, we alto
gether kneeled downe before them, with our hands
toward Heauen, yeelding God thankes: and we
made signes vnto them, shewing them the Heauens,
and that all our saluation dependeth onely on hini

114 THE HEART OF GASPfi
which in them dwelleth: whereat they shewed
a great admiration, looking first one at another,
and then vpon the Crosse. And after wee were
returned to our ships, their Captaine, clad with
an old Beares skin, with three of his sonnes, and
a brother of his with him, came vnto vs in one
of their boates, but they came not so neere vs
as they were wont to doe: there he made a long
Oration vnto vs, shewing vs the crosse we had set
vp, and making a crosse with two fingers, then
did he shew vs aU the Coimtrey about vs, as if
he would say that aU was his, and that wee should
not set \'p any crosse without his leaue. His talke
being ended, we shewed him an Axe, faining that
we would giue it him for his skin, to which he Us-
tened, for by Uttle and Uttle hee came neere our
ships. One of our fellowes that was in our boate,
tooke hold on theirs, and suddenly leapt into it,
with two or three more, who enforced them to
enter into our ships, whereat they were greatly
astonished. But our Captain did straightwaies
assure them, that they should haue no harme, nor
any iniurie offred them at aU, and entertained
them very friendly, making them eate and drinke.
Then did we shew them with signes, that the
crosse was but onely set ^-p to be as a Ught and
leader which wayes to enter into the port, and
that wee would shortly come againe, and bring
good store of iron wares and other things, but
that we would take two of his children with vs.

THE EARLY SETTLEMENTS 115
and afterward bring them to the sayd port againe:
and so wee clothed two of them in shirts, and
coloured coates, with red cappes, and put about
euery ones necke a copper chaine, whereat they
were greatly contented; then gauve they their old
clothes to their feUowes that went backe againe,
and we gave to each one of those three that went
backe, a hatchet, and some kniues, which made
them very glad. After these were gone, and had
told the news vnto their f eUowes, in the after noone
there came to our ships sixe boates of them, with
fine or sixe men in euery one, to take their farewels
of those two we had detained to take with vs,
and brought them some fish, vttering many words
which we did not vnderstand, making signes that
they would not remoue the crosse we had set vp."
Thus was the whole country, from that time
to be known as New France, become the domain
of the French King by this seizin on the shores of
Gasp6. From Gaspe, Cartier sailed back to St.
Malo, not stoppmg to enter the great waterway
of the St. Lawrence, which he may weU have be
lieved to lead to Cathay. On his return the next
year to follow up this passage to the Indies, he
did not stop at Gasp6 even long enough to dis
embark the two young Indians whom he had

116 THE HEART OF GASPfi
taken (the EngUsh say kidnapped) from Sandy
Beach back with hun to France. In the cen
tury that foUowed, the Gasp6 coast was visited
by the fishermen for the cod and mackerel, at
first we may suppose occasionally by some ven
turer beyond the banks of Newfoundland, but
by the middle of the sixteenth century probably
regularly for the whole fishing season from May
to November. They came from Normandy and
St. Malo, Bordogne and many places along the
Bay of Biscay, La Rochelle, Olonne and the
Isle d'Yeu, but they were not settlers on the
coast. We cannot tell the slender doings that
were slowly making during all this time toward
permanent occupation, but we may believe that
the beaches were yearly dotted with the curing-
houses and covered with the stages, flakes and the
round mows of dried fish thatched with birch-
bark held down by large stones as they were in
the days of Nicolas Denys and as they are to
day. Up to the time of Champlain's voyage along
the coast in 1603 and later, there was nothing to

THE EARLY SETTLEMENTS 117
invite the traveler for a longer stay than shelter
at Gasp6 harbor or wood and water at Perc6.
But if the character of the country failed to offer
inducement to permanent settlement to farmer or
fisherman, the souls of the natives did, and as early
as 1610 it was proposed to the Jesuit superiors to
estabUsh colonies for the purpose of disseminat
ing the gospel. Champlain, however, had a fond
ness for the Recollets; there was a Franciscan
monastery in his home town of Brouage, and so
the missions in New France were begun by the
four whom he brought out from Brouage in 1615.
Unmoved by motives of material gain, but in
zealous obedience to the divine command, Euntes
ergo docete omnes gentes, these knights of the faith
were soon to break ground in this wilderness of
Gasp6. Who it was and at what spot he began his labors
our records do not show, but the Relations say
that the date was 1619, and as Perc6 was the best
known station on the coast, where most of the
vessels from France dropped anchor on their way
in and out, and the French fishermen resorted

118 THE HEART OF GASPfi
in greatest numbers, it seems likely that here the
work commenced.
Trouble was now brewing between the two
governments which claimed supremacy over all
this country. The EngUsh were settlmg in Cape
Breton. Sir William Alexander, who had received
from James I. patents to all the territory as far
as Cape Gasp^, was endeavoring to spread the
settlements in this direction, and was scatter
ing new place names along the coast. With the
modesty of a Joshua he called all this country
from Acadia to the St. Lawrence, New Alexandria.
But New Alexandria was not to be of long dura
tion, nor was the RecoUet mission in Gaspe, for
the war between the French and EngUsh soon
came on and the fathers abandoned their work in
1624. It was in 1628 that Admiral Kirk of the
English fleet overhauled the French commander
De Roquemont in Gaspe Bay, where he had taken
harbor, and fought him to his complete finish,
burning his vessels laden with suppUes for the
forces at Quebec and capturing an enormous
booty. The Dieppois EngUshman tarried awhUe

THE EARLY SETTLEMENTS 119
in Gasp6 Basin, and Faucher says that while there
he burned a cache of grain belonging to the mis
sioners, though he had promised in the capitula
tion not to disturb the religious. It is evident
that the Recollets are meant, for several RecoUet
fathers were among the captives, and it is an in
teresting reference to their early presence in the
Basin. After the recovery of Canada from the EngUsh
in 1632, Richelieu offered the Canadian missions
to the Capuchins, but, declined by them, these
were tendered to the Jesuits, .and it was in that
year on Trinity Sunday that Father LeJeune ar
rived m "Gaspay," and he speaks of the content
ment with which he entered the new country after
his long voyage. Here he found fishing vessels
from Honfleur and Biscay and celebrated mass
in their cabins. Father LeJeune went on to Ta
doussac, but he seems to have been stationed on
the Gasp6 coast, for in 1634 he says the winter
was so cold that the Indians killed and ate a young
boy whom the Basques had left to learn the lan
guage and again in 1635 speaks of the great abun-

120 THE HEART OF GASPfi
dance of cod in "our great river at Gasp6." It was
in 1636 that Nicolas Denys began his labors for the
development of the coast and its opening to settle
ment. His long activity on the coast for more than
forty years seems to have been attended with an
open want of sympathy from those whose coopera
tion he was entitled to expect and with severe losses
from the adventures in the fishing. It is diSicult
to find evidence that any permanent settlement
had been made by the French at any Gaspe point
up to this date. Champlain's great map of his
explorations in New France, dated 1632, indicated
aU French settlements of the country with a flag,
but there is no flag on all Gasp^. And of the events
along the coast all during the supremacy of Denys
we know Uttle, though he himself wrote most in
terestingly of its natural history, its fishing, but
only incidentally of the procession of happenings
during his time.
Nicolas Denys came to Canada with the Com
mander Razilly soon after the treaty of 1632 and
estabUshed a settlement on the coast of Acadia.
His residence was frequently changed, but even

THE EARLY SETTLEMENTS 121
in his later years, when he had become concerned
with the Perc6 fishing, it does not appear that he
settled in Gaspe. With Nicolas came his brother
Denys de Vitrl. Nicolas established a fishing sta
tion at Rossignol which he exploited in partnership
with RazUly, and after the death of the latter he
settled for a while at Miscou and some years later
at St. Pierre, in Cape Breton. Ousted from Miscou
by d'Aulnay, he settled near by at Nepisiguit,
which was in his old age, to be his last home after
the trying vicissitudes of his career. Again he
went to St. Pierre where he found trouble await
ing him, for Le Borgne, a Rochelle merchant, had
obtained from the French Parliament a concession
of the same territory, from which he proceeded to
drive Denys out. Sixty of Le Borgne's men at
tacked Denys at his house on Cape Breton, car
ried off his workmen, and piUaged his vessel, which
was loaded with merchandise. Denys himself they
carried to Port Royal and put in irons. As soon
as he was released he made for France, and re
turned in 1653 with a commission from the Com
pagnie du Nouvelle France as "Gouverneur en

122 THE HEART OF GASPfi
toute I'etendue de la grande bale Saint-Laurent
et iles adjacentes a commencer depuis le cap de
Canseau jusqu' au Cap des Rosiers," which was
at once fortified with letters patent from the King.
His commission proved a costly one to maintain
and failing to carry out its conditions he was de
prived of lands at Perc6 by a grant from the In
tendant Talon to Denys's nephew Pierre, but as
this grant was neglected by Pierre it seems to have
been reassumed by Denys himself through his
son and lieutenant, Richard Denys de Fronsac.
Richard made grants to settlers at Perc6 and to
the Recollets at Ristigouche. This was in 1685,
three years before Denys's death.
During all the years from 1632 the Jesuits had
taken possession of the missions, but we catch
only occasional glimpses of their activities. We
know that Father Andre Richard was on the coast
at Perc6 and near by in 1661, and that he followed
in this field Father Martin Lyonne. Denys says
that there were twelve hundred French fishing
vessels along this coast and in Newfoundland in
1650. It was about 1670 that the Government

THE EARLY SETTLEMENTS 123
consented to the return of the RecoUets. Richard
Denys invited their presence at Perce, and Fathers
Hilarion Guesnin and Exuper de Thune were sent
here by their superior. Whether they came to
gether or in succession, they were the first to take
up the work abandoned by the Recollets fifty
years before. No progress had been made in the
settlement of the country; it was stiU a wilder
ness, and the mission was to the four or five hun
dred Gaspesian Indians and nearly the same
number of French fishermen. Thus it was when
Chrestien LeClercq arrived at Perc6, on the 27th of
October, 1675, to take the mission. LeClercq
repaired at once to the home of Pierre Denys, on
Mai Bay, and being wholly at loss for means of
communication with the Indians, set himself to
acquire their language, spending his first winter
with them in the camps at the headwaters of the
rivers. It is to him that we owe the interesting
Nouvelle Relation de la Gaspesie (1691), which has
depicted with vividness and force the labors, dis
couragements and slender results of his mission
and the nature, habits and customs of his Indians,

124 THE HEART OF GASPfi
an account which closes with the first period of
his labors.
The Perc6 mission house was founded in 1682,
according to the contemporary account given by
Father LeTac. LeClercq remained eleven years in
spite of discouragements in the conversion of the
natives. In his writings he speaks of the church
at Perc6, but it seems that this structure which
was to pass under the vocable "St. Peter's," was
not erected till 1685. It was built by Brother
Didace, was fifty feet long and contained rooms
for the reUgious. We may beUeve that the hospice
at Perc6 and the church of St. Claire on Bona
venture were built at the same time and by the
same hands. Father Joseph Denys was then mis
sionary at Perce. He was succeeded by Father
Jumeau, who had been at the mission during Le
Clercq's settlement; and it was Jumeau who wit
nessed the piUage and burning of all the churches
by the "Boston corsairs" and "Dieppe renegades"
which have recklessly been accredited to Sir Wil
Uam Phips's naval forces in 1690. One can con
ceive of LeClercq's horror and despair at receiving

THE EARLY SETTLEMENTS 125
from his former coworker the account of the ap
palling doings at the little mission.
After the Provincial congresses at Albany and
New York early in 1690, which concluded the
purpose on the part of the Colonies to take offen
sive measures against New France, Sir William
Phips was, as early as June, on his expedition from
Boston against Quebec. He captured Port Royal,
as all the world knows, and proceeded with his
thirty-four vessels up through the Gulf and on to
Quebec. Here he found himself confronted by
an impregnable fortress, and his imperious demand
for surrender was greeted with derision. Without
a gun fired he turned about and sailed for home,
and it was coincident with his disordered retreat
that the "corsairs" found an opportunity to dis
charge themselves of their pent-up zeal at the Uttle
mission of Perc6. It was a shameless, brutal out
burst of ruffianism which we may believe was
perpetrated by stragglers from the fleet without
the commander's orders or knowledge or by pri
vateers, perhaps commissioned, as Professor Gan
ong thinks, by the colony of New York. Father

126 THE HEART OF GASPfi
Jumeau, escaping from the devastation and wreck
to the Isle D'Yeu in Biscay, wrote to his coworker
as foUows:
My Reverend Father:
I pass in silence the distressing details of the
shipwreck that we suffered last year, during a ter
rible night, the twenty-third of November, off
Cap Des Rosiers, fifteen leagues from the Isle
Percee; and the troubles we have endured this
year, from having been seized by a frigate of Fles-
singue, fifty leagues from Rochelle; for I wish to
confide to you the one sorrow which fills my whole
heart at present, and which, I am certain, will
afflict you no less than it does me, since I have been
a witness of the pains you have taken in establish
ing our mission in the Isle Percee, and of the zeal
with which you have labored for the glory of God
and the salvation of souls. It seems as though it
pleased Our Lord to preserve my life in the ship
wreck only that I might be a witness also of the
total ruin and utter desolation of this place, in
order to relate it to you, who will make known to
aU the world to what excess of impiety and hatred
heresy can reach when once it finds itself able by
the help of its adherents to undertake and carry
out its plans. Briefly to teU you : in the early part
of last August two EngUsh frigates appeared,
flying the French flag, in the roadstead of the Isle

THE EARLY SETTLEMENTS 127
of Bonaventure, and by this stratagem they easily
seized five fishing vessels whose captains and crews
were at the time whoUy occupied with fishing,
and were all forced to fly to Quebec, not being in a
condition to defend themselves nor contend with
so many nations leagued against them. Then
these sworn enemies of the State and of Religion,
having attempted to land, and succeeding ac
cording to their desires, sojourned there eight
whole days, and committed an hundred impious
acts, with aU the disorders imaginable. Among
other things, they pillaged, ravaged and burned
the houses of the inhabitants, who number at
least eight or ten famiUes, and who, for the most
part, had already fled into the woods with pre
cipitation, to avoid the presence and the cruelty
of those pitiless Heretics, who made horrible car
nage, fire and blood everywhere. I shiver with
horror at the simple remembrance of the impieties
and sacrileges that these wretches conunitted in
our church, which they used as a guardhouse and
a place of debauch; animated by the same spirit
as the Iconoclasts, they broke and strewed under
foot our images, against which they fulminated
a thousand imprecations, with invectives and in
sults as though they had been Uving creatures.
The pictures of the Holy Virgin and of Saint Peter
were not exempt from their fury and violence; for
both were riddled with more than a hundred and
fifty shots which these wretched men discharged,

128 THE HEART OF GASPfi
and with each shot they pronounced with mockery
and derision these words of the Utanies:
Sancta Maria, ora pro nobis;
Sancte Petre, ora pro nobis.
Not a cross escaped their fury, with the excep
tion of the one that I formerly planted on the
Table-d-RoUand, which by reason of being on a
mountain of too difficult access, stands at present
all alone, the sacred monument of our Chris
tianity. The sacrileges of Balthazar, who in olden
times in the midst of a feast profaned the sacred
vessels of the Temple of Jerusalem, making his
courtesans and concubines drink from them, were
the same that these Heretics committed, who
amidst their horrible debauches day and night,
drank from our chalices bumpers to the health of
the Prince of Orange, whom they blessed, hurling
on the contrary a thousand imprecations against
their legitimate King. The commander, in order
to be as distinguished by his impiety as he was
by his position, dressed himself in the handsomest
of our chasubles, and by an ostentation as vain
as it was ridiculous, promenaded on the beach,
with the silver monstrance fastened on his cap,
and obUged his companions, using a thousand
dissolute words, to pay him the same honors and
reverences that the Catholics render in the most
solemn processions to the Most Holy Sacrament
of the Altar. At last they closed all these impieties

THE EARLY SETTLEMENTS 129
with a ceremony as extraordinary in form as it
was extravagant and abominable in all its circum
stances. They took the crowns of the Holy Sacra
ment and of the Holy Virgin, and placed them on
the head of a sheep; they tied the arumal's feet,
and having laid it on the consecrated Stone of
the High Altar, they kiUed it, sacrificed it in de
rision of the Sacrifice of the Holy Mass, as a
thanksgiving to God, (so they said) for the first
victories they had gained, over the Papists of New
France. This being finished they set fire to the
four corners of the church, which was quickly
reduced to ashes. So also did they treat that of
our Mission in the Isle of Bonaventure, doomed
to a Uke destiny, after they had broken the images
and cut aU the ornaments with great sabre-thrusts.
You can well judge by the sorrow you feel at the
simple recital that I make you of these disasters
how deeply I was moved, when, on the very spot
where had been the High Altar of our church, I
found still there the carcass of the sheep which
had served as the victim of that abominable sacri
fice of those impious men. Outraged and pene
trated with grief thus to see all the crosses of this
Mission hacked into pieces or overthrown, I at
once formed the resolution to re-estabUsh the
principal qnes; this I succeeded in doing with the
kind help of the inhabitants, who applied them
selves to this holy work with a piety and devotion
which exceeded even the fury and rage that the

130 THE HEART OF GASPfi
Heretics had displayed in destroying them. But
alas! my dear Father, I have great cause to be
lieve, and I fear indeed, that they wiU suffer again
the fatal results of a second attack from these
sworn enemies of our holy ReUgion, because two
days after the erection of these Crosses, that is to
say on the tenth of September, we were obUged
to quickly cut our cables and spread sail at the
sight of seven hostile ships, which gave chase to
us in a strange manner, but from which we hap
pily at last escaped by favor of the night, during
which we beheld with grief aU the habitations of
the Little River on fire. God knows in what per
plexity and inquietude we were then what to do,
having no port sail which we needed to crowd sail,
so as to get more quickly to a distance from the Isle
Percee, and besides that, in want of bread, of fresh
water, in a word of everything that is needed for so
long and difficult a voyage as is that from Canada
to France. But at last Our Lord in his mercy de
livered us out of all these dangers, and particularly
from the privateer of Flessingue, who, having
seized our vessel, stripped us of everything, and
after having detained us only four or five hours
on board his ship, sent us back on our vessel after
many menaces and much iU-treatment; and two
days later, being again pursued by another vessel,
we discovered joyfully the Isle Dieu [D'Yeu],
where we have just cast anchor in the roadstead,
and from which place I write you this letter.

THE EARLY SETTLEMENTS 131
hoping to describe to you more fully the misfor
tunes of our Mission of the Isle Percle. Mean
while remember me in your Holy Sacrifices, and
believe me for all eternity yours.
Father Hugolin, of the Franciscans, has quite
lately written at length concerning the RecoUet
mission at Perc6 and the reader who feels an
interest in the efforts made during the last quarter
of the 1600's toward settlement and evangeUza-
tion may profitably refer to his L' Etablissement des
Recollets a I'Isle Perc^— 1673-1690 (1912). With
the burning of the churches the mission was dis
continued. Perc6 was too openly exposed to
attack, now that trouble with the EngUsh was
becoming more acute. The Perc6 church was,
according to early documents, located "near the
beach," but as that is a rather vague statement,
tradition and common opinion of to-day are dis
posed to place it on the slope of Mt. Joli toward
the North beach, probably on the lower cUff so
that the structure and its cross could be well
seen by the fishermen in the north oflSng.
There Ues an ancient burying ground on the

132 THE HEART OF GASPfi
slope of Mt. Joli. The story goes that at a later
day after the Irish had begun to settle near Perce,
they objected to burial with the French in the
new cemetery and they were inhumed in the
"cimitiere ancienne." At all events I have been
witness of the opening of an ancient grave on the
slope of Mt. JoU, slabbed with stone a few feet
below the surface, from out of which was taken a
cranium with a bullet hole or spike wound in it —
a victim of some sea fight or homelier encounter
which has passed into oblivion. There is no record
to show when a mission was reestablished at Perce,
but the Recollets never came back after the dis
astrous affair of 1690.
It was in 1711 that Hovenden Walker and
Jack HiU led their armada from Boston out against
Quebec, and it was in Gaspe Bay they came to
anchor while feeling their way pilotless through
the Gulf. It was on the Egg Island that the storms
of these rough waters tossed them with fearful
loss of life, making an end of all their foolish ambi
tions. One at least of their fleet seems to have
been wrecked on Cape d'Espoir.

THE EARLY SETTLEMENTS 133
Time runs rapidly on this coast vrithout much
other record than the growth of the fisheries.
The crisis between the French and English claims
was approaching, and foreseeing it, Beauharnois,
the Governor General, proposed to the Ministry
in 1745 to effect an estabUshment at Gaspe while
a few years later (1756) Montcalm complained
that the English had already entrenched them
selves there and urged that a French fleet be sent
to drive them out.
Of General Wolfe's doings in Gaspe I have told
in another chapter, and after the subversion of
the French rule, settlement went on more rapidly.
Nicholas Cox,* Lieutenant-Governor of Gaspe,
* Governor Cox had been an officer mider Wolfe at Louis-
bourg and the Plains of Abraham. He was Lieut.-Governor
of Gasp6 in 1774 and Superintendent of the Labrador Fish
eries and in these capacities built up a httle court at New
Carhsle, Bonaventure County, but Uved intermittently at
Perc6. In this office he was succeeded by Francis LeMoine
who also resided at Perc6, the shiretown of Gasp6 Coimty.
At a later date the "Lieutenant-Governorship of Gasp6,"
says Sir James LeMoine, "was one of the many sinecures
which roused the patriotic ire of the Papineau party. In 1821
the House tried to abohsh the sinecure on the groimds that
the incumbent was often an absentee from the province.
The salary had been reduced from £1,000 to £300. In 1825,
it refused to pass the item in the Civil List."

134 THE HEART OF GASPfi
reported in 1777 that there were one hundred and
seventy-four persons Uving in Gasp6. Upon the
accomplishment of the American Revolution
loyalist families from the States sought new homes
in this country. In 1783 General Haldimand de-
taUed Capt. Justus Sherwood to explore the Bay
Chaleur and the region northward and select the
most suitable locations for settlement and as a
result of the exploration two hundred and fifty
to three hundred loyaUst famiUes, Irish, EngUsh
and Scotch, located, part at Douglastown, on
Gasp6 Bay, and the rest at New CarUsle and New
Richmond, in Bonaventure County. The rest of
the story of loyaUst settlement in the country is
rather long and disjointed.

FRENCH SEIGNIORIES AND ENGLISH PATENTS
Seigniories on the St. Lawrence river — Ste Anne-des-Monts —
Madeleine — Grand Etang — Grand Vallee — Mont Louis —
Griffon Cove — Cap-Chat — Perci — Grand River — Grand Pa-
bos — English patents at Gaspi Basin.
The earUest concessions of land in fief along the
Gasp6 coast were located on the St. Lawrence
river and were intended by the grantors to en
courage the business of the whale and cod fishery.
In these monopoUstic grants the name of Denis
Riverin plays a large part and we find that the
king himself was interested in the success of
Riverin's undertakings though he afterward lost
confidence in them and complained that, though
often helped, Riverin's fisheries were of slight
account (see a note in Parkman's Old Regime,
2:93). Ste Anne-des-Monts was granted to Riverin
(1688), who had besought the support of the
Governor and Intendant for his enterprise. The
next year (1689) he obtained the concession of
Cap-de-la-Magdalaine. The same Riverin with
135

136 THE HEART OF GASPfi
his partner Frangois Hazeur, secured the grant of
Grand Etang in 1697 and Hazeur had become
a proprietor of Grande Vallee in 1691. In 1725,
Michel Sarrazin, the distinguished naturalist and
physician, whose name is registered in American
botany by its association with Sarracenia, the
pitcher plant, acquired both of these seigniories.*
In 1810 they were sold by the sheriff to John Black
wood and in 1837, John Greenshields inherited a
part of the estate.
The first concessionaire of Mont-Louis was
Nicolas Bourlet, from whom it passed in 1725 to
Louis Gosselin and in 1754 to Joseph Cadet. It
* "His position in the colony," says Parkman in speaking
of Sarrazin, "was singular and characteristic. He got httle
or no pay from his patients; and though at one time the only
genuine physician in Canada, he was dependent on the king
for support. In 1699 we find him thanking his Majesty for
300 francs a year and asking at the same time for more as he
has nothing else to live on. Two years later the Governor
writes that as he serves almost everybody without fees, he
ought to have another 300 francs. The additional 300 francs
were given, but finding it insufficient he wanted to leave the
colony. 'He is too useful,' writes the Governor again, 'we
can not let him go.' His yearly pittance of 600 francs, French
money, was at one time reinforced by his salary as member of
the Superior Council. He died at Quebec in 1734."

SEIGNIORIES AND ENGLISH PATENTS 137
was acquired by Jacques Curchard in 1789 and
purchased at sheriff's sale by Matthew Bell in
1799. Griffon Cove was conceded in 1688 but was di
vided between Louis d'Ailleboust, governor of
New France, Jean, Charles and Louis de Lauzon,
Jacques le Neuf de-la-Poterie, Charles d'Ailleboust
des Musseaux, Jean Paul Godefroy and Jean
Bourdon. Cap-Chat seems to have been the first of all
these seigniorial grants. It was given in 1662 to
Michel le Neuf de-la- VaUi^re.
Perce, from 1654 acknowledged Nicolas Denys
as overlord, so far as there was anyone in the coun
try except the Micmacs to make this obeisance to
a seigneur who never went to Gaspe. Nicolas, we
have seen, did not keep the terms of his patent
and so Talon took Perc6 away from him in 1672
and gave it to Nicolas's nephew Pierre Denys, a
leasehold of three leagues of sea front and a half-
league landward. This grant was not confirmed
until 1676 by Talon's successor, Duchesneau, and
it provided that Charles Bazire and Charles

138 THE HEART OF GASPfi
Aubert-de-Chenaie should be associated with
Denys as co-proprietors of the Seigniory of the Isle
Percee. "They had a two-fold estabUshment; one
at the Little River [to-day Tickle Inletl at the en
trance of the Barachois . . . two leagues from
Perc4 toward Gaspe Bay; the other at Perce itseK"
(Hugolin). The pursuit of the fishery for which
this grant was made, was not a success and in
1677 the greater part of the grant was ceded by
the owners to Jacques Le Ber. This was the
stretch of coast on the Malbay front. Perc6 re
mained in the hands of Pierre Denys until 1685
when it seems to have been abandoned by him
and the proprietorship resumed by Nicolas Denys,
who was represented on the coast by his son,
Richard sieur de Fronsac.
At the time Pierre Denys was desirous of es-
tabUshing a RecoUet Mission on his seigniory he
represented to the society in France that there
was at Perce a storehouse, 50 by 25 feet, large
enough for packing the fish for a vessel of 300 tons
and to lodge its equipment; a Uttle house near by
for the commander; a chapel and lodgings for two

SEIGNIORIES AND ENGLISH PATENTS 139
RecoUets, framed up and ready for cultivation,
the other half needing only a Uttle work to fit it
for the plow. Besides this, at the "Uttle river"
(Barachois) were winter quarters and a poultry
yard; lodgings large enough for 15 people; store
house for provisions and fittings for barque and
chaloupe; barn and stable for 20 homed cattle
and 30 acres of cleared land; a court of two acres
and a garden of one acre, both enclosed with a
stone waU. There were four or five famiUes re
corded as settled at Perce during this time of
Father LeClercq's mission, and their names,
Boissel, Lamothe, Lespine, Le Gascon, may be
looked on, with Denys, as the earUest known on
the Perce coast.*
Further out on the coast were the seigniories of
Grand River and Grand Pahos. The former was
granted to Pierre Cochu in 1697. In 1793 Duncan
Anderson had become proprietor and sold it to
Charles Robin from whom it descended to his
* These statements regarding the Percd seigniory and
settlement are largely taken from Hugolin's Etablissement
des Recollets a I'Isle Percee, and Professor Ganong's life of
Nicolas Denys (Champlain Society).

140 THE HEART OF GASPfi
nephews, James, Philippe and John. It is now
owned by Mr. Cabot of Boston who holds it as a
salmon preserve.
Grand Pabos was conceded originally to Ren6
Hubert in 1696 and passed thence into the hands
of Messrs. Lefebvre and BeUefeuille. In 1765,
it was bought by General Haldimand who sold
in 1796 to Felix O'Hara and afterward to his heirs.
Later it was taken over by the ill-omened "Com
pagnie de Gaspe" which nearly ruined the land
by stripping off its forests, untU the government
stepped in in 1863, took possession and opened it
to settlement.
In the early days of the EngUsh rule some land
grants were made but they were all of smaU extent.
In 1766 Joseph Deane, captain and commander
of H. M. S. Mermaid, received a patent of 517
acres on the York side of the Sou'west Arm at
Gaspe Basin, and in 1767 Edward Manwaring,
customs officer at the port of Gaspe, acquired a
grant on the north side of Gasp€ Bay. The same
year Felix O'Hara and John McCord obtained
patent to lands on the north side of the Sou'west

SEIGNIORIES AND ENGLISH PATENTS 141
arm where the village of Gasp6 now stands. In
1787, Lieutenant-Governor Cox, then living at
Perc6, obtained the concession of Bonaventure
Island, which subsequently passed into the pos
session of Captain Peter John Duval, privateer.*
* Many of these statements regarding the seigniories and
other concessions I have freely taken from Mr. Engine Rouil-
lard's valuable descriptive account of the lower St. Lawrence
counties, entitled La Colonization dans les comtes de Temis-
couata, Rimouski, Matane, Bonaventure, Gaspi, and published
by the Quebec Commissioner of Colonization and Mines.
I have also consulted, through the favor of Mr. Chester
Guild, "Extrait des Titres des Concessions des Terres octroyies
en fief dans la Province du Bas-Canada.'' There is also before
me, by the courtesy of Mr. F. J. Richmond, a copy of the
original patent of Gasp6 Basin to Fehx O'Hara and John
McCord, wherein it is set forth that "whereas the premises
granted are barren and unfit for the production of Hemp or
Flax [the royal requisition for sails and cordage] they ought
rather to be employed in the feeding of neat cattle or to be
improved by the opening and working stone quarries or
mines of some other useful mineral, than to be planted, sown
or cultivated;" the grantees are to put seventy-eight neat
cattle on the premises and keep them there until seventy
acres were cleared, or some alternatives in regard to opening
quarries and feeding cattle at the rate of 3 to every fifty acres;
leaving the present day reader to wonder how it was all to be
done when the whole country side was in deep timber.

GENERAL WOLFE IN GASPfi
His arrival in 1758— The French settlement at Peninsula-
Smyth's picture — House of the Intendant occupied by
Wolfe — Destruction of Miramichi and Mont Louis —
Relics of French occupation on Peninsula Point — Later oc
cupation.
When Louisbourg surrendered in July, 1758, it
was only after stubborn resistance and it had
become too late in the season to carry out the
plans for the intended advance of the fleet upon
Quebec. General Amherst had received a hurry
call to New York where Montcalm had beaten off
the colonials and regulars at Ticonderoga. With
him he took 6,000 troops, so that the army at
Louisbourg was considerably weakened, but to
keep the ships employed and prevent their too
early return to England, he despatched orders to
the remaining troops, and Admiral Boscawen to
the squadron, to spend the rest of the season in
cruising along the French coast as far as Gasp6,
in order to despoil the fishing villages. Colonel
142

GENERAL WOLFE IN GASPfi 143
WoUe, as he was at Louisbourg, Brigadier-General
Wolfe as designated in these orders, was to com
mand the troops with Sir Charles Hardy as Admiral
of the fleet.
It was not a dignified undertaking. But it had
taken England so long to set her fleet free from
European waters to pursue the drama in America
that some such supplementary byplay was neces
sary to keep the ships from getting back to the
other side while the critical moment in the great
maritime war was impending. The plan would
serve in a measure too, to forestaU any purpose of
the French to strengthen the portals of the St.
Lawrence river. "Sir Charles Hardy and I,"
Wolfe wrote to his father, "are preparing to rob
the fishermen of their nets and burn their huts.
When that great exploit is at an end I return to
Louisbourg and thence to England."
On this mission seven ships with three regi
ments, the 15th, 28th and 58th, set sail August 28th
and arrived off Gasp4 on September 4th. Bou-
gainviUe says the soldiers numbered 1,500 men
and that the equipment included 12 houses "com-

144 THE HEART OF GASPfi
pletely fashioned"; which would seem to indicate
the intention of the general to winter a part of his
army in Gasp^, his objective point, whatever his
own purpose of return may have been. We have
no record of any stops being made on the way, or
of any settlements disturbed.
On arriving in Gaspe Bay the gun ships of the
squadron anchored off Sandy Beach at the his
toric spot where in all probabiUty Cartier made
his landing in 1534 and where Edward VII, as
Prince of Wales, was run aground in 1861, his first
contact with American soU. The transports of
the fleet went further up the bay within the cove
of the Penouil or Peninsula. The French settle
ment in the Bay was then, so far as we can ascer
tain, almost wholly on the broad triangular sand
pits of Peninsula point. Quite the only intimation
we can find in regard to it is from Capt. Hervey
Smyth's picture drawn while he was here as aide-
de-camp to Wolfe, engraved and printed in 1760.
Of aU the seven pubUshed pictures made by Smyth
of views in Canada, this one of Gasp6 Bay is much
the worst in drawing, for the artist has taken enor-

GENERAL WOLFE IN GASPfi 145
mous liberties with nature in bringing into his
picture both sides of the bay, compressing the
head of the bay thus from a width of three or four
miles to a space so narrow one might almost jump
across. The point of view is close outside the
Peninsula, and this brings the sand bar into the
foreground with strong effect and displays, with
very great precision as it proves, the location of
the buildings of the settlement. The principal
one of these is a two-storied, steep-gabled structure
of considerable dignity for such a settlement, the
main part having a large double door entrance,
while the wing has a single door and a Uttle shed
lean-to. Each wing has a chimney, and altogether
the building is in strong contrast to the four cabins
or settlers' houses which Ue in a row behind it at
the edge of the spruce woods. Over on the other
side of the bay, on the shore of what is to-day called
Lobster Cove, stands a single cabin, enough to
indicate that settlement had already extended to
both shores. But the main house was evidently
the residence of the intendant, Reval, who, Bou-
gainvUle says, had died three days before Wolfe's

146 THE HEART OF GASPfi
arrival. It was in this house that the General
took up his habitation whUe he remained at Gasp6.
Bougainville speaks of the building as a storehouse
from which the EngUsh obtained a large quantity
of dried cod. It was aU of these, beyond doubt;
an official residence and seat of the French customs,
a storehouse and the summer cottage of General
Wolfe during his vacation of 1758. The date of
its destruction is not known. It is probable that
the tender-hearted WoKe left it standing after it
had sheltered him. Its relics evince a confusion
of French and English belongings and its debris
which have been, in a way, casually known, to
some of the residents during all the years past, are
spoken of variantly as from the "French houses,"
the "old French custom house" or "General
Wolfe's house."
Upon arrival General Wolfe demanded the
surrender of the place but, as just said, found the
intendant already dead and the settlers gone up
the rivers. Only two or three responded to the
order. The "surrender" of Gasp6 to the EngUsh
dates from September 5th, 1758. One wonders.

GENERAL WOLFE IN GASPfi 147
in searching for contemporary accounts of the
doings of the army and fleet in the bay, how the
men deported themselves during their month's
stay here. The twelve houses "completely fash
ioned" probably for a winter's stay, were not taken
ashore. There were above a thousand soldiers
and the crews of seven ships to be kept busy at
something. Our wonder may be qualified as we
think of the waters of the bay, its rivers and brooks
teeming with trout, salmon and tuna, cod, mack
erel and herring; the wooded hills with moose,
caribou, elk and bear and much lesser game. The
general who esteemed Ughtly the dignity of his
mission had opportunity to solace his pride and
enjoy the fruits of his "conquest." Brigadier
General Murray — afterward to be whipped on
the Plains of Abraham by General Levis and even
so to become Canada's first EngUsh governor —
was in the meantime despatched to the mouth of
the Miramichi river with orders to destroy the
French settlement there and, according to his own
report, he did this effectively, though BougainvUle,
writing with contemporary knowledge, says he

148 THE HEART OF GASPfi
didn't — that the settlers blocked his passage to
the river and that the English left without doing
any damage. Miramichi and its "battle" are the
subject of one of Smyth's sketches and this shows
the church and religious establishment standing
on the south bank of the river; the present site.
Dr. Ganong says, of the village of Burnt Church,
which he beUeves embodies in its name the assault
made by Murray's soldiers. A part of the fieet
was also sent by Wolfe to destroy the reUgious
estabUshment at Mont-Louis on the south shore
of the St. Lawrence.
In the early days of October General Wolfe
withdrew his forces and returned to Louisbourg.
He and his men had had "a much needed rest"
in Gasp6 and, in modern parlance, that means,
"the time of their lives."
It is a matter of real interest that the site of the
"Custom House" and of at least two or three of
the smaller houses behind it have been satisfac
torily located. This has been done by Mr. Rich
mond of Gasp6 and myself with the help of Smyth's
picture drawn in 1758 which gives with entire

GENERAL WOLFE IN GASPfi 149
accuracy the positions of the buildings relative
to the woods and the boundaries of the sand bar.
The Custom House which stood in front of the
others, is to-day marked by a clump of dwarf spruce
standing almost alone in the sands and growing
out of the very chimney place of the building.
Another site is indicated by a brick-made chimney
and other debris at the place where now stands a
ferry house, just on the edge of the woods at the
south, and here probably stood the first of the
row of four houses indicated by Smyth. Still
further along the row northward and back close
to the edge of the spruce woods lies another pile
of debris near about where the third or the last
of the houses in the row stands in the picture.
The interest that attaches to these rubbish piles
lies in such remains as they contain of the French
occupancy and their indications of the modes of
living in these early settlements — so with some
care and persistence Mr. Richmond and I have
searched and sifted the sands for the reUcs of these
old days.
It will be understood that these reliquiae are

150 THE HEART OF GASPfi
buried in sand which has frozen and thawed for
half each year during perhaps 150 years. Any
thing there more fragile than metal has naturally
been reduced to fragments and its evidence has
had to be pieced together. In among the older
reliques too are perfectly clear evidences of a later
and EngUsh occupation. In the whaling days in
the Gulf, no longer ago than 40 years, the Penin
sula sand bar was much in use for trying out blub
ber and there are still plenty of stone hearths over
the sand nearer the point which indicate where
such operations were carried on. I am not sure
that the whalers ever made use of the old French
sites but if they did not some of the early English
settlers did, judging from the reUcs found in the
debris. When one speculates as to whether the EngUsh
troops destroyed these French houses or left them
standing to a later date, there are some fair con
siderations of weight. Wolfe was kind-hearted,
never ruthless, always a generous foe. It is hardly
likely he would have given orders to destroy the
buildings unless he had received very positive

GENERAL WOLFE IN GASPfi 151
orders to have it done. Yet there are evidences
in the remains even yet of a hurried departure
by their inmates — the coins scattered through
the sand, the vast number of clay pipes — one does
not leave such things behind except in a great
hurry. But in a new country when most of the
business must have been by barter, even the coin
of the realm lost some of its charm.
There is no trace of fire among the relics, not
the sUghtest evidence that the buildings were
burned, rather that even though they may have
been left in a hurry by the French on the approach
of the British ships, they feU away by natural
decay, left on the soU the spikes and nails that
kept the timbers together and with them the
ordinary debris and waste of Uving.
The discriminating knowledge of the man who
knows, tells what, among these relics, are early
and what are late and in ascertaining these dis
tinctions where my own knowledge faUed I have
had the judgment of many experts in many Unes
of esoteric knowledge. Here is a record of some
of these culture articles:

152 THE HEART OF GASPfi
There are coins of silver, billon and copper — a
statement not quite true, as the only two silver
coins that have come to my notice are one from
Pointe Naveau up the Dartmouth river a few miles,
and the other from the Perc6 beaches. Of these,
however, it is worth recording, the first is a finely
preserved egu or egu blanc, equal to 3 livres or 60
sous. The obverse carries the bust of the king and
the legend: LUDXVDGFRETNAVREX;
and the reverse the shield of three lilies couronn^es
with the inscription: SIT • NOMEN • DOMINI
BENEDICTUM1721. The coin from Perc6 is
a piece of four sous (quatre-sols) ; on the face:
LUDOVICUS • XIIII DGRA • around a draped
bust; and reverse: FRANETNA (var) RAE-
REX 1675 with a cross of fleurs-de-Us in the
center under a crown.
An interesting piece in billon from the custom
house site is a sou of Navarre-et-Beam bearing
the title "LUD- XIIII" and the date 1693. The
sou of this date was valued at 12 deniers.
Of the copper coins there are three Liards, in
aU of which the obverse with its bust and legend

GENERAL WOLFE IN GASPfi 153
are badly corroded. But the reverse shows the
denomination in uncials: LIARD DE FRANCE,
in three lines. One of these was found in the sand
near the Veit wharf at Gasp6 Basin and bears the
mint mark L, indicating the Saint-Lo mint. One
of the others carries the uncial I, the mark of the
Limoges mint. These coins are of about the date
of 1654-58.
Another copper coin is the Double Toumois
of 2 deniers. Three of these have been found at
Peninsula, all in pretty bad shape, and not in
aU respects alike. The Double was replaced in
1649 by the Liard of 3 deniers, but its first issue
goes as far back as 1575, so that the date of these
pieces may Ue anywhere between Henri IV and
Louis XIV. Several other coppers have been
obtamed but m too bad a condition for the experts
to identify.
Here then is evidence of buried treasure in
Gasp6 and there is doubtless more to come. It
is one thing to talk about buried money and plate
and quite another thing to find it. There are
plenty of stories on this coast of great fortunes

154 THE HEART OF GASPfi
secreted under flat rocks in iron chests. One of
these chests is buried at Little Gasp6. I am as
sured of that by a sailor who knows it is there and
has seen the rock it is buried under. Capt. Kidd's
plate (poor old Kidd who was a mere amateur
pirate and never captured enough in his brief
career to make one doubloon for each secret burial
place accredited to him) is hunted for in Lenfesty's
brook at Perc6. This is Kidd's "farthest north,"
I believe, but a seeker after truth has actually
been detected in digging here by the Ught of the
moon with a shovel fitted with copper rivets "to
attract the gold." So Gasp6 is not unlike other
coasts in its share of these tales.
Some of the other relics are of interest :
Tobacco seals. These objects are lead seals with
the holes through them for connecting wires. I
have obtained two of these impressed from tri
angular dies in a circular mold. Tobacco was a
government monopoly in France then as it is
to-day and these are rather interesting things for
one reason at least: that I have found no one yet
who is specially or expertly interested in them.

GENERAL WOLFE IN GASPfi 155
On each within a pearled border is a quatrefoil
at each angle. On one is the legend: BUR (eau)
DE-DINANT: L (ouis) • XV; at the center of the
die and above the king's name, a crown; on the
other side of this is a fleur-de-lis with the legend
PREFET ¦ DU ¦ TABAC. The second seal bears
on one side the legend: CARLIERDESBOY
TABAC with a Uly at the center; and on the other:
BUREAU ¦ CEN (trale) D • DINAN(t) with a ro
sette at the center. The first is the royal license,
the second evidently issued from the same govern
ment bureau at Dinant but carries the name of the
manufacturer. The pipes or the remains of them are material
for an interesting study, though they are badly
broken. Many of them are of the long stemmed
churchwarden type and a few have shown seals or
makers' marks indicating that they were of Dutch
or French manufacture, — pipes de Hollande, as
they were generaUy known to the trade of the
time. There are quantities of fragments of decorated
dishes which are certainly from the Staffordshire

156 THE HEART OF GASPfi
potteries of England and cannot date back beyond
the early part of the 18th century. These may
indicate a later occupation of the site but not of
necessity an English occupation, for the French
here did business with the English, otherwise
there would have been no need for a Custom
House. There are Micmac flint arrow tips, stone ax
and pipe stem; which intimate that the Indians
were frequently about the settlement at a pe
riod before they had abandoned their primitive
weapons.* FUnt nodules brought from the chalk beds of
France or England, or both, Ue in large quantity
at various places over the point. These were for
gun flints and were evidently brought over in
ballast from the old country. They are often
chipped, with plenty of flint flakes scattered about.
* The only dweller on the sand bar of Peninsula to-day is
John Lambert, now an old man, who has been here for well-
nigh half a century. Lambert is a half-breed Micmac, almost
the last of his race in this part of Gasp6. Long the ferrjonan
from Peninsula to the Basin, he is in his old age, a man of
some substance with a pretty home ensconced among the
spruce woods.

GENERAL WOLFE IN GASPfi 157
Some years ago in a Uttle ravine on the road back
of the point and running toward RoseviUe Mr.
Richmond found the iron parts, lock and barrel,
of three flint lock guns tucked away in a nook
in the rocks. These locks have been pronounced
by an expert in firearms to be of French manu
facture and of about the date of the Conquest.
Wrought iron spikes of great and small size lie
in some profusion in the sand. Oxidation has
penetrated clear through them and often the oxide
has aggregated balls of compact cemented sand
about them — good illustrations of the mode and
rate of producing such balls which are common
structures in rock formations.
Shoe or knee buckles, soUd or embossed metal
buttons, cod hooks of the ancient style without
the "Kirby" bend, are some of the other things
the sand has given up. Even the bricks which
compose the chimneys in some of the sites are of
interest, being evidently of French make and
peculiar to us by their long, flat, thin shape. In
all there is enough to arouse the curiosity, though
hardly the cupidity, of anyone concerned with the

158 THE HEART OF GASPfi
mode of living here among the early settlers on the
coast. And should anyone be interested in these
remains of the days in Gasp6, he may find these
collections in the Chateau de Ramezay, the historic
home of the Canadian Antiquarian Society.

THE WRECK OF THE JACQUES-CARTIER
There is not in all Gasp6 another such view as
one gets from the summit of the Bang's road which
crosses the ForiUon at the Grande Greve. It is
not easy to set down in ink and EngUsh a descrip
tion that wiU carry a true impression of its pe
cuUar grandeur to one who has not seen it; but
this is the way of it: you climb this road leading
up from Gasp6 Bay to the top of the hiU, a matter
of a mile, when suddenly it drops out of sight and
you find that one more step straight ahead will
precipitate you over a cUff six hundred feet or
more sheer to the waters of the St. Lawrence river.
The road has turned a Uttle to one side and bent
downward at almost a right angle — I cannot take
more than a few degrees off that statement; it is
no more abrupt than the road itself which few
travelers venture to ride down in their carts and
stiU fewer to come up. On one side the King's
highway Ues the ever lessening cliff slowly drop-
159

160 THE HEART OF GASPfi
ping to the water, while landward rises the bare
bluff of Mt. St. Alban towering gray and straight
to a height of near 2,000 feet. Losing itself to view
on its downward flight the way comes out at last
on the flat sea terrace of Cap-des-Rosiers Cove
and at length to the majestic Ught on the Cape
itself. We need to foUow it no further though
it runs on up the river coast through the French
fishing villages with inviting names and charm
ing locations; L'Anse-Louise, L'Anse-au-gris-fond,
L'Anse-Fugere, L'Anse-Valleau and Riviere-aux-
Renards, places that are seldom reached except
by the fish buyers and drummers; thence, on the
only road on this coast of somber mountains, till
it joins its inland neighbors far up the river near
Matane. At the point where the road falls off and dis
appears, at St. Alban, or the "Big HiU" as it is
known to the coast, there is a broad grassy plot
at the right where the spruce has been cut away
and here one can Ue among the scattered new
growth and command the whole arch of Rosiers
Cove far down below and the black cape that

AVRECK OF THE JACQUES-CARTIER 161
guards its farther end. Yet one does not catch
the meaning of this Cape and its adjoining cUffs
unless he goes to it and looks back from its light
house windows on the tremendous fortification
from which he has descended, and sees the sheer
waU of rock running from St. Alban, whose foot
is protected from the waters by the fallen talus,
out to the end of the peninsula at Cape Gasp6 —
cUffs at whose base a boat can scarcely find a
landing on the thin wavering Une of beach.
Only with this barricade under his eye can one
reaUze the fearful menace this giant comb of rocks
has been from the earUest days of navigation in
the upper Gulf and through the river. Against
these the northeast winds strike fuU and fair and
rush a frantic sea from off the Labrador and Anti
costi. AU this was a place of fearful wreckage
before the Ughts on Shiphead and Cap-des-Rosiers
were put up.* For a century before the conquest
there was a large traffic between the old France

* The Rosiers light is oldest on the coast below Point des
Monts, and dates from 1858. The old Shiphead Ught was
built in 1873, but the present one is of much later date.

162 THE HEART OF GASPfi
and the new. The growing ports of Quebec and
Montreal required the best of French transports
and often of French frigates for their supply and
their protection. The fisheries in the Gulf were
very active and profitable, and as many as two
hundred French fishing sail were to be seen at one
time in those days in the offing of Perce. But there
is no record to be found in home archives of the
vessels that were dashed to pieces on the rocks of
Cap-des-Rosiers. Traditions of the coast, place
names like L'Anse-Louise and Pointe-d-la-fregate,
cannon lying buried in the sand in a few fathoms
under the Bon Ami cliffs; and along the Malbay,
these tell of experiences which meant loss of hopes
and of life along this sea front and which must
have been by no means infrequent.
The J acques-C artier (we may believe) was a
square sterned schooner of the old type, out of
San Malo. In the pride which the Breton sailors
take in the discoverer of New France, its owners
had baptized it with the name of their famous
townsman and for an outward mark and visible
sign of its identity, they nailed to its stern a large

MEDALLION PORTRAIT BELIEVED TO BE OF JACQUES CARTIER, 1704
DIAMETER 20 INCHES

CARTIER CLIFFS FACING THE ST. LAWRENCE RIVER AT ROSIERS COVE

The tip of the spruce branch rests at the point on the shore where
the medallion was found

WRECK OF THE JACQUES-CARTIER 163
circular wooden shield bearing the head of the
great captain. This was in the early years of the
1700's, not long before Admiral Walker and Gen
eral HiU in their venture from Boston against
Quebec, came to grief in Gasp6 waters. Cartier
had then been gathered to his fathers well-nigh a
hundred and fifty years, but his lineaments were
treasured by the Malouins, perhaps from some
contemporary sketches, perhaps only from tradi
tion, and the wood carver who executed this head
portrayed a Malouin sailor, black-bearded and
rugged, with tufted bonnet, thick rolled surtout
and high buttoned waistcoat; yet fearing perhaps
lest his purpose might not be fully expressed, he
cut deep on the back of the medallion the initjals
of the man — J. C.
We hardly dare say that the J acques-C artier
was busied in the transport trade between her
home port and Quebec — it may be so, — perhaps
more Ukely so than that she was the schooner of
a fishing master bound for the fishing grounds of
Gasp6. Whatever her errand, beaten out of her
path or caught in a gale too much for her master

164 THE HEART OF GASPfi
to weather, dismantled and with masts down;
perhaps even lured on these horrid rocks by de
ceitful lights (for there are stories of such doings
by the wild settlers of the early days on the Rosiers
coast) she was driven ashore, her stores, her bones
and the bodies of her crew scattered along the
beaches of cliffs and cove. It was one of many
tragedies, of scores and hundreds that have faUen
out on the angry coasts of these turbulent waters,
and it left no ripple in the history of the country.
Neither here nor there, neither in the wilderness
that saw its death nor the port that gave it birth
was ever an entry to show that one more victim
had been devoured by the Gulf.
In those early days there were a few houses
along the beach of the cove built by the Breton
fishermen who were gradually settling down to
an irregular pesche sedentaire, the very beginning
of the permanent settlements in Gasp6. As one
descends the lower reaches of the appalling King's
road, he would have seen a few years ago, one of
these ancient houses still standing, the first of all
that caught his eye on the way down. No one

WRECK OF THE JACQUES-CARTIER 165
now seems quite sure how long this house had been
standing, but at any rate it had been time out of
mind in the family which then occupied it. Who
ever biult it in those early seventeen hundred days,
and whatever else he may have seen of the wreck
of the J acques-C artier and her crew, this fisherman
picked up on the beach the sternshield of the
schooner, battered somewhat by the waves which
had tossed it back and forth over the stones of
the shore, but still retaining uninjured the fea
tures of the great Captain with his costume and
still showing deep cut on its reverse and weathered
side the initials J. C. and the date, 1704; pierced
with the great wrought iron spikes which had held
it in its place, but sorely twisted by the waves
and jolts of the sea which had wrenched it from
its moorings. The many coats of paint of various
colors shown one atop of the other where some
part of the surface had been peeled off were evi
dence that it had served a goodly time and had
seen more than one season's work in the traffic
of the gulf. Now it was all of a red brown, with a
narrow yellow band at the edge, while the hair and

166 THE HEART OF GASPfi
the beard of the face were black. It was a strong,
forcible, keen cut face, its thin cheeks and high
cheek bones reinforced with a deep set eye and fine
forehead, the head set firm and immovable on a
robust neck, the tufted bonnet and heavy coats
expressing the proper garb of the sailor of the time.
Naturally the finder took his discovery to his
house where we may well believe it was laid aside
with other relics of the wreckage of the coast, but
it was an extraordinary bit of jetsam and instead
of being left in some corner in the way to be stum
bled over by heavy shod and often only too weary
feet, it was set in the hollow of the window.
These strange and out of the way objects that
creep into our houses by way of accident, perhaps
of discovery or inheritance, the generous remem
brance of much traveled friends or the hasty ca
price of an impulsive purchase, after a while lose
their first charm, take on the r6le of dust gatherers,
are pushed from mantel to corner and too often
become at last, shorn of the attraction of novelty,
despatched to some remote and forgetful coign
of attic or cellar.

WRECK OF THE JACQUES-CARTIER 167
And so it happened that when this fisherman,
his son or his grandson, found the house too thin
for the rigorous St. Lawrence winters and under
took to keep the weather out by adding a new skin
both outside and inside, the old medallion of
Cartier, no longer a novelty and now in the way,
was left in the window hole while the window itself
was closed up by the battens outside and the ceUed
wall inside.
There is no one to say when this happened, but
four years ago Marcil Smith, inheritor and owner
of the Uttle house, half English and half French of
name but aU Canayen in spirit, came to the con
clusion that the house, wracked by the storms of
many years, had reached the end of its possibUities
as a shelter for human beings and so proceeded to
tear it down in order to build anew on its place.
In dismantling the sides of the buUding he opened
up the lost and forgotten window hole, never
known to him, and in it found again the Cartier
medalUon hidden away for perhaps well-nigh two
centuries with its strong face undimmed, its work
manship unmarred save for the bruises the waves

168 THE HEART OF GASPfi
gave it as they rolled it about on the pebbles of
the Rosiers beach. And thus as it was found and
as it lay on the land-wash when the morning sun
shone over the wreckage of the J acques-C artier
and the scattered bodies of her crew, so it hangs
to-day on the wall of the writer's study.
It is a fact of singular interest that this skillfuUy
carved portrait which is quite generally granted
by Canadian and French historians who have
studied it and are best qualified to judge, to be the
oldest representation of the face of Cartier and the
only one that has come dovsm to us from behind
the nineteenth century, should have been found
scarce ten or fifteen miles, as the cormorant ffies,
from the spot in Gaspe Bay where, on a July day
in 1534, the discoverer of New France set up his
cross and lilies, taking possession of the new coun
try in the name of his king.

HISTORICAL SKETCH OF THE COD-FISHERIES
OF GASPE
Procedure in the time of Nicolas Denys — Same methods fol
lowed to-day — Present mode of packing for shipment — The
arrival of Charles Robin — Early procedure of the Robin
Establishment — Robin's letters — Capture of the "Bee"
and "Hope" — Business abandoned on account of Amer
ican Revolution — Criticisms of the Robin administration —
Incoming of the Loyalists settlers — Later fishing establish
ments.
To Gaspe the cod-fishing has been of much more
moment than to the other cod-producing regions
of the world. Newfoundland and Norway have
their timber, their mines, their agriculture, but
none of these save the timber of its inland wilder
ness, has many possibiUties for Gasp6. The cod
ever has been the chief commercial asset of the
country, the largest factor in its settlement and
development, and it is Ukely to continue so to be.
The venturesome Norman fishermen found their
way hither very early, but for more than one
hundred years after the coming of Cartier, indeed
169

170 THE HEART OF GASPfi
up to the arrival of the Recollets at Perc6, the fish
ing was carried on without permanent settlement
on the coast. Writing in 1672 Nicolas Denys says:
"Those who follow the fishing are mostly Nor
mans from Honfleur, Dieppe and other small
harbors of that country, some from Boulogne and
Calais, Brittany, Olonne and all the country of
Aulnais. The Basques," he adds, "are the most
skillful; after them the Rochelle men and those
from the neighboring islands, then the Bourdelois
and Bretons." Each year these fishing crews
made their way across the Atlantic, anchored in
the bays and coves, made their catch, cured it
ashore and returned to France with their cargo.
Sometimes the trip across was made even twice a
year, once just after the early summer fishing and
again after the autumn return of the fish, when all
sailed back to be in time for the Lenten market.
Even during these years while Denys watched and
shared in the fishing on the coast, from 1633 to
1688, and while it was carried on from across the
sea, the coast was a scene of great activity from
June to December and brought some hundreds of

THE COD-FISHERIES OF GASPfi 171
vessels from the other side. The picture which
Denys has given of the whole procedure of the
fishing business in chapter after chapter of his
Natural History of 1672, presents the minutest
detail and particular of these operations as then
carried out from the embarkation on the French
coast tiU anchor was again dropped in the home
ports. With the beginning of permanent settle
ment by the fishing folk the methods of the busi
ness did not materially alter, as everything still
depended on the shipmasters who came out from
France. In the 1700's the settlements were gradu
ally attained, bringing with them the storing of
the fish ashore tUl convenient transportation could
be had and Denys's dream of a successful pesche
sedentaire was reaUzed.
We have very slender records of this business
on the coast tUl the time of the coming of the
organizer and syndicator of the Gasp6 fishing,
Charles Robin, in 1766. A practical fishing master
of Gasp6 to-day, trained by long experience in the
Robin estabUshment, upon reading Denys's ac
count, assures me that, mutatis mutandis, that is.

172 THE HEART OF GASPfi
due allowance being made for the fact that the
fishing fleet is now Canadian and not French, the
methods and processes in vogue now are essentially
those of two hundred years ago and that time has
found Uttle to add to the efficiency of the pro
cedure. It was the business of the beach master then as
now to keep the beaches well covered with rounded
stones and pebbles, as free from sand as possible,
and to see that the boys pulled out all weeds and
removed all debris. With the same shaped hooks
and with Unes rigged as now, and with the same
bait, the cod was taken, and pitched from the
shallops with the same shaped pew. At the spUt-
ting table built as to-day were the trancheur, de-
coleur and picqueur, suppUed with fish from the
same shaped barrow by the same shaped boy.
The splitters with knives of the ancient pattern
to-day still grasp the fish by the "ears" for decapi
tation, with one time-honored movement disem
bowel it and push the Uvers into the vat through
a hole in the splitting table and with another cut
out the backbone. The liver vat still has its

THE COD-FISHERIES OF GASPfi 173
wicker for the oil to drain through, and still gives
off, as the livers stew in the sun, an incense too
rank to rise heavenward, the special parfumerie
of the devil, equaled only by the aroma rising from
the cod heads festering in the sun's heat on the
plowed fields.*
It is going on three centuries since the splitters
at their table stood in half -barrels with then* aprons
running down outside. In describing the work
at the spUtting table Denys says amongst other
details: The decoleur "pushes the cod on to the dresser,
who takes it by the ear with a mitten that he wears
on his left hand, otherwise he could not hold it
firmly, places the back against a wooden rod the
length of the cod, two fingers thick and nailed
opposite to him on the table to hold the fish steady
and prevent it from sliding in its fat during the
* Mr. Dolbel of the Fruing Co. at Grande Grfeve once told
me that this appalling and stupefying stench is actually agree
able to the fishermen and that when action has been taken by
the local authorities toward abating the nuisance, the fisher
men have been so incensed over the matter as to compel the
abeyance of such attempts.

174 THE HEART OF GASPfi
operation." The decoleur stiU wears the mitten
and the table stUl has the wooden rod.
As then so now the fish are laid head to tail and
salted, are arranged on the flakes, grouped en
mouton at night and in pile on the beach. The
spruce flakes on a weU-constructed beach are
now as they were then, though the boughs with
which they were overlain are now being driven
out by wire netting; * and the mow-shaped piles
on the beach are sometimes thatched with gaff
cod laid tail upward, but more often with birch
rinds, or in heavy weather with saU cloth, as in
the old days.
In fact, throughout Denys's description the
procedure is that still regarded as essential to mak
ing good fish. The gentlemen I have referred to
find a slight difference in the mode of drying the
fish then and now, and suspect that the old way
may be the best. Now the fish are spread on the
flakes flesh up and toward evening turned skin up
* The introduction of wire netting is regarded a decided
advance in the curing of the fish as it is less Uable to harbor
the multitude of flies which are attracted by the fish during
the first days they are on the flakes as well as in damp weather.

A CATCH OF COD

SPLITTING FISH ON THE BEACH AT PERCfi

THE COD-FISHERIES OF GASPfi 175
for the night. Then they were laid skin up first,
turned flesh up later in the day and then again
turned skin up for the night. The old process
involved another turning, but gave the skin a
chance to dry first, and the back must be thor
oughly dried in all well-cured cod.
The changed conditions of the coast to-day of
course have made the final stages in the packing
for shipment wholly different than formerly. Now
the fish are packed in tubs and drums containing
one Portuguese quintal of one hundred and twenty-
eight pounds for the Brazil markets, in casks of
four hundred and forty-eight pounds for the
Mediterranean and West Indies.* The large and
gaff fish generally go in bulk to Portugal. Not
every economy is employed in utilizing all parts of
the fish. Should a Chicago packing house allow
so much of any of its meat animals to go to waste
* Mr. Dolbel remarks that the four himdred and forty-eight
pound cask is a quite recent innovation and being shipped
by steamer puts the fish on the market much earlier in the
season than was usual by the old system of shipping in bulk
by small sailing vessels carrying from one thousand eight
himdred to two thousand five hundred quintals, saUing late
in September and not often arriving tiU November.

176 THE HEART OF GASPfi
as the fisherman does of his cod a considerable
margin of profit would be sheared away. The
cod's head, with its sharp, hard enamel teeth and
keen-edged bones and delicate flesh, is thrown
away, the backbone and sounds with their possi
bilities for glue and fertilizer are rejected, and the
livers refined only to a very crude oil for leather
dressing. Several thousand tons of rejectamenta
are annually left to waste their sweetness on the
Gasp6 air.
It was not until the fall of Quebec that capi-
taUsts from the Channel Islands became interested
in this Gaspe fishing, and among the first of these
were members of the Robin family of Jersey. The
Robins were established on Bay Chaleur in 1764,
and probably on Cape Breton as early, doing busi
ness in the latter place under the firm name of
Philip Robin & Co., and in the former at Paspe
biac, as Charles Robin & Co., PhiUp and Charles
being brothers.
When Charles Robin came to Gasp6 the fishing
was scattered in small estabUshments and without
organization. Though his purpose was to seek

THE COD-FISHERIES OF GASPfi 177
.locations for new establishments on the capital
he represented, yet the outcome was the develop
ment of a concern with interests so wide upon
the coast and infiuences so commanding upon
the greater part of the fishing industry as to prac-
ticaUy consolidate and control the entire business
without serious competition for nearly a century
and to set the pace for all future undertakings
along this line. The firm name has changed with
time, but tUl 1886 it was Charles Robin & Co.,
then took the form C. Robin & Co., Ltd. A few
years later CoUas & Co. amalgamated with the
old firm and the title became The Charles Robin-
CoUas Co., Ltd. Up to this time the capital of
the business was all in Jersey, and the entire
transaction of the fishing was carried out in ac
cordance with orders from across the sea. In
1904 CoUas & Whitman of Halifax entered the
company, and the business was for a while the
C. Robin-CoUas Co., Ltd., with headquarters at
Halifax; but now it has taken on the unfamiUar
name of Robin, Jones and Whitman and the
mystic letters C. R. C, which have been both

178 THE HEART OF GASPfi
sacred and execrated in Gaspe for more than a
century, are now on the road to oblivion. To
day with the main estabUshment at the his
toric location, Paspebiac, the company controls
twenty-eight fishing stations all along the shores
of Gasp6 from Bay Chaleur to well up the mouth
of the St. Lawrence and on the north shore of the
river and the Labrador.
When Robin arrived in Gasp6 he found an es
tablishment at Bonaventure controlled by WilUam
Smith and with him entered into business relations.
Smith gaining control of the stations up the Bay
and Robin devoting his attention to acquiring or
erecting new stations on the coast from Paspebiac
down. Smith and Robin had a good many
disagreements and finally ceased to cooperate.
Robin's enterprises were proving fortunate when
the American war broke out and his serious trou
bles began.
It has been my very good fortune through the
favor of the General Manager of the Robin estab
lishments and directly with the aid of Richardson
Tardif, Esq., of Perc6, to gain access to extracts

THE COD-FISHERIES OF GASPfi 179
from the letter books of Charles Robin kept among
the records of the Paspebiac house. The letters
of the earUest years of the establishment seem to
have been lost and the first in the book is dated
June 5, 1777, just at the commencement of his
troubles with the Americans. Writing this month
to his brother John at Neirechak he congratulates
him on his narrow escape from capture and his
safe arrival. They had apparently both started
together on the return from one of many trips to
Jersey, each in his own vessel and the fleet ac
companied by a convoy, but they were overhauled
by an American freebooter "the same that ruined
us last year in Neirechak," and one of the vessels
was captured. The sailing-masters had been wise
enough to take out French papers at Jersey and
with the help of the French flag completed their
disguise and got clear, though his brother was
separated from the rest of the fleet during the
attack. Just about a year after, June 30, 1778, he
writes to his brother PhiUp at Jersey an account
of the capture of his vessels, the Bee and Hope,
at the station at Paspebiac.

180 THE HEART OF GASPfi
"On the 11th instant at about 11 o'clock at
night, two American privateers schooners of 45
tons, 2 carriage guns, 12 swivels and forty-five
men each put alongside of the Bee & Hope and
boarded them, there were but 3 men on board
each, being all employed in the fishery and not
expecting a visit from them so early, as otherwise
the Bee could have kept them off had all the
people been on board, she being the only vessel
arrived for sometime was unloaded in a week which
obliged us to put her guns in her hole as she would
not bear them on deck in so wild a Road without
ballast & it could not be the case without we had
determined to make no fishing ourselves, an object
of Qtls. 2000 which I thought was worth our at
tention. The ' Hope ' had Qtls. 1400 fish on board,
was to take Qtls. 200 more the next day &
sail for Lisbon in a few days. They (the Priva
teers) sent her off the 13th and began to take
everything out of the stores and ship them on
board the 'Bee.' She was rigged & was going off
the 15th; after which departure the Americans
came to our Habitation to take me away, but I
had fled to the woods the night before mistrusting
it — however that morning three ships appearing,
viz.; His Majesty's ships 'Hunter' and 'Viper,'
and Mr. Smith's ship Bonaventure — the latter
was here the first and fired at them, on their ap
proach the Americans took in their Privateer aU
the dry goods they could come at and went away.

THE COD-FISHERIES OF GASPfi 181
I had concealed a little quantity (a third of the
goods) which they could not come at — they had
found the best part of our furs which they put
on board, but having coiled the cable on them were"
obUged to leave them behind as well as the powder
and ammunition, which I did not expect, neither
that they would leave the ship without setting
her on fire — both Privateers having been taken
since at Restigouche so that I have recovered my
goods to a trifle which they bartered with the
Indians for canoes for their escape. I am to
pay I salvage on the 'Bee.' The 'Hunter' and
'Viper' were laying in Gaspe but being informed
by Captain Fainton of Perce of the Privateer
being here they set out — however they were too
late to retake the 'Hope.' Capt. John Boyle of
H. M. S. 'Hunter' has promised to leave one
of his ships in the Bay for our protection. The
'Bee' is in ballast with ten men constantly on
board in the day time who watch at night when
there are thirty men on board and the shore gang
is ready to join them in case of alarm.
" I keep four shallops fishing & the Perc6 Gang,
but they don't absent themselves at night, the
crew sleeping on board."
Nervousness and anxiety are writ large aU
through this very disconnected letter, but the
times had indeed become nerve-wracking for one

182 THE HEART OF GASPfi
whose argosies were aU on this coast. Very soon
again he writes of more trouble:
July 25, 1778, "Neptune left for Miscou to
collect fish — was taken the next day by Am.
Privateer of 2 guns & 26 swivels with Qtls. 1050
fish which they put in their Privateer and sank
the shallop — they also took another shallop be
longing to the place, which shallop has since been
retaken by H. M. ship 'St. Peter,' the Privateer
escaped. Altho there are armed ships of war
stationed in the Gulf, these smaU Privateers find
means to be along the shore.
"The 'Bee' is still fully manned & you may be
persuaded we shall do our utmost to defend our
selves and property — these are very embarassing
times and heavy charges upon my weary shoulders,
this is no more a place for an EngUshman, the in
habitants being all incUned toward the Americans.
"Vessels to call at Fahnouth for orders & how
to proceed in case Jersey should be taken." [War
with France was then imminent.]
Before the season was over his apprehensions
got the best of Robin and he returned to Jersey
where he remained till the summer of 1783. In
April of this year he gives a letter of instructions
to Capt. George Neil of the brig Paix for his
guidance on arrival at Paspebiac, telling him

THE COD-FISHERIES OF GASPfi 183
among other things to "plant potatoes and May
peas," and he himself reached Paspebiac June 14th.
Soon after he writes that "war has impoverished
this coast amazingly" and complains that the
Restigouche savages had broken into his store at
Trocadiguess (Carleton) and had stolen all they
could take off.
Whatever may have been the methods adopted
by Robin in his previous business in dealing with
his employees, this year 1783, with the renewal
of his enterprises on the coast, he introduced the
"truck-system" then in vogue in Newfoundland.
This was payment to the fishermen for fish taken,
half in cash and haU in goods from the company's
stores. Doubtless this practice and its abuse laid
the foundation for the severe aspersions that have
at times been made upon the relations of the
employers to the fishermen, for the cash must of
necessity in large part be spent in the company
store, thus the company's talent was returned to
it with usury. The credit for goods led to ad
vances to the men which in many cases made them
almost serfs to the estabUshment, though by this

184 THE HEART OF GASPfi
practice of advances the company was certainly
the loser. For ninety-nine years this system was
maintained in the Robin establishments and still
later in some of the other concerns.
Charles Robin retired from the fishing in 1802
a very wealthy man. When the Abbe Ferland was
writing in 1836 he made some comments on the
mode of administration of the Robin business
which had then become the historic procedure.
Charles Robin was then dead and the heads of the
house were his nephews. I presume Ferland's
account a faithful as it certainly is an interesting
picture of the conduct of the business.
"Neither of the owners," he says, "resides on
the property. The head of it [Philip Robin] travels
in France and Italy; thence by letters communi
cates his plans and orders which are carried into
effect by the Jersey resident [Jacques Robin]. In
Gaspe the business is conducted by six commis
sioners placed two by two [presumably at the
three large establishments, Paspebiac, Grand River
and Perc6]. These employes must be unmarried
men, or if married they are not allowed to have
their wives with them. Very strict regulations
govern them, entering into the minutest details as

A SPREAD OV FISH ON THE DRYING BEACH

AT THE OLD C. ROBIN CO.'s STATION, PERci

THE COD-FISHERIES OF GASPfi 185
to their conduct, even specifying what dishes are to
be served each day at their table. If these rules
were faithfully carried out their cuisine would not
be very costly. Although the emoluments of the
commissioners are not great, nevertheless no master
was ever better served than are the MM. Robin.
"Chosen at about the age of fourteen years and
trained for some time by the heads of the concern,
these employes are then placed in the establish
ments of Gasp6 where the interests of the com
pany seem to become identified with their own.
Every second year one of the commissioners of
each warehouse spends the winter in Jersey in
order to give an account of the state of affairs.
"One of the important principles of the MM.
Robin is to aUow no innovations. Many incidents
are recorded relating to their attachment to the
estabUshed order ; I will cite only one. Their coast
ing vessels must always terminate in a long narrow
stern. A few years ago their head carpenter in
making a brig for the coast service thought de
sirable to give it a square stern, since the wood he
was using necessitated that shape. Some months
afterward he received orders to alter it and made
it over again with the elongated stern. To this
order was added a solemn injunction always to
maintain the ancient practise."
The strictures made by the Abb6 on the effect
of the Robin fishing trust upon the settlements

186 THE HEART OF GASPfi
and their people may present a fair picture of the
conditions seventy years ago and in the Ught of
the present it is interesting to read them.
"The inhabitants of Paspebiac are completely
dependent on the house of Robin. When the
government decided to make grants of land to
the people, M. Charles Robin, who held absolute
authority here, persuaded the fishermen that it
would be more to their advantage to have each
but one piece of ten acres, for the reason that
cultivation on a larger scale would take their tipae
from the fisheries. They allowed themselves to
be so persuaded and now repent of their foUy.
These small pieces of land furnish but a Uttle
amount of pasture, and the owners of them are
obliged to buy everything at the stores of the
company, who sell to them on credit and to whom
they are always in debt.
"When they endeavor to shake off their bond
age and carry their fish to other markets, they
are threatened with a summons for debt before
the tribunals of which they have a great dread.
They are forced to submit to the yoke and expiate
their effort at emancipation by a long penance.
"The regulations imposed on the agents forbid
them to advance anything to the fishermen before
a certain set time; the stores may be full of pro
visions, but not a biscuit can be given out before

THE COD-FISHERIES OF GASPfi 187
the hour set. As the fishermen are only paid in
goods they can not lay by anything for the future;
when they have been furnished with whatever is
necessary, their accounts are balanced by objects
of luxury. So it comes about that the girls here
wear more finery than the grand people of the
faubourgs of Quebec.
"Schools are proscribed. 'There is no need of
instruction for them,' wrote M. Philip Robin to
his commissioners. 'If they were educated, would
they be better fishermen?' . . . The fisher
man is always in debt to the proprietors, always at
their mercy, liable whenever his debts have got
to the point where they can not be paid by the
fisheries to be put on board any of the ships of the
company to make a voyage to Europe as a sailor.
So frequently one finds fishermen who have made
a voyage to Jersey, Lisbon, Cadiz, Messina,
Palermo." The commentary of the Abb6 Ferland probably
goes farther than the situation really justified.
Orders from the Jersey headquarters were indeed
strict, even to a much later day than his. Mr. Tar
dif says that he has heard the old hands whose
recollection runs back to the time of Ferland's
writing say that the food supplied to the cook
houses was good and the orders for general sup-

188 THE HEART OF GASPfi
plies called for salt beef, pork, biscuit, flour and
chocolate, with rum and tea in modest quantities.
Charles Robin's letters certainly indicate more
concern for the welfare of the settlements than
Ferland gives him credit for. Under date of
October 26, 1783, he expresses to his Jersey repre
sentative his wish that their next vessel shall be
named "St. Peter (le patron des pecheurs)" and
if there is to be another, the Aurora
"because these names are familiar to the inhabit
ants of these parts such as were used by their former
connections, in time their old manner will wear
out and they naturally wiU adopt ours seeing no
other set of men — this I observe daUy, our bor
rowing for a time something of their manners
make us appear more familiar which renders the
access easier — a contrary measure such as blam
ing their dress or their customs and those that
introduced them in the country to whom this
generation must yet in a degree be partial, would
retard that uniformity so very necessary to men
who must live together and we are obUged by
principles of generosity to go through the hardest
part requisite to bring it in for we are the con
querors & they the vanquished & such as could
not leave the country and seek a refuge among

THE COD-FISHERIES OF GASPfi 189
their own, being too poor — a hard situation, in
deed, which merits the commiseration of every
feeling breast."
Then the loyalist refugees began to come into
the country from the new States a year after and
with the aid of Governor Cox were to find settle
ments about Paspebiac and thence up the Bay.
The vessels brought two hundred families in July,
1784, and returned for three hundred famiUes
more and in view of this impending invasion Robin
appeals to Governor Cox to leave enough land for
the use of the fishermen "whose benefit is immense
not only in point of introducing wealth in the
Kingdom but also in contributing to the British
Marine in a very great measure, since it is allowed
by aU persons that after the coal trade the fishery
makes or nurses up the most seamen."
Repeatedly his request was urged upon Gov
ernor Cox and two years later we find him writing
to the Hon. John Collins, Quebec, his views of
what should be done to improve the condition of
the inhabitants and picturing the great value of
the fisheries of Gasp^. "This bay," he says,

190 THE HEART OF GASPfi
"together with Gaspe and the whole coast be
tween the two places produces at present about
Qtls. 50,000 fish and about 1,000 Tierces sahnon."
Referring to Ferland's statement about the
gaudily dressed fishermaids forced by Mr. Robin's
administration into unwelcome luxury Mr. Tardif
comments, "Judging from the inventory books of
stocks in those days I should be sorry for the
' grand people of the faubourgs of Quebec ' for all
the orders for cloth were for molten and serge,
molten being a heavy blue flannel used largely
for smocks."
An interesting note from Robin's letters is the
foUowing under date of Aug. 12, 1783: "The
Guernsey men have settled at Grande Greve."
These early settlers on the Grande Greve coast
must have been independent fishermen selling to
the Robins, for no establishment was organized
on that shore till 1798 when the Janvrins started
the business, taken over in 1855 and now con
ducted by the Wm. Fruing Co. from Grande
Grfive as a center with a considerable number of
stations along the coast.

THE COD-FISHERIES OF GASPfi 191
I have not attempted to give any detaUs in
regard to the competitors of the Robin interests
which have developed on the coast during the past
half century. Of the Hymans, Le Boutillhier Bros.,
the Le Boutilliers, Marquand & Co., Valpy & Le
Bas, The Perc6 Fishing Co., C. Biard & Co., some
have gone and some remain. It is common con
viction on the coast often expressed that the
fishing is not as good as it was in bygone years,
that the cod are fewer and the bait scarcer, but
in old Denys's story of the fishing during the half
century ending with 1672 there are occasional
growls over scarcity of bait and if one considers
how the fishing stations have multiplied on the
coast and how many more men are employed in
the business than ever before, then it is but nat
ural that the share falling to each man is palpably
slender by comparison. Mr. Dolbel of the Fruing
Co., has estimated for me that the number of fish
taken at his stations amounts to an average catch
of three to four miUions, and if this is a fair figure
certainly the entire Gasp6 coast must afford from
forty to fifty milUons of cod every year. The

192 THE HEART OF GASPfi
wonder is that after these nearly three hundred
years of fishing there is a cod left in all the Gulf.
Perhaps no one could find a more effective illustra
tion of the profluence of that alma mater of all
life, the sea.
One might say much of the salmon streams of
Gasp6, but the pursuit of the gentle art of kilUng
the salmon is so wholly apart from the genius of
this country and so entirely in the control of the
Sassenac, that it does not appertain.

THE FORILLON AND THE FATE OF JOHN
SIMONDS
The sea was in a savage mood during the long
years when she was carving out the marvelous
peninsula of the Forillon. She had found a single
range of mountains stretching its length out into
her domain and she sliced it straight and clean
along the middle from crest to roots; she tore
away the north half scattering its remnants over
the bottom of the St. Lawrence, "our Great River
of Gaspay," as the Jesuit missioners called it, and
left the south half with its spruce covered slopes
falling steeply away to Gasp6 Bay. And this is
the Forillon as it stands to-day with its bare cliffs
uncovering the very secrets of the mountains at
the north where the river is near a hundred miles
across. On this bold sheer gray front no man
can enter, unless by lucky chance he finds the
ladder on the rock wall at the portage which the
Jersey boys and the lobstermen put up, just where
193

194 THE HEART OF GASPfi
the skyline sags a little and the cliff settles down
into rough, rocky steps. I call it a ladder, and if
two spruce stems with cleats nailed across, most
of them broken off, make a ladder, they certainly
do not make the climb up or down inviting or easy.
It is half a mile or less across this finger of land
from water to water, from the mouth of the Saint-
Laurent as it sUps into the embrace of the Gulf,
to the reaches of the Baie-de-Gaspe, but it is a
half imle of hard puffing climb, if one is going up
over the clearing and through the spruce woods.
One single road runs along the peninsula as
near to the water as the gullied curves of the moun
tain side will permit but it is sometimes up and
sometimes down, with a long pull over the lime
stone ledges at the end, where it raises itself to
the light on Shiphead. From the fishing stations
of the Grande Gr^ve out to the Cape, it swells and
it faUs as it rides the great hill waves, the Uttle
fishing beaches to starboard, hardly a boat's
length in width, embrasured in their rock walls
which become higher and steeper the farther out
one goes; on the port side, the clearing and the

FATE OF JOHN SIMONDS 195
woods, the one sometimes climbing high and the
other stretching down low so that the road passes
through it. In this distance of about four miles
the houses of the farmer-fishermen are scattered
along at uneven distances usually hugging the
walled beaches, to be close to the fishing, cluster
ing together in places, as at L'Anse-Saint-George
and L'Anse-au-Sauvage. Once I knew all these
fine Jersey and Guernsey families — the Dolbels,
Gaveys, Bartletts, Lehuquets, Roberts, Middle-
tons, Cassavies, Esnoufs, Simonds, Richards —
and the slender intermixture of real Canayens.
These are men who do great deeds both on land
and sea, for they wrest from their chiUy farms,
tipped up at angles that would seem to defy the
laws of gravitation, their potatoes, oats and hay —
a living for themselves and their beasts; from the
sea, by the common hardihood of the coast, their
Uttle bank accounts.
Perhaps somewhere else in the world there may
be such panoramas as greet the eyes from the
summit cliffs of this half eaten mountain ridge, but
I do not know where to look for them. From any

196 THE HEART OF GASPfi
high spot beyond the "King's Road " which crosses
the peninsula at the Grande Greve and continues
up over the cliffs of the river shore clear to Rimou
ski, out to the point at Shiphead Cape, if the ob
server selects his outlook where the spruce woods
do not hang too heavy, there at the north stretches
out the tremendous unbounded river whose further
shore can only be guessed in the invisible distance.
Over its great channel, discharging from the heart
of the continent or drawing up into it, the ship
ping of all countries, he sees, happily remote,
evidence of human restlessness and interchange
which has left this Uttle shore unsullied, for it
can not be touched by any sea craft above a small
schooner's size. Toward the east the St. Lawrence
of the land gently slips into the embrace of the
St. Lawrence of the sea, whUe southward, beyond
the hiU slopes at his feet, is the more placid water
of the bay, stretching far up some 16 miles into
the land, lying in an ancient valley which once
lay as truly high between the mountain ridges
as does to-day any other vaUey in all the Appa
lachian mountains.

FATE OF JOHN SIMONDS 197
The observer may add his own selection of fore
ground, — the spruce, the vivid turf patched with
the brilUancy of the pasture flowers, the gently
molded mounds between the mountain rills.
One summer my varied fortunes on the coast
led me into the home of one of the fishermen at
L'Anse-au-Sauvage. I had been through this Cove
on my rambles and was attracted by the pretti-
ness of its location, for only here, at St. George
and at the Grande Greve have the lull streams
cut broad enough to make house room down close
to the shore. There are as many as four or even
five houses right at Indian Cove and one of these
has an "air" which bespeaks more than the cus
tomary prosperity, in the fishing and farming.
These are the homes of the Simonds and it was
as long ago as 1798 that William Simonds, founder
of the fanuly, came to this remote spot from the
island of Guernsey and settled for the fishing. In
the Uttle burial ground alongside the Chapel at
the top of the hiU as one comes down the winding
road to the cove, stands the gravestone of this
grandfather of the settlement. My haven of rest

198 THE HEART OF GASPfi
for a few weeks was just beyond the dip of the
Cove as one climbs the hUl beyond it after crossing
the little bridge. This was the home of John
Bichard, fine old Guernseyman, and, what was
quite as much to the point of my needs and hopes,
of his wife too. Back from the road, across the
rising pasture and well out on the cliff overhanging
the water, John had built his home, just a little
way from the grassy mounds which stiU marked
the cellar walls of his father's house. Like his
father and like all the coastmen of the older days,
he had laid every stone and timber and board,
cut every sash, paneled and biult every door, driven
every nail with his own hand, and would have
shamed himself to live in a house of another's mak
ing. With the joy of the sea in his heart, passed on
to him from generations of seafaring men and
enlarged by his own Ufe, he had set his house with
back to the road, gallery to the bay, and from that
gallery his keen sea eye could sweep the water
from the smoke clouds of Sandy Beach at the
mouth of Gasp6 Basin out to Plateau Island, the

FATE OF JOHN SIMONDS 199
full stretch of the bay waters. Now, I take a sea
eye on this coast to be one which can distinguish
two miles away the floating logs which have es
caped the booms at the lumber mills near the
Basin, and with a glass tell which are spruce and
which are hemlock. Such an eye lets spruce float
on out to be washed ashore outside on the beaches
about the Barachois, but if a hemlock or pine
passes, a boat soon sets out from the shore for it,
by skUlful maneuvering it is made fast and towed
ashore. We need not ask who owns the log; sup
pose it is branded, it is flotsam and becomes jet
sam, aU other claims to the contrary. Like all the
other houses on the Forillon, the front and the gal
lery face full south, catching all the heat of the
summer sun, without hope of shadow, and all the
winds that blow inshore and offshore up and down
this bay. Off at the left, up on the cliff are the
flakes and stage, but the fishing beach Ues far
down the cliff face fuU seventy-five feet and the
way down is the usual steep zigzag of footpath
and ladders. It is not only down this path to
reach the beach, the boats and tackle and splitting

200 THE HEART OF GASPfi
house, but it is up ladder and path to get back
again, and when John Bichard has to back up his
fish to the flakes, it is no fairies' dance.
In this house I found my solitude and my home
— if home means every thoughtful attention and
kindness, exquisite simplicity and perfect cleanli
ness. From my bed, in the half-awake hour of
the morning, I could watch the fishing fleet shoot
out of the coves all the way up the bay, and by
the time they had passed "outside," my breakfast
was waiting on my laziness. I have made some
interesting discoveries in Gaspe, but that first
morning of my waking in my corner room out
from among the soft comforts of my bed, I dis
covered, and I claim to be the first to make this
find, a real bath towel hanging demurely in its
proper place — the fuzzy, ruggy sort that follow
us in the haunts of home and town. I am sure
no such appanage of culture was known on this
coast when my entry was made ten years before.
But I was the guest, and I soon foimd the house
was mine.
When it suited my deliberate soul, my lazyship.

FATE OF JOHN SIMONDS 201
to turn out for breakfast, my table was set for
one, shoved up against the window through which
was the view of the woodpile, the stage, the knoll
on which little Ralph, the boy of the house, had
set his flagmast with the Union Jack at the peak,
in honor I think of the guest. Porridge, wild
strawberries and cod caught an hour before, left
nothing to be desired. If the coffee was not quite
really coffee, yet this is a land of tea drinkers and
it was at least better than the brand of drink that
passes under the name of coffee in the hotels of
London; and as the sugar was served in a china
porringer covered with great pink lustered grapes,
and the cream in an old Jersey gold lustered jug
touched off with sprigs of green, the coffee with
such accessories was unsurpassed.
It adds unspeakably to a man's enjoyment of
such surroundings when there is evidence of a real
solicitude for one's comfort — ^not the conven
tional oversight you pay for, but the thing that
comes as near to motherliness as one who has lost
aU mothering may hope to find, and at every turn
there was now the inquiring voice and now the

202 THE HEART OF GASPfi
inquiring look of the gentle-spirited woman who
made my slightest fancied wish her burden. Well,
it is not to teU of the spirit of this home, of its
becalming quietness which dispelled the nasty,
tangled cares and complexities of the world I had
left behind, nor of the personaUty of its mem
bers, that I started this sketch, — rather to record
a touch here of old Guernsey, the island out
of which the Bichard stock, husband and wife,
had come, for Mr. Bichard's grandfather was
among the early settlers and Mrs. Bichard was a
Simonds. The house contained but one book, and
I here should be expected to say that that was
the family bible — but it was not — and so far as I
know there was not a bible in the place. Can
any but an overstuffed soul whose daily commerce
has to be with books appreciate the rich fallow-
ness of a spot where no book stands between him
and his maker and he can give his mind freedom
for a whUe from thinking other people's thoughts?
The one Uterary article in the house was a paper
covered brochure entitled: Le Naufrage Anglais,
a thrilling story of adventure and shipwreck on

FATE OF JOHN SIMONDS 203
the Newfoundland ice in the early fishing days.
So the evening with nothing to read (this ship
wreck story already learned by heart) gave the
opportunity for homely talk of the countryside
and its reminiscences of a long life. It was on such
an occasion, sitting in the gallery in the long
twiUght that John told me the story of John
Simonds. It was like a bit out of Guernsey, if one could
imagine the hUls across the bay the Une of the
French coast, the rock waU down to the fishing
beach, such a cliff as commands the Channel
waters; for the speech was of the home island and
I am sure the gentleness and honesty of soul
showed the touch of the Guernsey of a century
ago. John Bichard had been a fisherman from
the start and his start was in this very spot of
his birth. Only once as a young man had he
felt the caU to get out into the larger world
and with some of his neighbors he had tried
life out on the Iowa prairies, but it was not
for long. The call of the sea soon brought him
back and now at sixty I could hear him crawUng

204 THE HEART OF GASPfi
softly down the stairs at three or four of the morn
ing to get his boat off for the fishing — and at four,
five or six in the afternoon he would be back with
his fish still to split before he could stretch himself
out for his rest — a long day indeed and often a
slender one in results, but it is the Ufe of the coast.
I have heard John Bichard say he felt safer in
his boat than he did ashore; I never heard another
fisherman or sailor say this thing and it became
intelUgible to me only when I had got my share of
bumps on the rickety ladder which led down to
the fishing beaches.
So it was of an evening on the gallery, his wife
standing in the doorway and Ralph, the Uttle son
of the house, sitting on the edge of the gallery
floor and swinging his feet while his jaws munched
away on the sweet green pods of the horse bean,
that John Bichard told me this story:
"Did somebody — mebbe dey was telUn' ye,
bout how Jawn Seemo was froze in hees flat?
Well, mebbe not. WeU, Mr. Seemo, de old man,
dere in de cove, my brudder in law, he had two
brudders — dere was Peter an James — an Jawn,
tree sons of William Seemo who came out from

FATE OF JOHN SIMONDS 205
Guernsey, oh long ago. Peter he fell from de rocks
one day and he was kill, and den Jawn one day
he goes shootin' birds down Shiphead in hees flat.
Well, it was in December and d'ice was along both
shore, on dis shore in de bay and on de river too
and so dose times d'ice come togedder from both
shores an it smash into each odder out dere be
yond Shiphead. Jawn — well he was only young
feUer bout nineteen or eighteen, an first he know
hees flat out in d'ice an caught by d'ice from dat
side Shiphead and dis side Shiphead. Well — d'ice
pinch an shove him an he try to get out an first
he know — it was cold an his oars got all wet, cov
ered wid ice, his flat a tippin, first he know hees
oars, bote of dem slide overboard and he lose dem.
"Course dey wasn't so many people living roun
here den an first nobody see him, but by an by
somebody see him an said: Jawn lost hees oars.
By an by two tree men dey get togedder and one
he said: I have me big famlee but I go after Jawn
Seemo if you go too, but de odders dey were afraid
to go cause of d'ice. We can do it, say de firs
man, we can make land at St. Peter or Sheang
Blong, but no, de odder men dasent. So nobody
go. WeU, by an by dey see wid de glass Jawn
pullin hes flat up on d'ice an was laborin hard
way out dere beyond Shiphead. Well, nobody
ever see Jawn Seemo again an his poor fader and
no one never know what become of him.
"W-e-l-1, tirty year after dat, my wife her

206 THE HEART OF GASPfi
cousin George West was over at Anticost wid hees
schooner an dere was a captain from Madeleine
islands an course dey talk, an dey tell stories, an
captain from Madeleine islands he tell how he
foun, long, long time ago, an he save a man in
hees flat. He say de man was froze to death an
he bury him on Madeleine islands. An nobody
know who he was, but he had hees name on hees
jersey, Jawn Seemo, but nobody dere know who
he was. An so when George West come back he
tell de old man hees son was found after tirty
years an he was buried on Madeleine islands, an
ole Mr. Seemo he very glad to know hees son was
not lost but he buried and he come round and teU
us all about it."

THE MAGDALEN ISLANDS
Situation — Relation to Gaspi — Original settlement — Physical
characters and geology— ;The Demoiselles — Entry I.; its
people; scenery — Amherst I.; civic center; its harbors and
sand bars — Grindstone I.; its gypsum cliffs — House Harbor
— The Great Lagoon — Alright I. — Grand Entry — Grosse
Isle — Coffin I. — Menace to navigation — Wrecks on the
Islands — Bishop Mountain's experiences in 1850 — Mag
dalen Island pony — Discovery of the islands by Cartier
— Later French and English visits in the 16th century —
Grant to Denys — To Doublet — To St. Pierre — To Sir Isaac
Coffin — Land tenure established by Coffin — Recent attempts
at development — Kingdom of fish — The ancient walrus
hunt — Brian I.; Cartier's account of it — The Bird Rocks;
their wonderful bird colony; history; their human tragedies.
The Magdalen Islands are a chain of disjected
and sea-wracked remnants of continental land
lying in the very heart of the Gulf, ninety miles
from Newfoundland at the east, one hundred from
Nova Scotia at the south and one hundred and
fifty from Gasp6 at the northwest. Their land is
of Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island, their
government of Quebec, their commerce in the
commodities of the sea, and their spirit that of
207

208 THE HEART OF GASPfi
the Acadian communities of the 18th century, the
purest expression remaining in Canada of the days
of Louisbourg and Grande-Pre. To the outer world,
particularly to the navigator of the turbulent
waters of the Gulf, they stand to-day as they have
stood since the beginning of navigation in these
waters, a fearful menace to the sailor and his craft.
Gasp6 is a stepmother to the Magdalens. By na
ture she has little in common with them, whether
in history, origin, scenery or commercial associa
tion, but she, with the province of Quebec behind
her, extends to them the protection of her aegis in
the administration of civil and criminal law. They
are far away from Gasp6 and it is a long and ar
duous stretch for the arm of Justice, it strains her
a little. But Gasp6 lets her wards go at that and
leaves them to their more natural and intimate
relations with Nova Scotia.
The Magdalens are an island Arcady; they have
not yet received from any pen the just and sym
pathetic portrayal which their fascinations of
situation, their little romances of history, the
tragedies of their simple living and the charms of

CHART OF THE MAGDALEN ISLANDS

210 THE E[EART OF GASPfi
their isolation invite. There are stories abroad
about them, of late years sterile magazine articles
not a few, mostly the work of the tripper whose
soul is in his fountain pen but who has never yet
caught the spirit of the islands or of their people.
One must know the physical aspect of even such
small patches of land if he is to understand the
reasons of their existence and the conditions that
govern the Ufe upon them. The chart of these
islands shows them stretched out like a long key
lying crosswise of the waters, with its axis north
east and southwest, the direction of aU the funda
mental folds of the rocks which govern the topog
raphy of the lands of the lower Gulf. If the eye
wiU follow the 20-fathom line on the chart it will
be seen what a tremendous rock platform has
been carried away by the waves in the gradual
washing of the land to this sUght depth. An ele
vation of the sea bottom 20 fathoms would throw
aU the chain of islands into a single land mass
which would have several hundred times the area
of the land now remaining. Even the 10-fathom
Une sweeps about all the islands, tying them into

THE MAGDALEN ISLANDS 311
one and reaches out to take in Brion island at the
north and the Great and Little Bird Rocks further
to the north and east. Brion and the Bird Rocks
are to-day distant and isolated platforms of sand
stone with sheer sea cliffs. The Magdalens them
selves are reaUy but mere specks of rock or land
but they are fringed with sand dunes and spits and
tied to one another by tremendous bars which
the seas from east and west have piled up into a
double chain, leaving between the great interior
lagoons, Basque Harbor, House Harbor, the Great
Lagoon and its branch at the extreme north be
hind the dunes of Grosse Isle and Old Harry.
In these piles of sand the sea has tried to bury the
bits of land its stUl unsated appetite has left be
hind, tossing back to them the feeble fragments
of their own ruins.
The islands of this archipelago seem on the chart
to be of considerable size but the most of them is
sand, the actual area of rock land smaU and re
solved into Uttle insular units of soU and popula
tion. And when we speak of the Magdalens as a
geographic group we must include Brion and the

212 THE HEART OF GASPfi
Birds at the north, even though the broad ten
mile channels that separate Brion from the others
both north and south have been swept clean of
the sand bars that may once have stretched across
them. Geologically these northern islands are all
of one piece with the interwoven chain of the
Magdalens. There is a fundamental and twofold
difference of quality in all the members of this
group; that of the sand with its broad reaches of
undulated dunes here and there, its straggling
growth of stunted spruce and dune grass, its arid,
wasted, desert surfaces broken in twain now and
again by the sea guUies which make an outlet for
the interior waters and an inlet for the tides; and
that of the rock land with its rounded and grace
ful demoiseUe hills, its richly fertile soil, grassy
treeless knoUs and low-lying flat plateaus. On
each of the habitable land patches, from Amherst,
the largest, to Grosse Isle and Northeast Cape,
the smaUest, there is some of all of these distin
guishing contours present.
These differences are simple but they are de
pendent on the geology of the islands and this is

THE MAGDALEN ISLANDS 213
the way of it. Broadly speaking, the rocks of the
island units are of three kinds, first, blood red soft
sandstones which give an extraordinary brilUancy
to the coloring of the shore cliffs; these are hori
zontal, flat and Ue low about the shores. Then,
second, gray hard sandstones, which usually under
lie the red and stand up in stouter, higher cliffs;
whUe the third is the volcanic rocks which stand
often in dark somber cliffs or low sheets but usually
rise into the beautifully symmetrical domes that
give the graceful skylines to the islands; the de
moiselles, as we have called them, taking the name
from the hiU on Amherst long known to the people
as La DemoiseUe. Quite incidental or accessory
to these varieties of rocks are the abundant masses
of gypsum standing out here and there in glisten
ing white or particolored cliffs, where the volcanic
lavas have come in contact with the sandstones
which they have broken through. These are some
plain facts about the islands as a whole, and to
one who is interested in studying the ancient his
tory of the Guff, the geology of the Magdalens is
inviting and intensely instructive.

214 THE HEART OF GASPfi
The traveler to the Magdalens by the cus
tomary route will reach them by boat from Pic-
tou. Nova Scotia, and so come upon them from
the south. This is the only estabUshed line of
approach. Lucky souls independent of prescribed
procedure may approach them from other direc
tions, but usuaUy one's acquaintance with the
chain wUl begin at the South. The petite Lady
Sybil which makes this route twice a week,
touches on every alternate trip first in the wee
hours of early dawn at the busy fishing port of
Etang-du-Nord on the west side of Grindstone
Island; but the seeker after truth is usuaUy asleep
or seasick at this juncture and his first impressive
glimpse of the islands is likely to be the blue,
gently molded breasts of Entry Island at the east,
rising starboard into the soft morning Ught. The
way of the boat is through the narrow, risky chan
nel which Ues between the hiUs and meads of En
try and the long nine mUe sand spit which reaches
its arm out from Amherst toward the east as if to
grasp the one island in all the group that has main
tained its independence of the entangling bars.

THE MAGDALEN ISLANDS 215
Entry is the portal, the He de V Entree of the early
navigators who came in from the southeast by
way of Cape Ray and Cabot Strait. Isolated
from the rest of the group it is unUke them in
many ways though but a fragment of the same
fabric. It is a traveler's paradise — that's all.
From its row of rounded demoiselles which girdle
the eastern shore and barricade the lower western
plateau against the eterbal tooth of the sea, an
unbroken carpet of green unrolls, furling itself in
and out over the Uttle knoUs and fens down to
the parterre of red sandstones which line the
channel. At the summits of its heights, if the day be calm
and fair, one might fancy himseU on some .^gean
isle as the eye sweeps the blue domain of the sea
to the east and south, just catching the smoky
outline of the Cape Breton shore in the scud of
haze. At the west and north stretch out the other
islands of the chain, fading away into a low nimbus
toward Alright, and the sand bars which stretch
away to Old Harry. At one's feet are the graceful
volcanic mounds which are like the parasitic cones

216 THE HEART OF GASPfi
on the sides of Etna; between them Ue deep sink
holes where the gypsum in the rocks has been
dissolved away, a squidgy mat of water weed
growing over their tops; down on the lower land
are pastures sprinkled with wild strawberries and
Uttle quagmires filled with fleurs-de-Us. It boots
little that the island is shadeless for even the Au
gust sun is bridled by the breeze or tempered by
the redintegrating sea fog. The island steamer
passes but never touches Entry and the inspiring
solitude of the place rests partly on the conscious
ness that once there, one can not get away save
by an extraordinary effort.
The islanders themselves heighten the content
of the visitor, for they have won from sea and
soil reasonable comfort and with genuine soUci-
tude for the comfort of another, do not obtrude
themselves upon one's designs. They are not
many, the Entry people, but they are select and
silent. They may be perhaps 30 famiUes in cot
tages scattered back of the plateau along the road
which runs from the sandy West Point back to the
light on the southeast hUl. They are Scotch and

THE MAGDALEN ISLANDS 217
Irish, and constitute the largest Anglo-Saxon set
tlement in the Magdalens, the lesser ones being
at Grosse Isle and Old Harry. Not a Frenchman
is left in the place nor has there been for more
than one generation. So while they are not of the
primitive island stock, these sturdy folk, coming
in mostly from Nova Scotia, have seen well-nigh
a century pass without the addition of a single
outsider, save by marriage. So they are aU of the
aristocracy and each is related in nearer or re
mote degree to everybody else. In-breeding is
bad for the race, it violates the primary laws of
eugenics. Behold in the sturdy boys and whole
some girls of the present generation how nature
on Entry Island laughs at these laws. The no
ticeable air of general average material comfort
here, one faUs to see in the other islands. Here
the intrusive and prosperous fish merchant is con
spicuous by his absence.
But nowhere else in all the group is the promise
of the soil so well realized. The Magdalens are
the kingdom of fish, their waters teem with an
extraordinary profusion of them, poured out

218 THE HEART OF GASPfi
freely on every coast; the cod, the herring, the
mackerel; the cod again in the autumn, the lob
ster in early summer and again (by gracious ex
ception of the law) in the fall, and to these crops,
the harvest of which depends largely on the in
clination of the fishermen, is to be added the
seal catch when the ice comes down from the
north. This is the historic wealth of the sea and in the
face of it the soil of the islands cries idly. Yet the
soil is of extraordinary fertility — in spite of fogs
and winds the hay and grain grow bountifully and
the return of potatoes and other buried roots,
with the very slightest effort at cultivation, is
amazing. The Entry people have taken advan
tage of the soil, have fished less and farmed more
and this fact seems to account for their noticeable
comfort. For every head of man, there seem to
be five head of cattle of excellent stock. MUk
is freer than fresh water, butter and cheese and
the things to which milk contributes are at hand
— and yet one knows nothing of exports from the
island save perhaps a Uttle by way of cheese. In

ENTRY ISLAND. OUTSIDE CELLAR BUILT OF A CHALOUPE SAWN
IN TWO AND THATCHED WITH SODS

X I \

ENTRY ISLAND. AN ISLAND HOME, WITH DEMOISELLE TOPOGRAPHY
IN THE BACKGROUND

THE MAGDALEN ISLANDS 219
fact the islanders live on themselves and enjoy
an independence which cares Uttle whether the
boat runs or not.
To get out of Entry — ^if one must — some husky
feUow wUl set you over to Amherst by sail or
gasolene, and once there the traveler is in the
largest of aU the islands, and the center of their
poUtical and civic activity. The boat landing at
Amherst is at a mere atom of land, hardly visible
on the chart, but tied to the rest of the island by
a broad sand bar. It is Mt. Gridley, bearing the
name, it is said, of an American who a century
ago, started a fish business here, but bearing too,
what is much more to the point to-day, an historic
inn which for two generations has cordially met
and hospitably satisfied the demands of the trav
eler — the only thing of the kind on the islands.
Mt. Gridley is a pretty three-cornered grass plot
whereon mushrooms scatter themselves; off toward
the west it ends at the Inlet which leads into the
Basin, a harbor for all the fishing craft, buried in
the armpit of the great nine mUe sand bar and pro
tected at the east by the Uttle bar of "Fishtown"

220 THE HEART OF GASPfi
which j oins Mt. Gridley and the real island. On the
"Fishtown" bar are the stores of the merchants
and the shacks and cook houses of the fishermen.
The bar leads toward the foot of DemoiseUe hill,
whose graceful summits rise into the sea waU and
this hUl whose name is a part of the history of
the place, stands as the type of all the "demoi
selles" of all the islands — a mass of outpoured lava.
Though by virtue of her ancient name she stands
for all these rounded hills, she is not the highest.
That Uttle honor goes to Entry, where St. Lawrence
hill rises to a height of 650 feet. Such a figure as
that seems rather unimpressive, but in a region
of lowland even such a height is a point of great
vantage. Between the DemoiseUe and Mt. Grid-
ley lies the only outside harbor on all the island
coast. Pleasant Bay, a pretty name for a summer
day, but of all roadsteads the most treacherous,
for it lies open to the northeast whence the storms
blow up almost without warning in these imcertain
waters. Scores of craft have broken their bones
on the sand bar here, caught by a sudden shift
in the wind before they could get out and around

THE MAGDALEN ISLANDS 221
into the basin. From the DemoiseUe westward
the island runs for ten miles and its inland surface
is crossed by irregular volcanic hills, less symmet
rical than in the other islands. The fields are
less inviting too than in some of the sister islands
because the soft red sandstone which lends so
much to the fertiUty of the soil is lacking here save
as one gets way across the island to the Sou'west
Point. Amherst (it is not Sir Jeffrey's but Gen
eral WilUam's name the island bears; the older
French name is Havre Aubert, still the official
post-office designation of this port) is dotted over
with homes and its population is not less than
1500 — a population that is almost of pure Acadian
extraction. After the fall of Louisbourg, some of
the scattered peasantry and fishermen from the
devastated French villages of Nova Scotia and
Cape Breton foimd their way to the Magdalens.
They constituted a population which soon became
fixed and fixed with it became their language, so
that nowhere in Canada is the ancient tongue of
the Acadians so well retained as here.
In a civic way, the islands as we have said con-

222 THE HEART OF GASPfi
stitute a subcounty of Gasp6, and of this sub-
county Amherst is the shire island with its palais-
de-justice, its gaol, its hall of records alongside
the post-office of Havre Aubert and to aU these
on court days Joanna Shea's boarding house, now
in its braver new dress dignified as Shea's Hotel,
is an indispensable accessory; for coimty business
brings judge and attorneys from the mainland
on this deepwater circuit and Shea's Hotel affords
most unexpected fullness of comfort.
At the time of my first visit to Amherst there
stood on Mt. Gridley an AngUcan church, its win
dows gone, its clapboards stripped away and its
altar vestments frayed and discolored. Even this
trace of Protestant worship is now gone, and of a
population of 1526 "souls" on Amherst, 1525 are
CathoUcs. Two great sand bars run north from Amherst
and inclose the Basque Harbor which finds its
connection with the sea by tickles or gulUes too
narrow to make a passage except for the smaUest
craft at highwater, but the inhabitants drive along
these bars from island to island fording the tickles

AMHERST ISLAND. MT. GRIDLEY IN THE FOREGROUND; THE ',' FISH
TOWN" BAR AND "la DEMOISELLE," WITH PLEASANT BAY BETWEEN

GROSSE ISLE HEAD. VIEW FROM THE NORTH, SHOWrSG A SINGLE WAVE-
EATEN DEMOISELLE HILL AND MOST OF THE SETTLEMENT

THE MAGDALEN ISLANDS 223
as best they can, always a perilous passage if there
is a heavy sea outside.
Reaching out northward with these long arms
Amherst clutches Grindstone Island, an almost
circular land platform five mUes or so across, with
rocky shore cliffs aU the way around on east and
west. Grindstone is a very inviting and fertile
island. Its shores are more brilUantly decked out
in the blood red cliffs of its lower rock shelves than
any other island of the group and between these
verdure capped shelves Ue here and there broad,
hard and beautiful beaches. This large area of
red sandstone contributes to the richness of the
soU in the southern part of the island whUe the
northern part, with higher lava cUffs and banks
of colored gypsum clays is diversified with a surface
of knoUs and pitholes characteristic of the gj^isum
bearing rocks. The demoiseUe domes are not as
conspicuous here as elsewhere but the lava beds are
accompanied by vast deposits of gypsum which
near the west shore stand out in briUiantly shining
sUvery towers. Where the boat lands at Pointe-au-
Meule on the east side, the gray sandstones rise

224 THE HEART OF GASPfi
into a high, bare, wave-eaten bluff, and gathered
about the wharf and the post-office is the EngUsh
settlement with the prosperous fish establishment
of WilUam Leslie, one of the commercial monu
ments of the islands. Here are the headquarters
and pretentious buildings of the new development
companies and from this point south the road
which circles the island leads over the fertUe sand
stone plateau around to the southwest corner
where lies the settlement of Etang-du-Nord. This
is the French end of the island and all is activity
in the fishing; indeed it is the chief center of the
real concentrated fishing industry of all the islands,
tjrpical in all the equipment of the business and
the entire devotion of its people to it. Its little
bay between its red cliffs harbors a larger fishing
fleet than one will find anywhere else in the group,
and its odors are eminently and intensely Gas
pesian. There is a hotel at Etang-du-Nord, if
you wUl; two indeed, one French, the other Eng
Ush — but what if they are black with flies? Was
there ever a fishing station without them? At
the north of the island lies the historic settlement

THE MAGDALEN ISLANDS 225
of Havre-aux-Maisons — House Harbor, where the
outside water pours in between Grindstone and
Alright from the east, entering the long south
arm of the Great Lagoon stretching north from
Grindstone for 26 miles, hemmed in by Alright on
the east and the great sand bar on the west, — as
far north as Grosse Isle where it opens out into the
broad reach of inside waters that separates Grosse
Isle and North East Cape from Grand Entry.
It is a passage that may be sailed along a carefully
staked but very sinuous channel where the tide
often runs heavy and in a stiff breeze the chance
of being blown out of the narrow course and
aground on the shaUows is ever present. The
lagoon is a mile across where narrowest, 12 nules
or more where widest behind Grand Entry; its
shores, barricaded by interminable sand dunes,
are the nesting places of innumerable waterfowl.
From Grindstone Island north the islets grow
smaUer. Alright Island, the next north, is a Uttle
strip of beautiful demoiselles skirted with orange
red cUffs, stretching four nules in coast line but
not more than half this in width. The steamer

226 THE HEART OF GASPfi
stops at Pointe-Basse under the lee of a demoiseUe,
but there are only a few people to serve; the popu
lation is smaU, though the island has a church and
conventual retreat at the south near House Harbor.
The beautifully molded hiUs and the red cliffs
soon run out at the north into endless sand which
stretches away to form the eastern boundary of
the great lagoon, as far as Grand Entry, the eastern
passage through the sand into the harbor within.
This is the safest resting place for saiUng craft in
all the islands and yet it is parlous enough to ne
gotiate in low water and a nor'east blow. I have
waited on the sands of Grand Entry eight hours
while the steamer was standing off outside watch
ing for a chance to take a reasonable risk at the
channel. From here all the lands left at the north
are mere beads of rock strung together on strands
of sand; on the west Grosse Isle and its Uttle valet,
Red Island, lying inside the lagoon; North East
Cape, East Island and Coffin Island. Champlain
called this string of islets Les Ramies, the neck
lace, a name that stuck to aU the islands on many
of the early charts. They are aU populated, and

ALRIGHT ISLAND, WITH DEMOISELLE HILL, LOW RED SANDSTONE
PLATEAU AND GRAY SANDSTONE CLIFFS

GROSSE ISLE — SAND BAR AND HOCK, PROM THE SOUTHWEST

THE MAGDALEN ISLANDS 227
quite entirely by EngUsh settlers, and they are
picturesque indeed with their sparse acres of ver
dure and their blazing expanse of sand dunes.
Grosse Isle is just a half a demoiselle with a fishing
cove at its base; joined by a bridge over a branch
of the lagoon with another knoll which looks
across over another lagoon to the steep slope of
North East Cape, another haff demoiselle and the
highest point on the northern islands, its green
sides showing a few white cottages.
Coffin Island was set aside by the proprietor as
maintenance for the church and there is an Eng
Ush church here as weU as at Grosse Isle. Old
Harry Head and Oyster Basin are parts of Coffin
Island and their southern sands lead down to the
harbor of Grand Entry.
The Magdalen cluster offers to the traveler or
student experience in wealth of variety. There is
an especial charm in the richness of color of their
low-lying shores. The greens are not the darker
hues of the spruce forests, but the emerald of grass
capped hiUs and plains. Under the green lie here
and there the almost crimson platforms of the soft

228 THE HEART OF GASPfi
sandstones into whose fronts the waves have
everywhere eaten gulUes and caves, obeUsks and
towers standing feeble guard over the extremities
of their Uttle capes. The cliffs of gypsiferous
clays rise to greater heights and there are places
where they command the eye by their extraor
dinary play of pink, gray and dull green bands.
The bolder points of gray sandstone and dark lavas
seem to stand as warders of the island masses
and to plead, as it were, for their salvation from
the relentless sea. The Gulf is azure in the sun
light on the rare summer days when her waters
are at peace, but the tawny sand heaps roUing
along the skyline, knoll on knoll, add a tinge of
melancholy, speaking of destruction past and
destruction to come, of time-long struggle, sur
render and of partial restitution.
It is quite in keeping with the history of the
Magdalens that there should be such a minor chord
in their harmony. The islands and their sands
have wrought terrific ruin to skippers and then-
craft from the time the Europeans began to throng
the Gulf. The long low dark coast and treacher-

THE MAGDALEN ISLANDS 229
ous bars have lain like a trap for the unwary
navigator, and when beating out of his course for
the channels at the north or the south, or in times
of stress when nor'east or nor'west gales were
driving against rocks and sands, hundreds of craft
have been broken on these unUghted shores, hun
dreds of fives have been lost and the bleaching
ribs of dead ships are always to be seen on the
coasts. There are castaways on aU the islands,
and tales of shipwreck make the history of yes
terday and the news of to-day. Mr. Brassette, the
venerable postmaster at Havre Aubert, has told
me that within his life on the island there have
been, he thinks, not less than five hundred ships
great and small cast away. The season of my
first visit I learned of but one wreck in the summer
weeks before my arrival. At the time of my second
visit, in July of another year, there had already
been three during the season with some loss of
Ufe. The atmosphere is full of the tragedy of the sea
and whUe by far the greater number of the wrecked
craft have met their fate on the northern sands.

230 THE HEART OF GASPfi
yet the southern islands have had thek fuU share.
One still hears the tale of the wreck of the Glou
cester fishing fleet in the "Lord's Day Gale"
one summer day of 1873 when by sudden shift of
the wind from west to nor'east forty and more
vessels were driven ashore in Pleasant Bay. The
Miracle, an emigrant ship from Ireland with above
400 passengers, went ashore in 1847 at East Cape
with terrific loss of Ufe. And so the stories go.
On my sideboard is a crest-marked silver tray,
tossed up on the shores of Entry from the wreck
of the good ship Cameo in 1861, and alongside my
desk, a mahogany cabin chair washed ashore in
Grosse Isle in 1884, from the Norwegian bark
Athene when the captain, Jorgen Lorentzen and
18 of his crew were lost. The mournful tales are
without end and not only do the burying grounds
with their rows of nameless graves, as on Mt.
Gridley, and in the Protestant churchyard at
Grindstone, teU these sad stories, but the contents
of the islanders' cottages bear witness of the
wreckage. It is at the north along the treacherous .
sands of East Cape and Grosse Isle where the

THE MAGDALEN ISLANDS 231
danger Ues nearest and the worst of the disasters
have happened.
And it is not with feelings of unmixed sorrow
that the kind-hearted settlers of the north see a
vessel laboring in distress in the offing. The story
told of many a rough coast is told too of these
islands — of the Uttle girl who nightly prayed that
she might be a good Uttle girl and "Please, God,
send another wreck before morning. ' ' Why should
it not be so? A provision ship went ashore on
Grosse Isle some twenty years ago in early May.
The islanders had had their hardest winter. Food
had run very low and among the French aU was
gone, though the more provident EngUsh had
saved a few potatoes. Those who had beasts
kiUed them, but very few had them, and wild
fowl were about aU that was left for food. The
poor begged from door to door for their sick
famiUes dying of starvation. The winter hung on
and the ice showed no signs of breaking tUl May.
May 19th came along the first vessel, by "good
luck" a provision boat bound for some distant
port. The "hand of Providence " drove her ashore

232 THE HEART OF GASPfi
and the wants of the starving were met tiU the seal
came down and the ice gave way to the fishing.
There is no better story of strenuous experiences
in these islands and no such Uvely picture of the
life there sixty and more years ago as that told
by the Rev'd Dr. George Jehoshaphat Mountain,
Third Lord Bishop of Quebec — the first Protestant
prelate to visit them. This intrepid man was
sixty-one years old when he felt it in the line of his
duty to go to the Magdalens and look after the
Protestant communities on Grosse Isle and Entry
whose existence had been reported to him. So
in 1850 "he determined to see those few sheep in
the wilderness with his own eyes" and took pas
sage in a small brigantine bound for Halifax and
whose captain undertook to put him off, on the
islands. As it chanced, the skipper approached
the islands in the night and knowing nothing of
their coasts was about to lay to, but as a fishing
schooner lay near by, the Bishop had himself and
his baggage transferred to this vessel,
"an unpainted, roughly finished craft of thirty
tons, abundantly redolent of cod and manned by six

THE MAGDALEN ISLANDS 233
Acadian fishermen, as unkempt and dirty a set of
beings as could well be pictured to the fancy.
The wind was damp and chiUy, but not reUshing
the idea of what was considered to be the cabin,
I wrapped mine auld cloak about me and sitting
down on the Uttle hatchway remained conversing
with the man at the helm. I could not help think
ing, as he sat bestriding the tUler, with gleams of
light thrown partiaUy upon his figure from the
mouth of the hatchway (there being a small fire
and a miserable greasy, blackened lamp burning
below), especiaUy when Placide, a young lad be
longing to the crew, brought him, at his com
mand, a coal in the tongs to rekindle his pipe,
which helped to discover his beard of about a
week's growth; — I could not help thinking what a
subject I had before me for the pencil. I felt
myself, altogether, in rather a strange situation.
I had come upon this occasion without a single
companion or attendant, and here I was, now a
grey-headed Bishop of the Church of England,
having tumbled, as it were, into this rude Uttle
fishing vessel which crossed my way by chance,
driving alone, in a dark night, upon the waters of
the Gulf and seeking to effect a landing, where I
knew not, but anywhere upon the islands, which
I had never visited before, upon which I did not
know a Uving soul, and after setting my foot upon
which I should be at a loss how to proceed or
what direction to take, in order to find the persons

234 THE HEART OF GASPfi
who could put things in train for me to accompUsh^
the objects of my visit. . . . When it approached
eleven o'clock, I went below and saw, to my sur
prise, a rude stone chimney built into the vessel
and a fire of fagots upon the hearth, which I was
glad to approach. I sat before it upon a chest
occupying the little central space between a couple
of berths looking most utterly repulsive. I sat up
the whole night over the fire which I took care to
keep in activity."
At half past four they ran inshore off Sou'west
Point on Amherst Island, in a downpour of rain
and nothing in sight but a black pig and two fish
houses on a beach strewed with cod heads. Stow
ing the Bishop's baggage under an overturned
flat, the sailors started off to find a horse and some
sort of conveyance, for where they had come ashore
was twelve miles from Amherst village and six
teen miles from Grindstone which he wished to
reach. We can imagine the distinguished and
devoted man on the sands of Sou'west Point as
"I took my post under my umbrella against one
of the boats but presently espying a Uttle cavity
which would just fit me, sitting, in a low browed
cliff of red sandstone, I proceeded to occupy it,

THE MAGDALEN ISLANDS 235
coming out in the intervals between the showers.
In an hour and a half the men returned bringing
with them two or three people and a low cart of
the rudest possible construction, drawn by a
wretched looking Uttle rat of a horse,* whose
harness, home made, was formed of strips of seal
skin with the fur left upon it, the saddle however
being worked into a sort of parchment and sup
ported by a parcel of rags. The headstaU was a
piece of old rope and the reins were of the same
* The Bishop thus had a chance, which no longer exists, to
ride behind a Magdalen island pony. This breed of tough
httle beast is now practically extinct, there being to-day but
one known to me and that is at Etang-du-Nord. The history
of this horselet and how it got to the islands is not known now
to any of the islanders, and, so far as I can find, is not a matter
of record; at all events fifty years ago this "rat of a horse"
was the only kind on the island and at that time had not been
crossed with outside stock. There is pony blood stiU in many
of the Acadian horses of the islands. There are good reasons
for stating that the ponies were brought over from Sable
Island, whose herd of horses dates back to an uncertain ship
wreck of a French or Spanish vessel in the 16- or 1700's,
from which a cargo of horses swam ashore and have ever
since multiplied and flourished, now under government con
trol. The Magdalen pony was in many ways unUke the
Sable Island ponies one sees to-day in the Halifax markets
where the government auctions off the increase of the herd
every four years, but it would not be safe to say that siich
differences as now exist between them are not too great to
have been developed in the course of a century, under the
different physical conditions in Sable Island and the Mag
dalens.

236 THE HEART OF GASPfi
material. Such a cart, it may be understood, had
no springs, but there was a board across the mid
dle of it for a seat. My baggage however quite
fiUed it up. The cart was driven by a French
lad." And so the Bishop walked over the sands of
Amherst Island in the early morning, umbreUa
spread against the pouring rain, without a house
in sight, nine miles to the tidal gully, which sepa
rated him from Etang-du-Nord, and then at last
to a house where he could dry his clothes and get
a breakfast, "of which, having walked about nine
miles after being up in the schooner all night, I
was thankful to partake." And the bishop adds
"with all gratitude" that he would have been
much more exhausted by these exertions forty
years before than he was then.
The bishop carried out his strenuous plans,
reached House Harbor, there procured a boat
which took him through the channel to his sheep
in the wilderness of Grosse Isle of which he found
about fifty, most of whom had never seen a Prot
estant minister or heard a religious service. The
settlement, he says, "in this rude, sequestered.

THE MAGDALEN ISLANDS 237
isolated comer," was twenty-two years old, that
is, was begun in 1828, and the bishop was deeply
impressed by the extreme poverty of the people.*
The visit to Grosse Isle was followed by one to
Entry Island, attended by Uvely experiences.
Over on Entry "there was a little question about
Ughts," for his evening service. A canvass of the
island, however, produced three candles; "one
was set in a candlestick, one forced into a lamp
and one stuck in the neck of a bottle." The people
heard him gladly and on his departure showed
evidence of their better condition in life by load
ing the vessel bountifully with the products of
their island.
Distant as these islands are and must always
be from the whirl of human interests, they have
* I can imagine the reverend gentleman's experiences at
Grosse Isle. Once, in passing a night there, I was routed out
of bed by aborigines who evidently beUeved me an intruder.
I bear such bed fellows no iU wiU for I know their distinguished
pedigree and that their ancestors found homes in the Silurian
beds before the human race was conceived. But as I had
other nights to stay I demurred to the partnership. My host
expressed regret without surprise, but casually remarked
that the last person who had slept in the bed was the Rev.
J — P — , the English minister.

238 THE HEART OF GASPfi
had their share in the earlier events on the coast.
Indeed Cartier visited them before he ever saw
and laid claim to New France and so their recorded
history runs back a little further than that of the
greater country of which they now form such a
slender appanage. In his first voyage of 1534 his
course into the Golfo Quadrato lay south from the
Straits of Belle Isle and he made land falls in suc
cession from the north; first the Bird Rocks which
he named the Isles aux Margaulx, then Brion
Island, which has carried from his day the name
of the first admiral of France, Philipe Chabot,
Sieur de Brion. Here he went ashore and of the
Island he wrote such a glorious description as to
make the reader feel he had found the Garden of
Eden. Some of the later voyagers applied this
name, Brion, to the entire group of islands, but
Cartier, passing this way the next year, speaks of
crossing over from Brion Island, which he re
visited, to Les Araynes — the sands of Grosse Isle
and East Point. By this name and its variants
the group was set down on many of the early
charts. The maps of the Gulf which date from

THE MAGDALEN ISLANDS 239
soon after Cartier's time are not altogether reUable
records of position but are of interest as showing
the growth of observations concerning the form of
the islands and their changes in name, the years
of confusion with the Isle St .-Jean (Prince Edward
Island) and their gradual distinction from it. In
deed few, if any, of the charts to Champlain's time
and later made out the Isle St .-Jean, fifty miles
to the west of the Magdalens.
We do not know how soon after Cartier's dis
covery the men of Normandy and Breton got in
among these islands, but by the latter part of the
16th century the stories they brought home of
the tremendous number of seals and walruses to
be had, reached England and started English ex
peditions into this quarter. There was a voyage
in 1591 by a skipper unknown, on behalf of M. de-
la-Court, Pr6-RavUlon and Grand-Pr6, for the
purpose of killing "Morses" for "trajnie oyl,"
which of itself indicates previous attempts by the
French for the same purpose. Then of the EngUsh,
George Drake made a passage in 1593, finding the
harbors already occupied by "Britons of S. Malo

240 THE HEART OF GASPfi
and Basques of S. John de Luz." Drake found
that "by coming a day after the Fayre" his efforts
were naught; just as Charles Leigh and Sylvester
Wyet, who with Drake were the first Englishmen
to saU so far within the Gulf, are said on their
arrival, to have been confronted by two hundred
French, who had planted three pieces of ordnance
on the beach, and three hundred savages — an
opposition which led to a sharp sea fight and seems
to have effectually dissuaded further attempts on
the part of the English to fasten their hold on
this business.
These islands were granted in 1653 by the Com
pany of New France to Nicolas Denys as a part
of the vast region stretching from Cape Canso at
the south to Cap-des-Rosiers at the north, and
the next year Denys received from the king letters
patent as governor and Ueutenant-general to aU
this great territory.
In those early days land patents in the world
of New France were given easily and confficting
claims to the same territory issued from the same
source often resulted. So it happened that in 1663

THE MAGDALEN ISLANDS 241
the Company of New France commissioned Fran-
gois Doublet of Honfleur to estabUsh a colony on
the "Ules de Brion" for the cod and seal fishing.
Doublet was also given permission to change the
name of the island from Brion to Madeleine,*
which was the name of his wife. So this name
has come down to the present as a memorial of
conjugal devotion, though Doublet's attempts at
a settlement failed totally and have been almost
forgotten. * Professor Ganong assures me that the name Madelene is
attached to these islands on Champlain's map of 1632, which
is not now accessible to me. This is a rather singular coinci
dence in view of the statement made above. Probably the
whole history of Doublet's attempts at settlement would
have passed with httle notice if it were not for a short sharp
passage in Denys's Description Geographique et Historique des
Costes de I'Amerique Septentrionale, 1672, and had not the
departmental archives at Rouen afforded in recent years the
manuscript journal of Doublet's son, which was edited and
printed in 1883 by Br^ard, under the title Journal du Corsaire
Jean Doublet de Honfleur. This is a remarkable story of a
freebooter's hfe in every quarter of the watery globe, be
ginning with his successful attempt, at the age of seven, to
stow himself away aboard his father's ship which came out
to the Madeleines in 1663; the experience of the attempted
colony there; the return next year to find the colony de
moralized, the place abandoned and the venture whoUy lost.
The younger Doublet declares the islands were named for
his mother, by consent of the proprietors.

242 THE HEART OF GASPfi
Like Doublet, Denys failed in his efforts to in
duce colonization and in 1720 the Magdalens,
with S. Jean and Miscou, were ceded by letters
patent to the Count de St.-Pierre, Equerry to the
Duchess of Orleans. He was commissioned not
only to carry on the fisheries but to cultivate the
soil and cut the timber. So far as we know, the
attempted colonization under this patent effected
Uttle and the islands were lost sight of tiU after
the faU of New France, when the English govern
ment annexed the islands to Newfoundland. By
the Quebec Act they were soon after attached to
that province where they now belong.
A new era in their history, however, began in
1798 when they were granted by royal patent
to Sir (afterwards Admiral) Isaac Coffin. Cap
tain Cofiin, the bright particular star of the prolix
New England Coffins, of which the Boston branch
were aU Loyalists, had fought weU in His Maj
esty's navy during the American war, and in
1788 while transporting to Quebec, his chief and
friend. Lord Dorchester, then for the second time
governor-general, passed the Madelemes on then*

THE MAGDALEN ISLANDS 243
course and in jocular mood and haphazard way
suggested that he would like to be made proprietor
of these islands. The governor-general assented,
but it was not tUl the time of his successor that
the royal warrant was issued.*
The new proprietor estabUshed at once a feudal
system of land tenure which has remained close
to the present day as a last flickering expression
of medievaUsm in the English lands of the western
world. Sir Isaac Coffin required the occupants of
the islands to take titles in the nature of emphy
teutic leases or perpetual leases at an irredeem
able rent. The islands cover nearly 100,000
acres and at the usual annual return of 20 cents
an acre would have produced a considerable ground
rent, but this land never was fully leased, the
rents never proved collectible and the system
resulted in continual contentions between agent
and tenant which at times culminated in con
siderable migrations from the islands. A very in-

* Admiral CoflSn's first naval service on these northern
waters was in the frigate Gaspie; his next, in the Sybil: ad
mirable omens for his later proprietorship.

244 THE HEART OF GASPfi
teresting account of the land tenure on the islands
forty years ago was given by Faucher de Saint-
Maurice in his Promenades dans le Golfe de Saint-
Laurent (1874), though it is no longer pertinent to
existing conditions and must be regarded as tinged
with the author's sympathetic interest in the
Acadians. In later years the attitude of the hereditary
seigneur has been more lenient and the parliament
of the province after long investigation of the
situation has enacted a regulated form of tenure
assuring outstanding tenants the right to become
proprietors, and it has further alleviated the really
deplorable condition in some of the islands by
making repayment to the tenant of one-third the
amount necessary to effect a freehold.
Yet in spite of these possible reliefs, not a single
dweller on Entry Island holds his land in fee— all
pay the rental as in the ancient days. The greater
ease of tenantry and the possibility of ownership
has, with the tremendous resources of the island
waters, helped to increase the population of the
archipelago, now reaching 7,000 people, the great

THE MAGDALEN ISLANDS 245
majority of whom are confined to the larger islands,
Amherst and Grindstone.
A few years ago the seigniorial rights of the
Coffin heirs were acquired by the Magdalen Island
Development Company subject to a controlling
restraint by the proprietor, and though the com
pany erected extensive fish houses and equipped
the fishermen with gasoline boats, the efforts
failed to increase the productiveness of the islands.
Still more recently such surviving rights as this
company possessed were assumed by the Eastern
Canada Fisheries, Limited, which hopes to reap
by modern methods the tremendous wealth of
both sea and land. But it is just as well to say, in
passing, that the "hustler" from Montreal or
Boston, or whatever place, who thinks to make
the Madeleine island fisherman adapt himself to
new modes, to fish when he doesn't want to fish,
to go out to the banks when the sun is under or a
gale is brewing, or to do any great amount of labor
when his credit at the store is good, is likely to
suffer from misplaced confidence. Heredity is
strong among these folk. They do not feel the

246 THE HEART OF GASPfi
compelling need for more money to help them
keep pace with the outside world. In their nat
ural philosophy it is best to keep life simple — it
always has been so. These are the Isles of Re
pose — nobody cares whether the venturers from
outside pay dividends or not.
To talk so much of these islands and to say so
Uttle of the wealth of their waters would be to
pass by what has seemed to the simpler philosophy
of islanders and visitors alike the reason for their
existence. At any rate it is nature's compensation
for those whom choice or fortune compels to Uve
here. The Ufe hereupon is not to be estimated in
terms of the summer sea. Blue skies and southerly
breezes are but for a day at a time. For nearly
half the year the islanders are icebound with no
communication with the outside world, save by
cable and now in these last days by wireless from
the hUltop on Grindstone. The turbulence of the
autumn begins as early as September in these
uneasy waters and with the breaking of the ice
fields in March and April begins the turbulence
of the spring. FuU haU the year is given over to

THE MAGDALEN ISLANDS 247
change of seasons, to gales and fogs. Of the other
half two months are summer, though seed time
and harvest stretch the season. Yet if nature
seems to have been stingy in her other gifts to the
islands, she stinted nothing when it came to fish.
The broad rock platforms which surround the
islands at slender depths are the natural gather
ing places of the fish and in spite of the milUons
taken out, more millions remain. With the dis
appearance of the ice comes the spring run of cod.
The herring still abound in limitless shoals, the
mackerel have never yet deserted the islands as
they have the Gasp6 Coast and with the coming
down of the fall the cod return fat and fine for the
late fishing. On most of Gasp4 only the cod re
mains, the herring are too few for anything but
bait and the mackerel migrated long years ago,
only just now coming back here and there to their
historic grounds. The islanders have only to
reach out and take — but reaching out to take
means the roughest and most hazardous work so
it is Uttle wonder that the fisherman prefers to
venture just so far into this struggle as the neces-

248 THE HEART OF GASPfi
sities of life require and no further. But this is
not aU the wealth of the water that comes his
way. The lobster harvest is tremendous and a
million lobsters a year, even at 3 to 4 cents a lob
ster, mean a lot of money to the islandman, to
whom, because he is a "poor islander," the Fish
eries Commission allows an extra month of fishing
in the fall, which the other lobstermen of Gasp6
do not get.
And then there are the seal which come with
the moving of the northern ice. In the great
attack upon the seal as it is carried on by ice-
breaking steamers from Newfoundland, the Mag-
dalener has no share. His part in this perilous
business is done from the shore or from his light
skin boats which do not get out of the island waters.
With his faciUties he does the best he can, and
often very weU, but the Newfoundland sealers will
get in his way, breaking into his ice and his pros
pective herds. The season is short and quick — a
few days and it is over and the harvest of hooded
seal is sometimes 15,000, sometimes, though rarely,
75,000. Here and there on the islands are the

THE MAGDALEN ISLANDS 249
square oil vats for trying down the blubber and
these are about all the traces of the business the
visitor of summer days can see. The little harbor
seal which dot the sandbanks and lagoons on
summer days play no part in this battle. So with
seal and lobster, cod, herring, mackerel, lobster
and cod again, from spring to winter, the Mag-
dalener is really in a marine garden though he
may choose to pluck but Uttle. There was once
a larger game in abundance here, but its day is
long past — the walrus. It was for its rich stores
of oU, ivory and leather that the early expeditions
to the island were made. Stories are left of the
hunt for this big mammal here, and most of them
are of doubtful veracity, for I have seen it recorded
that the last walrus killed on the islands was in
the 1780's, while Professor Packard says that the
last killed in the Guff was on the Labrador in
1841. The records of this old himt remain be
neath the soil of the islands; on the low shores of
Grindstone and all along the western shore of
Entry where the waves have cut into the land of
a century ago, there are layers of bones, tusks

250 THE HEART OF GASPE
and teeth. I have even dug out a great leaden
slug from the skuU of one of these creatures.
There's a Sea-cow point on Coffin Island, another
on the south shore of Amherst, both of which
record these activities of the past. And indeed
the bone heaps distributed over rock surfaces and
beneath 6-10 inches of soU are indications of a
slaughter which helps one to understand how the
walrus has become extinct in these waters.
There are a few other little dots of rock about
this island group. Wolf Island Ues buried in the
long western bar; Shag, a bare platform, is off the
sands of Alright, and Gull is near Etang-du-nord.
Deadman's Island — Alezay, it was called by Car-
tier — is a sarcophagus ten miles southwest of
Amherst. Of it, Thomas Moore, on his way home
from Canada, sang dolorously a fanciful song of
shipwreck, though he misplaced the island by
putting it off the coast of Newfoundland. What
tales of sea and seamen these ragged Uttle rocks
enshrine, no one can ever know, nor tell of the
bones of skipper and craft buried on the shoals
of the White Horse, the Pierre-du-Gros-Cap, on

THE MAGDALEN ISLANDS 251
the west, the Columbines and the Pearl reef on
the east.
Ten miles off to the north of Grosse Isle, with a
ten fathom channel between is Brion Island, seven
miles long, but stretched out thin, with 200 foot
cliffs on the west and all a platform of horizontal
gray sandstones, grass-topped and inviting. This
is the island that its discoverer, Cartier, went into
ecstasies over on that June day of 1534, when he
anchored and went ashore; and when he expressed
his enthusiasm by giving the spot the name of his
patron. EngUsh charts, with dull insistence, as
sume that Cartier was mistaken in its name and
so they call it Byron. The attractions that Car-
tier found here on that long ago summer day are
not so many now. Its timber is gone, the "morses"
which lined its shore departed a century ago, its
grapes, its gooseberries are hard to find and its
roses are blasted, but its verdure and fertUity
remain, its sheep produce a wool of extraordinary
worth and a mutton of purest fiavor. Brion has
for two generations been the property of the Ding
wall family and its new inhabitants are for the

252 THE HEART OF GASPfi
most part in some relation of dependence upon
the descendants. Doubtless, the island has its
fascinations to one who will search them out. I
have sailed about it and gazed upon it wistfully,
but have not yet been ashore.
The Bird Rocks, lying out beyond Brion, to the
northeast some ten miles, have another sort of
story — one of birds and of human tragedy. "Set
by God the Lord in the midst of the waters," said
Father Juvenseus, in the 1600's, they seemed to
him like a great dovecote, so covered were they
with birds from top to bottom. And since his day
and that earlier year when Cartier called them the
Isles-aux-margaulx, this great colony of water
fowl has been the wonder of navigators, in later
years the theme of much writing by the bird men.
But of the human tragedies on these remote bits
of bare rocks, little has been recorded. The Bird
Rocks are three in number now. In the early days,
the two little fragments now known as the Little
Birds, were evidently one, but the sea has broken
them apart. The Great or Northern Bird is a
flat rock table, not as large as some ice floes,

THE MAGDALEN ISLANDS 253
made up of the same horizontal gray sandstones
that compose Brion and much of the Magdalen
group, and these have sheer vertical walls on all
sides, rising to a height of 150 feet at the base
of the lighthouse. Its grassy top covers near
seven acres of ground. Here on the horizontal
ledges of its sheer cUffs roosts what is commonly
regarded the largest bird colony on the Atlantic
Coast. The discrepancies in the accounts of the
number of the birds given by the early writers
and the census that the bird students of to-day
have taken of the population is so great as to con
vince us that the settlement has been well-nigh
decimated. Here are the gannets, most beauti
ful of all water fowl, in greatest profusion, murres
and kittiwakes, razor bill auks, puffins and guil
lemots, — only a short list of species, but an as
sociation of most ancient date. And in the old
days, there was the great auk, awkward gare-
fowl, long ago beaten to death and extinction by
the clubs of the sailors. There is one and only
one evident cause for the rapid decrease in the
number in this bird colony in these later years

254 THE HEART OF GASPfi
and that is the inroads made by the fishermen
and "eggers" upon the egg supply — the potential
feature of the settlement. In the days when the
Gloucester fishing fleet had free access to these
waters, the Bird Rock was their resort when pro
visions ran low, and the "egger" who now as
saults the Newfoundland-Labrador colonies in un
restrained Ucense was not checked in his attacks on
this island until it was made a bird reserve by the
government and put under the care of the Ught-
keeper. And now it is the bird "lover," the egg
collector with commercial proclivities who is carry
ing the work along. I have encountered one of
these "lovers" who had in his possession 367
clutches of eggs of each of the seven known species
of birds. This avid murderer had, in one \dsit,
thus put an end to not less than 2,000 members of
this community, an offense for which in his own
State, he would have been well fined or imprisoned.
But let no one visit on the head of the lonely Ught-
keeper reproach for such performances. His soU-
tude, his deUght in a ^dsitor from the big world
outside are their own justifications for winking

THE LEDGES OF THE ILE-AUX-MARGOTS

THE GREAT BIRD ROCK, WITH BUILDINGS OF THE LIGHT

THE MAGDALEN ISLANDS 255
at such performances. The real romance of bird
life on this rock has been depicted in extraordinary
portraiture by the marvelous photographs taken
by Mr. Herbert K. Job from periculous points
of view on the narrow ledges where a foothold is
only tenable when one is tied to security by a rope
from above. The decrease in the number of the
bird population here is a cause of some just soUci-
tude to the conservation of our native fauna, but
the remedy is, as we have indicated, not far to
seek. The gannet is not to be found elsewhere in
the Gulf, except at Bonaventure Island near Perc6,
and at Perroquet Island off Anticosti, and there
is little doubt that, of these settlements, the one
at Bonaventure is the largest.
It was not until 1870 that any light was placed
on the Bird Rock. Up to that time, being square
in the path of navigation through the southern
passage, these rocks were a fearful menace to
skippers and craft. For many years after the
erection of the Ught, the only means of ascending
the rock face was in a crate hauled up the cUff
by a windlass and a jib. Some of the early Ught-

256 THE HEART OF GASPfi
keepers dug out a rough stairway on the cliff face
and up these, one and the other, all suppUes and all
construction material were taken. Ten years ago
the government made a more reliable stairway in
the rocks with an iron hand tail. It is a precarious
passage enough, amid crumbling rock and scream
ing birds, and even so, the hoist must stiU serve
for heavier loads.
I doubt if the world holds a more isolated light
station. Here, during the unfrozen months, the
lightkeeper and his Uttle family, usually his wife,
a few children and his assistant, have only their
dull routine of duties. Once or twice perhaps,
in the year, the light inspection steamer with
suppUes, then the occasional bird student or fisher
man. The shipping which the lighthouse serves
passes the rock on one side and another and the
news of the day is only the passing of another
vessel. Perhaps the casual visitor brings in a
newspaper or a Uttle talk of the world outside,
but for the rest, the eternal sea, the sempiternal
screams of the birds, the monotonous round of
daily work at the light, the fog horn, the boat-

^'

Ij^

Is?

w

tma'^:

GANNETS NESTING ON THE BIRD ROCK
(Permission of Herbert K. Job)

BRUNNICH MURRES AND KITTIWAKES ON THE BIRD ROCK LEDGES

THE MAGDALEN ISLANDS 257
house. Frozen in for nearly half the year with
only an endless waste of ice to look out upon,
housed for days by gales and storms, till every
word on every book and paper has been burned
into the brain and every thought thought over a
score of times, is it any wonder that more than
once, the keeper, mad with his awful soUtude, has
been taken from the island in a straightjacket?
Once there was a cable stretched from here by
way of the Magdalens on to Cape Breton but now
that is broken and abandoned, a set of Inter
national Code flags being the only means the
keeper has to make known his distress to his neigh
bors, if perchance any should be passing, or the
Ughtkeeper at Brion should see them. Some
years ago at the down coming of the seal, the
keeper and his assistant were floated off on sepa
rated ice cakes — the keeper to his death, the as
sistant to be washed ashore frozen and famished
on the distant sands of Cape Breton. In 1912, the
tragedy repeated itself and again the keeper was
lost in the seal himt, leaving the anguished wife
to tend the light and to signal for succor with the

258 THE HEART OF GASPfi
International Code flags a kind-hearted ministry
had placed at their disposal. But so heavy hung
the fog banks day upon day that the signals were
unavailing and so the stout-hearted widow with
babe at breast, steered her shallop through the
ice fields to her nearest neighbor on Brion Island.
They wiU teU you on the Magdalens of the time
the bomb exploded prematurely, blowing the
keeper to fragments and fearfully maiming the
assistant, who still lives upon the islands.
And yet, with all its atmosphere of soUtude and
tragedy, the Bird Rock is a charming spot for a
brief stay. Its isolation is sublime, its attractions
novel, its mode incomparable, if only one stay
through at least one storm and then do not out
stay his welcome.

THE PLACE NAMES
The names scattered over a country illuminate
an intimate side of its history which often escapes
any other record. They aline themselves into the
epochs of occupation, express sometimes old home
ties, mark the merits of those who helped make
history, bear witness to the settlers and best of
all besprinkle the land with the associations,
descriptive terms and whimsical conceptions of its
first people. Everywhere through the States the
poverty of the English imagination has smeared
the map with humdrum and commonplace loans
of names from the home country or even of the
young States from the older. The only salvation
in American names Ues in the large survival from
the Indian, the Dutch, the Spanish and the French.
The EngUsh name is palpable. Its absolute
frankness leaves nothing to imagination, though
usually much to euphony. It seldom has a value
beyond its association with the home town from
259

260 THE HEART OF GASPfi
which it was taken. But it wiU always have one
merit — it was not stolen from a classical diction
ary or a map of continental Europe or South
America, like the multitude of designations which
disfigure the surface of New York.
Gasp6, like all Quebec, is well loved of saints
and angels for it bears its full share of them. Saint-
George has a cove on the Forillon, one of the very
earliest of the English settlements, and a canton
across Gasp6 Bay, at Saint-Peter. Indeed Saint-
Peter is in the canton of Saint-George. There are
Saint-Joseph and Saint-Martin, Saint-John and
Saint- Adelaide. But the first of all these holy
names to consecrate Gaspe was that of Notre Dame,
given by Champlain to the mountains of the north
shore, more commonly known now by the Micmac
term Shickshocks — the rocky mountains. There
are latter day saints, too, represented by such ven
erable names as Baillargeon, Bishop of Quebec,
Marjorique, a cur6 of Douglastown, Blanchet, a
priest of the lower provinces and afterwards Arch
bishop of Oregon, Magdeleine, an abb4 who gave
land for an Indian mission on the north shore.

PLACE NAMES 261
Very appropriate is De Noue, one of the earliest of
the Jesuits in New France.
With less merit to Gaspesian recognition are
some of the personal names. These are township
names and we may assume that they occurred to
the official surveyors who first divided the coun
try into townships, as altogether worthy of recog
nition regardless of geography. In the shortage
of reaUy commemorative names, as has often hap
pened in the work of a land office, there is the cus
tomary run on the politicians of the day for the
perfunctory christening of exceedingly perfunc
tory divisions of land. De Beaujeu and Du£hesnay,
great though their merits, had no especial claim
on this peninsula; the town of Fox carries a dis
tinguished cognomen which seems to have no rela
tion to the river (Renard) which it includes; Fortin
has a better right as member for this county and
Gait is appropriate anywhere in Canada. Syden
ham commemorates a governor-general; Laforce a
soldier of 1812.
Few of such names illuminate much of the his
tory of the country; but there are others, both less

262 THE HEART OF GASPfi
and greater, that shine with a clearer Ught; from
Louis, the Grande Monarque, patron of Mont
Louis, to Douglas, the Scotch surveyor who laid
out the many streeted Douglastown for the United
Empire Loyalists; O'Hara, patentee of Gasp6
Basin, and Governor-General Haldimand; Arcouil,
a Jersey fisherman, and the author Rameau; the
fighting member from the county, Christie, and
Arnold, the early Anglican missionary at Gasp6
Basin; Alban Bond, a first settler to whose honor
stands Mount Alban, the highest point on the
coast, and Rose, an old family, guUtless of any
association with Cap-des-Rosiers.
Albany is a nam.e that came in with the maps of
Sir William Alexander's time and was applied to
the Shickshock mountains, while the same Scot
loyally rejected Cartier's Baie-des-Chaleurs for
Stirling Bay. There's a touch of old France in
the name Chlorydorme, a strangely Attic word of
many spellings, which the grantee of the seigniory
brought from the heme town of Cloridon. The
Parisian visitor Bonfils, who spent a summer
at Perce, was lucky to have the broad cove of

PLACE NAMES 263
L' Anse-au-beaufils (anglic6, Lancy Buffy) named
for him. The cUffs of Bon Ami, which lower over
the St. Lawrence across from Grande Gr^ve, might
imply a friendly retreat for the fishermen in stress
of weather, but the name is really that of a Jersey-
man who long ago set his lobster pots there. People
stiU debate whether L'Anse-au-Brillant refers
to a long forgotten settler or is, as Colonel Wood
has said, a cove where the rising sun strikes in
with marvelous brUUancy. L'Anse-aux-Cousins
(Aunts and Cousins) is purely a family matter.
The Coffin families came early into Gaspe Basin
with the first LoyaUsts, were blest and multiplied.
In this cove aU the settlers were of this clan and
so in the course of the generations, all became
cousins. It goes without comment that the oldest and
the most picturesque of Gaspe names are those of
early French origin which are descriptive of nat
ural effects, or natural associations. The former
have given a chance to the imagination and they
are legitimately perpetuated on from the very few
Micmac names left in Gasp6, but which own to a

264 THE HEART OF GASPfi
like origin. Cap-Blanc, Cap-Rouge, Cap-Barr4,
Pointe Jaune all are projecting points of the parti
colored rocks which beautify the coast.
Chien-Blanc, a low-lying cliff of white sandstone,
with the outline of a crouching dog, is less com
monplace. Mont-Joli is simple and pretty, but
Cap-Chat is a bone of contention. Captain Demers,
master pilot and skipper of the Campana, ship
of pleasant memories but now buried in the Quebec
channel, used to say when the tourist would ex
claim at the slender resemblance in the cliff face,
"A cat? what kind of a cat?" "WeU, you may
spell it chat or chatte, as suits you best." It is
spelled both ways on the charts. Many of the
older writers have believed that Cap-Chat was
named for de Chaste or de-la-Chate, Champlain's
Dieppe patron. Roy, as well as others less depend
able, have thought this, but RouiUard beUeves the
founder of New France would hardly have turned
the graceless compUment of tacking so large a
name to so small a headland. In fact the name
is very ancient and the old charts are not at all
uncertain on the meaning of the word. Francis

PLACE NAMES 265
de Creux in his map of 1660, has it Promontorium
felis and Jeffrey's map of 1760 says flatly Cape
Cat. Forillon is a very ancient and picturesque
name which was originally appUed to the Uttle
finger-like peninsula between the St. Lawrence and
Gasp6 Bay. It is long out of use and I have tried
hard to reinstate it as it is needed for an altogether
unique geographic and geologic figure. It is to
be hoped that it may come again into its own.
ForiUon seems to refer to the long drill-shape
of this finger of mountain ridge — as it were from
forer, to driU.
Perc6 was originally the He Percee, the Insula
perforata on De Creux's map. AppUed at first
only to the Pierced Rock, the name soon became
transferred to the land alongside — and there are
stUl a few among the older residents of that parish
who have respect to the ancient form and speU it
Percie. Penouil is Peninsula. The word is almost lost
to-day except among a few Canadians on the ForU
lon who occasionaUy speak of the ferry at the
Penouil. It is a Basque word, and once Gaspi

266 THE HEART OF GASPfi
Bay was the Baie-dvrPenouil. In the Rivibre-
Ferree the fisherman found the water fuU of iron
rust; in Tourelle he saw the rock pillars on the
coast. As the Greeks ideaUzed a drippmg lime
stone cliff with its stalagmites, into Niobe weeping
for her children slain at her feet, so the Canadian
found in the multitude of little streams pourmg
down its sloping beaches a weeping cove — Anse-
Pleureuse. The undulated flat summit of Mt.-Ste.
Anne at Perc6, was, to early settlers, Table-or
rolante. Grande Grhe is but a Uttle fishing beach, but it
is the largest that the Guernseymen found on the
shores of the ForiUon. Out at the end of Ship-
head (itself a wonderfully effective descriptive
name) Ue the remains of La Vieille, a rock tower
detached from the cliff. The "old man" and the
"old woman" seem to be favorite terms among
sailors for such fugitive rock pUes beaten out from
the headlands by the force of the waves. One fimds
them in the Magdalens and on the shores of Scot
land and the Orkneys, the "Old Man of Hoy" stiU
being Great Britain's most striking rock column.

PLACE NAMES 267
Names of association were scattered wide by
the CanacUans. Champlain began it by baptizing
Cap-des-Rosiers for its wUd roses. The rivers Ail
and Echalotte have carried the aroma of wild onion
for centuries. It would be strange indeed if some
stream among the pines should not be Epinette
blanche; if some geographic features did not con
serve the crow (Cap-corbeau) , the kingfisher {R.
Orclaude), the fox {R. aiix-renards) , the fern {Anse-
fugkre), the martin {R. d-la-marte), the bear (C. d-
Vours), and even the potato {R. patate).
Some of the names are solely commemorative;
Anse-Louise recaUs the wreck of the frigate La
Louise; similarly but less definitely Pointe d-la-
fregate and Anse-naufrage. A sort of anticlimax
is the name Mississippi given to a little stream
back of Gaspi, doubtless by some whimsical ex
plorer. There are names which indicate the bestead
sailors' hope or despair, like Bonaventure Island
and Cape Despair. Over the latter name a Uttle
war has raged, but here is some new light upon it :
Despair is commonly supposed to be the angUcized

268 THE HEART OF GASPfi
style of the French, C. d'Espoir, which is the usual
form of the name on the French charts. Of course
one inverts the meaning of the other. Occasion
ally one finds Desespoir on a French map. On
the De Creux map of 1660 it is Promontorium spei,
which would seem to estabUsh the fact that d'Es
poir was the accepted term very early, but I have
found an ItaUan map by Gastaldi, dated 1546,
in which the name is written C. despera and this
certainly carries the term back to the time of
Cartier who rounded this desperate headland in
1534 in coming out of the Baie-des-Chaleurs.
Names which have imdergone corruptions, with
changing population, are frequent everywhere in
this continent of many tongues. The EngUshman
plays havoc with aU names that sound strange
to him. If they convey no idea to his percep
tion they are "stupid" and forthwith made over
to suit his taste. In the Hudson VaUey and its
vicinity where the EngUsh foUowed the Dutch,
the old HoUand names have been shamefully and
shapelessly mouthed. Gaspi has some of a Uke
origin. Fame Point achieved its distinction be-

PLACE NAMES 269
cause some poor Frenchmen cast ashore here,
suffered from himger (faim). Griffon Cove was
L'Anse au-gris-fond — it had a sandy bottom; but
surely the Frenchmen had no right to pronounce
the name as they did unless there was a griffon in
it, and so in the griffon went. The little island off
the point of St. Peter has had its vicissitudes. It
is a bit of perfectly flat rock and so the early French
caUed it Plateau. Comes Admiral Bayfield and
speUs it on his charts; Plato. Doubtless Plato was
quite as appropriate to the Gaspi Aegean as Pom-
pey, Cicero, Syracuse and Pharsalia were to the
wheat fields of central New York. Bayfield's
Plato has hung to most of the charts though once
in a whUe a map translated the name into plain
EngUsh, Flat Island. I have seen on an 18th cen
tury transcription of such a map, the name put
down as Hat Island, the antique italic Fl of the
original having looked Uke an H to the copyist.
At Cap-aux-os, the waves piled up some whale
bones; the Frenchmen saw them; thus the name.
Bayfield, and after him. Sir WilUam Logan,
noted the spot and spelled it Cape Oiseau, as

270 THE HEART OF GASPfi
though the birds had something to do with it.
Later came the modern mapmakers, the Century
Atlas and Rand & McNally among them, speUing
it in strictly English phonetics. Cape Ozo. Evolu
tion is not yet through with the term, for the Eng
Ush on the coast are letting it gradually slip into
Caboozo. One more of these transformations to show how
even a Frenchman may forget his own origin: On
the Dartmouth river is Point Navoo; it was once
Pointe Navarre, doubtless commemorating to its
settlers the home country and their sovereign
King of Navarre and Beam. The children's chil
dren of these pioneers knew nothing of Navarre
but they did know a turnip {navoo) and a turnip
it is. "It's a sign that they would rather
Have a turnip than their father."
EngUsh deglutition of French place names is
beautifully exhibited in the transmogrification of
Petit Rocher into Little Russia and Mille Roches
into Millrush, Gaspe names outside of Gaspi
County.

PLACE NAMES ' 271
But aU this uncertainty of names is perfectly
characteristic of a country where the names of
the people themselves have often long since ceased
to indicate the tongue they speak. There are
Smiths on the south shore who are dumb in Eng
lish and every traveler through the Eastern Town
ships has seen the strapping sandy haired Mac-
phersons, Macdonalds, Warrens, descendants of
Eraser's soldiers, who know no word of Scotch or
EngUsh. After a little experience with these lost
clans one can comprehend the story told me by a
priest of Gaspesia. "What is your name?" he
asked a Uttle girl who had just joined his parish
school. "Jeanette Bourget," she repUed. "And
who is your father?" said the priest. "Alcide
Bourget, he's Scotch," said the child. "Your
mother, who was she? " asked the priest. " Mother
is French," answered the girl, "her name was
Mclntyre." That's a perfectly intelligible mix
ture. But the quiet jocular fondness of the habit
ant for a nickname sometimes produces singular
results. Colonel Wood teUs two happy yarns to
show this; one of a British castaway whose only

272 THE HEART OF GASPfi
French was the single phrase "je n'en sais rien,"
and whose grandson is now a French druggist,
M. Jean Sarrien; another such castaway was WU-
liam Hastie whose French descendants do busi
ness to-day under the name of Billhastie. His
Frenchman who could turn the village of Inverness
into Sainte-Ivrognesse, and commit the sin of
Sainte-Elizabeth-de-Boundary-Line, on a frontier
settlement need ask nothing of the Englishman
who changed L'Anse-au-gris-fond into Griffon
Cove.

GLOSSARY OF GASPfi PLACE NAMES
Adams Point, Gasp6 (same as Lourde Point). The Adams
family were the first settlers.
Ail, rivifere-Eb-l'. On the St. Lawrence shore, town of Syden
ham; Uke R. Echalotte; from the garlic or wild onion
that abounds in the valley.
Albany Mountains. An old name of the Notre Dame or
Shickshock mountains. It appears on Jeffery's map of
1860 but may date back to the time of Sir WiUiam
Alexander.
Alezay or Alezai. Cartier's name for Deadman's I.
Alright. One of the Magdalen Islands. Sailor's term. Not
older than the Coffin patent. Either this or Grindstone
I. was called Saunders I. by Bayfield or the Coffins.
Amherst. Island in the Magdalen group. Gen. William (not
Jeffrey) Amherst — a name given by the Coffin patentees.
The old French name is Havre Aubert and this is the
post office name to-day. Aubert was commissioner for
the islands at an early day and the "Havi-e" has refer
ence to the interior lagoon or Basin which is open for
small vessels.
Ann, Cape. On a map published with Hugh Gray's Letters
from Canada, 1809. Same as C. Despair.
Arcouil Point. "After Arcouil, a Jersey fisherman who
made several voyages to this coast" (White).
Arnold's Blufp, Gasp6. Rev. Mr. Arnold was one of the
early Church of England missionaries. He married
Miss O'Hara (see Cape O'Hara) (F. J. Richmond).
Aubert. See Amherst.
Baie-au-Plaisance. See Pleasant Bay.
273

274 GLOSSARY OF GASPfi PLACE NAMES
Baillargeon, town. "After Mgr. Charles Francis Baillar
geon, third R. C. Bishop of Quebec, 1850-67 " (White).
Barachois. General term appUed to any water at a river
mouth impounded behind a coastal sand bar. Village
at the head of Malbay (B.-de-Mal-Baie). "East Indian
French" (White). Barre-cheois, the part protected from
the tumble of the waves (Ferland). Barre-echuie, the
waters protected by a bar.
Barr£, Cap. A cape on the St. Lawrence a few miles above
Fox river; also at the north beach at Perc6. "From the
rock of the cape which is varicolored or 'barred' "
(White). This does not apply well to the first named
and only in part to the last. Cape Barr6 at Perc6 is a
mass of gray rocks but the cliffs beyond, at the ''Blow
hole" and Red Peak are banded in shales of red, orange
and gray. "Named after a settler'' (R. Tardif).
Basque Harbor. A name dating to the 1600's when the
Basques were in possession.
Basse, Pointe. Magdalen Is. The steamer-landing at Al
right — not on chart. (Pointe Basque?)
Beaufils. Cove (Anse-&^Beaufils) between Perc6 and Cape
Cove. "After a French nobleman, Bonfils, who spent
a summer at Perc6" (White). Certainly a hospitable
way to treat a tourist.
Bird Rocks. Magdalen Is. The Rocks are separated into
North or Great Bird (7 acres) and the Little Birds, two
in number.
Blanc, Cap, anglice "Whitehead"; south of Perc6. The cape
is made by a mass of Ught gray rocks standing vertical
between masses of red.
Blanche, Isle. See Grindstone.
Blanchet, town. "After Rev. Francis Norbert Blanchet, a
priest of Quebec who went as a missionary to British
Columbia and afterwards became Archbishop of Oregon"
(White).

GLOSSARY OF GASPfi PLACE NAMES 275
Blondel, Anse. Cove near Newport village. "Named after
a settler" (R. Tardif).
Blowhole. Sea cUff on the MuraiUes of Perc6.
Bois Brul£. Brook and district on south shore of Gasp6
Bay. Descriptive; the burned woods are stiU a visible
feature.
BoN Ami, Cape. On the east side of the Forillon. "After a
settler from the island of Jersey" (White). "The set
tler was a Guernseyman at Grande Gr6ve" (A. M.
Dolbel).
Bonaventure, Island. "Mgr. Boss6 suggests that it may
be after the vessel in which the Sieur de la Court-Pr6-
Ravillon made a walrus hunt in 1591. It seems more
probable that it commemorates some fortimate occur
rence that Champlain has omitted to note. Or after the
Marquis de Bonaventure" (White). Hardly the first,
as Pr6-RaviUon's hunt was in the Magdalens. It is a
very ancient name and a natural expression for a happy
landfaU.
Bheche-a-Manon. Town of Perc6, near Little River.
"Named after a settler. Also written Breche-^Menon"
(R. Tardif).
Brilliant, cove (Anse-a-Brillant; sometimes Briand). South
shore of Gasp6 Bay. "After the BriUant family of
Quebec, who settled here" (White). "Romantic people
say that the rising sun shines into L'Anse-&^Brillant with
almost miraculous brilUancy; slangy ones that the BrU-
lant family came here from Quebec" (Wood).
Brion. One of the Magdalen Islands. AppUed by Cartier,
1534, to the island now bearing it, it was often used by
early explorers for the whole group. It was given in
honor of PhiUpe Chabot, Sieur de Brion.
Brton. Alternative form of Brion, which see.
Byron. Same as Brion, and a British distortion of that name.
Cabanes, L'Anse-Aux-. See Cabin Cove.

276 GLOSSARY OF GASPfi PLACE NAMES
Cabin Cove. On the south shore of Amherst, Magdalen Is.
Has reference to Micmac lodges there at an early day.
Canards, cove. (Anse-^-Canards). Town of Pabos. Duck
Cove.
Cannes-des-Roches. On the Perc6 cliffs or Murailles, facing
Malbay. "I have thought this referred to the quantity
of stone, but am told it was named for birds which fre
quented the rocks and were thus termed by the French"
(R. Tardif). Cannes-des-roches = Rock ducks.
Canon, Cap-au, Perc6. May have reference to a cannon
placed on this headland at Perc6 but more likely from the
booming of the waves against it.
Canot, cove (Anse-&^Canot). Town of Chlorydorme. De
scriptive; Canoe Cove.
Cap, Anse-du-, village, cove. Cape Cove, town of Perc6.
Cap-des-Rosiers, town, village, cape. Cape of the roses;
from the abundance of wild roses here in Champlain's
time, from which the name dates.
Carnaval, cove. (Anse-Camaval), town of Pabos. "Re
ferring to local good times on the cove" (R. Tardif).
Castor, river, town of ToureUe. Beaver river.
Chaloupe, Pointe-&.-la-, cape. From its resemblance to a
sail-boat or chaloupe.
Chasse, point (Pointe-S^Chasse), town of Duchesnay. Point
of the Hunt (family name?).
Chat, cape (Cap-Chat), town, village, capes (Cap-Chat and
Petit Cap-Chat), cove. "So caUed because the cape
seen in profile resembles a cat (chat) " (White). "Cham
plain ayant acquittd sa reconnaissance envers son bien-
¦faiteur le commandeur de Chatte en dormant son nom k
un cap de la NouveUe France, etc." (P.G.Roy). "Cap
Chat was named for de Chastes or de la Chate, Cham
plain's Dieppe patron who brought him out on his first
trip, and without prejudice to its original significance it
stands on the map by Francis de Creux, dated 1660, as

GLOSSARY OF GASPfi PLACE NAMES 277
'Promontorium Felis' (Clarke). It is "Cape Cat" on
Jeffrey's map, 1760.
Chien-Blanc, cliff, south shore of Gasp6 Bay. The long gray
cliff face with low rounded top and lying between red
rocks suggested a "white dog" to the French fishermen.
Chlorydorme, town, village, cape. According to Wliite the
preferred speUing is Cloridorme, though the former is in
vogue. "The grantee, Chas. Morin, requested that the
seigniory be named 'Cloridon'" (White).
Christie, town. "After Robt. Christie (1788-1856), his
torian, member of the House of Assembly for Gasp6
(1827-29) ; in 1829 expelled on the ground of having mis
advised the government; was again returned and again
expeUed and deprived of his seat until the union; again
elected and remained a member until 1854" (White).
Claude, river (Rivi§re-L\-Claude), town of Mont Louis.
"From the numbers of kingfishers found along this
stream" (White).
Coffin. One of the Magdalens. Named for the proprietor.
Sir Isaac Coffin.
Corbeau, Cape, town of Chlorydorme. Having the shape of
a crow or abounding in crows.
Corner-of-the-Beach, village. Lies at the beginning of the
Malbay beach, back of Perc6 Mountains.
Corps Mort. Same as Deadman's I.
Cousins, cove (Anse-aux-Cousins), on the south shore, Nor'
west Arm, Gasp6 Bay. This locaUty was settled by the
prolific Coffin family, U. E. LoyaUsts, who intermarried
freely tiU aU later generations are related (F. J. Rich
mond).
Dartmouth, river (The "Nor'west Arm" of Gaspd Bay).
After Dartmouth, England.
Dauphin, Cape. See North Cape.
Deadman's I. A smaU rock platform, seven miles west of
Amherst, Magdalen Is. Same as Alezay.

278 GLOSSARY OF GASPfi PLACE NAMES
DeBeaujeu, town. "After Hon. George Saveuse de Beaujeu,
seignior of Soulanges and member of the Legislative
Council;d. 1865" (White).
Demoiselle. A hiU on Amherst, Magdalen Is. Takes its
name from its symmetrical shape which the French
thought resembled a maiden's breast, in which respect
it is like all the volcanic-gypsum hiUs on Grindstone,
Alright and Entry Islands.
DeNou:6, town. "After Rev. Father Aime-de-Nou6, Jesuit
missionary in New France, 1646" (White).
Despair, Cape, town of Perc6. Commonly supposed to be
an anglicized form of Cap d'Espoir, exactly reversing the
original meaning; but see d'Espoir.
D'Espoir, Cap. Cape of Good Hope. On the map of de
Creux, 1660, it is Promontorium spei. Rarely Desespoir
on some early maps. D'Espoir is the usual form on
French maps, but on a map of 1546 in the Hispanic
Museum in New York, it is C. despera. I am informed
by Mr. Stevenson, secretary of the Hispanic Society,
that the map is by Gastaldi, an Italian map engraver of
high repute.
Douglas, town. See foUowing.
Douglastown, village, town of Douglas. White says this
name is that of Rear-Admiral Sir Charles Douglas, but
Le Moine and others say that it was named after the
Scotch surveyor who laid out this village of houseless
streets.
Duchesnay, town. "After Hon. Antoine Juchereau Duches
nay, M. L. C. previous to Confederation, Senator, 1867,
until his death m 1871" (White).
Echalotte, river (RiviSre-^l'echaJotte), town of Syden
ham. "After a kind of wild onion formerly found here"
(White).
Entry. An island of the Magdalen group; I. de rEntr6e.
It guards the southeastern portal of the group.

GLOSSARY OF GASPfi PLACE NAMES 279
Epinette Blanche, river, town of Chlorydorme. White
Pine river.
EsPOiR, Cap d'. See D'Espoir.
Etang-du-nord. Village on Grindstone I., Magdalen group.
Pronounced by the English, Tantanour. The pond is
the north pond of Basque Harbor.
Fame Point, marine station. English corruption of the French
"faim," hunger.
Febb^e, river (Riviere Ferree), town of Taschereau. Refer
ring to the iron in the water shown by the ochreous stains
on the bottom.
Flottant, brook (Ruisseau-de-Flottant), town of Taschereau.
May refer to the sluggish character of the stream, but
probably is the name of an early settler.
Forillon, town of Cap-des-Rosiers. Name originally ap
plied to the narrow peninsula from Grande Gr6ve to
Cape Gasp6 or Shiphead. So used by Lescarbot. Prob
ably derived from "forer," to driU, as the peninsula has
the shape of a driU. The term ForiUon was in quite
general use in early days and on old maps. Denys mis
applied it to Plateau Island on the south side of Gasp6
Bay. Frequently the name was attached to the end of
the cliff at Cape Gasp6 where formerly stood an obeUsk
of rock cut off by the sea and which was thought to sug
gest a "driU." White says: "From the French 'farillon'
or 'phariUon,' meaning the pan in which the fishermen
make a light to attract the fish of night."
FoRTiN, town. "After Pierre Fortin, M. P. P. from Gasp6,
1867; Commissioner of Crown Lands, Quebec, 1873-74"
(White).
FouRCHE, river (RiviSre-Sr-la-fourche). Descriptive, refers to
the fork in the stream.
Fox, town. "Probably after Chas. James Fox, 1749-1806";
possibly "suggested by Fox river which traverses the
township'' (White).

280 GLOSSARY OF GASPfi PLACE NAMES
Fox RrvEH, viUage, river; Rivi6re-aux-r6nards. A transla
tion.
Frigate, Point6, town of Chlorydorme. Some forgotten
shipwreck.
Friday's Bluff. St. John river.
FuGiiRE, cove (Anse FugSre), town of Fox. "Possibly from
the rank growth of ferns (fougfere). Or a corruption of
the name of a former resident, Fisher" (White).
Galt, town. "After Sir A. T. Gait (1817-93) one of the
'fathers of the Confederation'" (White).
Gasp£, penmsula, county, towns (north and south), bay
village. "Gasp6," says F. Pacifique, "is palpably a
Micmac word: Gespeg, meaning 'end' or 'extremity.'
There is another word, two indeed, which have the same
name in composition and have the same meaning: Ges-
pogoitg, Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, and Gespesaocg, Cape
Breton" (Romllard, Noms g6ographiques).
Grand Entry. Magdalen Is. This passage between Alright
and Coffin islands seems to have been in use from the
days of the Basques and Bretons. It was, I beUeve, the
harbor called by Leigh, 1591, Halobolina, and was men
tioned by Cartier.
Grand Etang, town, cove. A "great pond" or lake Ues near
the center of this seigniory.
Grande CarriIire, ruisseau-de-la. Same as Grande Cav6e.
Grande CavJib, ruisseau-de-la-, towns of Fox and Cap-des-
Rosiers. The stream makes a "deep gully.''
Grande Coupe, town of DeNou6; also town of Perc6, facing
Malbay. Refers to the sheer cliff waU.
Grande Gr^ve, village, town of Cap-des-Rosiers. The
"great beach"; it is a smaU beach but great in compari
son with the other beaches on the ForiUon.
Grande Riviere, town, viUage, river. Descriptive.
Grande Vall^ie-des-Monts, town and village (Grande
VaU^e). A "grand valley" in the Shickshock Mountains.

GLOSSARY OF GASPfi PLACE NAMES 281
Gridley, Mt. The little triangle of land at Amherst wharf,
Magdalen Is. Gridley was an American who estabUshed
the first lobster fishing here about 1763.
Griffon, cove (Anse-au-Griffon), town of Cap-des-Rosiers.
Originally Anse-au-gris-fond, cove with a gray bottom.
Corrupted by the EngUsh to Griffon or Griffin Cove
and now accepted on some French maps as Anse-au-
Griffon.
Grindstone. Member of the Magdalen group. Takes its
name from the coai'se white sandstone which forms the
principal headland, Cape Meule.
Gros-Cap-aux-Os, cape; Cap-aux-Os, village, north shore
of Gasp6 Bay. Cape of the bones, doubtless referring to
large bones, probably of the whale, found on the shore.
Written by Bayfield, Logan and others Cape Oiseau and
on modern English maps (Century Atlas) Cape Ozo.
To-day vidgo, Caboozo.
Grosse Isle. The Great Island of the Magdalens or the
Great Magdalen of a few English writers. One of the
smaUest of tlie group but connected by vast sands with
aU the other land at the north.
Haldimand, town. "After Gen. Sir Frederick Haldimand,
Governor General of Canada 1778-84, who tried to settle
his nephews here in 1784" (Wliite).
Harbor Basque. See Basque Harbor.
Havre-aux-Basques. See Basque Harbor.
Havre-Aubert. See Amherst.
HopriAL, Cap-au-. See Hospital.
Hospital. Cape on Grindstone I., Magdalen group. The
origin is lost both to the French and English, but the
name naturally suggests a wreck and rescue.
House. Harbor on the IMagdakn Islands between Grind
stone and Alright. An ancient term referring to early
settlement, probably the first on the islands.
Ilot, cove (Anse-a,-ri!ot) ; town of Pabos. Descriptive.

282 GLOSSARY OF GASPfi PLACE NAMES
Indian Cove (Anse-S^-sauvage) ; north shore of Gasp6 Bay.
From a Micmac family located here during the early
white settlement.
Irishtown (Perc6), hamlet. Inhabitants largely Irish, some
of them of loyaUst stock but mostly later comers.
Islets, Ruisseau-des; town of Newport. Descriptive.
Jardin, Anse. Near Newport. "This place was formerly
caUed Jardin-du-Naveau as it is one of the few spots
there fit to grow turnips" (R. Tardif).
Jaune, Pointe; near south point of Gasp^ Bay. A strip of
yellowish rocks runs down to the shore at this point.
Jean, cove (Anse-^-Jean), town of Christie. What Jean is
not known.
Jeanne Echourib, river; town of Fox. "The water being
very shallow at low tide supposed to be from the word
eschori^e or stranded" (C. O. Carrel).
Jersey Cove, cove and village (Anse Jersey); town of Cap-
des-Rosiers. Jerseymen first settled here.
Joli, Mt.; Perc6. Pretty ui itself and in the view from its
summit.
Ladysteps brook; entering the Dartmouth river in rapids
caused by a series of small step-like ledges.
Laforce, town. "After Major Pierre Laforce, who served
in the war of 1812" (White).
Larocque, town. "After Rt. Rev. Paul Larocque, Bishop of
Sherbrooke" (White).
Les Araynes. The northern part of the Magdalen Islands.
Cartier speaks, in the narrative of his second voyage, of
crossing over from Brion to the sands, "les araynes,"
meaning the sands of Grosse Isle and eastward. The
name appears on early charts in the alternative forms
here given and appUed to all the group except Brion and
Alezay: /. des Arenas; I. des Arines; I. aux-Sablons;
I. aux-Sabloens. There is another name of the same
extent, I. Duoron, the meaning of which is not known.

GLOSSARY OF GASPfi PLACE NAMES 283
Leslie Cove. Named for WilUam Leslie, early pioneer of
the lobster business, and stUl there after 40 years' resi
dence. This is the post-office name of the eastern part
of Grindstone I., Magdalen group.
Little GaspjS (Petit Gasp6), post village; on north shore of
Gasp6 Bay.
Little River (Petite Riviere); town of Grand River; river,
viUage. In contrast to Grand River, a few mUes away.
Lobster Cove, Gasp6 Basin. From abundance of lobsters.
Louise, cove (Anse-&^Louise) ; town of Cap-des-Rosiers. At
an early but uncertain date, the French frigate La Louise
was wrecked here.
Loup, Anse-au-; town of Grand River. Wolf Cove.
Loups-Marins, Anse; viUage, cove; south shore of Gasp6
Bay. Anglice, Seal Cove.
Loutre, Riviere-la. Otter river.
Madeleine. Island group named for Madeleine Doublet,
wife of Franjois Doublet, 1663.
Magdalen ) „ n/r j i •
> See Madeleme.
Magdalene )
Magdeleine (Cap-de-la-Magdeleine), town, village, river.
"Seigniory, Champlain; the land for an Indian mission
foimded here by the Jesuits was donated by de la Fert6,
abb6 de-la-Magdeleine, after whom it was named"
(White).
Maison, Harbor. See House.
Maisons, Havre-aux-. See House.
Mal-Baie, bay, town, vUlage. Molue-baie or Baie-des-
molues, Breton for morues (cod fish) ; Codfish Bay.
Manche-d'Ep£e, brook (Ruisseau-du-Manche-d'Ep6e), town
of Taschereau. Perhaps from the curves in its course,
Uke a sword hUt.
Maquereau, Pointe; town of Newport. Mackerel potm.
"Tradition says that a vessel of that name was wrecked
on the point" (White).

284 GLOSSARY OF GASPfi PLACE NAMES
Margaulx, Isle-aux-. See Margots.
Margots, Isle-aux-. Cartier's name for the Bird Rocks.
Mabsouis, river (Riviere Marsouis), town of Duchesnay.
Porpoises are common enough as far up the St. Lawrence
as this, and the fishing of them was inaugurated by Vitr6
as far back as 1690.
Marte, river (Riviere-a-la-Marte), town of Christie. The
martin is stiU common on the headwaters of this stream.
Mate, river (Riviere-du-gros-Mate), town of Taschereau.
Maudlin. Broad French and vulgar EngUsh. (See Made
leine.)
Meules, Isle-aux. See Grindstone.
Mississippi, brook; town of Baillargeon. An anticlimax — ^a
smaU stream named for a big one.
Mont Louis, town, viUage, river, mountain. "The moun
tains forming the boundary of this vaUey were named in
honor of Louis XIV, reigning sovereign of France when
the first concession was made" (Vvliite).
Morin, brook (Ruisseau-^-Morin) ; town of Cap-des-Rosiers.
"After a settler in the vicinity" (White).
Murailles. The cUffs or walls at Perc6, facing Malbay.
Naufrage, cove (Anse-naufrage), town of Duchesnay. Some
forgotten shipwreck.
Newport, town, village. Adapted EngUsh name.
North Cape. This is the Cap-au-Dauphin of Cartier, a name
stiU in use among the French.
Notre Dame Mountains. Champlain's name for the moun
tains which Ue back of the south shore. See Shickshock
and Albany mountains.
O'Hara, Cape. From FeUx O'Hara, patentee of the lands
where Gasp6 viUage now Ues.
OiSEAUx, Isle-aux-. One of the early names for the Bird
Rocks.
Old Harry Head. On CoflSn I., one of the Magdalens.
Probably of Uke date.

GLOSSARY OF GASPfi PLACE NAMES 285
Os, Gros-Cap-aux-. See Gros-Cap-aux-Os.
Ours, cape (Cap-Jt-l'Ours), town of DeNoul. Cape of the
bear.
Pabos, town, river, viUage (Grand Pabos, Little Pabos). "A
weU known Basque word appUed to a place formerly
much frequented by the fishermen of that nation"
(White, quoted).
Patate, river (Riviere patate), town of Tourelle. Potato
river.
Pel£, Cap; town of Grand River. "A barren spot" (R. Tar
dif.)
Peninsula, peninsula, viUage; Gasp6 Bay. Descriptive. See
Penouil.
Penouil; Gasp6 Bay. Same as Peninsula; a Basque word
appUed to the sand spit (Peninsula point) and stiU in
use among the French.
PERcfi, shire-town, viUage, mountains, island (Rock). The
name of the Pierced Rock, L'isle Percee, has extended to
the adjoining mainland. In early writings Rocher Perc6
and Isle Percee were appUed only to the rock. The
present use however in application to the shoreland is
ancient and dates back at least to the early part of the
17th century.
Perry Cove (Anse-S^-Perry), town of Cap-Chat. Name of
some EngUsh settler?
Pierre MeuliJire. See Grindstone.
Plateau, Island; off south point of Gasp6 Bay. Flat Island;
sometimes so written. Corrupted by Bayfield and later
EngUsh writers to Plato Island. On some English maps
written Hat Island, due to careless transcription of the
word Flat. It is a low island with broad flat rock surface.
Pleasant Bay. The broad bay on the east coast of Amherst,
Magdalen Is., a deadly anchorage in an easterly gale.
Pleureuse, cove (Anse-pleureuse), town of Taschereau.
White also cites Cap-pleureur, Anse and RiviSre-Pleur-

286 GLOSSARY OF GASPfi PLACE NAMES
ence. Of the former he says: "from the little streams
which spring from several points on its surface giving it
the appearance of 'weeping'"; of the latter: "from
fancied 'crying' heard by the fishermen; probably the
wind or cries of wUd animals on the forest."
Point Navarre, settlement on Nor'west arm of Gasp6 Bay.
Some of the early settlers may have come from Navarre.
French coins found in Gaspd often bear the arms of
Navarre-et-Beam. Vulgo P. Navoo or Naveau, in Cana
dian French, a turnip.
Ramea. See Ramies.
Rameau, town. "After E. Rameau-de-St.-PIre, a French
writer friendly to Canadians and Acadians" (White).
Ramies. Champlain appUed the name Ram6e-Brion to the
Magdalen Island group, Ram^e having reference to the
way the islands are strung together by bars. The name
was in use before Champlain's time, as it appears in
Fisher's narrative of 1591 and Drake's, 1593. "Called
by the Britons of S. Malo the Isle of Ram^e."
Ramies. See Ramies.
Ramsay, Fort; York side of Gasp6 Basin.
Rebours, brook (Ruisseau-S,-Rebours), town of Duchesnay.
"Probably from the 'turning back' of the water at an
'elbow' near the source" (White).
Red Cape. Grindstone I., Magdalen group. Its blood-red
sand-stones.
Red Head, cape (Cap Rouge), on south shore of Gaspi Bay.
The rocks are red.
Renards, Riviere-aux-, viUage, river, town of Fox; Fox
River; which see.
Roseville, post village; on north side of Nor'west Arm,
Gasp6 Bay. Named after a settler. Now known as
Rosebridge.
Rosiers. See Cap-des-Rosiers.
Rouge, cap (Cap Rouge). From the red rocks.

GLOSSARY OF GASPfi PLACE NAMES 287
RouGEAU, Rivi^re-Sr-mon; town of Newport.
Sailor Cove. SaUor unknown.
Saijjte-Adelaide. See Pabos.
Sainte-Anne, mountain, at Perc6 (Ste-Anne-de Perc6).
Same as Table-^-rolante.
Sainte- Anne-des-Monts, town, viUage (Ste-Anne), cape
and river; town of Cap-Chat. "After Ste-Anne-de-la-
Pocatifere, from which parish the first settler came, and
des Monts from the Notre Dame mountains in which
the river rises" (White). Roy writes: " Sainte- Anne-de-
Monts" and says Champlain named the river for M. de
Monts. RouiUard regards this a mere legend and says
that when Champlain desired to commemorate one of
his friends or protectors he mentioned the fact in his
Relations or inscribed it on his maps, but of this name he
made no record.
Saint-Anges, Cap. Bonaventure Island.
Sandy Beach. Long sand bar extending into Gasp6 Bay
from the south shore; the neutral line between the waters
of the York river and those of Gasp6 Bay. Here, in the
outer or inner bay Jacques Cartier is supposed to have
made his landing, 1534, and on this bar the Prince of
Wales (Edward VII) was run aground in 1860, his first
stop in America.
Sauvage, Anse-au-. See Indian Cove.
Seal Cove (Anse-loups-marins); on south shore of Gasp6
Bay. From the abundance of seals.
Seal Rock, post viUage, reef. This is a submerged and
dangerous rock l3dng off the north shore of Gaspd Bay,
exposed only at very low neap tides when it suggests a
seal.
Seche, Pomte; town of Chlorydorme. Probably descriptive.
Serpent, Cap; town of Fox.
Serpentine Mt.; town of Sydenham South. It is largely
composed of serpentine rocks.

288 GLOSSARY OF GASPfi PLACE NAMES
Shag. Island, one of the Magdalens. This is a bird roost and
a shag is a cormorant.
Shickshock Mountains. The Micmac word from which it
is derived means rocky mountains. These are the moun
tains to which Champlain appUed the name Notre Dame
and probably Alexander's cartographers the name Al
bany. In the southern part of Gaspesia, where the
ranges of very different rocks approach the coast at
Carleton and Maria, the inhabitants commonly call those
ranges the Shickshocks, but the use of that name has
neither historic nor geographic accuracy. An alterna
tive and far more acceptable term is Carleton Moun
tains.
Shiphead. The more southerly of the two headlands at the
end of the Forillon peninsula; the other is Cape Gaspd.
Shiphead resembles the lofty prow of a vessel standing
high above the water. On its triangular flat summit
stands the lighthouse.
Sou'west Cape

„ , T, ( See West Point.
Sou west Point
St. Alban Mountain; on the ForiUon peninsula. "After
Alban Bond, the first settler" (White).
St. George's Cove. North shore of Gasp6 Bay.
St. John River.
St. Marjorique (or S. M. du-Nord-Ouest), parish, on the
Nor'west arm of Gasp6 Bay. "After Marjorique Bolduc,
cur6 of Douglastown when parish was formed" (White).
St. Pierre, cape, vUlage. At the south end of Gasp6 Bay.
An appropriate name for a rocky cape.
Sydenham (North and South), townships. "After Chas.
Poulett Thompson Baron Sydenham (1793-1841),
Governor-General of Canada, 1839-41" (White).
Table-a-Rolante; sometimes Table-a,-Roland. Mt. Ste
Anne, Perc6. An old name referring to the. undulating
table top of the mountain.

GLOSSARY OF GASPfi PLACE NAMES 289
Tar Point. SmaU cape on south shore of Gasp6 Bay where
bitumen has oozed from the rocks.
Taschereau, town. "After His Eminence Elz&r Alexandre
Taschereau (1820-98), Archbishop of Quebec, 1871;
Cardinal, 1886" (White).
Toubelle, town, river, cape. "From two rocks on the shore
about three nules apart, which at a distance present the
appearance of towers" (White).
Tbois Ruisseaus. Three brooks.
Trou-au-Chat; Cats den, a ravine or coul^ at the north end
of Perc6 village.
Thou-aux-Margots. Cliffs on the northeast side of Bona-
ventvu-e Island where the gannets nest more abundantly than
anjrwhere else on the Atlantic coast.
Teou, Cap le. Grindstone I., Magdalen group. Stands on
the hydrographic chart but does not seem to be known
to the residents. ,
Vachb-Marine, Riviere; town of Newport. Walrus river.
Valleau, cove (Anse-^VaUeau) ; town of Fox. "Some
authorities say it should be written 'VaUon' (a Uttle
vaUey); although this name would be descriptive Roy
considers it improbable" (White). "From the deep
vaUey, i. e., Anse-au- VaU^e" (C. O. Carrel).
Vall£e, river, town of Christie.
Verte, Pointe; town of Malbaie. Descriptive.
West Point. On Amherst, Magdalen Is.
Whitehead, Cape. Fr. Cap Blanc, which see.
York, town. After York, England.

THE LIGHTHOUSES AND LIGHT SIGNALS OF GASPfi
COUNTY

their situation, dates of erection and characteristics
Chat Rtver
Cape Chat

Ste. Anne-des-Monts
RrVlijRE-A-LA-MARTRE

Mont Louis
Cape Magdalen
Grande Vall£e
Chlorydorme
Fame Point
Fox River

2 continuous red lights on
wharf. 1909.
On cape 120 feet above high
water. Flashing white Ught
1871; rebuilt 1909.
Continuous red Ught. 1905.
4 white flashes every 30 sec
onds; 130 feet high; 1876,
rebuUt 1906.
2 continuous red lanterns.
1905.
3 white flashes every 30 sec
onds; elevation 146 feet.
1871.
2 continuous red lanterns;
1905.
2 continuous red lanterns;
1905.
Double white flash at unequal
intervals; elevation 190
feet; 1880, rebuUt 1907.
2 continuous red lanterns;
1905.

* Compiled from the reports of the Dominion Department
of Marine and Fisheries. 290

LIGHTHOUSES AND LIGHT,,SIGNALS 291

Griffon Cove 2 continuous red lanterns;
1905.
Cap-des-Rosiers Bright white Ught for 15 sec
onds, suddenly ecUpsed;
elevation 136 feet; 1858.
Cape Gasp^ (Shiphead) White, revolving, 3 flashes 15
seconds apart, with 30 sec
onds eclipse. Elevation 355.
(?) feet; 1873; rebuilt 1892.
Gasp£ — O'Hara Point Wharf Red lantern.

Sandy Beach Point

Plateau Island

BarachoisPercb Wharf
White-headCape d'Espoir

Grand River Wharf
Grand River
Grand Pabos
Entry Island

Amherst Island
Etang-du-Nobd Grand Entry

White, visible 6 seconds,
eclipsed 4 seconds; Ught
ship from 1871 to 1904.
Revolving red light, 30 sec
onds; elevation 77 feet.
1883.
Red lantern.
Red lantern.
Continuous white Ught, eleva
tion 149 feet. 1874.
Revolving white light, every
30 seconds; elevation 90
feet. 1874.
Continuous white Ught.
Continuous red lantern.
Red lantern.
On hiU near S. E. pomt. White
Ught, visible 4 sec, eclipsed
4 sec; elevation about 250
feet. 1874, removed 1905,
again removed 1911.
South point. Alternating red
and white. 1871.
Revolving white Ught. 1874.
Continuous red Ught.

292 LIGHTHOUSES AND LIGHT SIGNALS
Brion Island Near West point. Flashing
white Ught. Elevation 126
feet. 1905.
Bird Rocks White, visible 15 sec, eclipsed
5 sec. Elevation 152 feet.
1870, rebmlt 1887.

npHE foUowing pages contain advertisements of a
few of the MacmiUan books on kindred subjects.

New Illustrated Books of Travel, Adventure, and Description

My Life Among the Eskimos
By VILHJALMUR STEFANSSON.
lUustrated with half tone reproductions of photographs taken
by the author and others.
Decorated cloth, 8vo. Preparing
A fascinating book of description and adventure has been written
by the famous traveler and explorer, who has passed years of
his life within the Arctic Circle. Mr. Stefansson has had a vast
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he knows their language; he has subsisted on their food; he has
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few explorers. Consequently his remarks about this primitive
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Hunting the Elephant in Africa
By C. H. STIGAND.
With illustrations made from photographs taken by the author.
With an Introduction by Col. Theodore Roosevelt.
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For a period of more than thirteen years the author of this work has
hunted big game in the jungles of East Africa. Here are told
simply and with an attractive modesty, yet dramatically, gome
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points on the habits of the beasts of a wild country. Captain
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one in which is embodied the spirit of the real hunter. Colonel
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PUBLISHED BY
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York

New Illustrated Books of Travel, Adventure, and Description
Highways and Byways from the St. Law
rence to Virginia By CLIFTON JOHNSON.
With many illustrations made from photographs taken by the
author. Decorated cloth, 8vo. SI -50 net
As in the case of the other volumes in this series Mr. Johnson deals
here primarily with country life — especially that which is typical
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yet there is none with which it is so difficult to get into close
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cerning automobile routes and other facts of interest to tourists
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A Woman Rice Planter
By PATIENCE PENNINGTON.
With an Introduction by Owen Wister and many illustrations by
Alice R. Huger Smith.
Decorated cloth, Svo. Preparing
Here are detailed the actual experiences of a woman rice planter on
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The narrative of the planter's life, with its many responsibilities,
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the sagacity, skill and indomitable persistency with which she
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quently valuable for its insight into a remarkable Southern home.

PUBLISHED BY
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York

New Illustrated Books of Travel, Adventure, and Description
The Barbary Coast
By ALBERT EDWARDS,
author of "Panama," "Comrade Yetta," etc. With many
illustrations. Decorated cloth, ISmo. Preparing
Albert Edwards's Panama: The Canal, the Country and the People,
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scriptive volume, in which Mr. Edwards relates some of his re
markable and always interesting experiences in the states of
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and he writes out of his own Ufe.
America As I Saw It
By E. ALEC TWEEDIE
With iUustrations. Decorated cloth, Svo. Preparing
Many books have been written by people who have visited this coun
try and have then returned to their native heath, but it is doubt
ful whether anyone has gone at the task with such an abundance
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Tweedie says things, to be sure, about America and Americans
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it is quite likely that her criticisms will provoke laughter as good
humored in itself as the remarks which provoke it. There is
hardly a spot on the broad continent that does not pass under
Mrs. Tweedie's examination, and scarcely a person of importance.
She finds much to praise openly, but amusing as it may seem,
these praiseworthy factors are not those upon which we expect
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tems, our transportation facilities, our home life, our theatres,
our books, our art, all are analyzed and Tweedie verdicts passed.
Of course the book is to be taken seriously, but not too seriously.
Mrs. Tweedie would be offended if we did not laugh at her
cajolery ; that is what she wrote it for.

PUBLISHED BY
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York

YALE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY

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